The attacks of recent days in southern Colombia leave no room for doubt: illegal armed groups are still there, active, coordinated, and capable of striking the State when they deem it necessary.
In less than 48 hours, police stations and military battalions were targeted in a sequence of armed actions that, although the initial attacks did not result in any fatalities, yesterday afternoon’s attack on the Pan-American Highway left 19 people dead and 38 injured. These attacks send a clear message in the midst of the election campaign.
Despite appearing to be isolated incidents, the simultaneity, the chosen targets, and the political timing point to a strategy: to intervene, in some way, in the presidential elections of May 31 and to remind the country—despite their absolute discredit among society—that they remain active and capable of causing harm.
Although one of the attacks yesterday, Saturday, was successfully repelled by the Army, preventing more serious consequences, the objective remains the same: to add an element of propaganda to the electoral context.
What these illegal groups seek is to make it clear that they have not disappeared, that they have not been structurally weakened, and that they continue to set the pace in certain regions of the country.
Violence: the role of armed groups in Colombia’s election campaign
What has happened does not respond to a classic military logic. There is no intention to take over towns or sustain prolonged combat. What is observed is measured violence, calibrated to generate impact without escalating into a scenario of open war. It is a show of force and propaganda.
In the midst of the presidential campaign, these attacks function as a form of pressure. They mark territory, remind of their presence, and, above all, seek to influence the political climate. They do not need to carry out massacres to make themselves noticed. It is enough to show that they can attack State facilities and withdraw.
This type of action has multiple targets. On the one hand, the civilian population, which is reminded—although they sadly already know it well, as they have suffered it for years—who exercises control in certain areas. On the other, the political class, which enters the campaign with the reminder that security remains an unresolved issue. It is, in essence, a form of indirect intervention in the electoral debate.
There is a key element to understanding the nature of this crisis: these groups are no longer what they claimed to be. After the demobilization of the FARC in 2016, the armed landscape changed profoundly. What remained was not a cohesive insurgency with a political project, but a fragmentation of structures that mutated toward illegal economies.
While the former FARC used drug trafficking and illicit economies—such as mining—for financing, the illegal armed organization had a political project and sought to intervene in public life, despite the limited social support that indiscriminate violence cost them in recent decades.
Today, however, these armed actors respond exclusively to a criminal logic. The ideological discourse that for decades attempted to justify violence has lost meaning: the means—drug trafficking and violence—are now an end. In this way, with the political project gone—no matter how much they insist on using it as justification, they no longer represent it at all—what persists is the interest in controlling drug trafficking, illegal mining, and other illicit revenues: money, in short.
Recent attacks must be read in that key. They are not acts of revolutionary war, but movements by organizations that defend their corridors, their routes, and their businesses. Violence is an instrument, not a political end.
In this context, speaking of armed conflict in traditional terms is increasingly insufficient. Colombia no longer lives an armed conflict, which ended ten years ago, but rather the consequence of maintaining a disarticulated social structure that continues to feed these illegal organizations with hundreds and hundreds of people stripped of a future in civilian life.
Today, what the State faces—with a left-wing government that naively extended a hand to prolong the 2016 peace with these groups—is a network of criminal structures that operate with a business logic, adapting quickly and without the constraints of an ideological agenda.
The failure of Total Peace and what is at stake for Colombia
The “Total Peace” policy of Gustavo Petro’s government started from an ambitious diagnosis: to negotiate simultaneously with different armed actors to deactivate violence on multiple fronts, including urban common crime. However, reality has been more complex and, in many respects, adverse.
Ceasefires—although not the only cause—ended up granting tactical advantages to illegal groups. They allowed them to reorganize, expand territorially, and strengthen their illicit economies without sustained pressure from the State. Instead of structurally reducing violence, spaces for criminal reconfiguration were created.
Recent attacks are, in part, a consequence of that dynamic. They show that armed groups not only did not disappear, but maintain operational capacity and, in some cases, greater control over certain areas.
This does not mean that the search for negotiated solutions is irrelevant, but it does highlight the limits of a strategy that failed to contain or transform these actors. Peace, in this context, cannot depend solely on the willingness of organizations whose main incentive is economic.
With all this on the table, the government’s main objective is to guarantee—as it did with the legislative elections last March—that the May electoral process unfolds without armed interference. Violence, even when it leaves no victims, has a deterrent effect on participation and distorts democratic debate.
In addition, there is also a more structural objective that the next government will have to manage. The president who is elected, regardless of political orientation, will face a scenario in which armed groups can no longer be treated as traditional political interlocutors. They are criminal organizations with clear and highly lucrative interests.
This requires—also for the left represented by candidate Ivan Cepeda—a redefinition of the State’s strategy. Military operations or fragmented negotiation processes are not enough. What is needed is a combination of effective territorial control, institutional strengthening, and a sustained policy against the illegal economies that fuel violence.
Colombia must move from words to action and establish a real presence in those frontier territories now controlled with impunity by a litany of grandiose names and small warlords seeking a prominence that Colombia does not grant them.
That is the challenge ahead and, although it is nothing new, the country must come together to move beyond prior political positions and truly confront the structural and social change that Colombia needs to stop feeding a criminality that—as has been shown—does not end solely with relentless military campaigns or with dialogue tables.