CÚCUTA, Colombia — Between 1964 and the signing of the Havana Accords in 2016, fighting among the Colombian military, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas killed more than 450,000 people. That war, which involved relatively cohesive ideological sides, is beginning again, this time with players that more closely resemble those of Mexico’s cartel wars. Colombia’s new right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella, began his term on Aug. 7 heralding an intensification of rising violence and a return to the failed policies of the past.
The future can be glimpsed in Norte de Santander, a department on the country’s northeast border with Venezuela that is home to roughly one-fifth of Colombia’s coca production. Its population is still reeling from conflict that erupted over the winter of 2025 between the left-wing Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and ex-FARC Frente 33 guerrilla groups. As the fighting escalated into Colombia’s largest displacement crisis in a decade, the country’s left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, declared a state of emergency , deployed troops and paused state peace talks with the ELN. By this May, more than 100,000 people had been displaced. The region’s community governments, like a growing number of others across Colombia, were “ without leaders ” due to death threats and assassinations.
“We’re bringing back the airstrikes.”
The return of hostilities has been sudden and heartbreaking for a country that believed it was turning the page. Just four years ago, Petro unified leftist parties and social movements behind a political strategy known as Paz Total. It engaged all armed groups in peaceful negotiations, halted forced coca eradication and funded voluntary substitution programs and other rural development schemes. But right-wing opponents and private-sector lobbies fought Petro’s efforts and mocked the idea of curtailing the drug trade through diplomacy and development. As political infighting chipped away at his support from key senators and ministers, armed group activity and illicit coca cultivation continued. So, too, did the violence. When Petro left office on Aug. 7, at least 14 regions across Colombia were experiencing conflict among armed groups — right-wing paramilitaries, criminal outfits, dissident factions from various guerrilla armies — fighting over territory previously controlled by the FARC, which disarmed in 2016.
Espriella, elected in June by a razor-thin margin, is a former criminal defense lawyer who promises a fusion policy modeled on two past Colombian presidents: the forced eradication programs of Alvaro Uribe and the offensive military campaigns of Ivan Duqué. To house all of the people he plans to arrest, Espriella proposes building 10 mega-prisons modeled after El Salvador’s Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), notorious for solitary confinement and torture. Espriella has also proposed 10 mega-centers for drug addiction treatment across the country, which his party deems a “profoundly humane” approach. This forms the foundation of a Patria Milagro, or Miracle Homeland, which he predicates on a moral battle against the “masked radicalism of modernity” he believes threatens the fabric of Colombian society.
Espriella has made much of his plans to unleash the military in the most embattled parts of the country, such as Catatumbo. As he told Caracol TV, “We’re bringing back the airstrikes.”
Espriella won his highest vote margins in conflict-racked Norte de Santander, where his promises to crush armed groups and “narcoterrorists” endeared him to residents. The people here are understandably weary after more than a half-century of violence. But the same promises sent shivers down the spines of local observers and activists who say his policies will only pour gasoline on the growing fire.
“We’re all in a panic,” said Lorena Acevedo Acuña, director and legal representative with Cúcuta-based human rights organization Corporación Construyendo Poder Democracia y Paz. “The right-wing paramilitary structures never disappeared and are strengthening with institutional support. To the [new government], all discourse about human rights is equal to ‘guerrilla.’” In Norte de Santander, she added, people are “convinced that the use of military force is the only way to overcome the presence of armed groups.”
Durable disarmament and peace, Acevedo said, will require continuing efforts to address the inequitable land distribution that drives rural violence. Colombia’s war, she notes, began in the 1960s as a peasant revolution during a wave of neoliberalism that saw the country divided up piecemeal by foreign corporations and private landowners. As jungle war blazed over fertile lands, campesinos, or peasants, organized into a leftist insurgency. The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC), or Peoples’ Revolutionary Army, formed to defend collective lands from privatization and push for agrarian reforms.
Campesinos were the primary victims of Colombia’s long war and its final act in Plan Colombia, the Washington-sponsored $13 billion counter-narcotics campaign that for 15 years armed the Colombian military to the teeth and fumigated more than 4 million acres of campesino and Indigenous land with poison rains of glyphosate. These same battered communities were at the heart of the 2016 peace agreement, which promised not just peace and disarmament, but agrarian reforms and funding for sustainable development projects.
“We’re all in a panic.”
For campesinos, state interest in their well-being was a long time coming. As early as 1994, Colombia recognized “zonas de reserva campesinas,” or collectively-owned and governed peasant reserves. But until the 2016 agreement, they mostly existed on paper, despite pleas from locals that only collective land tenure could “guarantee the eradication of coca leaves crops without glyphosate poison and the militarization of the area,” and protect local crops from encroaching palm oil and petroleum industries.
The left-wing electoral alliance known as Pacto Histórico committed to these reforms. Following Petro’s victory in 2022, it ramped up the number of awarded reserve zones and constitutionally recognized campesinos as a protected group. During escalated fighting in Catatumbo last year, the state granted 7,000 people in Catatumbo 59,000 collectively owned hectares.
The new president has no patience for peasant-led projects or any form of rural bureaucracy. Espriella plans to recall protections for nearly 1 million hectares of farmland under Petro’s scheme , as well as restructure or eliminate government agencies tasked with overseeing agrarian reforms and formalizing land titles, including for communities displaced during the war.
Observers warn that this would reverse the modest gains of Indigenous and campesino communities and halt the victims’ access to reparations. “Hopefully the new government can at least respect the judicial process regarding land titles,” said Lina Mejía Torres, a lawyer with Vivamos Humanos, a nongovernmental organization working with rural communities across Colombia. “It’s necessary to strengthen the institutional presence of these agencies in rural areas, not weaken them.”
Espriella’s oligarch-friendly “revolution of abundance” platform has won him the support of Colombia’s most powerful lobbies, including the national Federation of Ranchers . Property security is a serious concern in places like Norte de Santander, and these interests welcome renewed state focus on protecting their grazing lands and sprawling palm oil plantations from guerrillas and criminal syndicates, at the cost of supporting smaller local industries with infrastructure and development.
One piece of Espriella’s agenda casts an especially dark shadow over Colombia’s farmers: his plan to revive fossil fuel exploration, including by fracking. Petro froze most of this activity when he redirected Colombia toward green energy and some of the world’s most ambitious climate goals. In Norte de Santander, the impacts will fall hardest on Catatumbo, part of the continuous geological formations containing the black gold of Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin.
Oil companies gained a foothold in the region under Uribe. Their arrival brought militarization and the steady carving away of Indigenous Barí territory. The imminent acceleration of aggressive, state-backed extraction represents a final nail in the Petro government’s promises of social reforms cognizant of the “effects of extractivist development and conflict in the region.” Since the 2016 peace accords, Catatumbo had been prioritized for social investments that promised to end decades of neglect and bring much needed infrastructure like potable water and electricity.
“The official narrative does not recognize that Colombia’s conflict begins with the destruction of land,” Acevedo said. “Relying on force is incredibly infantile and simplistic.”
The specter of state-backed, corporate-aligned paramilitary activity once again looms.
As Petro’s policy of social development is displaced by militarization and privatization, the specter of state-backed, corporate-aligned paramilitary activity once again looms.
Beginning in the 1960s, right-wing paramilitaries routinely and sometimes indiscriminately murdered civilians in Norte de Santander. In some cases, massacres were traced back to local commanders’ desire to meet killing quotas set by Colombian military brass. One of the most brutal paramilitary assaults occurred in 1999, when the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) slaughtered over 150 people over three months in La Gabarra and Tibú , the seat of Catatumbo’s coca, petroleum and, now, palm oil industries. Declassified evidence has since shown the military not only permitted this mass “liquidation” of suspected guerrillas and sympathizers, but actively “donned AUC armbands and participated directly.” (Colombian officials reported this to the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá.) Among those who “looked the other way” on human rights atrocities was Jorge Enrique Mora, the brother of Espriella’s new defense minister, who was a local commander at the time. As a humanitarian worker testified in 2007, “the Colombian government only provides safety to a few villages that are on the coal highway or that have significant oil resources.”
Although the AUC began to demobilize in 2004, it has since been overtaken by a third generation of paramilitaries. Just as quickly as left-wing splinter groups took over FARC territories, the new right-wing paramilitaries began running criminal operations. “You don’t see it, but it’s there,” one local said. Among the most feared groups is the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de Sierra Nevada, which moved into Catatumbo as fighting escalated this spring, evolving out of a Caribbean protection racket for landowners and drug runners. Along with extortion and intimidation, these groups engage in what they call the “ social cleansing ” of community leaders and activists. Earlier this year, campesino union leaders Freiman Velásquez and Iván Stiven Camacho Castillo were assassinated in Tibú, along with two union members and their state-provided bodyguards. Observers worry that Espriella’s policies — and vocal derision of leftists and peaceful protest — will return the region to a culture of paramilitary impunity.
In preparation for the impacts of Espriella’s policies, ex-guerillas have little incentive to continue with demobilization and seek negotiations for amnesty. But even if they did, they no longer have a good-faith partner. Espriella has already undermined peace talks between the government and the paramilitary group Estado Mayor Bloques y Frentes — formed by ex-FARC guerrillas following the 2016 peace deal — by demanding the group disarm before he took office. Negotiations had centered on plans for a Zona de Ubicación Temporal, or a land plot where ex-guerillas could transition to civilian life, based on a model Zona designated last year near Tibú for Frente 33 members. The new president has also denounced a special court tasked with negotiating amnesties with ex-FARC guerrillas as a “whitewash.”
Instead, Espriella is preparing the air force to negotiate from above.
This pivot to the past has an echo in Colombia’s new foreign policy. After four years of diplomacy that prioritized relations with the Global South, Espriella is directing Bogotá back into Washington’s fold. This shift is heralded by Colombia’s role in the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas counter-cartel coalition. Launched in March, the coalition designates cartels as terrorist organizations and legitimizes cross-border military actions like the U.S. bombing campaign against suspected drug-running boats, and this spring’s U.S. Special Forces-backed military operation in Ecuador. At the same time, Bogotá and Washington are negotiating Plan Patriota 2.0, a bilateral drug policy led by the countries’ top military chiefs.
Plan Patriota revives the Uribista counterinsurgency strategy that resulted in the displacement of 46,000 people. According to Colombia’s Truth Commission , most of the civilians who fled were smeared as guerrillas just because they lived in or near “zonas rojas,” or red zones, as guerrilla territories were called by the government. Echoing the language of that era, Espriella’s defense minister, Jorge Mora, recently said , “We have to put pressure on [these zones] with bombings, with attacks, with constant sieges, and not let them breathe.”
“A total reversal” that “will exponentially increase cocaleros’ vulnerability.”
Critics of these policies point to the legacy of Plan Colombia and say it is facile to expect anything but the same tragic results.
“The real risk of Plan Patriota 2.0 is not that it will fail,” Leonardo González, director of human rights organization Indepaz, recently wrote , “but that it will be considered a success based on the same old metrics: more arrests, more casualties, more tons seized in military operations, as organized crime changes its name, routes and leaders, while keeping intact its capacity to reproduce.”
Under Petro’s more socially grounded drug policy, police and military focused on large traffickers, while small-time cultivators, or cocaleros , were offered programs and subsidies for transitioning to legal crops. Liliana del Pilar Castillo, director of the NGO Asociación Minga, calls Espriella’s return to militarization “a total reversal” that “will exponentially increase cocaleros’ vulnerability.”
These assessments are shared by Luis Fernando Niño Lopez, Petro’s appointee for the peace and reconciliation process in Norte de Santander.
“Forced eradication,” he said, “will only drive campesinos further into extreme poverty without any alternative.”
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Get Ready for Plan Colombia 2.0
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