In Colombia, Is the Clock Turning Back on Security?

Colombia is facing its most severe security crisis since its 2016 peace accord. In January, the still-active National Liberation Army (ELN), launched an offensive in Catatumbo, a major coca-producing region along the border with Venezuela, killing at least one hundred and confining to their homes or displacing thousands more. Then, on June 7, came an assassination attempt against presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay in Bogotá, the likes of which Colombia hasn’t seen in years. The next week, armed groups carried out at least two dozen terrorist attacks across the southwestern part of the country, killing at least seven. Many of these attacks have been linked to the Central General Staff, a dissident faction of the now demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). 

These events reflect the costs of only partially fulfilling the provisions of the 2016 peace accord. Many had hoped the accord, which demobilized the FARC—then, Colombia’s biggest armed group—would not only bring security and repair the country’s social divisions but also help bring stability to neighboring countries through the reduction of coca production. Instead, the opposite happened. Colombia’s illegal economies, coca included, boomed, setting off conflicts like the ones in Catatumbo and the southwest of the country, destabilizing Ecuador and large parts of the Brazilian Amazon, and benefiting cartels as far away as Mexico. To improve not only its own security, but also the region’s, Colombia must implement the remaining provisions of the accord. This will require repairing congressional-executive relations, identifying new funding sources to support the accord’s implementation, and ensuring these resources are used efficiently.

Peace Undermined

The 2016 peace accord raised hopes that after more than fifty years of conflict between the state and the FARC, Colombia would finally see lasting peace and the fifth of the country the FARC had controlled would finally be free. The Colombian state committed to improving socioeconomic conditions and increasing state presence in these areas through the provision of jobs, health and education, and infrastructure projects. The plan was ambitious both politically—assuming sustained political will to transform the Colombian state—and fiscally: one estimate put the price tag for fully implementing the accord at $41 billion, equivalent to more than half the total government budget for 2016. 

The accord suffered its first blow before it was even finalized. Voters narrowly rejected it in an October 2016 plebiscite, after former President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) campaigned publicly against ratifying it, arguing it was too lenient on ex-combatants. While lawmakers still passed the accord through congress, the social and political consensus needed to make rapid progress on implementation had frayed. Meanwhile, former President Juan Manuel Santos spent down his political capital during the negotiations, so in his final years in office, implementation faced hurdles. Polarization slowed the progress of peace-related legislation in Colombia’s legislature. Although Colombia completed 86 percent of the provisions required for 2017, many of the initial achievements were short-term: monitoring compliance and demobilizing FARC fighters.

And even though 2017 saw the country’s homicide rate reach its lowest level in more than four decades, homicides and forced displacement began to rise again in former conflict zones, as new armed groups capitalized on legislative and bureaucratic delays in implementing promised rural reforms to fill the void left by FARC. They forged alliances with criminal organizations like Mexican cartels, which the FARC had previously often barred from their territories, and consolidated control over drug routes and illegal mining operations.

Rapid implementation required a successor to Santos who believed in the spirit of the accord. Instead, Uribe protégé Iván Duque, a vocal critic, won the presidency in 2018. Once in office, Duque didn’t tear up the agreement like some feared, but backed by a significant portion of congress, he did slow its implementation. Duque publicly criticized the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP)—a tribunal that forms the lynchpin of the transitional justice system—and tried, unsuccessfully, to veto it, undermining the Colombian public’s trust in the institution, and the peace accord more broadly. He stopped new households from registering for the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (PNIS), a program paying coca farmers to switch to legal crops, citing fiscal constraints. Despite an estimated 80 percent of coca-growing families signing up for the program at its outset, only 3 percent received promised seed money. 

What implementation did occur under Duque—such as financing some infrastructure projects, designing some rural reform projects, and continuing to demobilize and reintegrate ex-rebels—owed mostly to pressure from international actors and Colombian civil society. Funding for peace-related initiatives also lagged significantly behind what was promised, especially financing for rural reform provisions.

The lethargic pace of implementation meant state presence didn’t expand at the pace of the new criminal groups and FARC dissidents taking over rural power vacuums.

Duque dispatched the military to fight these groups and increased manual eradication of coca, but this did not improve the security situation. Heavy-handed tactics turned parts of the countryside against the state, and Duque’s focus on capturing and killing armed group bosses fragmented them and increased violent competition. 

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic intensified Colombia’s challenges. When Duque left office in 2022, he was the first president this century to hand off a security situation to his successor worse than the one he inherited.

Deterioration Under Petro

Gustavo Petro’s 2022 inauguration was supposed to signal a dramatic shift in the Colombian government’s commitment to the peace process. Petro campaigned on implementing the peace deal. But after making limited early progress—for instance, by reaching an agreement to purchase cattle ranchers’ land to redistribute to small farmers—implementation again stalled, this time, not as a result of government opposition, but because of disorganization, a lack of dedicated resources, and his prioritization of his Total Peace agenda—a bid to simultaneously negotiate peace with all the country’s remaining illegal armed groups. Petro claimed other branches obstructed his implementation plans, but it is his own blunders and missteps that have mattered more than any alleged obstruction.

Petro’s approach to drugs also set Colombia back. In theory, he endeavored to help coca farmers switch to legal crop alternatives. But by doing almost nothing to control coca supply and reducing all forms of eradication dramatically compared to his predecessor, he instead oversaw record-high coca and cocaine production in 2023, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The Colombian cocaine glut flooded neighboring countries, like Ecuador and Brazil, helping transform their street and prison gangs into full-blown drug cartels, and contributed to increased drug overdose deaths in the United States and Europe. 

Meanwhile, Total Peace’s failures deepened the rural security crisis. Numerous failed ceasefires and a drawback of Colombian security forces only consolidated armed groups’ territorial control. Fear of potentially violating ceasefire agreements hamstrung Colombia’s defense ministry. 

In October 2024, Petro pivoted, showing some renewed interest in implementing the 2016 accord. He announced a rapid response plan to accelerate implementation and said it would be a priority for the final year of his administration. A bill to regulate the operations of the agrarian jurisdiction, a special court system to adjudicate land disputes, is nearing a final vote in Congress, and could help advance the accord’s most underdeveloped pillar—comprehensive rural reform. But the broader deterioration of the security situation and Petro’s continued combative relationship with Colombia’s Congress and the United States—which has helped fund implementation in the past—will likely limit progress.

A Mixed Record

If not for the peace accord, Colombia would be worse off today. More than 80 percent of the 13,000 plus former combatants who demobilized have remained that way. Thousands of individuals have testified before the JEP. The institution has issued more than 200 indictments against former FARC combatants and members of Colombia’s security forces, and four of its cases are at the trial stage. 

The creation of the Territorially Focused Development Programs (PDETs), an ambitious strategy to bring the Colombian state and economic development to the communities worst affected by the conflict, has made some progress, but the initiative has been plagued by corruption scandals, a lack of institutional capacity, the continued presence of armed groups, and design flaws that make it difficult to envision many of the projects delivering sustainable development. 

Concerningly, most of the peace accord’s provisions remain unfinished, and the rate of implementation has slowed considerably in recent years.

Colombians are understandably pessimistic about the peace accord’s future. 76 percent of those surveyed in April 2025 said they believed the implementation of the peace deal was moving in the wrong direction.

While Colombia’s homicide rate remains much lower than its peak during the 1990s and early 2000s, homicides are still up 20.9 percent since 2016. Parts of the country continue to live outside the law, as evidenced by the nearly 450 former combatants and more than 1,000 social leaders and human rights defenders who have been murdered since the signing of the peace accord. More than one million civilians have been forcibly confined or displaced since 2016. Child recruitment by armed groups is up 1,000 percent over the last four years. Armed groups continue to proliferate and are consolidating their territory with the Gulf Clan and the ELN each operating in at least a fifth of Colombian municipalities. 

Limited progress on rural reform, arguably the most important component of the peace accord and its most expensive, is another source of pessimism. The rural reform chapter of the peace accord was meant to address the historical inequities in land distribution, the urban-rural development divide, and rural poverty through land adjudication and formalization and PDETs. However, stringent regulations, administrative and bureaucratic delays, weak institutional and technical capacity and coordination, budgetary and fiscal constraints, and the continued presence of armed groups have hindered implementation. The state has implemented only 9 percent of rural reform commitments and left rural reform funds unspent, while official government figures on land formalization and allocation are plagued by inconsistencies. The lack of rural development in turn has strengthened illicit economies, because many areas continue to lack the infrastructure that makes legal crops and livelihoods viable. 

The Future of Peace 

Implementing the remaining provisions will require Petro to repair relations with the Colombian military, so it feels supported to put the necessary pressure on armed groups to bring them to the negotiating table, which Petro has begun to do with the recent appointment of retired General Pedro Sánchez as defense minister and Petro’s acknowledgement that he needed to modify his security strategy. 

Colombia will also need to find additional sources of revenue to fund the peace accord’s implementation process. The country’s fiscal deficit increased to 6.7 percent of GDP in 2024, tax revenue fell, and the current administration faces strong pressures to reduce spending, all constraining the government’s ability to fund implementation, and increasing the importance of foreign funding. If the Trump administration is unwilling to provide it, Colombia must search for alternatives like European governments or multilateral institutions.

Petro and his successor must also improve oversight and accountability mechanisms to ensure that funds earmarked for implementation are not squandered. 

Smoother executive-legislative relations would benefit implementation, as well. Petro’s combative relationship with lawmakers and his accusations they are blocking implementation has been its own source of obstacles. It will be easier to clear administrative and regulatory hurdles complicating land adjudication and formalization and set aside the necessary funding for implementation if both branches cooperate. 

Most importantly, further success implementing the remaining provisions of the peace deal will be contingent on whoever succeeds Petro having a strong commitment to the 2016 peace accord. If another Duque or Uribe is elected, the prospects are slim to none. Although fully implementing the accord looks less and less likely, progress could improve both Colombia’s security situation and the region’s. Too much is at stake not to try.