Colombia Bombing Rebels, 10 Years After Peace Deal That Failed To End Fighting

Colombia’s president is autographing bombs.In a video posted Monday, President Abelardo de la Espriella signs a roughly 1,000-pound explosive later dropped on forces known as FARC dissidents in rural Tibú, near the Venezuelan border, calling it “460 kilograms of democracy.”The strike capped three months in which his government stopped negotiating with armed groups and started bombing them. It came as Bogotá told the world something few expected to hear: the 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group, known as FARC, once held up as a model has never brought peace.Addressing the United Nations Security Council for the first time on Oct. 12, Foreign Minister Omar Bula said 132,930 people were murdered between the signing of the 2016 accord and August 2026. He also cited nearly 100,000 extortion cases and more than 2,750 kidnappings over the same period, while armed group membership grew from 6,000 to almost 30,000.So how did a deal hailed as a blueprint for ending wars leave Colombia with five times as many fighters? The answer may start with the deal itself.“The increase in the quantity and number of persons in armed groups shows that the flawed 2016 accords, like the attempt to demobilize the self-defense groups, only produced more fragmentation and violence,” a research professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, Evan Ellis, tells The New York Sun.What the Accord Delivered, and What It Did NotThe agreement was meant to end more than 50 years of fighting that killed some 450,000 people, according to Colombia’s Truth Commission. Roughly 13,000 FARC members demobilized. Yet of the deal’s 578 commitments, only about a third have been fully carried out, with nearly 10 of its 15 years gone, according to the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute.The United Nations envoy for Colombia, Miroslav Jenča, told the council on Oct. 12 that the deal ended the country’s longest-running insurgency, while noting that 501 signatories of the accord have been slain since 2016.Others see a deal flawed from the outset.Mr. Ellis points to a shortage of jobs for the demobilized, a vast criminal economy built on cocaine and illegal mining, and a state unable to impose order in regions crowded with armed groups.“The peace deal was merely an ill-conceived and expensive attempt to ‘sweep water’ in light of the nature of the problem,” he says.Yet Mr. Bula described the figures as nationwide homicides, not conflict deaths. That distinction matters, according to one Bogotá-based analyst.“The 132,930 figure cited by the Foreign Minister likely refers to an umbrella count of total national homicides over the past decade, rather than conflict deaths, and paints a deceptive relationship between homicides and the peace agreement,” a specialist at the political risk firm Colombia Risk Analysis, Daniel Poveda, tells the Sun.Those who track the accord take a longer view. In 2002, at the height of the war with the FARC, Colombia’s homicide rate was 67.3 per 100,000 people. Since the deal was signed, it has hovered around 26.“Colombia therefore experiences less than half the homicide violence it faced at the peak of that period of conflict,” the director of the Peace Accords Matrix at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Josefina Echavarría Álvarez, tells the Sun.Mr. Poveda, however, blames what followed the signing.“Implementation failure is the main driver,” he says. The Clan del Golfo grew stronger, he notes. The National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, dug in, and new FARC dissident factions formed. Iván Duque, the conservative president from 2018 to 2022, campaigned on rolling back the accord while his leftist successor, Gustavo Petro, treated it as an afterthought in pursuit of “total peace,” an attempt to negotiate with nearly every armed group in the country.The Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s largest drug trafficking group, has more than 10,000 members by government figures, up from about 4,000 in 2022.The Marxist ELN never signed the 2016 deal and is now Colombia’s largest active rebel army. The FARC dissidents, former guerrillas who rejected the accord or later rearmed, include the faction of Iván Mordisco, Colombia’s most wanted rebel commander, and a rival bloc loyal to a commander known as Calarcá, the target of Monday’s strike.“That Petro policy largely failed, with armed and criminal group membership growing roughly 90 percent to nearly 30,000 by the end of his term,” Mr. Poveda says.The FARC walked away, the state never delivered, and other armed groups moved into the abandoned ground.“Where the state has failed to establish a sustained presence through justice, roads, education, clean water, and other essential public services, other armed actors have found opportunities to expand their influence and compete for territorial control,” Ms. Echavarría Álvarez says.Those groups have cocaine money. Colombia ended 2024 with a record 261,000 hectares of coca, according to the United Nations drug office. The ombudsman’s office counted 86 massacres with 326 victims between January and August of this year.Colombians responded by electing a candidate who promised to stop talking and start fighting.President Wants Out of the Negotiating BusinessPresident de la Espriella, a lawyer who had never held public office, beat Iván Cepeda by less than a percentage point in a June runoff, the closest presidential race in Colombian history.He has scrapped the peace commissioner post and halted negotiations. His government carried out six airstrikes against the ELN, FARC dissidents and the Clan del Golfo between Aug. 11 and Oct. 28, some of which killed minors. He says he signed 142 extradition orders in his first 74 days, and he has vowed to shut down the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the accord’s court, calling it a source of impunity.Mr. Bula told the council that the administration’s first 60 days produced 32,029 arrests, more than 135 tons of seized narcotics and 3,414 confiscated firearms.The president on Nov. 4 signed the Submission Law, which formally buries Mr. Petro’s “total peace.” The Senate passed it 57-24 and the House 95-10. The law offers reduced sentences to armed group members who surrender, but only if they hand over weapons and assets and give up information on their organizations.It offers no political negotiations, and opposition lawmakers have vowed to challenge it in court.Breaking off talks was the right first move, Mr. Ellis observes, though it comes at a price.“Ending the negotiations, which only limited the options of the state and bought time for some criminal groups while others fought on, was a useful start,” he explains. “But his government and the Colombian people must be prepared for the short-term surge in violence and fragmentation it will produce.”Mr. Poveda doubts the military-first approach will hold.“This approach will likely produce short-term gains, but dropping all Petro-era initiatives indiscriminately leaves no medium or long-term strategy,” he underscores. “However, the Administration does hold an early, if slim, mandate to break with a peace policy that delivered few results.”A Slimmer United Nations MissionBogotá got the United Nations mission it asked for.The Security Council unanimously renewed the Verification Mission in Colombia until Oct. 31, 2027. At Colombia’s request, the council dropped the mission’s task of checking the accord’s rural reform chapter, the land promises at the heart of the deal. That leaves the original core: the reintegration and security of former FARC fighters and communities in conflict zones.It was the second straight year of cuts. Last year’s extension stripped two tasks: verifying the Special Jurisdiction’s restorative sentences and monitoring the accord’s ethnic chapter. This time Colombia, which holds an elected council seat, helped negotiate the terms of the mission watching over it.The mission, with 29 field offices in the hardest-hit regions, is the only international body checking on the ground whether the accord is honored. On land reform, Bogotá will now largely judge itself.The American representative told the council that “total peace” let armed groups expand their ranks and territory. Mr. Bula said his government is still committed to the accord, arguing that rural reform belongs with Colombia’s own institutions.Mr. Ellis sees a case for a leaner mission.“It is appropriate to restructure the UN role to emphasize the legitimate and sovereign control over the national territory, while preserving functions such as observation, demining support and others,” he says.Mr. Poveda warns that those who already disarmed have the most to lose.“More than 500 former combatants and signatories have been killed since 2016, and losing independent monitoring will potentially raise that risk further,” he says. “Losing an impartial guarantor effectively endorses the Administration’s revisionist approach to the accord, despite its stated international commitment to it.”A decade on, the world is still watching Colombia’s peace deal, just less of it.“A decade after, the 2016 agreement has lost its footing as a road map for addressing the armed conflict, which has mutated, while support for its implementation has withered, whether because of the government’s unwillingness, waning U.S. support through international aid for its implementation, or a public that no longer sees it as a priority way forward,” Mr. Poveda adds.

Colombia Bombing Rebels, 10 Years After Peace Deal That Failed To End Fighting

Colombia Bombing Rebels, 10 Years After Peace Deal That Failed To End Fighting

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