The Colombian Senate installed its seven constitutional committees between 29 July and 1 August, each electing a chair and a vice-chair for the coming legislative year. Of the fourteen posts, the Pacto Histórico — the bloc of the outgoing president Gustavo Petro — took none. Nothing about that breaches the opposition’s statutory guarantees: Ley 1909 of 2018 reserves places for declared opposition parties on the leadership of the two chambers’ plenaries, not on their committees, and the Pacto Histórico does hold the Senate plenary’s second vice-presidency.
Six of the seven results were announced by the Senate press office. The seventh was not. Comisión Segunda, which handles foreign policy and defence, is the only committee whose new leadership went outside the parties that carried the other six: its chair is Luis Alfonso Mejía Núñez of Alianza Verde, with Centro Democrático’s Josué Alirio Barrera as vice-chair. There was no release, no vote count and no date — the change appeared on the committee’s own page, which as recently as mid-July still listed the outgoing 2022–26 membership.
Only the First Committee was contested. Seven parties jointly nominated Enrique Gómez Martínez of the Movimiento de Salvación Nacional; Senator Iván Cepeda nominated Carolina Corcho for the Pacto Histórico and then announced his bench would cast blank ballots, and the count was twelve to six blank. The Third and Fourth Committees elected their chairs unanimously, the Seventh recorded its election as giving effect to agreements between the parties, and in the Sixth a Pacto Histórico senator spoke in favour of the winner.
Gómez Martínez is also the author of the motion that moved the inauguration out of Bogotá. That has taken two votes in eight days: on 22 July the Senate approved relocating to the department of Cauca by 55 to 32, and after a plan to use a military garrison collapsed — the outgoing president having ordered that no military establishment be used — it approved sitting in Cali by 58 to 30 on the 29th. Under Article 140 of the constitution Congress sits in the capital and can move only by agreement between the chambers. Abelardo de la Espriella is sworn in on Friday.