DL works on the new edition of the Directorio Legislativo de Colombia 2026-2030
Following the complete renewal of Congress in July, the DL team is gathering, office by office, information on the 286 members of Congress who make up the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Fundación Directorio Legislativo (DL) is preparing the third edition of the Directorio Legislativo de Colombia: Who Our Members of Congress Are and How They Represent Us, covering the 2026-2030 constitutional term. The publication will bring together up-to-date information on the composition of the Congress of the Republic that emerged from the legislative elections of March 8, 2026, in which citizens elected 103 senators and 183 representatives.
As part of this process, in recent weeks Juan Krahl, DL’s Coordinator of Citizenship and Government Institutions, travelled to Bogotá to kick off the project. “Going office by office is not just a data-collection exercise: it is a way of bringing Congress closer to citizens by giving them a tool to know who their representatives are and how they represent them,” said Krahl. Fieldwork is a central part of the methodology: the information is obtained through a form completed by the legislators themselves, which the DL team then classifies, validates and standardizes. Getting every office to respond requires personalized follow-up, without which much of this data would never become public.
What is the Directorio Legislativo?
The Directorio Legislativo is a transparency tool that brings together each legislator’s biographical information, professional career and political background, parliamentary activity and contact details. It also includes institutional information on the structure of Congress, its committees and the legislative process. It works as a snapshot of the Legislative Branch at a given moment: it makes it possible to know who the representatives are and how they represent citizens.
In Colombia, the publication has been produced since 2018, and this will be its 3rd edition. It is published in print and is also available on the digital platform legisladores.directoriolegislativo.org, which offers standardized, comparable information in open data format.
Objectives
The purpose of the Directorio is to promote access to public information and strengthen the link between representatives and those they represent. It aims to be a reference tool for members of Congress and their teams, journalists, researchers, civil society organizations, the private sector and the general public, while also encouraging good transparency practices within Congress itself. This edition is especially relevant at the start of a new political cycle, with a Congress renewed on July 20 and a new government that took office on August 7.
A regional perspective
The Directorio Legislativo was born in Argentina in 2000 and has been published after every legislative renewal since then. Over time, the initiative was replicated in other countries in the region, such as Mexico and Colombia, consolidating a common methodology that allows the composition and functioning of Latin American congresses to be compared. In July this year, DL presented the 14th edition of the Directorio Legislativo de Argentina 2026-2027 at the national Chamber of Deputies.
This comparative perspective is complemented by other DL lines of work in Colombia, such as monitoring the political and legislative situation, the regional survey of parliamentary salaries, and the Joining the Dots project, which analyzes the asset, income and conflict-of-interest disclosures of members of Congress and public officials.
At Directorio Legislativo, we reaffirm our commitment to legislative transparency in Latin America and the Caribbean, convinced that an informed citizenry is a necessary condition for more open and representative democratic institutions.