Uribe's 'ladroncito' insult targeted different De la Espriella, not 2026 candidate

A screenshot of a 2012 tweet from former president Álvaro Uribe has been circulating across social media for weeks, shared more than 9,000 times, appearing to show him calling presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella a "ladroncito"—a diminutive insult meaning "little thief." The image, which gained particular traction after senator María José Pizarro shared it on February 17, accumulated over 300,000 views and thousands of comments. But the attribution is wrong. The tweet was not about the 2026 candidate at all. It was directed at a different person entirely: former congressman Miguel de la Espriella, with whom Uribe had clashed over parapolítica allegations more than a decade earlier.

Abelardo de la Espriella, the actual candidate, has positioned himself as a loyal Uribe ally. He leads the independent political movement "Defensores de la Patria" and has repeatedly defended the former president in legal proceedings. In August 2025, he posted that Uribe was "our symbol" in the fight for the security and justice Colombia had lost. In July, he shared photos of Uribe receiving birthday gifts, writing that whatever could be given to the former president was little compared to what he had given the nation. The misattributed insult, therefore, created a false narrative of conflict between two figures who actually stand together politically.

The original tweet, posted on September 26, 2012, reads: "Ladroncito De La Espriella received and stole money from Mancuso and now they say it was for the campaign." When searched directly on Uribe's verified account, the tweet appears without any attached image—just text. The version circulating on social media includes a photograph of Abelardo de la Espriella highlighted in a red circle, a visual manipulation designed to create the false impression that he was the target. The original post has accumulated over 5,000 retweets and 7,000 likes over the years, but in its authentic form, it makes no reference to the current candidate.

The context of the 2012 tweet reveals a bitter dispute between Uribe and Miguel de la Espriella, the former congressman. At that time, both were entangled in accusations related to paramilitarism during the 2002 elections. Miguel de la Espriella and another former parliamentarian, Heleonora Pineda, had testified that paramilitaries had supported Uribe's presidential campaign. Uribe responded by accusing them of lying and of having themselves received and stolen money from paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso. The "ladroncito" insult was part of this back-and-forth, directed squarely at Miguel de la Espriella as a witness in the parapolítica scandal.

Miguel de la Espriella's history bears out the seriousness of those allegations. In 2008, he was convicted of links to paramilitaries and sentenced to three years and seven months in prison. In 2010, the Procuraduría removed him from office and barred him from holding public positions for twenty years. Then, in May 2015, the Supreme Court's criminal chamber convicted him again—this time to five years of imprisonment—for coercing voters. The court found that paramilitaries in Córdoba and Sucre had forced citizens to vote for him in congressional elections. There is no family relationship between Miguel de la Espriella (whose mother's surname was Burgos) and Abelardo de la Espriella (whose second surname is Otero). They are different people entirely, separated by different generations and different legal histories.

When fact-checkers at El Tiempo and AFP Factual traced the viral claim, they found the original tweet still live on Uribe's account, unaltered and unambiguous in its target. They also found contemporary news reports from 2012 documenting the actual dispute between Uribe and Miguel de la Espriella. In October 2025, Abelardo de la Espriella's campaign issued a statement denouncing the misinformation, calling it a "double falsehood" that confused identities and distorted the meaning of Uribe's words. The statement reasserted that Abelardo de la Espriella and Uribe "have been and are firm allies in the defense of democracy, institutions, and the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism in Colombia."

The episode illustrates how easily a fourteen-year-old tweet can be weaponized in the run-up to an election. A screenshot, a cropped image, a shared caption—and suddenly a historical insult becomes a current scandal. The viral spread happened fast enough that the false version reached hundreds of thousands of people before the correction could catch up. As Colombia heads toward the May 31, 2026 presidential election, the case serves as a reminder of how misinformation moves through social networks, and how the same name, shared by different people, can become a vector for confusion and distortion.