Saab and Murcia shadows haunt far-right Colombian candidate's presidential bid

Abelardo de la Espriella arrived at Colombia's 2025 presidential race as a sudden force. The fiery criminal defense attorney, making his first electoral bid, had vaulted into the top tier of polling—behind leftist senator Iván Cepeda but ahead of centrist Sergio Fajardo—by promising iron-fisted governance and a crusade against what he calls the radical left. His self-styled nickname, "El Tigre," and his calls for a grand coalition of anti-Petro forces resonated enough to make him competitive. Yet even as he climbed, a question shadowed his campaign: what exactly had he been doing as a lawyer all these years?

The answer, his rivals were quick to remind voters, involved two men whose names had become synonymous with corruption and fraud in Colombia. From 2015 onward, de la Espriella represented Alex Saab, the mysterious Barranquilla businessman who became known as Nicolás Maduro's financial operator. Saab was detained in the United States on money-laundering charges, held in Cape Verde awaiting extradition, and eventually released in a 2023 prisoner exchange—after which Maduro appointed him minister of industry and production. During those years when de la Espriella was Saab's lawyer, the attorney published a July 2017 column in El Heraldo calling for Maduro's death as a patriotic necessity, without disclosing that he was simultaneously representing the regime's alleged money man. "His best client was Alex Saab, and at the same time he was writing columns saying Maduro should die, from where his best client was making money," investigative journalist Gerardo Reyes noted in his book on Saab. The contradiction was stark enough that journalist Vicky Dávila, former editor of Semana magazine, called it disqualifying. "You cannot be against the narco-dictator Nicolás Maduro and receive payments from his principal front man Alex Saab," she said, rejecting de la Espriella's coalition overtures.

The second shadow was David Murcia Guzmán, architect of DMG, a pyramid scheme that defrauded more than 200,000 Colombian savers of multimillion-dollar sums. The fraud was so massive that President Álvaro Uribe declared a state of emergency to manage the fallout. Murcia, whom police general Óscar Naranjo described as perhaps the most complicated criminal mind he had ever confronted—a figure who posed as a savior, a king Midas, a master of mass mobilization—was eventually detained in Panama and extradited to the United States in 2010 on money-laundering charges. De la Espriella had been his lawyer. He claimed publicly that Murcia, then a fugitive, was willing to surrender if guaranteed safety, but framed the prosecution as political persecution. When the Fiscalía's evidence contradicted the accounting Murcia had shown his attorney, de la Espriella withdrew from the case. Former Murcia associates said the lawyer had tried to negotiate a judicial settlement, but Murcia refused to accept the charges—he clung to his persecution narrative—and the relationship fractured.

When Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, rejected de la Espriella's coalition pitch, he did so by invoking Murcia directly: "I want to see someone who has worked for the poor, not someone who was the lawyer for people who toppled hundreds of thousands of poor people." De la Espriella's defense was legalistic. "I'm surprised that someone so educated and worldly still confuses the lawyer with the client," he said. But the distinction, however legally sound, did not settle the matter in the court of public opinion.

The Saab relationship proved especially thorny because it suggested ongoing entanglement. Investigative journalist Roberto Deniz, who has documented corruption in the Chavista regime extensively, noted that when de la Espriella began representing Saab in 2015, there were already ample signs the businessman was close to Maduro. Saab had signed a prefab housing contract at Miraflores Palace in 2011 in front of Hugo Chávez himself, then-foreign minister Maduro, and Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos—a ceremony so bizarre that Santos later asked his chancellor who this unknown man was. Over time, Saab accumulated shadowy functions across the regime, eventually managing the CLAP food-box distribution program through a Hong Kong company, a role de la Espriella initially denied. When former Venezuelan prosecutor general Luisa Ortega Díaz, who fled to Colombia in 2017 after death threats, called Saab Maduro's "front man," de la Espriella threatened her with a defamation suit. He insisted Saab was merely a state contractor, not a government partner. The relationship supposedly ended in July 2019, after the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Saab for leading a large-scale corruption network tied to Maduro's regime. Yet Dávila has suggested the ties persisted, pointing to Daniel Peñarredonda, a longtime deputy director of de la Espriella's law firm who maintained close links with Saab and his wife Camila Fabri.

As de la Espriella campaigns on promises of strength and patriotism, these shadows refuse to fade. His rivals, even those on the right, have weaponized his legal history to argue that he cannot be trusted to lead a fight against corruption and foreign interference. The paradox of his candidacy—a man who speaks the language of anti-leftism while having profited from defending figures entangled with a leftist regime and a domestic fraud that devastated ordinary Colombians—remains the central tension of his bid. Whether voters will see his legal work as the neutral exercise of a defense attorney's duty, or as something more compromising, may well determine whether "El Tigre" can survive the general election.