As of Monday, Colombian state entities can once again use direct contracting and enter into inter-administrative agreements without the restriction that applied over recent months. It ended with the presidential run-off of 21 June, which settled the succession to Gustavo Petro and, with it, exhausted the period of the "guarantees law" that Law 996 of 2005 imposes on state contracting during election season.
The electoral guarantees law is not a procurement rule: it is a rule to protect clean elections, and it uses public procurement as one of its instruments. Its logic is simple: in the months before an election, the sitting government holds an enormous volume of resources and appointments that, unchecked, it could use to tilt the balance towards a candidate. So the law suspends, for a defined window, the procurement method that demands the least competition and concentrates the most discretion: direct contracting.
This time the restriction came in two speeds. From 8 November 2025, limits applied to inter-administrative agreements executing public funds, in the hands of mayors, governors and heads of decentralised entities. From 31 January 2026, the ban on contracting directly extended to every state entity, regardless of level or source of funds. Colombia Compra Eficiente set the operating rules for that cycle in External Circular 006 of 2025, a primer clarifying the dates, the listed exceptions — defence, security, public credit, education and health emergencies, infrastructure reconstruction — and the carve-out for contracts financed with funds from international bodies, which fell outside the ban.
Along the way, the boundary between an inter-administrative "agreement" and a "contract" ended up in court. Colombia Compra Eficiente had extended the restriction on agreements to inter-administrative contracts by circular, and the Consejo de Estado corrected it in two successive decisions: first suspending it and then, in November 2025, confirming definitively that the extension exceeded the agency's powers, because an agreement and an inter-administrative contract are legally distinct instruments and prohibitive rules are read narrowly, without extension by analogy. The practical consequence was that many entities were able to keep using inter-administrative contracts — not agreements — through much of the restriction, as long as they respected the selection method that applied to them.
What restarts now is, strictly speaking, normality: entities can again contract directly under the grounds in article 2 of Law 1150 of 2007 — declared emergency, inter-administrative contracts, science and technology, leases, among others — without the extra layer of electoral restriction, and territorial entities recover full use of inter-administrative agreements. What does not change is the rest of the control scaffolding: a declared emergency still requires a prior declaration of disaster or calamity by the competent authority and its own reasoned act to support it, as Colombia Compra Eficiente clarified in an opinion of November 2024, and it remains subject to after-the-fact fiscal review by the Contraloría. Adherence to the bidding documents, objective selection and the standard documents are untouched too: the guarantees law never suspended those principles, it only closed the door, for a time, on the method that loosens them most.
Experience from earlier electoral cycles teaches that the end of the restriction usually brings a rebound in direct contracting and in awards that were dammed up during the freeze, concentrated in July and August — just before the incoming government, which takes office on 7 August, has a chance to review the commitments it inherits. This is not necessarily irregular: it is the normal behaviour of an administration picking up a tool that was closed to it for months. But it is exactly the kind of pattern worth watching closely: an unusual jump in the number or value of an entity's direct contracts, concentrated in a few weeks and with the same supplier benefiting several times, deserves more attention than the same jump spread across many bidders and justified on clear grounds.
For oversight groups, suppliers and journalists, SECOP II becomes again, from this week, the place to check whether that restart is happening within the rules or is being used to accommodate last-minute commitments before the change of government. LuxIA tracks that body of rules and case law in real time for precisely this reason: so that the question of whether a direct contract signed in July answers to a genuine ground or to end-of-term haste does not depend on anyone's memory, but on public data that anyone can review.