Jorge Octavio Guzmán Gutiérrez, succeeds Elías Larrahondo Carabalí, for the period 2024 – 2027.
This Thursday, December 28, at 10:00 in the morning, the new governor of the department of Cauca, Jorge Octavio Guzmán Gutiérrez, will take office and take the oath of office, in a public ceremony that will take place in the Francisco José de Caldas park.
For legal purposes, Guzmán Gutiérrez’s mandate will begin on January 1, 2024.
The incoming regional leader won the territorial elections on October 29, with 174,058 votes, surpassing his biggest opponents, Víctor Libardo Ramírez, of the Liberal party, and Juan Diego Castrillón, of the Historic Pact.
He is a native of the El Palmar district, jurisdiction of the municipality of La Vega, southern Cauca, a mining and agricultural area.
He managed to win the first position in the department, with the support of Elías Larrahondo Carabalí, who will hold the mandate until December 31, 2023, that is, leaving a successor, in addition to the support of the former senator and former governor, Temístocles Ortega Narváez and a group of the conservative party led by former senator José Darío Salazar and the former mayor of Popayán, José Gabriel Silva Riviere.
Guzmán Gutiérrez, in 2012, was elected mayor of his municipality, La Vega. He then returned to Popayán as Secretary General of the Government, in the mandate of the current representative to the Chamber, Óscar Rodrigo Campo Hurtado. In 2018 he wanted to repeat in the Mayor’s Office of La Vega, for the ASI party, but he did not succeed. In 2020 he was appointed by the current regional president, Elías Larrahondo, as Secretary of Education and Culture of the department.
He succeeds his mentor, Larrahondo Carabalí, whose mandate did not stand out, when he had to demand all the attention from the national government for this long-suffering department, martyred by guerrillas, drug traffickers and another group of criminals. He was not an effective spokesperson before national bodies, he dedicated himself to the micro-business of politicking, in that he “excelled.” Meanwhile, cases of corruption within the Government did not wait through hiring.
Recently, the Attorney General’s Office opened a preliminary investigation against officials of the Government of Cauca, for alleged acts of corruption for self-enrichment, among whom the Secretary of Women, who, paradoxically, was awarded a few days ago.
It is expected that the new governor, who surely knows the institution from the inside, as he held the Ministry of Education and Culture in the mandate that is about to expire, will appoint a suitable cabinet that will work for the development of Cauca. That the new governor does not arrive to favor the political aspiration of his mentor, to return the favor, as usually happens in Cauca, without thinking about the higher interests of the department.