Colombia's president-elect says he will close 14 embassies and about 15 consulates, and cut ties with Cuba and Nicaragua

A government that does not exist yet has published its first cut.

Abelardo de la Espriella, who is sworn in as president of Colombia on August 7, said on Monday that he will close 14 embassies and around 15 consulates, in what he described as a first stage of optimizing the foreign service. He made the announcement in a broadcast on his own social media accounts, reported by David Alejandro Realpe Iregui at La República. "We cannot maintain a structure so expensive that it produces no concrete results for the country," he said during the broadcast, in this desk's translation from the Spanish.

The named embassies are Algeria, Azerbaijan, Barbados, Cuba, Czechia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Romania, Senegal and South Africa. He said he will also suspend the opening of an embassy in Palestine, on the ground that it never came into operation. Which consulates close was not specified.

Alongside the closures is a consolidation. Where Colombia holds more than one accreditation in the same place, de la Espriella said one ambassador will now hold them all, and he named the embassy to France and the mission to UNESCO as one such pair, and Italy and the Food and Agriculture Organization as another.

He drew a line between two things that are easy to blur. Closing a post is not the same as breaking relations, and he said that in most cases the countries losing an embassy will be handled by concurrent representation from other missions in the region. Cuba and Nicaragua are the exception, and he said his government will break relations with both. "In my government there will be no link at all with tyrannies," he said, in a message he first posted after claiming victory in the presidential election in June. Euronews, in a report by Rafael Salido, notes that he has also said he will reopen Colombia's embassy in Jerusalem, restoring representation with Israel after the break ordered by President Gustavo Petro in 2024, and that his inauguration will be held in Cali rather than in Bogotá.

He said a new embassy will open in Nigeria, and that a technical audit in his first 100 days will assess whether the remaining missions are worth keeping.

The case he made for all of it is fiscal. He said the decision will save the treasury thousands of millions of pesos a year and that the money freed can go to security, health, education, infrastructure and programs for the poorest. No figure was given for the saving, no cost was published for the posts being closed, and no closure dates were announced.

There is no primary document behind this item and there cannot be one yet. De la Espriella is not in office until August 7, so no decree, no ministry resolution and no budget line exists to link, and the announcement so far consists of what he said on camera and what reporters who watched it have written down.