[Salon] If Colombia fails, Latin America burns

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

Dear Distinguished Dignitaries, Professors, Colleagues, and Friends:

I hope you are all in good health.

I send the following analysis not as a detached observer, but as someone who has inhabited the fracture between exile and origin—between legal refuge and national unraveling. This essay began as a 2,000-word draft meant for publication. But I quickly abandoned that frame. What is unfolding in Colombia today—and what may soon ignite in Latin America—cannot be contained by concision. It demands something denser: a dissection of state erosion, institutional ungluing, and hemispheric consequence.

Since Gustavo Petro’s rise to power, I’ve watched Colombia with a growing unease that hardened, over the past year, into certainty. I urged those closest to me to prepare for departure—to liquidate what could be salvaged, to insulate themselves from what I feared would come. Not out of ideological panic or moral absolutism, but because I could see the foundations of the state—legal, territorial, coercive—beginning to dissolve in ways that felt not episodic, but systemic. And I knew from history: once state dissolution reaches a certain velocity, it doesn’t respect borders. It radiates.

I left Colombia when I was 9 years old, moving first to New York, then to Toronto, and later returning to New York. Though my Spanish remained fluent, it took on a subtle distortion—shaped by time, distance, and the constant need to translate myself across contexts. My memories of Colombia faded with each passing year, and when I visited after the Uribe years had brought stability, old friends greeted me with a polite estrangement: they recognized my outline but not my substance. Over time, I stopped trying to re-enter a world that had moved on without me. I came to see that belonging isn’t bound by blood or geography; it depends on whether a society gives you the space to envision yourself as part of its future.

In the United States, that space opened—not because my accent marked me as native, but because it didn’t need to. What I found, often quietly and without ceremony, was a culture that valued motion over ancestry, direction over pedigree. It asked not who I had been, but what I was reaching toward. There was no need to erase where I came from, only to clarify where I was going. In Colombia, identity felt like a performance I had to get right. In the U.S., it felt like a movement I was free to choreograph. That difference mattered. It changed the shape of my loyalty. I could imagine sacrificing my life for Washington—not because it claimed me, but because it allowed me to claim it. Because it gave me, without ritual or demand, the strange and solemn gift of coherence: the ability to build a life that felt internally continuous, even if it began in rupture. That kind of belonging does not ask for devotion—it invites it. And over time, it becomes indistinguishable from love.

For the past seven years, I worked alongside my father on cross-border projects spanning Latin America and Europe. Some of these years coincided with Petro’s ascent, and as the rhetoric of reform gave way to the reality of legal mutation, I began to realize the full precarity of Colombia’s institutional scaffolding. I watched state architecture become fluid, enforcement become selective, and legality become a tool of political choreography. These weren’t reforms. They were dissolutions.

When my father sold his first company, Genfar, around 12 years ago, I urged him to transfer the proceeds offshore. Some of it was moved, other remained. Later, when additional assets were divested, I repeated the warning: move it to jurisdictions that understand continuity—not as abstraction, but as law-backed infrastructure. I saw what could be done in California: I have good friends I admire—who understand how to operationalize science and technology—who are much smarter than I. People with world-altering ideas. I believed our capital could help catalyze something extraordinary.

But my father never listened. He stayed. And though I chose a different path, I do not judge his. Born in 1949, he was shaped by a Colombia defined not by its promises, but by its ruptures—by the trauma of La Violencia, the disillusionment of reformist hopes undone, and the slow normalization of armed conflict. He endured two kidnappings. Two of his brothers were assassinated, but he was never granted the grace to bury them — they vanished into silence, their bodies lost to the earth. And still, I think he remains—not because he is nostalgic, but because his sense of home was never constructed through peace. It was forged through aguante, that deeply Colombian ethic of withstanding.

He is tethered not to the Colombia of the present, but to an older, internal one—a Colombia imagined in spite of everything, preserved through memory and resistance, not through reward. His generation did not experience the state as protector, but as absence. They did not expect coherence; they carved meaning out of fragmentation. For men like him, belonging is not aspirational—it is historical. It is not a project to be evaluated, but a fact to be endured. Rootedness, for him, is not a function of opportunity, but of sacrifice already made.

He shares that tether with millions: Colombians who stay not because they fail to see the collapse, but because they have lived so long inside its slow unfolding that leaving would feel like betrayal—not of the state, but of the pain they’ve already absorbed. Their allegiance is not ideological. It is existential. It is the stubborn dignity of those who have refused to be exiled by their own country, even when their country exiled its own future.

Before deciding to leave my father’s firm, I needed to confirm that what I feared wasn’t abstract. So I traveled through some of the regions most deeply marked by the fragmentation and violence of Colombia and Peru. I moved quietly with a different name. With someone who knew the areas. I listened. I observed. I took risks. What I found did not surprise me—but it removed any remaining doubt. I thought, briefly, of writing about those experiences in personal terms. But anonymity still offers a fragile shield to some of those I encountered. And I do not believe in exploiting vulnerability for rhetorical effect. This essay, then, is not memoir. It is not a cry of exile. It is an attempt at forensic clarity—a structured argument grounded in observation and deduction, institutional analysis, legal architecture, and security. It seeks to map not just what is happening in Colombia, but how, and why, and what may follow.

As I left Latin America, on my flight from Lima to Madrid, I kept thinking about the Spanish Second Republic in its terminal phase. Between 1934 and 1936, the Spanish Republic still preserved the outward forms of governance—courts, ministries, and elections—but its coercive power was already unraveling. The brutal suppression of the Asturian miners’ revolt in October 1934 revealed deep fractures within the security forces, while newly energized groups—Falangist, Carlist, anarchist—tapped into foreign ideologies and funding, adding another layer of clandestine tensions. In Catalonia, the rollback of regional autonomy further stoked discontent, loosening Madrid’s hold on its periphery. Across the political spectrum, party leaders moved in and out of legality, tacitly sanctioning violence to maintain leverage. The executive, struggling to unify the splintered loyalties of the Civil Guard, the Assault Guard, and local militias, relied on a flurry of emergency decrees, selective amnesties, and uneasy deals with regional power brokers. By the time the Republic confronted its final crisis in July 1936, it had already lost the institutional and coercive cohesion to survive. What later erupted into open war was less an abrupt collapse than the endpoint of a gradual decomposition—rooted in legal ambiguities, administrative fragmentation, and the creeping withdrawal of entire regions from central authority.

If Colombia Falls, Latin America Will Burn

Colombia is approaching a tipping point not seen since the darkest phases of its twentieth-century conflict: a return to civil war—this time via the implosion of legal thresholds, territorial control, and state deterrence. The Petro administration’s dismantling of traditional conflict governance has enabled the de facto legalization of insurgents, cartels, and hybrid armed groups. In strategic corridors like Catatumbo, Bajo Cauca, and Putumayo, the state has ceded its operational presence, while formal mechanisms of enforcement, intelligence coordination, and judicial prosecution have been suspended or fragmented. The outcome is not merely internal disorder—it is a hemispheric destabilization process already underway. Make no mistake: Gustavo Petro is a threat to the region.

The cascading effects of a renewed Colombian civil war would be immediate and multidirectional, with particular velocity in Peru and Ecuador, whose border departments have already become conduits for transnational criminal convergence. Both countries are politically debilitated, institutionally fractured, and increasingly embedded in overlapping narcotics and arms economies—making them acutely vulnerable to Colombian spillover.

In Peru, the state has entered a phase of sustained delegitimization and systemic incapacitation. Since 2016, six presidents have been removed, arrested, or forced to resign, including Pedro Castillo, who attempted to dissolve Congress in December 2022 and was immediately deposed. Castillo’s administration appointed individuals with ties and sympathies toward Movadef—the political front organization linked to the Shining Path insurgency and enabled a soft reentry of radical leftist networks into the state apparatus. Some of these actors publicly expressed their disdain for liberal democracy, suggesting that institutional politics was merely a stepping stone in a broader revolutionary project rooted in “popular power.”

Following Castillo’s removal, Vice President Dina Boluarte assumed power without electoral legitimacy, triggering widespread protests—especially in historically marginalized Andean regions such as Puno and Ayacucho. Between December 2022 and March 2023, at least 67 civilians were killed during military repression operations. Boluarte’s administration has relied heavily on militarized containment, further eroding public trust and fracturing national cohesion. While initially invoking emergency powers to deploy security forces, the government soon retreated into legal ambivalence: police were subjected to prosecutorial oversight, limiting their ability to intervene even as roadblocks, extortion, and attacks proliferated in various regions. Protest tactics became increasingly decentralized and horizontally coordinated, resembling the logic of “molecular revolts” seen during Chile’s 2019 uprising—non-hierarchical, geographically dispersed, and resistant to centralized negotiation. These tactics destabilized urban centers and disrupted commerce, infrastructure, and daily life, revealing both the volatility of the social terrain and the state’s inability to reestablish order.

Boluarte’s own political trajectory reflects the incoherence of the current crisis. She rose to national office as part of Perú Libre, a party ideologically rooted in Marxism-Leninism and openly influenced by the thoughts of Abimael Guzmán, Fidel Castro, and Vladimir Lenin, as expressed in the party’s founding documents. Since assuming the presidency, Boluarte has pivoted toward the so-called Peruvian right, while appointing a cabinet filled with recycled figures from the left—and failing to articulate a consistent ideological or institutional project. This volatile balancing act has given rise to a contradictory mode of governance marked by tactical alliances and strategic ambiguity. Meanwhile, calls for secession in southern regions—often linked to narcotrafficking networks—have intensified, and Venezuela has denounced Boluarte as a usurper while condemning Congress as a coup-mongering institution. The result is a state where institutions have been delegitimized, political actors are paralyzed or complicit, and public confidence has collapsed.

Simultaneously, organized crime has accelerated its infiltration of Peruvian territory. The Valle de los Ríos Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM)—the country’s principal coca-producing zone—has become a contested enclave where remnants of Sendero Luminoso collaborate with narcotraffickers and local protection networks. Coca cultivation reached approximately 229,000 acres. in 2023, with 71% located in “special territories” such as protected natural areas, Indigenous lands, and forestry concessions. Peru, the second-largest producer of cocaine globally, now functions not only as a coca cultivator and processor but as a central maritime platform for global cocaine exports to Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. The port of El Callao, the most important on South America’s Pacific coast, has become a critical exit point. It is also a locus of convergence between transnational criminal logistics and high-level institutional corruption.

Indeed, Peru’s narco-economy is deeply entangled with systemic judicial and political corruption. The “Cuellos Blancos del Puerto” scandal revealed how drug traffickers secured favorable rulings from judges, prosecutors, and court officials, including Supreme Court magistrates. Phone intercepts tied to a cocaine trafficking investigation exposed vast networks of collusion between organized crime and judicial authorities—demonstrating that narco-governance in Peru does not only operate through coercion, but through systemic impunity. As of 2020, over 330 judges and prosecutors were under investigation for corruption, underscoring the scale of institutional penetration.

The integration of the drug trade with elite corruption extends Peru’s narcotics economy beyond rural production into the heart of state functions. Traffickers rely on public officials, customs agents, and port administrators to facilitate containerized cocaine exports. This institutional complicity is compounded by selective criminal enforcement: while the state pursues small producers and micro traffickers, the upper echelons of narco-capitalism are often protected by legal shields and political patronage. Over 20% of Peru’s prison population is incarcerated for drug offenses—mostly low-level actors held in pretrial detention, not cartel financiers or traffickers.

Meanwhile, the convergence of cocaine and gold economies has transformed the Amazon into a multi-criminal basin. Criminal organizations increasingly launder drug proceeds through illegal gold mining, particularly in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. In Madre de Dios, Peru’s gold-rich department, the Superintendency of Banking estimates that 30–70% of national gold exports could originate from illegal sources. Criminal groups finance dredges, excavators, and mercury imports with narco-capital, using falsified invoices, phantom concessions, and loosely regulated self-declaration systems to pass illicit gold as legal. Unlike cocaine, whose illegality is total, gold becomes “legal” once extracted, allowing it to enter global markets under the guise of legitimacy. This is why gold—in some zones—has even displaced coca as the preferred commodity of organized crime.

The environmental dimension is catastrophic. In Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador, criminal organizations including the PCC, Los Choneros, and FARC dissidents now operate directly in gold extraction, often taxing miners, extorting legal concession holders, or expelling them outright. In Ecuador’s Napo province, mining-linked violence and heavy metal pollution—particularly mercury, lead, and copper—have devastated Kichwa communities. Over 2,000 acres of rainforest have been deforested, while rivers have been poisoned, traditional lifeways eroded, and youth recruited into cartel-linked extraction networks.

One of the most heavily contested corridors is the Puré River, which cuts through Río Puré National Park. Once monitored by Colombia’s National Parks Service, the river is now saturated with illegal gold dredges—at least 30 on the Colombian side, and 120 more in Brazil. The park’s monitoring station was destroyed in 2020 after threats from Frente Carolina Ramírez, and the area has since become a hub for both coca and gold trafficking. Mercury is released into vital aquatic ecosystems while generating enormous, untraceable profits: a single large dredge can yield $300,000/month in gold. Local divers—often Indigenous youth—are hired for the most dangerous jobs, and gold is laundered through airports, remittance chains, and jewelry markets.

Moreover, the gota a gota microloan mafias, largely operated by Colombian and Venezuelan networks, now function as violent shadow banks across Latin America, especially in urban districts. In Piura, Peruvian authorities arrested Colombian national José Mauricio Aquino in 2016 with a client ledger listing more than 4,200 debtors—a case that revealed the industrial scale of gota a gota lending even in mid-sized cities. His loans, disguised as wholesale rice card purchases, were a laundering mechanism to conceal the origin of criminal capital. The operation exposed how everyday commercial transactions had been transformed into debt-based surveillance and coercion systems. These loans—often issued without collateral, contracts, or oversight—range from $30 to $500, with effective monthly interest rates of 20–50%, enforced through daily repayment visits.

Victims have reported defamation campaigns, WhatsApp death threats, physical assault, and coerced recruitment into drug trafficking. Peruvian police arrested 900+ actors in April 2023, yet only 5% of cases led to prosecution. The networks operate under rigid hierarchies: promoters, administrators, collectors, enforcers, and franchise managers—all funneling 5% royalties per loan to capos in Colombia. Groups such as La Oficina de Envigado, Cordillera, Los Costeños, and the Clan del Golfo (via Jimmy Luma and Negro Valle) directly manage operations across Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico. Apps like CobrarApps, PagAppDiario, and RapiCrédito handle real-time monitoring, GPS tracking, and automated coercion via digital threats and mass contact scraping. In Colombia alone, over 338 formal complaints were filed against digital lenders in early 2022. Victims are often coerced into service—some even trafficked as drug mules to Marseille or São Paulo to settle debts.

Despite its coercive nature, gota a gota thrives not because of criminal ingenuity alone, but because it fills a structural void left by formal financial exclusion. In Colombia, only 34% of adults access formal credit, and fewer than 13% of microenterprises rely on banks. In Peru, over 71% of the labor force is informal, and 12 million people remain underbanked—disqualified from state-backed loans due to documentation, employment status, or geographic location. In Brazil, some 40 million adults don't hold banking accounts, and in border states like Acre, entire towns operate without a single banking institution. According to the Office of the Financial Consumer, as of 2023, more than 7% of Costa Ricans reported having taken out this type of loan—equivalent to approximately 221,000 people nationwide. Fintech inclusion efforts have failed to reach migrant workers, single mothers, and informal vendors—the very groups most targeted by gota a gota. For them, cartel-backed microloans are not just dangerous—they are the only source of liquidity.

In Ecuador, the breakdown of state sovereignty is no longer incremental—it has crossed into open contestation. Between 2021 and 2023, over 450 prisoners were killed in coordinated massacres within the penitentiary system, which is now controlled in large part by criminal syndicates aligned with Mexican cartels. Los Choneros, backed by Sinaloa, and Los Lobos, tied to CJNG, have transformed Ecuador’s coastal prisons into operational command centers. In January 2024, armed men stormed TC Televisión’s Guayaquil studio during a live broadcast—an unprecedented act of symbolic state capture echoing the 2019 Culiacán siege.

President Daniel Noboa declared a state of internal armed conflict in response, deploying the military to urban areas and prisons. However, his government remains vulnerable: the National Assembly is fragmented, and the judiciary is under increasing threat, with multiple judges assassinated in 2023. The CIES (Ecuadorian Intelligence Service) has documented Colombian armed groups operating along the San Lorenzo–Esmeraldas axis, engaging in arms-for-drugs exchanges with local gangs. In the province of El Oro, a strategic node for Pacific cocaine exports, police and customs officials have been linked to trafficking cells with ties to Colombian FARC dissident fronts.

Both Ecuador and Peru are not merely “at risk”—they are structurally interlocked with Colombia’s criminal economy. The Putumayo–Loreto corridor has become a bi-national narco-logistical zone, with trafficking routes crossing through Colombia’s La Tagua and Peru’s Teniente Manuel Clavero district. Ecuador’s Carchi and Sucumbíos provinces are increasingly operating as rear-guard zones for ELN and Segunda Marquetalia fronts, which have retreated there following counter-pressure in Colombia. These zones allow Colombian groups to rearm, launder revenues, and control strategic exit routes toward maritime ports.

This dynamic has been weaponized by Mexican cartels—particularly the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG)—which now operate not only as cocaine buyers but as vertically integrated actors with logistical, territorial, and paramilitary capacity in Colombia. Intelligence reports confirm CJNG and Sinaloa presence in Tibú (Norte de Santander), where cartel envoys have offered local landowners $3,000-$2,0000 per acre. to plant coca, securing supply chains from raw input to retail distribution. Colombian mayors and local officials have been forced into exile or remote governance, as in the case of Tibú’s mayor Nelson Leal López, highlighting the collapse of civilian authority in strategic coca enclaves.

Mexican cartels have forged flexible alliances with Colombian armed groups across ideological lines, partnering with FARC dissidents, Clan del Golfo, ELN fronts, and hybrid post-paramilitary cells. One of the most notable examples is the emergence of “Los Salsa,” a Cartagena-based network linking CJNG, Sinaloa, Los Paisas, and Los Caños—collaborating in extortion, contract killings, and the regional expansion of gota a gota microloan rackets. In Cartagena, these operations are directed by figures like alias El Abuelo and his enforcer John Harrison Martínez Perdomo, who run militarized extortion circuits with operational protocols modeled on state security forces. Their entrenchment in historically peripheral conflict zones reflects a strategic urban shift in Colombia’s criminal geography.

More than 10,000 Colombian soldiers retire each year, and a growing number of former special forces operatives—trained in jungle warfare, urban combat, and counterinsurgency—have been recruited via encrypted messaging apps and deployed to Mexico. Paid up to $4,000/month, they are transforming cartel warfare by training local sicarios and organizing units modeled on elite Colombian army squads. Colombian military intelligence, especially after the 2021 Haitian presidential assassination involving Colombian mercenaries, has tracked a steady export of tactical expertise into cartel-controlled cities like Tijuana, Zacatecas, and Tepic—effectively transferring asymmetric warfare capabilities from Colombian conflict theaters to Mexico’s criminal insurgency.

Operational integration is also expanding through narco-intelligence. At least 87 Mexican cartel operators were arrested across Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil in 2022 alone. Known as “the invisibles,” they avoid ostentation, travel with multiple passports, and coordinate diversified trafficking chains, including synthetic drugs like methamphetamine. Colombian ports like Buenaventura have recorded meth seizures, and synthetic shipments have appeared in Europe disguised as detergent—evidence of a broader Mexican-Colombian logistics convergence.

This evolution is nowhere more evident than in Colombia’s tri-border region with Peru and Ecuador. In southern Putumayo, Sinaloa and CJNG-backed groups like the Comandos de la Frontera have established transnational regimes of criminal governance. Despite the presence of Colombia’s Southern Naval Command and a regional intelligence fusion center, national forces admit they cannot detain known actors unless caught in flagrante. Armed groups enforce curfews, tax coca, adjudicate disputes, and manage logistical supply chains using Colombian pesos on both sides of the river. In the words of Peruvian officials: “functional secession” is underway.

The Colombian Navy has destroyed over 240 labs in the zone in 2024, but this fails to dent a mobile and decentralized narco-administrative apparatus. Armed actors increasingly function as sovereign institutions—regulating commerce, labor, and mobility in the absence of the state.

If Colombia’s internal conflict escalates into full-scale civil war, these dynamics will crystallize into a regional insurgent-criminal archipelago. In this scenario, the Andes will no longer function as a geopolitical buffer; they will become an integrated conflict ecosystem. Armed groups will shift from national actors to regional franchises, adapting governance models across borders. Rural displacement in Colombia will push tens of thousands of civilians toward Amazonas, Napo, and Zamora-Chinchipe, overloading already fragile social protection systems. Drug production and processing will reconfigure toward northern Peru and southern Ecuador, areas with minimal aerial surveillance and poor state presence.

Moreover, there will be secondary impacts on regional energy, migration, and security systems. The Trans-Andean oil pipeline in Ecuador, the NorPeruano pipeline, and Colombia’s own Caño Limón–Coveñas are all vulnerable to sabotage or territorial reappropriation. Increased displacement will funnel migrants toward Central America via the Darién Gap, already strained by a 102% increase in transit migration in 2023, according to Panamanian authorities. Mexican cartels—entrenched in both the origin and transit corridors—will further consolidate vertical control over the Andean–Central American trafficking architecture, reducing costs, increasing security, and externalizing violence onto local populations.

Unlike in previous decades, these developments are occurring under conditions of state incapacity, not simply inefficiency. Colombia, once the regional security anchor, is now its weakest link. Its disintegration will not merely empower non-state actors—it will redefine the nature of regional power. What is emerging is not a return to “narco-states,” but the rise of a multi-nodal sovereign disorder, in which legality is no longer monopolized by states but negotiated between armed networks, captured officials, and disjointed institutions.

In 2022, Petro announced—via Twitter, at midnight on New Year’s Eve—a supposed bilateral ceasefire with five armed groups: the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) a faction of FARC dissidents, the Segunda Marquetalia, the Clan del Golfo (AGC), and the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN). This announcement bypassed the Ministry of Defense and the military high command, and it lacked verified consent from several of the named groups. Within 24 hours, the ELN’s central command issued a communique denying any ceasefire agreement, exposing the announcement as diplomatically premature and operationally uncoordinated.

Rather than centralizing negotiations through a defined channel with the EMC’s national leadership under Iván Mordisco, the Petro administration opted for dialogue with select regional blocs. This strategy, marked by territorial atomization, led to the proliferation of splinter factions with heterogeneous agendas. Under this context, the EMC expanded from 14 to 26 substructures from 2021 to 2023, increasing its municipal presence from 117 to 172, with especially rapid growth in Caquetá, Putumayo, and Guaviare. The result was the reinforcement of micro-cartelized armed governance and the renaissance of the FARC’s territorial intelligence networks through narcotics taxation, environmental extortion, and electoral influence.

Meanwhile, the legal armature necessary to differentiate political insurgents from organized crime was left deliberately undeveloped. Despite multiple rulings by the Constitutional Court underscoring the need for a distinct legal framework for the submission of high-impact criminal groups (such as the AGC and ACSN), the Petro administration refused to prioritize a ley de sometimiento in its July 2023 legislative agenda. This omission was not accidental. It reflected a strategic legal opacity, allowing Petro to treat groups of radically different legal status—insurgents, narco-militias, and mafias—as equally legitimate negotiation partners. The result is de facto recognition of criminal sovereignty, unmoored from any transitional justice architecture or constitutional constraint.

By December 2023, as kidnappings and civilian massacres surged, Peace Commissioner Otty Patiño attempted to regain credibility by conditioning progress in dialogues on the cessation of kidnappings. Yet this corrective was immediately undermined by Senator Iván Cepeda, a key ideological architect of the peace process. Cepeda—whose father, Manuel Cepeda Vargas, a prominent communist senator, was assassinated in the 1990s and whose name was later adopted by a FARC front—has consistently advocated for unconditional dialogue at all costs.

In the aftermath of the April 2023 ambush in Antioquia—in which six soldiers were killed and five wounded by the Clan del Golfo—President Gustavo Petro publicly accused high-ranking officers of collusion, claiming they were effectively “on the Clan’s payroll.” This was not a mere rhetorical rupture but an inflection point in a broader campaign already underway: since August 2022, the Petro administration had initiated a deliberate effort to erode the institutional autonomy of Colombia’s Armed Forces. The Antioquia incident sharpened the pretext for deeper intervention into military hierarchies.

In Colombia’s security architecture, the Army has often functioned as the state’s primary on-the-ground presence in remote conflict zones. In areas such as the Serranía de San Lucas, Guaviare, and Bajo Cauca, military units—including mobile brigades and jungle battalions—have upheld a degree of institutional continuity amid the absence of civilian authorities and the dominance of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and criminal networks. During the 1980s and 1990s, regular and counter-guerrilla battalions in regions like Caquetá and Putumayo enabled the reentry of judicial commissions, electoral officials, and infrastructure teams. From the mid-2000s, Army-led stabilization efforts under programs such as Plan Patriota and Plan Consolidación helped reopen municipal governments in formerly insurgent-held territories.

These operations—backed by logistics, intelligence, and adaptable regional commands—have frequently substituted for weak or absent civilian institutions. While there have been efforts to scale back the military’s involvement in civil affairs, doing so without first reinforcing local governance risks creating administrative vacuums. In many contested regions, the Army’s sustained field presence has effectively served as the only mechanism for projecting state authority where civilian entities remain nonfunctional or unwilling to engage.

From the mid-twentieth century onward, Colombia’s armed forces have occupied a paradoxical space: formally subordinate to civilian authority, yet substantially autonomous in matters of internal security. This tension emerged most vividly under General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who overthrew President Laureano Gómez in 1953. In the midst of La Violencia—the prolonged partisan conflict between Liberals and Conservatives—Rojas presented himself as a neutral arbiter capable of restoring order. His brief but consequential military regime (1953–1957) established patterns of governance that outlasted its demise.

Although it lacked the sweeping ideological mission seen in some other Latin American dictatorships, Rojas’s administration nonetheless centralized power within a technocratic command structure. He strengthened the Ministry of Communications and relied heavily on state-controlled radio to construct a narrative of national redemption. The military expanded its oversight of radio, press, and telegraphy and exercised broad authority to crush insurrections. In this period, Rojas also laid the groundwork for a more institutionalized intelligence apparatus—culminating in the creation of the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Seguridad (DAS) in 1960, which institutionalized centralized intelligence operations for decades. While not as ideologically rigid as the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s, Rojas flirted with a form of corporatist and developmentalist military governance reminiscent of Peronism in Argentina. When popular pressure and elite alliances forced Rojas out in 1957, the image of the military as “saviors” of public order and overseers of vital state functions was already deeply embedded.

The subsequent National Front (1958–1974)—a bipartisan pact whereby Liberals and Conservatives alternated the presidency—ostensibly ushered in a return to civilian rule. Yet the core impetus of the National Front was less about democratizing governance than about containing future partisan bloodshed by excluding radical alternatives from power. In service of that goal, the civilian leadership allowed the armed forces a wide berth to maintain internal stability, especially as emergent guerrilla groups—among them the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional), and later the EPL (Ejército Popular de Liberación)—began to coalesce in the countryside.

This political bargain was enshrined legislatively in Decree 3398 of 1965, initially intended as a temporary emergency measure but extended indefinitely through Law 48 of 1968, as the insurgent threat intensified. This period also saw the legalization of “irregular forces”—civilian auxiliaries authorized to support military operations—setting a precedent for later paramilitary formations. These provisions were justified by lawmakers as essential to counter nascent insurgencies. Over the long run, however, they institutionalized a blurring of civil and military roles: the police were integrated under the Ministry of Defense—originally by Rojas in 1953—and the armed forces exercised ongoing jurisdiction over large swaths of Colombian territory.

As the 1970s advanced, a combination of insurgent pressure, narco-trafficking networks, and state centralization continued to feed the armed forces’ sense of itself as the ultimate guarantor of the nation’s survival. President Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978–1982) capitalized on that sentiment by enacting the “Security Statute,” which gave the military further discretionary powers in the name of national security. While Turbay’s critics condemned the statute for enabling human rights abuses—thousands of arbitrary detentions and numerous allegations of torture—the legislative framework deepened the military’s internal policing role. By the dawn of the 1980s, much of Colombia’s territorial administration—particularly rural zones—fell under the purview of army and intelligence units rather than local civilian authorities.

When President Belisario Betancur (1982–1986) took office, he sought to break with the entrenched militarized approach by proposing peace negotiations with the FARC. Betancur faced resistance almost immediately from within his own cabinet, most famously from Minister of Defense General Fernando Landazábal Reyes, whose public opposition to dialogue demonstrated the fragility of presidential authority in the face of entrenched counterinsurgency mindsets. The Landazábal-Betancur conflict reached its apex in 1984, when the general openly opposed the La Uribe peace accords between the government and the FARC, challenging the president’s legitimacy. Betancur’s dilemma was emblematic: although the 1886 Constitution (in effect until 1991) formally placed the military under civilian command, the high command had cultivated decades-long autonomy in devising security policy.

Events like the 1985 Palace of Justice siege by the M-19 guerrilla group and the military’s overwhelming response revealed both the intensity of guerrilla confrontations and the volatility of an armed institution deeply convinced of its prerogatives. The operation was commanded by General Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales, whose decisions during the retaking of the Palace drew intense scrutiny domestically and internationally. The episode became emblematic of a broader dynamic in which military doctrine and institutional prerogatives overrode civilian crisis management.

Civil–military relations did not simplify in the aftermath. The 1991 Constitution, promulgated amid hopes for a more participatory democracy, maintained many of the structures that placed internal security responsibilities on the armed forces. While new institutions such as the Constitutional Court raised expectations for stronger rule of law, practical reforms often collided with local realities. In many rural and conflict-affected areas, the armed forces continued to operate in a quasi-autonomous manner, sometimes in collusion with emergent paramilitary factions.

Moreover, although the 1991 Constitution formally reaffirmed civilian supremacy, Article 217 permits the military to act internally “when the Constitution or laws authorize it,” creating a zone of interpretive flexibility. This constitutional ambiguity has long generated tensions between the normative text and operational doctrine—especially in how “internal order” is legally defined and functionally applied. The persistence of fuero militar—military jurisdiction for crimes committed by members of the armed forces—became a central point of contention, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s, when serious human rights violations came to light. The Constitutional Court intervened in several landmark rulings, notably Sentencia C-251/2002, which aimed to restrict the reach of military tribunals in cases involving civilian victims. In practice, however, such reforms remained contested and unevenly enforced.

Under President Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002), the attempt to open formal negotiations with the FARC in a demilitarized zone in southern Colombia showcased the precarious nature of executive ambitions to demilitarize the conflict. Elements of the armed forces were skeptical, fearing that giving the guerrillas territorial concessions would embolden them. Tensions rose when negotiations stalled, reinforcing the sense that whenever a president sought to break with long-standing counterinsurgency orthodoxy, he risked internal backlash from military leaders.

A decisive turning point in Colombia’s civil–military dynamics occurred with the election of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–2010), whose Democratic Security policy redefined the strategic and institutional role of the armed forces. This doctrine not only expanded military expenditures and operational reach but also ideologically aligned the presidency with the armed forces’ institutional perspective: insurgent groups such as the FARC were to be treated primarily as terrorist threats to be neutralized through military force rather than political negotiation. This rhetorical and strategic convergence significantly reduced overt civil–military friction and positioned the armed forces as the primary guarantors of national sovereignty and territorial order.

Under Uribe, the military was recentered as the backbone of state presence across vast swaths of the national territory. The Democratic Security policy prioritized the reconsolidation of state control over key industrial zones and strategic corridors of mobility—roads, pipelines, and communication routes—transforming the geography of state authority. By the end of Uribe’s first term, the state had reasserted control over nearly 50% of previously ungoverned territory and reached over 60% of the national population, reversing the trend of insurgent territorial dominance. One of the cornerstones was the construction of an extensive civilian intelligence apparatus through the recruitment of a national informant network to support military intelligence operations. The initial objective was to enlist one million informants; although precise data remains unavailable, multiple reports indicate that this target was likely surpassed.

The empirical outcomes were striking: the number of municipalities affected by armed attacks fell from 209 in 2002 to 87 in 2008, and only one recorded attack by 2009. The return of mayors to previously abandoned municipalities, now accompanied by the sustained presence of the military, signaled a partial restoration of civilian governance. Terrorist attacks declined by 61% between 2002 and 2010, and kidnappings dropped from 2,882 in 2002 to just 123 in 2010. The FARC’s troop strength fell dramatically—from 20,776 fighters in 2002 to an estimated 6,700 by the end of the decade—while an aggregate of 89,625 combatants from various illegal armed groups were either killed, captured, or demobilized during Uribe’s presidency.

This military resurgence was accompanied by a broader consolidation of state authority and economic revitalization. Foreign direct investment surged by 226.9% by the end of Uribe’s first term, while GDP growth remained resilient: between 2002 and 2008, Colombia experienced sustained economic expansion, and even during the 2009 global recession, it maintained positive growth at 0.4%, outperforming regional peers. Public opinion mirrored this transformation: whereas in 2007 only 18% of Colombians believed a military victory over the FARC was possible, by 2009 over 50% of the population shared that belief.

Despite ongoing internal conflict, Colombia under Uribe emerged as the fourth-largest economy in Latin America—testament to the extent to which military-led territorial recovery, institutional realignment, and macroeconomic stability had become mutually reinforcing pillars of statecraft.

When Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s former defense minister, became president in 2010, he eventually pursued negotiations that led to the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. This time, despite some misgivings, the high command supported ceasefires and transitional arrangements. General Javier Flórez, former commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played a key role by leading the Subcomisión Técnica—the technical subcommission that coordinated the military aspects of the peace process—marking a rare moment of high-level military cooperation in political negotiations.

Even so, critics argued that the final agreement left ambiguous the question of whether and how the military’s counterinsurgency structure would be dismantled or transformed in a post-conflict scenario. The institutional transition envisioned in the accord remained largely unimplemented in practice, and the legal frameworks underpinning military doctrine were left intact. These unresolved questions later reemerged under President Iván Duque, as skepticism of the peace accords resurfaced.

Within weeks of taking office in 2022, Petro launched one of the most aggressive high-command purges in Colombia’s democratic history. Approximately 52 senior officers were dismissed across the Armed Forces and National Police, including 27 Army generals, a dozen National Police generals, and senior leaders from strategic commands such as the Comando Conjunto de Operaciones Especiales (CCOES) and the Dirección de Inteligencia Policial (DIPOL). The purge occurred outside the regular promotion cycle, bypassing institutional boards and undermining the time-in-grade norms established under Decree 1790 of 2000. Promotions to general officer ranks, traditionally overseen by the Ministry of Defense, the Military Forces Command, and the Senate (Article 173, Clause 2), were redefined by informal criteria.

Many of the purged officers were U.S.-trained veterans of Plan Colombia, including WHINSEC graduates and leaders of joint operations against insurgents and narco-paramilitary networks. In their place, Petro elevated figures aligned with transitional justice, international legal norms, and humanitarian missions—credentials historically peripheral to command authority. This was not a legal reform but a functional redefinition of what merit meant within the senior ranks. Executive discretion, once used for routine adjustments, was now instrumentalized as a mechanism of ideological filtration.

Rather than merge with the military or militarize governance, Petro has pursued what might be called a civil-military inversion. The Armed Forces remain procedurally intact, but their internal coherence has been recalibrated around discursive alignment, legalist language, and bureaucratic pliability. Strategic autonomy, battlefield experience, and command tradition have been displaced by technocratic subordination to an executive-led civilian doctrine. This inversion does not resolve Colombia’s historic tensions—it mutates them, producing a force that is no longer independent but not yet fully politicized, vulnerable to ad hoc civilianization without constitutional guardrails.

This model bears structural resemblance to what may be theorized as asymmetric fusion regimes—a regional pattern in which coercive institutions are neither dismantled nor fully subordinated, but reprogrammed through selective compliance and ideological synchronization. Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua each offer examples of how hybrid civilian executives refunction the military apparatus while maintaining republican formalities.

In Venezuela, the transformation of the Armed Forces under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro was both legal and ontological. Beginning with the 2004 Ley Orgánica de la Fuerza Armada Nacional, and reinforced in 2008 by the rebranding of the force as the Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana (FANB), the military’s mission was redefined as the “integral defense of the nation,” encompassing ideological and developmental functions. The creation of the Comando Estratégico Operacional (CEOFANB), a supra-branch command reporting directly to the president, bypassed horizontal oversight and institutionalized functional rotation across border, civic-military, and internal repression missions.

Economic entanglement deepened this subordination. Military-controlled holding companies such as CAMIMPEG were granted control over extractive and logistical sectors, embedding officers in an off-budget resource economy. By 2018, over one-third of ministerial portfolios were held by current or former officers, linking career advancement to regime loyalty and insulating the military from institutional accountability.

In Cuba, military fusion emerged not through restructuring, but through revolutionary bureaucratization. Under Raúl Castro, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR) operated as a dual institution: a military and a political matrix. Modeled after Soviet commissarial doctrine, political officers were embedded at every level and promotions filtered through the Communist Party’s Departamento Político, based on class origin and ideological conformity. The FAR’s economic wing, GAESA, managed remittance flows, tourism, and ports, allowing the military to maintain fiscal autonomy even during severe economic contraction. The result was a vertically loyal officer corps whose dependency was as much material as ideological—eliminating the need for constant purges.

Nicaragua represents a model of legal hybridization and paramilitary diffusion. After a period of professionalization in the 1990s, the Sandinista-controlled military was gradually reabsorbed into presidential control under Daniel Ortega, beginning in 2007. The 2010 Ley de Organización, Jurisdicción y Previsión Social Militar abolished the legislature’s role in approving promotions and weakened judicial oversight. Simultaneously, Ortega activated irregular coercive groups through municipal councils and Sandinista-aligned networks. These paramilitary actors operated alongside official forces during protests and elections, while maintaining formal distance from the Army and Police. The end result was a regime-protective security system built through legal opacity, decentralized repression, and bureaucratic loyalty.

These cases reflect the broader logic of asymmetric fusion: coercive institutions are fragmented internally, synchronized ideologically, and fused structurally with executive regimes—not to ensure national defense, but to enforce selective repression, extract resources, and secure regime continuity. Professionalism is diluted, autonomy is curtailed, and cohesion is deliberately dismantled to prevent the emergence of alternative power centers within the state.

This directly challenges the normative assumptions of civil-military theorists such as Rebecca L. Schiff and Zoltan Barany. Schiff posits that democratic civil-military relations depend on shared norms among military elites, politicians, and the public. Barany emphasizes professionalism and institutional autonomy as prerequisites for consolidation. Asymmetric fusion regimes invert these logics: redundancy, fragmentation, and dual chains of command are not malfunctions—they are design features.

Colombia under Gustavo Petro now exhibits early features of this trajectory. No milicia has been established, and no foundational legal restructuring has occurred. But commissarial logic has entered through the back door: a shift from battlefield legitimacy to bureaucratic subordination, from strategic autonomy to ideological reliability. Petro’s pivot from “national security” to “human security” reframes coercion as a problem of inequality rather than a contest for sovereignty, embedding security within a socio-legal paradigm that recodes doctrine without constitutional debate.

This reorientation has enabled jurisdictional displacement. In March 2023, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP) unilaterally declared a Zona de Diálogo Humanitario in Tarazá, Antioquia—a territory under Clan del Golfo influence. The announcement bypassed formal military channels, leaving deployed units without clear engagement protocols. Intelligence agencies like DIJIN and SIEDCO were sidelined in decision-making, while Petro publicly questioned the reliability of Colombia’s intelligence services—undermining both interagency coordination and institutional relevance. The cumulative effect has been not only operational confusion but strategic erosion: a weakening of the very architecture that once insulated Colombia from the regional logics of fusion.

The Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DNI)—successor to the now-defunct DAS has undergone a profound structural and epistemic recalibration under Petro. In early 2022, Petro appointed Manuel Alberto Casanova, an M-19 member and Petro’s former private secretary, as DNI subdirector. Casanova, who previously worked with ex-combatants at Fundación Avanzar and held administrative posts in the Bogotá Mayor’s Office and SENA, lacked formal intelligence or security credentials. Yet he was entrusted with the agency’s most sensitive portfolios: counterintelligence, personnel vetting, budgetary supervision, and international liaisoning. His leadership marked a sharp ideological pivot away from the technocratic professionalism inherited from naval and police intelligence structures. Retired Admiral Rodolfo Amaya, whom he replaced, had presided over a relatively stable period of intelligence coordination—a legacy rapidly undone.

By 2023, the DNI had begun systematically purging career intelligence officers, particularly in the Dirección de Contrainteligencia Estratégica, replacing them with politically vetted appointees linked to Petro’s governing coalition or ex-M-19 networks. Institutional nodes with interagency connectivity—such as DIJIN, SIEDCO, and the Comando Conjunto de Inteligencia y Contrainteligencia Militar—were dismantled or bypassed. Budget lines previously insulated under the Plan Estratégico de Inteligencia Nacional (PEIN) were collapsed under centralized discretionary control. Informal “coordination committees” were created to circumvent formal advisory boards. The net effect was the erosion of institutional memory and operational neutrality.

In late 2023, Casanova authorized surveillance-related contracts using black budget funds that allegedly bypassed the Unidad de Planeación Estratégica de Inteligencia (UPEI) and formal acquisition oversight mechanisms. He shielded political allies from background checks and redirected risk assessments to minimize perceived threats from FARC dissidents while concentrating surveillance efforts on actors aligned with the political opposition. Separately, complaints emerged regarding a covert surveillance unit operating from a luxury apartment in Bogotá’s Calle 92 and Carrera 11. These overlapping scandals triggered Casanova’s resignation, followed by the departures of senior officials such as Edwin Chavarro, Consuelo Ramos, and Urías Trujillo, all amid concurrent investigations by the Fiscalía, Procuraduría, and Comptroller General.

Casanova came under mounting scrutiny over the illegal surveillance of two domestic workers employed by Laura Sarabia, who was then head of the Administrative Department of the Presidency (DAPRE) and now serves as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The housekeeping staff were subjected to unauthorized polygraph tests and surveillance by intelligence personnel, following Sarabia’s allegation that cash had been stolen from her private residence. Sarabia’s rapid political rise—despite being just 31 years old and lacking fluency in English—reflects the administration’s politicized appointments and the decline of professional standards within key state institutions.

Simultaneously, Casanova was implicated in a covert operation tied to a passport contract scandal, in which 30 million pesos from the DNI’s black budget budget were used to pay an individual who claimed to possess compromising information about Camilo Bautista, a partner in Thomas Greg & Sons. The cash was deposited at a Bancolombia branch by Casanova’s inner circle, and the payment—later confirmed by the Comptroller General—raised serious concerns about the politicized and opaque use of reserved intelligence funds. While the operation was initially justified as a legitimate effort to acquire sensitive intelligence, reports surfaced that the entire affair had been orchestrated with the knowledge of Leyva himself to simulate an extortion attempt and portray the minister as a political victim. The competing narratives—remain unresolved, but the incident triggered a purge at the top of the DNI and revealed deep suspicion within Petro’s intelligence apparatus.

Carlos Ramón González was appointed by Petro to replace Casanova, a former M-19 commander known by the alias Mario Santander, who once served as the personal security chief of Jaime Bateman and held military leadership roles in the Santander region. After demobilizing, Ramón González entered politics as a Bucaramanga councilman, later becoming a national congressman and ultimately co-founding the Green Alliance, a political party that—under Petro’s presidency—has expanded its bureaucratic footprint into SENA, Icetex, the Superintendence of Health, and the Vice Ministry of the Interior. As a political operative, strategist, and financier, Ramón González embodied a nexus of ideological loyalty, strategic discretion, and bureaucratic influence, maintaining a low public profile while quietly orchestrating personnel decisions, legislative outreach, and internal state coordination.

While nominally professionalized after the collapse of the DAS, the DNI was gradually transformed into a bureaucratic instrument for managing the ideological and logistical priorities of the Petro administration. Ramón González appointment followed his previous role as head of DAPRE, where he coordinated internal presidential operations and allegedly directed illicit funds from the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (UNGRD) to congressional leaders during the 2023 legislative reform campaign. Former deputy director Sneyder Pinilla claimed that then-UNGRD director Olmedo López, under Ramón González instruction, disbursed funds to Senate President Iván Name and House President Andrés Calle to secure support for Petro’s reform package. Although Ramón González has denied any involvement in the affair or in alleged surveillance operations dubbed "Plan Orión," the Supreme Court summoned him to testify in 2024, deepening concerns over the use of intelligence institutions for covert political engineering.

Notably, Petro allies outside of the DNI exert enormous pressure. Luis Eduardo Parra Galindo, Petro’s former lawyer and current delegate comptroller for defense, has gained access to sensitive intelligence outputs—and allies of the former Minister of Defense and Petro's ally in Indumil.

Rather than rebuilding post-DAS intelligence under democratic norms and civilian oversight, the Petro government has converted the DNI into a mechanism of internal filtration and narrative enforcement. The Sistema Nacional de Inteligencia (SNI)—originally created to coordinate interagency flows among military, police, and civilian organs—has been sidelined. Intelligence-sharing with Comando Conjunto, Policía Judicial, and the Unidad de Información y Análisis Financiero (UIAF) has fragmented. The result is the erosion of national situational awareness, particularly regarding hybrid threats such as ELN–FARC dissident convergence, military-narco alliances, and regional criminal realignments.

In parallel, judicial authorities have begun raising alarms. Magistrates of the Constitutional Court, including Jorge Enrique Ibáñez and José Fernando Reyes, publicly warned of illegal intercepts and profiling by the DNI. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and the heads of Colombia’s high courts issued statements demanding investigations and judicial protections.

Following the exposure of the DAS’s systematic political surveillance in 2009—including illegal wiretaps against magistrates of the Constitutional Court, opposition senators, and human rights defenders—the agency was formally dismantled in 2011. Its dissolution, propelled by congressional inquiries and Petro’s own denunciations as a then-senator, was intended to mark a structural rupture with executive-led intelligence abuses. In its place, the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DNI) was established in 2012, conceived as a non-operational, civilian agency without policing powers, governed by Statutory Law 1621 of 2013 to ensure legal proportionality, institutional checks, and congressional oversight. Yet under Petro’s presidency, this framework has been systematically eroded and he has turned the DNI into an adaptive apparatus for internal filtration and ideological consolidation.

Parallel to this institutional reconfiguration, Petro’s administration has implemented a doctrine of operational abstention that has systematically degraded the Armed Forces’ deterrent posture. Field intelligence and internal military communications, particularly in Catatumbo, Bajo Cauca, and southern Córdoba, document standing orders for tactical non-engagement—directives that prevent intervention even during active offensives by non-state armed actors. This has produced a de facto demilitarization of critical conflict zones.

Tibú has become the global epicenter of coca cultivation, with over 50,000 acres planted—constituting nearly 80% of Catatumbo’s total and surpassing entire national totals of some coca-producing countries. The municipality’s logistical centrality within ELN-controlled trafficking corridors, combined with its proximity to Venezuelan territory and joint control by Venezuelan military and intelligence units, has transformed it into a bi-national enclave of criminal governance. Likewise, the Arauca–Apure corridor functions not merely as a smuggling route but as a transnational zone of shared sovereignty between ELN fronts and Bolivarian militias embedded within Venezuela’s security doctrine. This corridor now serves as both a launchpad for cross-border influence operations and a buffer zone strategically used by Caracas to destabilize Colombia through plausible deniability.

The permissive security climate has catalyzed a structural reorganization of armed group architecture across Colombia. Unlike pre-2016 insurgencies such as the FARC or M-19—which relied on vertical hierarchies and centralized command—the dominant armed actors today operate through decentralized, polycentric networks characterized by modularity, redundancy, and territorial franchising. These configurations facilitate rapid adaptation and continuity even after the neutralization of key commanders.

The Clan del Golfo exemplifies this transformation. Its shift toward a federated model, granting operational autonomy to regional blocs while preserving centralized control over finances and logistics, has enabled exponential territorial growth. Between 2022 and 2023, the Clan expanded its presence by 84%, most visibly in Urabá, where it has consolidated control over the Darién Gap’s migrant-smuggling routes—a high-margin criminal economy now integral to its financial model. The route, once dominated by coyotes and informal actors, is now under cartel-style management, with logistics, extortion checkpoints, and paramilitary protection integrated into a cohesive enterprise.

Simultaneously, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) has undergone a strategic metamorphosis. Beyond its traditional insurgent role, it now functions as a hybrid paramilitary-entrepreneurial actor embedded in Venezuela’s regional security strategy. The group has expanded its operational footprint by 56%, diversifying its revenue sources to include illegal gold mining in Chocó, crude oil siphoning from the Caño Limón–Coveñas pipeline in Arauca, and cross-border extortion rings. Caracas both tolerates and facilitates these activities—particularly where ELN militias act as counterweights to rival armed groups near Venezuela’s western frontier. By mid-2023, the ELN held presence in approximately 200 municipalities across 19 departments—more than any other actor.

Human Rights Watch data from 2024 confirms the magnitude of armed expansion. According to them, the Clan del Golfo operates in 392 municipalities—up 55% from 2022. The ELN is present in 232 (+23%), and FARC dissident factions in 299 (+30%). Leaked internal Ministry of Defense briefings reported by Colombian newspapers from late 2023 estimate the total armed strength of these actors—combining ELN, EMC, Segunda Marquetalia, and the Clan—at 16,770 combatants, marking an 11% increase over the previous year. Most strikingly, former Peace Commissioner Danilo Rueda, who resigned in August 2023, revised his initial estimate of the Clan del Golfo’s force from 9,000 in early 2023 to 14,000 by December—a 55% surge within a single calendar year.

This acceleration in paramilitary capacity has coincided with the gravest mass displacement crisis recorded in Colombia since national statistics began in 1997. In Catatumbo alone, forced displacement in 2023 reached nearly 40,000 people—exceeding all prior national annual displacement totals. This crisis is not a collateral consequence of policy misalignment. Rather, it is the predictable result of a permissive legal-institutional framework, the strategic paralysis of national security forces, and a negotiation paradigm that has inadvertently incentivized armed expansion by lowering the costs of violent governance and territorial occupation.

Petro’s total peace enacts a structural reprogramming of the legal-institutional architecture governing state engagement with armed actors. Anchored in Law 2272 of 2022, which modifies and extends Law 418 of 1997, the policy introduces what can be more precisely characterized as a form of procedural insurgency: a modality of legal subversion in which the executive repurposes and reorders statutory instruments without overtly violating their formal structure. Law is neither suspended nor overthrown; rather, it is internally inverted to permit executive discretion to override the prior sequencing, jurisdictional thresholds, and classificatory authority of Colombia’s conflict governance framework.

This transformation is most evident in the rupture with the sequencing logic embedded in Colombia’s foundational conflict statutes—Law 418 of 1997 (and its multiple reforms), Law 975 of 2005 (Justice and Peace), and Law 1448 of 2011 (Victims and Land Restitution). These laws conditioned state engagement on prior legal recognition: a group’s political character, adherence to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), cessation of hostilities, and a demonstrable commitment to victim reparations. Under Law 2272, that logic is reversed. Engagement precedes classification; recognition becomes an administrative outcome rather than a legal prerequisite. The result is a post-legal framework in which legality is preserved in form but deferred in function—reordered as a consequence of executive discretion, not as a gatekeeping condition.

At the center of this reordering is the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP), whose powers were expanded by Article 5 of Law 2272. Once a technical advisory entity, the OACP is now empowered to initiate acercamientos (approaches) and diálogos exploratorios (exploratory dialogues) with armed actors absent any judicial or prosecutorial assessment of ideology, organizational structure, territorial presence, or IHL compliance. It functions as a discretionary gatekeeper, bypassing the judicial review functions of the Fiscalía General de la Nación and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which previously regulated the legality of engagement. The process becomes executive-led and procedurally unbound.

This dynamic was crystallized in Resolution 075 of 2022, whereby the OACP requested the suspension of arrest and extradition orders for members of the AGC (Clan del Golfo) and the Estado Mayor Central (EMC)—groups that had been historically classified by Colombian courts as criminal or dissident armed actors. The legal justification cited Decree 1175 of 2016, originally designed to facilitate the demobilization of the FARC-EP under the 2016 peace accord. Its application to non-recognized groups like the AGC and EMC constituted a significant legal stretch, as these actors had not undergone any process of political recognition or transitional justice inclusion. While this move was contested by the Procuraduría General de la Nación for procedural and constitutional irregularities—including the circumvention of due process and the neutralization of prosecutorial authority under Article 250 of the Constitution—no definitive ruling has yet been issued by the Constitutional Court. The objections remain advisory unless judicially enforced, and the resolution remains legally operative in the interim.

The case of the AGC is particularly emblematic. Although formally classified as a criminal organization (Organización Delictiva) by the Colombian state, its members received procedural benefits typically reserved for politically recognized armed actors—such as immunity from arrest and access to dialogue channels. This disjuncture reinforces the emergence of hybrid statuses, wherein groups occupy an ambiguous legal position: not formally recognized as political actors, yet granted partial legal and procedural benefits normally contingent on such recognition.

Together, Law 2272 and Resolution 075 produce a regime of executive legal suspension, with three converging effects:

• Judicial authority is temporally displaced: enforcement is paused before legal status is adjudicated.
• Legal tools are repurposed politically: arrest and extradition mechanisms become flexible instruments of negotiation.
• Hybrid statuses emerge: armed groups acquire procedural benefits—immunity, political interlocution—without legal transformation.

This architecture bears resemblance to comparative models of para-institutional legalism, particularly in hybrid regimes where legal form is retained while normative content is hollowed. Rather than a rupture, this is an intensification of legality: legal instruments are stretched, anticipatorily applied, or strategically deferred to neutralize horizontal accountability. The judiciary remains formally intact, but its functional authority is subordinated to executive sequencing.

Such techniques resonate with Carl Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception, though with important distinctions. Petro does not invoke formal emergency powers or suspend constitutional norms outright. Instead, legality is reoriented through temporal distortion and procedural elasticity, producing a regime better described as normative withdrawal: legality persists in form but is selectively deactivated in function. Armed actors—EMC, ELN, AGC—are neither criminalized nor politically recognized; they inhabit a juridical limbo, perpetually engaged but never conclusively adjudicated.

Historical analogues for this architecture are not found in overt states of exception like those of Napoleon, but in more subtle reconfigurations where law is neither abolished nor upheld, but internally restructured to govern through ambiguity. Two cases—Jacobin France in 1794 and post-revolutionary Mexico under Carranza and Obregón—offer precedents in which legality was retained yet operationally evacuated, retooled as a vehicle for executive temporality, tactical discretion, and jurisdictional asymmetry.

In revolutionary France, the Law of 22 Prairial (22 June 1794), engineered by Couthon under Robespierre, reconfigured the Tribunal Révolutionnaire into a preemptive machinery of classification. Abolishing defense rights, excluding evidentiary standards, and authorizing verdicts based on “moral conviction,” the law juridified suspicion itself. Terms like ennemis du peuple became legally performative—condemning individuals through designation alone. Under Fouquier-Tinville, over 1,300 were executed in Paris within seven weeks, many in mass trials resolved within minutes.

Yet this architecture extended beyond Paris. Regional tribunals in Lyon, Nantes, and Arras adapted the national legal script to local factional contexts, producing juridical pluralism within a formally unitary terror regime. In Lyon, Joseph Fouché orchestrated streamlined executions through military commissions, bypassing formal tribunals altogether. In Nantes, Jean-Baptiste Carrier implemented mass drownings of prisoners—noyades—under the rhetorical guise of revolutionary justice but without any legal infrastructure. Even intra-Jacobin purges—such as the arrest of Danton and Desmoulins—were procedurally encoded through the term indulgents, a charge devoid of statutory grounding but institutionally fatal. What unified these cases was not uniformity but fragmented legal performativity: revolutionary legality multiplied and diffused across local jurisdictions, invoked ritualistically while hollowed of forensic or deliberative content. As Colin Lucas has noted, the Jacobin state did not abolish legal form; it fractured, accelerated, and weaponized it. The result was a system in which legality was everywhere deployed but nowhere stabilized.

Petro’s total peace replicates this inversion via more technocratic modalities. The Colombian state engages armed groups not post-adjudication but in anticipation of classification—granting procedural concessions such as arrest suspension or exploratory dialogue before any legal status is conferred, as seen with the AGC and EMC. Legal sequencing is sidestepped through administrative temporality: recognition becomes an outcome of negotiation, not a prerequisite. Classification, like in 1794, becomes performative, preemptive, and detached from closure—executed through legal form but emptied of adjudicative finality.

If the Jacobin case illustrates procedural hypertrophy, post-revolutionary Mexico offers a complementary logic: juridical fragmentation. After the 1917 Constitution, Carranza’s regime preserved formal legal supremacy while accommodating a mosaic of regional warlords and para-sovereign actors. In Sonora, Obregón operated a state within a state, distributing ministries among loyalists and establishing para-fiscal regimes outside federal oversight. Veracruz under General Manuel Peláez functioned as a militarized petro-feudal enclave, financed by U.S. oil companies, where customs duties, justice, and security were administered by private militias. Rather than confront these autonomies, the federal state retroactively issued provisional recognitions, military appointments, or de facto incorporations—legal gestures that normalized fragmentation under the sign of unity.

The defensas rurales system, formalized under Obregón, legalized armed irregulars under the constitutional framework while insulating them from centralized command. These units, composed of ex-insurgents, smugglers, and regional bosses, exercised coercive and fiscal powers without judicial accountability. In Morelos, Zapatista successor networks continued to adjudicate agrarian claims and tax local economies, eventually absorbed through Article 27’s agrarian reform mechanisms. This was not state consolidation but selective constitutionalization of insurgent legality, producing a hybrid order where the federal state claimed formal sovereignty while outsourcing operational authority to localized legal fictions.

Total peace operates along similar lines. Exploratory dialogues advance with some actors (EMC, ELN), while others remain in ambiguous limbo—excluded or indefinitely deferred. There is no unified classificatory regime; armed groups exist in hybrid legal statuses, partially engaged but never conclusively defined. The law becomes a site of strategic deferral, enabling executive maneuverability across fragmented zones of violence. As with Carranza’s pacts, Petro’s framework cultivates para-institutional tolerance—juridically enabled yet structurally unresolved.

These analogies sharpen broader theoretical insights. Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception becoming the rule” is here refined into a condition of administrative exceptionalism: the rule of law is not suspended but recursively postponed, producing indefinite thresholds rather than decisive breaks. Duncan Kennedy’s theory of legal indeterminacy also resonates. By dissolving constraints of sequencing, jurisdiction, and classification, Petro’s legal strategy renders law a field of executive plasticity—malleable, anticipatory, and strategically non-final.

Recruited at eighteen into a propaganda cell of the M-19 in Zipaquirá, Petro's tasks were pedagogical and public-facing: the distribution of political bulletins on worker buses, the circulation of revolutionary materials in urban markets, and participation in ideological discussion circles. He was not clandestine nor militarized. When the M-19 transitioned into underground armed struggle following the 1978 Cantón Norte arms raid, Petro embedded himself in formal municipal structures instead—first as personero in 1982, then as concejal in 1984. But this institutional participation was never assimilationist. His orchestration of land invasions to establish the barrio Bolívar 83, and his later imprisonment for illegal arms possession, suggest an insurgent legalism: the tactical use of legal status to generate territorial facts. The institution became a platform for contestation, not compromise. What emerges is a consistent grammar of mobilized legality—one in which political authorization derives not from adjudicated norms but from spatial intervention, popular eruption, and juridical improvisation. This grammar persists in total peace.

After the death of Gentil Duarte in May 2022—previously the dominant figure among FARC dissidents— Ivan Mordisco swiftly consolidated his position as EMC’s national leader. With legal action halted and state pressure lifted, he reactivated logistical corridors through San Vicente del Caguán, a historic FARC stronghold, and reestablished control along the Caguán and Orteguaza rivers. These corridors, once vital to the FARC Southern Bloc, again became critical conduits for weapons and coca base transport.

In this vacuum, EMC fronts in southern Meta, Guaviare, and Putumayo expanded territorial control—coinciding with broader shifts in Colombia’s coca economy. According to the UNODC’s October 2024 report, coca cultivation rose 10% in 2023, reaching a record 625,072 acres. More strikingly, estimated potential cocaine output jumped 53%, from 1,738 metric tons in 2022 to 2,664 in 2023—driven not only by expanded cultivation, but by higher yields and more efficient processing.

Putumayo and Peru’s Loreto region across the border saw some of the sharpest increases. Between 2018 and 2022, Putumayo’s coca cultivation nearly doubled (1.8x), particularly in municipalities where EMC influence had resurged. Free from detention, Mordisco was able to command, reorganize, and consolidate EMC as a national force—leveraging the suspension of enforcement as political capital in negotiations. The EMC was able to maintain a dual posture: a political interlocutor and a militarily expanding insurgency, tightening its grip on key narco-financial corridors.

At the time, the Fiscalía, Ministry of Environment, and Army’s 22nd Jungle Brigade were executing a joint operation targeting illegal mining and forced displacement networks in the buffer zones of La Macarena National Park, an area of overlapping ecological fragility and insurgent entrenchment. The Guayabero corridor there serves as a critical logistical artery for armed actors, connecting coca-producing zones with transshipment routes toward Venezuela and Brazil, and enabling territorial continuity across multiple fronts of the EMC. The suspension halted enforcement efforts, as further action required direct presidential authorization amid uncertainty.

During this procedural limbo, EMC forces expanded their presence in rural sectors of Vista Hermosa (Meta) and San José del Guaviare, consolidating territorial control. Coercion against campesino communities escalated, including threats of displacement and the forced integration of coca growers into EMC-run extortion schemes. Deforestation surged in protected areas throughout 2023, driven by coca cultivation and illicit mineral extraction—particularly antimony. These environmental crimes, previously geo-referenced for prosecution, remained untouched during the suspension.

The breakdown not only derailed enforcement in one of Colombia’s most sensitive ecological corridors, but also fractured coordination between the Fiscalía, military, and environmental authorities—exposing how legal ambiguities under Paz Total can generate de facto impunity zones and institutional disarticulation.In Buenaventura, the trajectory of alias ‘El Mocho’, a high-ranking commander of the urban criminal structure Los Shottas, illustrates the blurring of legal categories under Paz Total, and the risks this posed for both local governance and national security. While Los Shottas were never formally designated as a political actor eligible for peace negotiations under Law 2272 of 2022, their inclusion in local-level ceasefire conversations with government emissaries in 2023 created a de facto protection framework, one that substantially altered enforcement dynamics in the city.

In April 2023, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP) facilitated “Diálogos Sociojurídicos por la Vida”, a municipal-level initiative aimed at reducing violence through community dialogue in Buenaventura. According to reporting by La Silla Vacía (June 2023) and Contagio Radio (May 2023), although these dialogues were framed as socio-community efforts, members of both Los Shottas and their rival group, Los Espartanos, were present in several early meetings, and local Fiscalía offices received informal instructions to limit enforcement actions during the confidence-building phase. This informal operational shift was not backed by any legal declaration of ceasefire or political status, yet resulted in a temporary suspension of active investigations and arrest operations.

During this period of procedural ambiguity, Los Shottas increased targeted violence in disputed sectors of Comuna 12, culminating in a series of assassinations and forced curfews between August and December 2023. Civil society monitoring platforms, including Buenaventura Resiste and the Red Departamental de Derechos Humanos del Valle del Cauca, documented an escalation of intimidation and coercion, with the December 2023 Comuna 12 massacre—which left eight people dead—attributed by multiple community sources to Los Shottas. Despite this, investigative procedures remained hampered by confusion over the legal framework governing dialogue participants.

The Procuraduría General de la Nación raised alarms about this ambiguity. In an official statement issued in January 2024, it warned that the executive had no legal authority to suspend enforcement or confer negotiation protections on groups not recognized under international humanitarian law as armed political actors. The case triggered institutional friction between the Fiscalía, the Procuraduría, and the OACP, as the latter's informal handling of dialogue logistics effectively placed violent non-political actors beyond the reach of immediate judicial intervention.

The strategic implications were both local and national. On the ground, Los Shottas strengthened their hold on extortion circuits, micro trafficking routes, and informal territorial governance structures, while enjoying a period of state-enforced judicial inaction. Nationally, the case revealed a fundamental weakness in the legal architecture of Paz Total: the absence of clear classification standards for dialogue interlocutors, and the risk of executive overreach into judicial discretion. By informally recognizing criminal groups without any grounding in humanitarian or transitional legal categories, the government blurred the boundary between peacebuilding and impunity—creating a precedent with constitutional and security consequences well beyond Buenaventura.

A comparable dynamic unfolded in Casanare, where alias ‘Pijarvey’, a former paramilitary commander linked to the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC), became the object of informal exploratory dialogues under a “submission to justice” logic. Despite being under investigation for multiple homicides, arms trafficking, and land dispossession, prosecutorial action was frozen following exploratory contact initiated under the Paz Total framework. This procedural halt enabled Pijarvey’s faction to entrench itself in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, where state presence was minimal and intelligence indicated growing collaboration with narcotrafficking routes through Arauca. Strategically, this local inaction reverberated at the national level by incentivizing other AGC factions—particularly in Antioquia and Córdoba—to signal openness to dialogue in exchange for de facto legal protection, diluting the state’s ability to draw firm lines between negotiation and submission. It also triggered concern within military and intelligence institutions that the peace framework was being instrumentalized by non-political actors to co-opt state mechanisms for strategic pause and expansion, rather than genuine demobilization.

Moreover, this framework establishes a normative asymmetry between armed actors within the transitional justice system (e.g., those under the jurisdiction of the JEP)—who are bound by truth, reparations, and conditionality—and those under Paz Total, who benefit from legal suspensions without submitting to any judicial mechanism. The result is a bifurcated peace architecture: one governed by law, the other by executive proceduralism.

As of 2024, the Fiscalía had documented at least 19 cases in which regional prosecutors were unable to execute judicial functions due to total peace decrees—none of which passed through formal judicial channels for review. This systemic circumvention not only transforms peace implementation from a legal process into a discretionary political instrument—it strategically empowers armed actors, weakens prosecutorial legitimacy, fragments territorial control, and generates incentives for conflict actors to simulate negotiation in order to gain time, territory, and impunity.

One of the most revealing mechanisms in Petro’s broader strategy of para-institutional governance is his attempt to reprogram Colombia’s 70,000 Juntas de Acción Comunal (JACs) into territorial subcontractors of the “popular economy.” These civic bodies—originally established by Law 19 of 1958 and legally reinforced under Law 743 of 2002—are among the most expansive and locally rooted institutions in Colombia’s political geography. With more than six million members, the JACs have long served as generators of social cohesion, participatory democracy, and bottom-up governance. But under Petro, they are being operationalized as state executors without state constraints.

Through the 2022–2026 National Development Plan (Colombia: Potencia Mundial de la Vida), the Petro administration assigned the JACs responsibility for executing major public works under the new Public-Popular Partnerships (APPo)—a model introduced by Decree 1961 of 2023 and defended via Decree 0874 of 2024 after the Constitutional Court declared the former unconstitutional. JACs were tasked with implementing tertiary road rehabilitation, solar micro-grid installations, school meal distribution (PAE), and rural internet provision. These were not small symbolic acts: Petro allocated 2 trillion pesos to the Caminos Comunitarios para la Paz Total infrastructure program, with a significant portion earmarked for execution through JACs under the APPo framework. Government officials projected that up to 8 trillion pesos could eventually be managed through these mechanisms.

Functionally, this model bypasses the formal Public-Private Partnership framework by routing execution through politically vetted community organizations—many of which lack accounting systems, procurement protocols, or even formal bank accounts. While the standard PPP model established under Law 1508 of 2012 continues to operate, the APPo format creates a parallel structure, nominally legal but exceptional in its circumvention of conventional state contracting norms. In effect, Petro’s administration has externalized state execution into a parallel civic infrastructure—justified as participatory democracy but structurally subordinated to central executive control, though opportunistically adopted by some JACs seeking institutional recognition and access to funds.

The deeper significance of this shift lies in its historical continuity with insurgent governance. During the internal conflict, particularly in zones of FARC influence like Huila, JACs were co-opted as instruments of guerrilla control. The FARC did not destroy JACs—they embedded themselves within them, issuing binding orientaciones (orders) through assembly meetings, codifying behavioral rules in community manuals, and using Comités de Convivencia y Conciliación to adjudicate disputes and enforce informal law. These institutions became vectors of what Ana Arjona terms rebelocracy: the institutionalization of insurgent rule through localized civic channels.

After the 2016 Peace Accord, this embedded order disintegrated. JACs were left juridically hollow—no longer backed by either the FARC’s coercive apparatus or the state’s institutional presence. In many areas, the resulting vacuum was filled by criminal actors invoking guerrilla legitimacy without its embedded discipline. Surveillance networks, informal security patrols, and memory-based community sanctions became the only available mechanisms of self-defense. In some regions, particularly those under the presence of residual FARC factions, the ELN, or the Clan del Golfo, JACs have remained vulnerable to coercive co-optation—functioning as hybrid governance nodes where civic autonomy is subordinated to armed group control.

Petro’s reactivation of the JACs does not revive their civic autonomy. Instead, it repositions them as instruments of para-institutional delivery, controlled through central ministries and ad hoc contracting decrees. Implementation has already revealed the contradictions of this model. Under the Caminos Comunitarios para la Paz Total program, over 29,000 project proposals were submitted by JACs—thousands of which were disqualified due to paperwork errors, digital illiteracy, or incompatible governance rules. Departments such as Santander, Chocó, and Meta reported particularly high rejection rates. State agencies like Invías imposed top-down compliance frameworks—requiring board presidents to resign to delegate authority and conditioning disbursements on co-signed bank certificates—undermining the JACs’ horizontal statutes and generating extortion risks, delayed payments, and reputational damage. The lack of a national training or institutional support framework—no standardized accounting systems, no integrated digital platforms, and no structured onboarding—has left many JACs legally exposed and administratively vulnerable.

This dynamic—where executive agencies treat JACs as both autonomous and subordinate—mirrors the broader legal duplicity of Paz Total. Just as the state engages armed groups without classification, it contracts with JACs without building structural capacity. The result is not community empowerment but instrumentalized decentralization, creating logistical chaos, legal exposure, and the dispersion of accountability. In 2023 alone, over 50 JAC leaders were assassinated, according to INDEPAZ—the highest toll of any social sector—reflecting the elevated risk of turning unprotected civic leaders into politically exposed public contractors.

Even successful cases reveal the logic of politicization. In departments like Cundinamarca, where JACs previously executed infrastructure projects under Governor Jorge Rey, programmatic alignment with Petro has translated into electoral mobilization. The Movimiento Comunal y Comunitario, dismantled after paramilitary threats in the 2000s, is now being revived through CNE registration processes—especially in departments like Cauca, Meta, and Cundinamarca—where JAC leaders have run under the Pacto Histórico banner or allied lists. Petro has publicly encouraged JACs to support his reform agenda and to march for his administration. What emerges is not merely a participatory economy, but a territorial political machine built on legal improvisation and grassroots dependency.

The JAC experiment illustrates Petro’s deeper strategy: a recomposition of the Colombian state through para-institutional networks. Public order is no longer enforced through judicial hierarchy or security doctrine, but reimagined as a decentralized system of loyal intermediaries—armed groups in some zones, communal boards in others. In both cases, the rule of law is replaced by rule through negotiated presence, procedural discretion, and political loyalty.

This model aligns with the broader architecture of executive procedural insurgency described throughout this essay: law is not suspended, but reordered to produce impunity. The judiciary remains intact in form, but its gatekeeping functions—classification, accountability, oversight—are either bypassed or deferred. In this sense, the JACs are not an aberration. They are the civic analogue to Petro’s armed dialogue strategy: a tool for territorial insertion, legal circumvention, and political reengineering under the sign of legality.

Indeed, this experiment shares structural affinities with other Latin American para-state models such as Venezuela’s Consejos Comunales or Bolivia’s MAS-era civic contracting, where participatory frameworks became instruments of executive consolidation under the legal banner of popular sovereignty.

Petro may imagine himself a constitutional engineer, bending legality toward some higher dialectical horizon. But if he continues to dissolve the boundaries between law and violence—if he persists in elevating mafias to juridical subjects while neutralizing the Armed Forces and fracturing the judiciary—he will not govern a subdued republic. He will preside over the ignition of civil war. Not the ideological insurrections of the 20th century, but a structurally defensive war—triggered not by partisanship, but by the annihilation of institutional boundaries that Colombians, across generations, have learned to defend in blood. “Un poder sin ley, aunque se revista de formas legales, es una corrupción del alma nacional,” warned José Eusebio Caro, the co-founder of the Conservative Party, in a letter from 1853, during another era of constitutional mutation. His insight holds: when the law is manipulated to sanctify impunity, when justice becomes choreography, the nation recoils not in abstraction but in historical reflex. The result is not procedural disagreement. It is rupture.

Colombia is not Cuba, nor is it Venezuela. It is a country with no metaphysical loyalty to power and no historical tradition of docile continuity. It has burned its capitals before, dethroned its parties, and buried its constitutions. Its people do not rise for utopia—they rise when the state itself becomes indistinguishable from the enemy. Petro is building precisely such a state: one that governs through juridical fog, rewards territorial coercion, and places civic institutions under ideological command. But what he misjudges is not the patience of Colombians—it is the ancient, violent literacy of a people who remember that war, however tragic, can also be the final grammar of boundary. Colombia has lived through civil wars not because it was lawless, but because it could not abide being ruled as if law no longer mattered. Should Petro continue on this path, he will not face opposition in the abstract. He will find himself in open confrontation with a republic that, once awakened, fights not to destroy its institutions—but to resurrect them.

--

"Woe unto him who has not tasted defeat."