Colombia’s March 2026 inflation reading came in at 5.56%, marking the second consecutive monthly increase since February, but the energy components of the basket told a contrasting story of deceleration rather than acceleration.
In a wide-ranging interview, Luz Stella Murgas, president of the Asociación Colombiana de Gas Natural (Naturgas), delivered a clear-eyed assessment of Colombia’s gas supply crisis that cuts against the government’s preferred framing: the country’s problem is not a shortage of gas in the ground but a persistent failure to build the political and institutional consensus needed to get it out.
With Colombia now a net gas importer and conventional production in sustained decline, energy sector voices are pushing hydraulic fracturing back onto the national agenda as the most credible lever for reversing the country’s hydrocarbon trajectory.
Presidential candidate Iván Cepeda, running on a platform broadly aligned with the Petro government’s ideology, used a campaign rally to outline his energy policy intentions for Ecopetrol, firmly rejecting any dilution of the state’s controlling stake in the company.
A couple of weeks ago we reported President Gustavo Petro’s declaration that Colombia would withdraw from the international investment arbitration system, leaving only local courts to settle contract disputes. We wanted to go a bit deeper into this.
Richard Francis, co-director of Sovereign Ratings for the Americas at Fitch Ratings, delivered a sober assessment of Colombia’s fiscal and economic outlook in an interview published April 6, 2026, estimating the country would need at least three to four additional years to recover the investment grade it lost in 2021.
Senior officials from Trinidad and Tobago and Colombia met in late March 2026 to explore deepening bilateral energy cooperation, reflecting both countries’ strategic interest in regional energy security.
The Ministry of Finance issued Decree 0288 on March 19, 2026, adding CoP$2.87T to the Sistema General de Regalías (SGR) budget for the 2025–2026 biennium, responding to a significant decline in royalties revenue that has reduced the resources available to Colombia’s departments and municipalities.
Energy and Mines Minister Edwin Palma represented Colombia at CERAWeek in Houston on March 25, 2026, using one of the global energy sector’s most prominent forums to advance the Petro government’s framing of the energy transition as a technically grounded, socially responsible process rather than an ideological commitment.
Three Bloomberg Línea analyses published in mid-to-late March paint a nuanced and cautionary picture of how the Middle East conflict’s energy price shock is landing across Latin America — one in which the instinct to read rising oil as a regional windfall is increasingly being challenged.
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