Leftist Colombian President’s ‘Total Peace’ in Total Collapse

The bus had been carrying families home through Colombia’s Cauca department, ordinary people navigating ordinary roads, when an explosive device tore through it near the El Túnel sector of Cajibío on April 25.The death toll eventually climbed to at least 20, with Cauca Governor Octavio Guzmán confirming the dead included 15 women and five men, and 36 more injured — three of them in intensive care, five of them minors.Among those searching for survivors were relatives already in mourning. Vivian Tejada, a Colombian woman who lost three relatives in the blast, told local media her family had been on the bus returning home after burying another relative who had recently passed away.Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro blamed the attack on a “narco-terrorist group” led by Néstor Vera, commonly known as Iván Mordisco — a dissident former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla and one of the nation’s most wanted men. Colombia’s armed forces commander General Hugo López described it as a “terrorist act,” also pointing to the Jaime Martínez faction, another dissident faction of the defunct FARC operating in the region.It was, by most accounts, the deadliest attack on Colombian civilians since the 2003 car bombing of the El Nogal social club in Bogotá, which killed 36 people. The attack came just over a month before Colombia’s May 31 presidential election, part of a broader offensive in which authorities recorded at least 26 attacks across Cauca and Valle del Cauca in the span of two days.The president who promised to silence the guns has ended up ordering airstrikes, and Colombia’s descent into its worst violence in a decade has left observers to wonder whether peace can ever be negotiated with those who see the negotiating table as a tactical weapon.Peace President Goes to WarA former M-19 guerrilla recruited into the Marxist urban rebel movement at 17, Mr. Petro was jailed in 1985 for possession of firearms and explosives and demobilized in 1990 when the group traded weapons for politics. Riding into office in 2022 on a pledge to achieve “total peace,” he opened negotiations with all of Colombia’s armed groups simultaneously: guerrillas, criminal factions, and drug trafficking organizations alike.He managed to start talks with roughly 22 armed groups at once. It was an audacious, unprecedented wager on dialogue over force, and it drew international attention as a potential model for conflict resolution. Four years later, the model has cracked at every seam. This year is already on track to be the most violent since the 2016 peace agreement.In the first three months of 2025, violent incidents — including attacks against security forces and civilians, massacres, conflict-related gender-based violence, and forced displacement — increased by 45 percent compared to the same period the year prior.By mid-year, nearly 1.45 million people had been affected by conflict-related violence, more than four times the number from the same period in 2024. Civilians injured or killed by explosive devices rose by 145 percent between January and August 2025, according to the United Nations.The carnage has not slowed heading into election season: Peace activist group Indepaz has confirmed 48 massacres and 249 deaths in the first four months of 2026 alone — the highest pre-electoral toll in a decade.Mr. Petro’s missteps were baked in right from the start, believes Evan Ellis, research professor at the United States Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. “The error of treating the FARC as a legitimate political entity and negotiating the legal framework of the Colombian state goes back to the flawed 2016 accords,” he tells the New York Sun. The president compounded the problem, Mr. Ellis emphasizes, by “agreeing to ceasefires and otherwise tying the hands of Colombian security forces as the state negotiated, giving those [violent opposition] groups the opportunity to consolidate and expand their power, even as the explosion of coca production supercharged the resources available to those groups.”International security expert Johan Obdola tells the Sun that the government’s misjudgment sent the wrong signal to every armed group in the country: Violence pays.“By extending political treatment to these factions, the Colombian state effectively sent a dangerous message: that armed pressure, territorial control, and criminal power can still produce political recognition,” says Mr. Obdola, founder and president of the Global Organization for Security and Intelligence. “A state cannot negotiate effectively from weakness. If armed groups believe that violence will give them political status, the incentive is not peace. The incentive is escalation.”Mr. Petro himself has since conceded the point. By August 2025, he acknowledged that the dissident groups are not political insurgencies but transnational drug trafficking organizations, a reversal of the framing that underpinned his entire peace strategy. He renamed them the “Narcotrafficking Junta.” It was an admission, from the personification of total peace himself, that years of negotiations had been built on a false premise.The irony is difficult to overstate. When Mr. Petro took office in 2022, one of his first acts was to suspend airstrikes against rebel groups, having accused previous governments of committing “war crimes” when minors died in such strikes.By 2024, he had authorized their resumption. Colombian military operations have since killed at least 12 forcibly recruited minors — children pressed into service by the same armed groups Mr. Petro had once sought to negotiate with. Human rights ombudswoman Iris Marín called on the president to halt the strikes; he apologized to the mothers of those killed but refused to stop.Mr. Ellis stresses the civilian toll does not absolve the armed groups. “The recruitment of minors is a serious crime by the groups involved,” he says, noting that Mr. Petro’s tone has produced within the armed forces “a chilling effect against taking risks,” with battlefield choices that have “cost the lives of Colombian soldiers.”The deaths of children in these strikes, analysts say, are not simply a tragic byproduct of war; they are part of the armed groups’ deliberate playbook.“They use children as fighters, shields, symbols, and later as propaganda instruments when military operations produce civilian or child casualties,” Mr. Obdola says. “The answer is not military paralysis. The answer is smarter force, better intelligence, stronger legitimacy, and a clear political message: The state will not surrender its territory to criminal armed power.”When Ceasefires Become CoverMr. Petro’s peace project did not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It eroded over time — through broken ceasefires, through armed groups that used negotiation windows to expand their territory, through a state that drew down its offensive posture while adversaries quietly regrouped.The numbers tell the story. Between 2019 and 2024, the Gulf Clan expanded its territorial presence by 84 percent, while FARC dissident factions increased the number of municipalities where they claimed a presence by 141 percent, according to Colombia’s Office of the Ombudsperson. Armed groups now operate across more than 700 municipalities nationwide.Former Transparency Secretary Camilo Enciso told Noticias RCN this week that the country is witnessing “an absolute collapse of citizen security,” with Cauca, La Guajira, and Nariño effectively “captured by organized crime.”The bloodiest single rupture came in January last year in the Catatumbo region along the Venezuelan border, when the National Liberation Army (ELN) launched a coordinated offensive against FARC dissidents, killing around 100 people and displacing over 56,000 — the largest mass displacement Colombia had seen in nearly three decades, and it unfolded inside an active peace process.Mr. Petro suspended peace talks with the ELN and declared a state of “internal commotion” and economic emergency.The Colombian president was treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease, says Nazih Richani, who directs Latin American Studies at Kean University.“Petro attempted to solve the continuation of violence in rural areas by dealing with the symptoms — armed groups — without addressing the root causes such as marginalization, dismal social conditions, poverty, lack of opportunities,” Professor Richani tells the Sun.Without fixing those underlying conditions, he warns, the violence will not stop — especially with global cocaine demand still climbing.“More than 200,000 families depend on coca as a cash crop to sustain their livelihood,” Mr. Richani notes.The trouble, experts contend, is that the armed groups always knew this.“They use that pause to recruit, rearm, consolidate routes, expand illicit economies, intimidate communities, infiltrate local power structures, and improve their position before the next confrontation or negotiation,” Mr. Obdola stresses. “A ceasefire without verification, territorial control, and consequences is not a peace strategy. It is time granted to armed groups to reorganize, expand, and strengthen their bargaining position.”Not everyone dismisses the effort outright. Mr. Petro’s supporters point out that his government achieved a year-long ceasefire with the ELN — the longest that group had ever agreed to in its six-decade history — and that clashes between state forces and armed groups fell by nearly 28 percent in the early years of his administration.His government also made record cocaine seizures — confiscating a historic 985 tonnes in 2025 alone, prompting Petro to declare his administration had “seized the most cocaine in the history of the world.” Experts cautioned, however, that seizure volumes alone do not equal success, and the figures did little to ease pressure from Washington. The argument from Petro’s camp has always been that Colombia’s violence is structural, not presidential, and that decades of neglect cannot be undone in a single term.Electoral ReckoningColombia is now weeks away from choosing Mr. Petro’s successor, and the security question has consumed the campaign. The United States has accredited 86 embassy observers, the first time it has directly observed a Colombian presidential election.Right-wing candidates Abelardo de la Espriella and Paloma Valencia have both promised to scrap “total peace” and return to military confrontation, while Senator Iván Cepeda — Mr. Petro’s preferred successor and the framework’s chief architect — is defending the strategy even as the bodies accumulate.The motives behind the April carnage are not in dispute. Colombian security forces believe the arrest of four of Mordisco’s brothers and the death of his partner in a late-March military bombing drove the retaliatory wave, illustrating the circular logic of this conflict: Military operations trigger retaliation, retaliation triggers further operations, and civilians absorb the impact at both ends.The peace deal itself was never adequately resourced. Between the signing of the 2016 accord and March 2025, 460 former FARC fighters who attempted reintegration were killed by various non-state actors. As of May 2024, only 33 percent of the accord’s stipulations had been fully implemented, according to the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace.Mr. Ellis emphasizes that a path forward exists, but only with a wholesale change in posture.Once there is “clear leadership, adequate resources, a realistic strategic concept for applying force, clearly implemented, tying the securing of terrain to the restoration of state presence, rule of law, and economic opportunity, real progress can be made,” he explains.“Dialogue is pointless until the state can create the condition in which an end to the conflict can be negotiated within the framework of the Constitution and laws that Colombians have democratically chosen.”What the next government chooses will determine whether Colombia will finally break the cycle or merely rebrand it.“The real question is who governs the territory: the democratic state, or criminal armed power,” says Mr. Obdola. “If the next government does not answer that question with clarity, the violence will not only continue. It will evolve.”

Leftist Colombian President’s ‘Total Peace’ in Total Collapse

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