The new Inspector General: the more it changes, the more it stays the same
The new Inspector General: the more it changes, the more it stays the same
The Senate elected Colombia's new Inspector General (Procurador General), Gregorio Eljach. A look at a controversial and distinctively Colombian institution, and what Eljach's election means.
On October 2, the Senate elected Gregorio Eljach as Colombia’s new Inspector General (Procurador General) for a four-year term.
A unique institution: The disciplinarian
The Procuraduría General, often awkwardly translated in English as the Inspector General’s office, is a unique and distinctively Colombian institution, rooted in Simón Bolívar’s ideas. While it has various powers, its primary mission is as a disciplinary authority responsible for overseeing the conduct of public servants, including elected officials, initiating investigations and imposing sanctions for disciplinary offences. The disciplinary code, a uniquely Colombian area of law, covers a broad range of offences by public servants, which may not necessarily involve criminal wrongdoing, including public procurement irregularities, administrative breaches, misuse of public funds, loss of public assets, ‘intervention in politics’ and breaches of ‘public morality’, among others. Disciplinary offences may be committed by act or omission, with intent or by negligence, and are considered ‘very serious’, ‘serious’ or ‘minor’ (very serious offences are exhaustively enumerated in the law). The disciplinary sanctions imposed by the Procuraduría include reprimands, fines, suspension from office, removal from office and ineligibility to hold public office for up to 20 years. The Procuraduría’s disciplinary role is most prominent but it also, theoretically, has a preventive responsibility, monitoring the actions of public servants and warning of any actions that could violate laws and regulations.
The Procuraduría’s other powers, often overlooked and forgotten, include protecting human rights and defending collective interests. It intervenes in trials and before judicial and administrative authorities, at its discretion, to defend the legal order, public assets or fundamental rights, and provides an opinion in constitutionality cases before the Constitutional Court.
The Inspector General is elected by the Senate for a four-year term from a list of three candidates nominated by the President, the Supreme Court and the Council of State. Since 2015, the Inspector General cannot be reelected.
The Procuraduría is not a judicial body and is considered one of the supervisory ‘control institutions’ (organismos de control) alongside the Comptroller General and the Auditor General. It is the head of the Public Ministry (Ministerio Público), alongside the Ombudsman (Defensoría del Pueblo), which is autonomous of the Procuraduría since 2015. The Procuraduría is not the only disciplinary body in the Colombian political system, but it exercises ‘preferential disciplinary authority’ and is the only body that can investigate and prosecute disciplinary offences by elected officials. There is limited due process in disciplinary proceedings: the Procuraduría investigates, ‘prosecutes’ and imposes the sanction. Only since 2021 does the law guarantee that the defendant will be investigated and judged by different officials, and the right to appeal a sanction to a different authority.
A controversial institution
In the last decades, the Procuraduría has made extensive use of its powers to remove elected officials from office based on disciplinary wrongdoings. According to its last report to Congress, in the twelve months from July 2023 to June 2024, the Procuraduría imposed 185 sanctions on elected officials, including 36 removals from office. The Procuraduría’s disciplinary powers and role as a watchdog of public probity seem to be at odds with the principles of electoral democracy and the political rights of popularly elected officeholders.
That tension came into sharp focus with Gustavo Petro’s removal from office as mayor of Bogotá in December 2013 by then-Inspector General Alejandro Ordóñez, an arch-conservative who made no secret of his aversion to leftist politicians. Petro was removed from office, and declared ineligible to hold public office for 15 years, for the chaotic, mismanaged implementation of a new trash collection model a year before that led to a three-day trash crisis (see here for more details). Petro was effectively sacked for mismanagement, incompetence, improvisation, administrative faults and acting carelessly, ignoring several prior warnings—not any criminal offences. Petro turned to international law for recourse, with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granting precautionary measures protecting his political rights under the American Convention on Human Rights, ordering his reinstatement as mayor. Petro was eventually reinstated as mayor, five weeks after being removed. In 2017, the Council of State annulled the Procuraduría’s decision.
Petro’s case was referred to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which issued its ruling in the summer of 2020. In the case of Petro Urrego v. Colombia, the Inter-American Court found that the Colombian state violated Petro’s political rights. Under article 23(2) of the Convention, political rights may only be restricted by “sentencing by a competent court in criminal proceedings,” and the Court has said that this may only be done through “a judicial act (judgment) by a competent judge in the corresponding criminal proceedings” and that a disciplinary administrative authority, like the Procuraduría, may not restrict the rights of democratically elected officials by dismissing or disqualifying them from office. The Court ordered Colombia to “update its domestic legal code in accordance with the parameters established in this judgment.”
The Colombian state has long defended the Procuraduría’s powers and jurisdictions, and resisted attempts to comply with the Court’s sentence. In 2021, Inspector General Margarita Cabello, supported by President Iván Duque (her former boss, who had nominated her for the job), came up with an ingenious but very crude way to feign compliance with the Court’s decision, making a mockery of it. By way of a law, modifying the disciplinary code, the Procuraduría was given ‘jurisdictional functions’ and retained its power to dismiss elected officials. The law gave new guarantees to defendants—like being investigated and judged by different officials, creating second instance or double conformity (sanctions revised by different chambers of the Procuraduría before being final) and the possibility of extraordinary review by the Council of State for decisions against elected officials. The adoption of this reform significantly increased the size of the Procuraduría’s bureaucracy, creating some 1,200 new positions.
As had been widely anticipated, in 2023 the Constitutional Court struck down the Procuraduría’s new jurisdictional functions as unconstitutional. In a split 5-4 decision, the Court allowed the Procuraduría to impose sanctions against elected officials but ruled that these sanctions would only be made definitive after being reviewed by an administrative judge—in other words, a judge will have the last word on the suspension, dismissal and disqualification of an elected official, after the Procuraduría’s disciplinary trial. The Court’s sentence clarified that the Inspector General can still provisionally suspend elected officeholders (during a disciplinary trial as a precautionary measure, pending a final sanction). The Constitutional Court’s decision was criticized by some who felt that it sidestepped the most difficult questions of adapting Colombian law to the standards of the American Convention. The Council of State, the highest administrative court that is charged with (automatically) reviewing the Procuraduría’s decisions against elected officials, was itself divided, with some magistrates who refused to hear such cases, considering that it violates the American Convention and the Inter-American Court’s sentence.
A political office
Adding to the controversy is that the Inspector General is not a neutral, independent arbiter but very much a political figure. The method for electing the Inspector General, involving all three branches of government, is designed to ensure that the winner doesn’t owe his/her appointment to anyone. However, in reality, the body electing the Inspector General is a very political one (the Senate), one of the nominators is a politician (the president) and there is well document political interference and clientelism in the two other nominating bodies (the high courts).
Alejandro Ordóñez (2009-2016) and Margarita Cabello (2021-2025) in particular used their disciplinary powers in a selective, arbitrary and disproportionate manner, protecting their friends and allies while targeting political opponents.
Ordóñez put the institution at the service of his arch-conservative moral and religious views, philosophically hostile to liberal democracy, and staunchly opposed LGBT+ rights, abortion, land restitution, minority rights, women’s rights and the peace process with the FARC. He made heavy use of his power to sanction elected officials, often arbitrarily, going after political rivals (like Petro or Piedad Córdoba—in both cases his decisions were later overturned by the courts) while absolving certain right-wing politicians. Through clientelism, Ordóñez amassed substantial power in the state apparatus. In September 2016, his reelection was nullified by the Council of State because he had appointed relatives of Supreme Court magistrates (who nominated him for reelection) to jobs in the Procuraduría.
Margarita Cabello, the outgoing Inspector General, had been Iván Duque’s justice minister for about a year when he nominated her as his candidate for the office in the summer of 2020. She was easily elected because, in addition to her ties to Duque and uribismo, she was friends with much of the traditional political class, notably the old elites of her native Atlántico (including, of course, the Char family). She has done little to allay fears that she was politically biased. During the 2022 campaign, she earned Petro’s ire for suspending Daniel Quintero (mayor of Medellín at the time) shortly after he made social media posts implying an endorsement for Petro and his coalition. Since 2022, Cabello and Petro have fought repeatedly. She’s suspended several Petro appointees, including Daniel Rojas in February 2023 and foreign minister Álvaro Leyva in January 2024 (the first time a cabinet minister was suspended), as well as Pacto senator Alex Flórez (for a drunken brawl in which he insulted cops). She’s also opened several investigations which have seemed politically motivated: for example, she filed disciplinary charges against Pacto senator Wilson Arias for “slanderous statements” against police officers in 2021. Petro and his allies have have accused Cabello’s Procuraduría of being part of the fabled golpe blando against the government. Petro has compared Cabello’s Procuraduría to a political police.
The office of Inspector General is an appetizing one because it comes with control over some 4,000 positions in the Procuraduría, which can be handed out to repay political favours, placate certain people, reward allies or satisfy certain bureaucratic cravings. In Colombia’s transactional and clientelist political culture, parties and congressmen (including the senators who elect the Inspector General) expect to receive bureaucratic ‘quotas’ in state institutions like the Procuraduría. In addition, given the Procuraduría’s feared disciplinary powers, it’s useful to be on the Inspector General’s good side—to protect allies and to threaten (if not remove) opponents.
Petro has made himself an advocate of the political rights guaranteed under the American Convention, and as president he has invoked the Convention to come to the defence of Pedro Castillo in Peru and, belatedly, María Corina Machado in Venezuela.
In July 2023, citing the Convention and the Inter-American Court, Petro refused to sign off on the suspension of the mayor of Riohacha (La Guajira) by Cabello (by law, a sanction against governors or mayors of districts is made effective by the president). Cabello said that Petro was not complying with a constitutional obligation.
To justify its existence, the Inspector General usually says that, in a country like Colombia, the Procuraduría is necessary to ‘fight corruption’. Successive Inspectors General have vowed that their Procuraduría would be laser focused on the ‘fight against corruption’. However, it’s unclear how effective the Procuraduría has actually been at fighting corruption.
Unlike his predecessors, Petro hasn’t defended the peculiar existence of the Procuraduría in the Colombian political system and has proposed to abolish it. Voices on both the left and right (most recently former vice president Germán Vargas Lleras) have proposed getting rid of the Procuraduría. Many agree that the institution has become redundant and that its main powers could be better handled by other bodies. Lesser disciplinary infractions by civil servants should be handled internally by their own bosses and agencies, while serious disciplinary offences are almost always crimes (like corruption) and should be investigated by the Fiscalía, concentrating the fight against corruption in the hands of criminal prosecutors. Others have said that the Procuraduría is necessary, to protect the integrity and legality of public service, a safeguard against abuse and negligence by public officials, but that it needs to be reformed—for example, a new method for electing the Inspector General to remove political interference, or slimming down the vast bureaucracy of the Procuraduría.
Reforming or abolishing the Procuraduría requires a constitutional reform—which requires some form of political conensus and time (at least a year, plus some months to pass additional legislation and a transition period), neither of which the current administration has. Petro has talked at length about the need to reform the Procuraduría (most recently a few months ago) but, like on many other things, hasn’t actually done anything about it. Last year, the justice ministry released a draft constitutional reform that’d take away the Inspector General’s power to suspend, dismiss or disqualify elected officials. The government never presented it to Congress. Former justice minister Néstor Osuna’s judicial reform commission, which will go nowhere, doesn’t seem to have touched on the Procuraduría much.
Realpolitik: Petro vs. Vargas Lleras
Fast forward to the present. The Procuraduría is still very much a thing, and a very powerful thing that politicians on all sides want to get their hands on.
In the two highest courts, the Supreme Court and Council of State, former politicians or politically-connected senior bureaucrats, former magistrates and lawyers topped the list of favourites.
In early September, the Council of State nominated former cabinet minister Luis Felipe Henao as its candidate. Henao is a lawyer and career political-bureaucrat who has long been a political protégé of Germán Vargas Lleras. Henao served as secretary general in the environment and housing ministry and later vice minister of housing during Uribe’s second term. When Vargas Lleras became interior and justie minister under Santos in 2010, Henao served as secretary general and later vice minister, and in 2012 he followed his mentor to the housing ministry, as vice minister. When Vargas Lleras resigned from cabinet in 2013 to join Santos’ reelection campaign, Henao inherited the housing ministry, which had become Vargas Lleras’ prized possession. As housing minister, Henao led the construction and delivery of the 100,000 free houses, Vargas Lleras’ political pet project. In 2016, after leaving cabinet, Henao went to work for business magnate Luis Carlos Sarmiento. He reappeared politically in 2022 as Fico Gutiérrez’s campaign manager.
Shortly afterwards, the Supreme Court nominated former senator Germán Varón. Varón is a retired five term Cambio Radical (CR) congressman, long considered one of Vargas Lleras’ closest allies. Varón was elected to the House of Representatives in Bogotá in 2002, and reelected in 2006 and 2010. He was one of his party’s most prominent figures, holding leadership positions in the party, and in 2008-2009 he was president of the House. Varón, like Vargas Lleras, publicly opposed Uribe’s second reelection in 2010 and, as president of the House, worked to delay and impede the ‘reelection referendum’. In 2014, Varón ‘jumped’ to the Senate, winning 82,500 votes, and was reelected in 2018 with 66,000 votes. Varón retired and did not seek reelection in 2022. For most of his years in Congress, Varón was considered one of Vargas Lleras’ closest allies. However, Varón and Vargas Lleras have been distanced since 2021, originally because of a dispute over the new electoral code, which Varón supported as senator but which Vargas opposed. He told Blu Radio that he has no relation with Vargas for over two years. W Radio reported that Varón had lunch with his former friend, but Varón emphasized that their rift was irreparable and not a mere temporary disagreement.
In his column in El Tiempo on September 25, Vargas Lleras denied contacting magistrates of either high court or intervening to support Henao or Varón’s candidacies—saying that wouldn’t be coherent on his behalf to promote candidates given that he wants to abolish the Procuraduría.
Meanwhile, Petro organized his own selection process, made public under the guises of transparency. The president’s list of names, reduced to 20 in early September, included former deputy attorney general Jorge Perdomo and Petro’s lawyer Héctor Carvajal (who represented the president in the campaign finance case before the CNE). However, Henao and Varón’s nominations significantly complicated things for Petro. None of Petro’s initial names measured up to Henao or Varón. Petro faced the very real risk of having an unfriendly Inspector General for the last half of his administration, someone who would have used the office to make life hell for the government by investigating ministers and senior officials.
That reality forced Petro to make a very political calculation. The president scrapped his plans, discarded his list of preselected names and instead nominated a candidate entirely foreign to petrismo but very much aligned with the traditional political class that Petro loves to attack: Juan Gregorio Eljach. Largely unknown to the general public, Eljach is very well known in the political world—he had been secretary general of the Senate since 2012, a position similar to clerk but with greater political influence as the administrative and legal authority on all Senate sessions, debates, procedural disputes and decisions.
Eljach began his career as a protégé of the late caucano caudillo Aurelio Iragorri Hormaza, one of the founding members of the Partido de la U in the mid 2000s. However, with twelve years as secretary general of the Senate, Eljach “belong to no one” but is “friends with everyone”—he’s well liked by senators on all sides, who regularly reelected him every two years. Daniel Coronell said that he built his career through “small favours, some of them simple, like the assignment of a comfortable office or one with a view; and others on the limits of the law, like accepting a late medical excuse or not registering the absence at a session.”
Eljach has had his eyes on the Procuraduría for a while. In 2020, he made it to the Council of State’s list of ten finalists but didn’t make it. This year, he sought the Supreme Court’s nod but was again passed over in the end. Until, unexpectedly, Petro selected him as his nominee, a few days after the high courts had chosen their candidates. After Henao and Varón’s nominations, and understanding that Varón was the favourite thanks to the support of the right-wing opposition (CR, CD) and traditional parties (Conservatives, Liberals, La U) and some Greens, and that his favourite (Perdomo) didn’t have the votes, Petro sacrificed them and decided on Eljach. He was pushed by interior minister Juan Fernando Cristo (who was a senator until 2014), planning director Alexander López (a senator until 2024), Laura Sarabia as well as senator María José Pizarro and former senator Roy Barreras (now ambassador in London), a close friend of Eljach.
Petro wanted to avoid at all costs gifting such an important office to Vargas Lleras—a political rival, a vocal opposition leader in the media and a potential candidate in 2026 (Petro is also embroiled in a legal battle with Vargas Lleras’ brother Enrique).
As calculated, Eljach’s surprise nomination changed the equation entirely. With his close ties to senators, he became the prohibitive favourite. The ‘friend of everyone’ received everyone’s support: La U (the party he’s usually attached to), the Pacto and its allies, the Conservatives (with the strong backing of the Conservative president of the Senate, Efraín Cepeda) and the Liberals. The right-wing opposition, that would have been Varón and Henao’s base, read the prevailing winds and abandoned them.
On October 2, Eljach was elected Inspector General with 95 votes in the Senate, against three for Henao, two for Varón and three blank votes. It was the most votes for any candidate for the Procuraduría under the 1991 constitution. Everyone—from the left to the right, from devout petristas to fire-breathing anti-petristas—voted for him. In the end, everyone wants to be on the Inspector General’s good side—after all, Petro himself voted for Ordóñez in 2008.
Publicly, the parties that supported him sang the praises of an esteemed, highly qualified man with an unimpeachable professional and academic career, who would be impartial and independent and respectful of the constitution, the laws and the separation of powers. Eljach is a candidate who is not identified with any party or leader, and he provides ‘guarantees’. According to Coronell, those ‘guarantees’ means that he won’t interfere with the jobs that they have in the Procuraduría and that he won’t be the most diligent in investigations against them.
Eljach’s nomination was a smart, pragmatic move by Petro who has at times been surprisingly pragmatic and shrewd, while being inflexible and dogmatic at other moments. Petro tweeted that he didn’t want a Procuraduría that bows to the government but he didn’t want someone who turns the Procuraduría into a ‘political police’ like Ordóñez and Cabello.
It also contradicts his regular criticisms of and attacks on the ‘political class’ and his longstanding criticisms of the Procuraduría as an institution. After spending years attacking it, for good reason, as a politicized disciplinary body that should be done away with (or stripped of its power to sanction elected officials), he turned around and nominated the ultimate political insider for it, ultimately for selfish political reasons. La Silla Vacía, for example, said that with his decision, Petro “betrayed a fight of more than ten years.” Although, as La Silla’s columnist Héctor Riveros points out, there’s an interesting tone in political and media treatment of Petro’s decisions: when he sticks to his views and is stubborn (like with the healthcare reform) it’s said that he wants to “impose everything” and that it’s “an obsession” for him; when he’s pragmatic and is forced to make concessions it’s a “betrayal of years of struggle.”
If we’re going to point out Petro’s contradictions here, we should also ask the opposition about their contradictions. If they loudly insist and screech that Petro is a dictator who wants to ‘seize’ all institutions and destroy the separation of powers (which is unlikely: even Álvaro Uribe, who had eight years and was politically much more savvy than Petro, couldn’t do it), then why did they vote for a candidate nominated by Petro for Inspector General?
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Eljach as Inspector General is more of the same. Either of his two challengers for the office would also have been more of the same. The necessary discussions about the usefulness and powers of the Procuraduría will continue, but actual reforms to the Procuraduría will wait.
In his column about Eljach, Coronell wrote that he will lead a Procuraduría “passive in the fight against corruption and active in bureaucratic distribution”—just like his predecessors. Eljach himself has little qualifications for the job: he’s a politically-connected bureaucrat who has spent his career in the Senate. He hasn’t expressed views on many things, and hasn’t expressed his vision for the institution he will lead besides the usual stuff about ‘fighting corruption’ that they all repeat. Eljach has said that he would be independent and autonomous, that he wouldn’t obey orders from anyone, and called for consensus and national unity.
As Eljach’s call for consensus suggests, the main change will be that the Procuraduría will no longer be in confrontation with the president, as it had been under Cabello. Eljach won’t be a procurador de bolsillo (‘in the pocket’) for Petro, although he could be in the pocket of his old friends in Congress, who will have in him someone who won’t bother them too much. Eljach will be more inclined to operate under the old transactional dynamics, rather than go after the executive or the legislature.
Despite what the opposition claims, Petro hasn’t tried to impose names that are subservient to the government in other institutions—unlike Duque, who nominated his best friend and classmate Francisco Barbosa to be attorney general and his justice minister to be Inspector General. Instead, as Pares argues, his goal has been to ‘moderate’ the control institutions like the Fiscalía and Procuraduría, which had been strong counterweights—almost opposition bastions—to the administration under Barbosa and Cabello. Just like the new attorney general, Luz Adriana Camargo, has been far less confrontational with Petro compared to Barbosa (it is too early to judge just how submissive she is to the government), Eljach will be less confrontational than Cabello.
After Eljach’s victory, interior minister Cristo said that his election will provide “institutional tranquility and guarantees to all sectors of Colombian society.” This is a nicer way of saying that he’ll be less confrontational and more protective of the status-quo. Cristo also celebrated it as an “important factor of consensus” that’d contribute to the government’s elusive, mythical ‘national agreement’ (acuerdo nacional). Of course, as per usual, Petro has since personally undermined the so-called acuerdo nacional (this time by getting into a conflict with the courts).
While Eljach may not be procurador de bolsillo, he may be useful to the government’s interests in other ways. In his column, Vargas Lleras claimed that the real importance of the election is in the ability of the new Inspector General to support the government’s plans to capture a majority on the Constitutional Court. In 2025, four magistrates (out of nine) will change. Only one of them will come from a shortlist presented by Petro, the others will come from shortlists from the Supreme Court (two) and the Council of State (one). Through the Procuraduría and its ties to the judiciary and big bureaucracy, the government could influence the nominations of the high courts and/or in the elections in the Senate. Vargas Lleras’ argument is quasi-conspiratorial and exaggerated (and his party’s senators ended up largely voting for Eljach too…), and all of this remains pure speculation for the time being. He does, however, raise some fair questions: did Eljach and the government agree on something with relation to the ConCourt or support in the Senate? What will be Eljach’s degree of independence with a government he owes his job to after being rejected by the Supreme Court?
In the end, Eljach will be more of the same. After all the debates about the future of the Procuraduría and Petro’s promises to reform or abolish it, it will stay the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…