The 2011 Colombian regional and municipal elections were held on 30 October 2011, to elect the governors of 32 departments and their Department Assemblies, the mayors of 1,099 municipalities and their city councils, and the Local Administrative Juntas (JAL) of national territories.
The last mayor elected in Bogotá before the 2011 elections, Samuel Moreno, was suspended after a scandal over public works bids by Colombia's inspector general. He was replaced by an interim mayor, Clara López Obregón, until the 2011 elections.
Leading up to the elections, 41 candidates were assassinated with many others receiving threats against their lives or those of their family. Then President Juan Manuel Santos deployed 300,000 troops in an effort to prevent violence against candidates and voters. Electoral Observation Mission (MOE), a Colombian civil society network active in election monitoring training, created a crowdsourcing website, "Pilas con el Voto" ('), just prior to the elections to encourage both anonymous and non-anonymous reporting of election-related violence and irregularities in the voting itself and for publishing maps and analyses of these.
Among the winners of the 2011 elections was future 34th President Gustavo Petro. Petro ran and won a campaign for the mayor of Bogotá, the nation's capital city, under the Progresistas Party against Green Party and Union Party for the People candidate, and former mayor, Enrique Peñalosa Londoño as well as independent Gina Parody.
The first independent mayor of MedellÃÂn, Sergio Fajardo, successfully ran for Governor of MedellÃÂn's Antioquia Department under the Green Party.
A notable losing candidate was MarÃÂa Isabel Urrutia, an Olympic weightlifter who won Colombia's first gold medal in 2000; she unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Cali under the Alternative Democratic Pole. She would later be appointed as Minister of Sports in Gustavo Petro's Cabinet.
A number of candidates for mayoral, municipal, and gubernatorial offices were alleged to have ties with paramilitaries. This included around 1 in 4 or 25% of the elected governors.