Colombia: The high price of a flawed peace - Mills and Molina
Key topics:
The complex and cyclical nature of conflict and reform in Colombia.
The shift from political insurgency to a criminal narco-state.
The challenges and setbacks of a flawed peace process.
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By Greg Mills and J D Molina*
Within a decade, the government had turned the tide in its favour, Colombia becoming a metaphor for turnaround, not least for South Africa, with its sizeable population and comparable income per capita.
But Colombia’s more recent circumstances are a reminder that reform is a self-licking lollipop and that recovery is never complete, as the country slips backwards once more, this time into a brand of retributive, populist politics with a familiar narco-criminal problem.
Francisco ‘Pacho’ Santos was vice-president to Álvaro Uribe in Colombia between 2002 and 2010. During this time, the country turned a corner, from a failing state into one offering a foundation of governance and rule of law, a turnaround which led to a peace deal between the government and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement hatched by Pacho’s cousin, President Juan Manuel Santos, in 2016.
Now President Uribe, long a thorn in the side of the left in Colombia, has been prosecuted on the grounds that he ordered imprisoned witnesses to testify in his favour over his alleged links to paramilitary groups.
Uribe, who has always denied the charges, saying he is a victim of political persecution, was sentenced to 12 years’ house arrest on 1 August. On 19 August a court in Bogotá ordered his release to“protect the fundamental right to individual liberty of citizen Álvaro Uribe Vélez” while the sentence underwent review. This trial has increased polarisation in Colombian politics less than a year before the next presidential elections.
This was the first criminal conviction of a former president in the history of Colombia, a process which has further divided already polarised public opinion in the run-up to the 2026 presidential elections. As the era of Uribe recedes, Colombia is returning to its past of violence and criminality.
An early battle
President from 1990 until 1994, César Gaviria, is best known as the man who took the fight to Pablo Escobar, an early battle in the war on drugs which reached its dramatic conclusion on a rooftop in the suburbs of Medellin with Escobar’s death in December 1993.
Gaviria’s home, stacked with an impressive collection of art, is tucked up against the mountain in La Calera. On the outskirts of Bogota, it was as close to the capital as the rebel FARC reached in 2000, at which point they controlled as much as half of Colombia’s territory. “Just around Bogota,” recalls General Alberto José Mejía, later chief of the armed forces, “there were 22 FARC fronts”. The FARC was estimated to have an army of 25,000, with a further 75,000 militia in support.
By the turn of the century, Colombia was a country on the cusp of chaos.
Colombia is the oldest democracy in Latin America, but has been at war for 150 of its 200 years of independence: there were nine civil wars and more than fifty insurrections in the 19th century alone. This violence expressed the people’s discontent with the stubborn economic, social and political inequalities that still define the country.
A cosy reconciliation between Liberals and Conservative elites − which, by definition, excluded the poor, rural, and indigenous workers and peasants who had been most heavily affected by the violence − ended systemic insecurity, which peaked during a period in the 1950s known as La Violencia, but in so doing seeded the conditions for a new round of conflict.
The deal excluded Communist armed movements, as well as more moderate Marxist groups, that had emerged outside the traditional Liberal-Conservative dichotomy. The Communist Party refused to join the National Front reconciliation process; several Communist militias refused to disarm, instead establishing autonomous zones in defiance of Bogota.
Conflict intensified after 1959, part of a region-wide rise in unrest after the Cuban Revolution. In July 1964 a confederation of guerrilla groups formed the ‘Southern Bloc’. Declaring themselves “victims of the policy of fire and sword proclaimed and carried out by the oligarchic usurpers of power”, the new coalition called for an “armed revolutionary struggle to win power” and renamed itself the FARC. Also opposing the government were the rural ELN (Ejercito de Liberación Nacional) the Maoist Chinese-oriented EPL (Ejercito Popular de Liberacion) and a decade later, the urban M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril). The army, in turn, received support − sometimes helpful, often unrequited and embarrassing − from right-wing paramilitaries that had formed to defend communities (and wealthy landowners) threatened by the guerrillas, the very same groups with which Uribe is alleged to have enjoyed links.
Guerrilla movements
Starting from Belisario Betancourt’s government in the 1980s, Colombia has negotiated disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration processes with most of the guerrilla movements.
M-19 demobilised in 1990 and transformed itself into a parliamentary political party, but FARC and ELN opted to continue the struggle, alongside EPL, turning to criminal activity to fund their struggles. With the collapse of global Communism in the early 1990s, the prospect of external support receded even further, and narcotics became a key source of finance, along with kidnapping and extortion, making the groups shift from political violence to narco-terrorism.
Drugs brought in an estimated $3.5 billion annually by 2005, or nearly half of FARC’s funding.The right-wing paramilitaries, likewise, received three-quarters of their income from drug cartels, to which they hired out their services.
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This created a huge overlap between guerrillas and gangsters in Colombia. FARC leaders (among others) emerged as conflict entrepreneurs − they discovered the value of crime as an enabler for their pursuit of raw political power, a trait which continues today as the drug trade rises once more to record levels.
By 1996 Colombia was losing the battle against this criminal-insurgent complex. Drug cartels − Pablo Escobar in Medellín, and the rival Cali cartel − had subverted Colombia’s democracy and brought violence to its cities. In the countryside, paramilitaries had united into the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) and branched out into drugs, extortion and extrajudicial killing. FARC columns, operating openly in large formations, proved capable of defeating battalion-sized army units and seizing and holding territory.
By the end of the 20th century, on the army’s admission, the guerrillas were in control of territory stretching “from Ecuador to Venezuela, had built themselves considerable infrastructure in the southeast around Caquetá and Meta, and not only had Bogotá surrounded, but had deployed guerrillas into its outskirts. Road transport between the major cities was very difficult, if not impossible.”
Wake-up call
FARC’s victories −and its expansion, which for the first time directly threatened Colombia’s major cities − were a wake-up call for Colombians. Many had previously seen the guerrillas (to the extent they thought about them at all) as a nuisance, a problem for campesinos but no threat to business as usual in Colombia’s sophisticated capital cities.
Suddenly the threat seemed real.
Elected in 1998, President Andrés Pastrana initially pursued peace talks, creating a demilitarised zone centred on San Vicente del Caguan, including a ‘peace camp’ at Las Pozos. But he broke off talks in February 2002 after the guerrillas showed no willingness to abandon the armed struggle, continued the fight outside the demilitarised zone, exploited the peace talks to gain breathing space, and used their Caguán enclave to massively expand cocaine production and attack Colombia’s cities.
Colombia’s military leaders realised that something had to change, and began developing plans to break the deadlock. These eventually resulted in a major FARC defeat at Mitu, which signalled the government’s new resolve and marked the beginning of Colombia’s remarkable turnaround. Pastrana had earlier formulated Plan Colombia, a $10.6 billion effort formally known as the ‘Colombia Strategic Development Initiative’, which became a determining factor in the return of government control to wide areas of the country. Launched in 2000, Plan Colombia was initially focused primarily on the drug war but gained impetus after the 2001 Al Qaeda World Trade Center attacks, which freed Washington to expand co-operation beyond counter-narcotics into anti-terrorism.
Encouraged by this external direction and financial boost, though largely relying on their own agency and domestic funding, the Colombian military turned the tide, a process that hastened after the election of Uribe as president in August 2002.
Uribe served two terms until 2010, energetically executing Plan Colombia through his Democratic Security Policy which set as the very first objective the territorial consolidation of the state in areas largely dominated by the guerrillas and paramilitaries. In those eight years the army created brigades and elite anti-terrorist groups that cornered FARC and ELN and shrank the ungoverned spaces.
Increasing irrelevance
Uribe’s government aimed to strengthen the state to improve security, the economy and the social programmes, which would squeeze the FARC and other guerrilla organisations into increasing irrelevance. While he acknowledged the need for political inclusion, he recognised that this would have to be “without impunity” for past crimes. His approach was fundamentally organic and bottom-up through improvements in security, education and health care among other government services, expanding economic opportunities through the increased investment that would follow, rather than top-down.
These security and economic policies were expected to be continued by Juan Manuel Santos, who was the Minister of Defence during the biggest operations against FARC during Uribe’s administration. His presidency proved a moment of change along with elements of continuity, signing a peace deal with the FARC despite significant public scepticism. On 26 September 2016, Santos and Rodrigo Londoño, the leader of the FARC better known by his nom de guerre ‘Timochenko’, signed a peace deal greeted by the applause of international dignitaries in the historic coastal city of Cartagena.
General Jorge Luis Vargas was a career police officer who served as director of the Police Intelligence Directorate, in which post he supported March 2008’s Operation Phoenix, in which Luis Édgar Devia (alias Raúl Reyes) was killed; Operation Odysseus in November 2011 when Guillermo León Sáenz (alias Alfonso Cano) was killed, and Operation Sodom in September 2010 in Meta, which saw the demise of Mono Jojoy. General Vargas later became the Director of the Colombian National Police. Vargas says that the effectiveness of the security forces was born out of the integration of “the military, police and judicial arms of government” by Uribe in 2002. This only knitted together an effective force by 2006. Although there was a lot of resistance in the high command, this created a new doctrine – Joint Co-ordination and Inter-Agency – which was “like putting a puzzle together for the first time”. In practical terms, this created new rules of engagement within a legal platform, ensured the sharing of intelligence, and ensured clear tasking, especially of the leadership of the FARC. “This was driven by improved intelligence, 97% of which was received from the FARC itself through a payments system.”
Obstacles to peace
What went wrong, Vargas holds, was that they lacked a clear intelligence picture of the differences within FARC, which prevented them from pinpointing and assessing the obstacles to peace. In part this was down to the hosting of the talks in Cuba, as “Cuba’s G2 [intelligence] was very strong” says the CIA-trained intelligence officer. “Cuba was not a neutral country, a bit like having a peace process between Israel and Hamas being hosted by Tehran.”
And then there were differences “from the start” with President Santos, “who always wanted a plebiscite to ensure legitimacy, but with a high risk of losing and dividing the country. All our recommendations were not to do this plebiscite.” There was also no plan to manage the dissidents of the FARC, which led to their exclusion from the process, and the continuation (and expansion) of the drug trade.
Overall, Vargas notes, from the government side, pressure for a quick deal and “a lack of preparation proved a major blow to the peace process”. Iván Duque, who became president after Santos in 2018, says that while “the ultimate purpose of a counter-insurgency campaign and confrontation is to have a peaceful, political ending”, whatever the political imperative for peace, you cannot do so − citing Uribe’s earlier fears − “with impunity”.
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With the election of Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, as president following Duque in 2022, the worst fears of the peace deal’s opponents came into sharper focus.
Dissident factions
The new administration aimed to create a demobilisation and reintegration agreement, named Paz Total, that would include the drug cartels along with those dissident factions of the FARC that had rejected the peace deal signed six years before. This ambitious initiative was supposed to bring sustainable peace and development to the country. However, the security conditions have deteriorated in the last three years, along with a faltering economy driven by falling investment and public confidence levels, and an emasculated and overstretched armed forces, with a reduced budget and leadership retired early. “Investment is like refuelling a plane,” notes Luis Fernando Mejia of Fedesarollo, Colombia’s top economic think-tank. “Without it the plane will stall and then crash”.
The dramatic increase in narco-trafficking which followed the peace agreement hinged on a combination of judicial impunity, an end to aerial spraying (insisted on by the guerrillas, unsurprisingly) and other forms of eradication, and a failure to implement a comprehensive post-conflict development and governance programme which the military had devised.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the success of Plan Colombia has proven partial and temporary, especially in terms of its original counter-drug purpose. The transition of some FARC members from guerrillas producing cocaine to straightforward cocaine producers, has seen coca cultivation leap from 40,000 hectares in 2013 to 270,000 hectares today. This started during Santos’s second term as president (2014–18) when, with the focus on not upsetting the prospect of a peace deal, the area under coca crop production more than quadrupled.
Escobar’s murderous time
According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Colombia now produces an estimated 2,664 tonnes of cocaine annually, or enough to fill 20 Boeing 747 cargo planes. Colombia now produces more coca than it did during Pablo Escobar’s murderous time.
The country is once more the world’s biggest supplier of cocaine, with some 90% of that total entering the United States. Interdiction has fallen, too, with new smuggling routes through Venezuela and the involvement of Mexican cartels. It is estimated that the FARC, whether these be former members or so-called dissidents, controls around half of the drug trade.
Pacho Santos was a journalist before he became vice president. He says that the stability created under Plan Colombia was “dismantled” by the peace process in several stages, initially through President Santos’s abandoning coca eradication and the subsequent undoing of the capability and thus control of the security agencies in the light of the Havana agreement.
General Juan Pablo Rodriguez, who served as Chief of the Armed Forces under Santos, offers a salutary reminder of the costs of failing to see beyond the pomp and ceremony of the settlement: “Having signed the peace accords did not mean that peace had arrived.” The former vice-president says that while peace is a marathon, it is one in which you “cannot change direction, as President Santos did, with consequences for the intersection between drugs, security and, today, democracy. We face the Mexicanisation of the Colombian state,” says the former vice president, “where lives and livelihoods, government and governance are shaped by drugs and criminality”.
Colombia’s ups and downs over the last ten years are a warning to others in believing that peace is an event rather than a much longer-term process. It’s also a warning for those businesses which prefer to find the means to work with or around incumbents than to take a principled stance against them. And yet independent business remains the only financial counter to the power and wealth today wielded in the political domain by the nexus of politicians and drug-traffickers.
Opportunity to course correct
The May 2026 election offers Colombians among the centre-right an opportunity to course correct, but for others, a chance to double-down on the leftist populism preferred by Petro.
Pacho Santos fears that in the event the centre and right do not unite behind a single candidate and succeed in swallowing personal egos and ambitions in the national interest in undoing the hold of the populists, “we will become an autocratic pseudo-democracy in the image of Maduro’s Venezuela, one that is unlikely to have another free election.” He cites the murder of another Senator Uribe, the Harvard-educated Miguel, who was seeking the centre-right’s nomination for the presidency for 2026, and was shot at a rally in Bogota in June and died on 11 August. In 1990, Miguel Uribe’s mother, Diana Turbay, a prominent lawyer and journalist, was kidnapped by the Medellín cartel and was subsequently killed during a failed police rescue attempt. The aim of the cartel, led by Pablo Escobar, was to kidnap politicians and journalists (including Pacho Santos) to prevent Colombian legislators from approving an extradition treaty with Washington.
As Andrés Pastrana puts it: “If you want to see what’s happening in Colombia, speak to the Venezuelans. They come from the future.” This warning has become even more relevant today, as the Venezuelan and Colombian governments announced the creation of a Special Economic Zone on the border between the two countries, where armed groups fight for control of the drug trade and production, with the collusion of both states.
The key lesson from contemporary Colombia is that a bad peace leads inevitably to more conflict. This is a lesson from Europe in 1918 as much as it is likely from Ukraine today.
*Dr Greg Mills is a Fellow at the University of Navarra in Spain and a founder of the Platform for African Democrats (https://www.pad.africa/). From 2005, he was for 20 years the director for the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation. His recent books include "Rich State, Poor State," "The Art of War and Peace." and the forthcoming "The Essence of Success: Insights in Leadership and Strategy from Sport, Business, War and Politics," all published by Penguin Random House.
*Juan Diego Molina is a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra. He has a graduate degree in History, a Master's in Political Science, and a Master's in Economic Analysis of Law and Public Policy from the University of Salamanca. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis at the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Navarra.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.