The Radio, the Gun, and What Nobody’s Actually Watching

What’s already real

On September 22, President Abelardo De la Espriella walked through Santa Marta with an encrypted radio slung over his shoulder and what looked like a pistol at his waist, in the middle of an armed shutdown declared by Los Pachenca after one of its leaders was killed. The Interior Minister called it “a strong message” to criminals (Infobae). The radio isn’t a random prop: it runs on an encrypted Motorola trunking network with permanent national coverage, and the president is rarely seen without it in public (Las2orillas).

Political communication analysts have been describing this pattern for weeks: columnist Gabriel Cifuentes says the president “has been stacking symbols in every appearance” — the radio, the gun, the image of Cristo Rey — to present himself as commander-in-chief on security. One communications strategist put it bluntly: “political campaigns are nothing but show business. You don’t win with policy proposals, you win with emotion” (El Tiempo). And that formula already worked once: De la Espriella took office with the highest vote count in the country’s history — 12.9 million votes in the June 21 runoff.

What nobody tells you

Legally, this is neither as simple nor as scandalous as it was sold. Decree 2535 of 1993 lets any citizen with a permit carry a firearm, and the president, as supreme commander of the armed forces, falls squarely within that rule — criminal law experts consulted agree it’s “perfectly possible” (Infobae). On September 8, De la Espriella had already signed the decree lifting the general suspension on firearm carry permits.

One day after that gun decree, on September 9, the Finance Ministry signed Decree 1372. That’s the one that actually hits your wallet. It raised the TES issuance ceiling from COP 85.25 to COP 110.25 trillion — COP 25 trillion in additional public debt hitting the market right as yields were already near record highs and Colombia’s country risk had overtaken Mexico’s and Brazil’s (Cambio; El Colombiano). That decision got a fraction of the coverage the Santa Marta walk did. And yet it’s the one pushing up the cost of your mortgage, your credit card, and any business financing anchored to the sovereign curve.

The real opportunity: look under the headline

It’s no accident that a brand-new government needs to project authority through symbols — it’s practically a page out of Uribe’s playbook: operational control, physical presence, command imagery. But the symbol does its job precisely by pulling your eyes away from something else. While the whole country argued over whether a president can carry a gun, almost nobody in the public conversation connected the dots: that same week, his government was borrowing an extra COP 25 trillion in a market already charging us more than it charges our neighbors.

This is where the CRITERIO Method actually earns its keep, not as a tidy closing line but as a real exercise: whenever a political story dominates headlines for days, it’s worth asking what fiscal, regulatory, or spending decision is moving underneath it, with far less noise. You don’t need to be an economist to do it — you need the habit of checking, even once a week, what decrees the Finance Ministry actually signed, not just what photos the presidency published. AI, used well, helps here: it can scan official gazettes and debt-auction calendars faster than any of us could by hand — but deciding what to ask is still on you.

The radio and the gun are political theater — legal, and probably effective for whoever designed the message. Decree 1372 is the balance sheet. One shows up on camera. The other shows up on your bank statement a few months from now.

How many of your government’s actual decisions did you review this week — versus how many photos did you see?

If you want help separating political noise from the decisions that actually move your money, I put it in front of you every day in the ViSFI Daily Briefing — five minutes, no theater.