By Julián Rios Monroy, Colombia+20, EL ESPECTADOR, March 16, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The recent violent activities in the regions of Cauca and Norte de Santander show that militarization is not enough. The illegal organizations that have walked away from the peace dialogs have crossed up the President’s plans for transformation. Experts point out that it’s stalled, while the people that live there are viewing the administration response with mistrust.
With his throat choked by sobs, the soldier decided to cut off the message he was recording to request reinforcements. “They attacked us just now. Some of the comrades have been killed. Work with me to get some help.” He started to do another audio, but he was so desperate that he got the words wrong, and he sounded disoriented, breathless: “I don’t even know where I am. We just got hit by another rocket and they’re going to blow us up pretty soon. We’re in deep s*** here.”
All this happened in the town (vereda) of La Esperanza, in Balboa, Cauca Department, a mountainous and forgotten territory where the Carlos Patiño Front of the FARC dissidents attacked a military convoy of soldiers this week. The terrorist attack left five soldiers killed and sixteen wounded.
Nobody has found out that soldier’s name, but his voice was heard all over the country. It was the ragged voice of someone suffering the most in the bloody war, who sees a comrade die while he’s carrying out their mission. The soldiers were headed to a bridge they were going to replace because the Patiño gang had flown between La Hacienda and El Plateado, the District (Corregimiento) in Cauca where President Gustavo Petro has been trying for 20 months to retake the territory, still without complete success.
The new episode of violence sums up, pretty much, how bogged down the security situation is in this country. The administration’s hope for transformation of the countryside, laudable and necessary, appears to have been cut short by the violent activities of the illegal armed groups which, after walking out on the peace dialogs, are more empowered and belligerent than ever, and they refuse to give up the territory they control to the government.
“What this scenario demonstrates is that the administration got into a swamp in its security policy. Its parts are in conflict with each other; we’re seeing defeats in this side and the other side, but those harms don’t change the war equation substantially, and that is the logic that awaits us here in 2026,” suggests researcher Jorge Mantilla, expert in security, crime, and armed governance.
The case of El Plateado and the Micay Canyon with the Carlos Patiño Front, (which is part of the Western Bloc of the Central Command (EMC in Spanish) of Iván Mordisco), is only the tip of the iceberg.
Two months ago, the country saw the magnitude that our conflict could be having now, when the ELN guerrillas set off a violent terrorist attack in Catatumbo (Norte de Santander Department). It caused the worst humanitarian crisis in nearly three decades: 55,000 people displaced, at least 75 people killed, 25,000 kept confined, and an environment of menace that still persists.
The sharp change of direction in security is not sufficient.
With the crisis, the administration has opted for a tougher military strategy, to increase the number of boots on the ground, and strike more blows at the illegal organizations.
The change of direction began in the middle of last year, given the lack of results from “total peace”, but it’s been going deeper, like the appointment of General Pedro Sánchez as Defense Minister. He retired from the Armed Forces to take the position, a novelty after 30 years without a uniformed officer in that position.
The change in the strategy was noted forcibly at least eight months ago when the administration opened the door to intensifying the military offensives. On July 24 of last year, right there in El Plateado, the Colombian Air Force carried out the first bombing of the Petro administration. Actions like that had been restrained to the maximum, among other reasons, to avoid mishaps with the locations of the dialogs with the armed groups.
But then, when the ceasefire with the ELN was no longer in effect, they augmented the operations against the guerrillas, and the end of the year was marked by the entrance of hundreds of soldiers into El Plateado as part of Operation Perseus.
However, the militarization was not enough. As Iván Velásquez, who was the Defense Minister at that time, explained to the first televised Council of Ministers, the delays in getting into the urban part of the District, were tied to the lack of connection with other governmental entities to bring projects like health, education, agriculture, and substitution of illegal crops into the area.
“We have insisted that we can’t stay in an area indefinitely without the real presence of the government,” said former Minister Velásquez.
The keys to an understanding of how we got here
The Micay Canyon area and the Catatumbo region, separated by two mountain ranges and 1,200 kilometers of distance, share several characteristics: they are regions historically marked by the absence of the government, being under the control of illegal organizations, where a very high percentage of the rural population subsists on illegal economies (coca plantings or illegal mining) and, besides that, where there a lot of communities that don’t trust the government agencies because of the broken promises by administration after administration.
“In these areas, the people are living in a very difficult situation, feeling a lot of pressure from the armed groups. In that context, the government can’t just come in relying on the military, but rather with an integrated effort behind it, and even though they have been aware of that, after two years the people feel frustrated because they don’t see any promises being kept,” explains researcher Elizabeth Dickinson of the International Crisis Group.
Mantilla suggests three central elements that explain what we are seeing: the lack of connection between “total peace” and the administration’s security policy; “they have lost the initiative for the use of force, which has turned the government into a secondary actor” in the battle; the failures in the military’s capability, which resulted in the weakening of air power, of the soldiers, and intelligence. Added to that is the failure to implement the Peace Agreement.
“Independent of whether ‘total peace’ is a failure or not—that was always a possibility—those elements bring us to the current scenario, where now the government wants to recover control and launch an offensive. It’s not going to see results, in the short or medium range, but a stalemate instead. El Plateado is evidence of that, because there are still no tangible results after 20 months,” said Mantilla.
A resident of that District in Cauca synthesized the situation to Colombia+20 this way: “It’s an advance when the soldiers have got into the town, but we don’t see any real recovery. Los Patiño are still bossing us around there, they’re taking everything with extortion, they’re threatening people, and you see the problem the most in the lower part. In San Juan de Mechengue, La Emboscada, and Huisitó, they’re in charge. If the Army doesn’t take that part over, this isn’t going anywhere.”
“We’ve seen this movie and it wasn’t any good.”
In the Catatumbo region, there are also persistent doubts about the President’s proposition. Although he introduced a plan for substitutes for the coca crops, titling the parcels of land, and carrying out public works, several sectors have pointed out that there are mistakes in the planning.
Add to that the difficulties in carrying out alternative development programs in an area where the government doesn’t even have control over the territory. In Norte de Santander, the ELN dominates the better part of the countryside; in Cauca, it’s the FARC dissidents.
In fact, the risk is not only that these groups are an obstacle to the carrying out of public works, but also that they can take advantage of them to enrich themselves. It’s well known how the armed organizations threaten and extort the contractors to get money; they even manage to establish alliances to siphon off funds into their criminal coffers, as has happened with the ELN in Arauca Department.
“It’s obvious that there’s a risk that there will be a scenario of coopted government funds by those groups, like the ‘araucanization’ of Catatumbo for example,” points out researcher Jorge Mantilla.
In Plateado, like in Catatumbo, the President is relying on his push for plans that will substitute other crops for coca and on alternative development to confront the crisis of violence created by the illegal armed groups.
Nevertheless, one of the concerns is that this reliance, especially on the matter of the illegal crops, has some similarity to the Integrated National Plan for Crop Substitution (PNIS in Spanish), the strategy agreed upon in the 2016 Peace Agreement. That Plan failed on several points: it didn’t reduce the number of hectares planted illegally, it increased the violence against social leaders by 480%, and especially, as a result of the failure, it increased the communities’ lack of confidence in the government.
President Petro himself, in his most recent televised Council of Ministers, scolded some of his high officials for not putting forth initiatives that would contribute to pulling the situation in those regions out by its roots.
“This is not change,” the President told the Minister of Agriculture after she said that her objective is to create productive projects of cane and cacao for 200 families in the region, while the goal for the Housing agency was to improve 581 houses. In his expressions of displeasure, he demanded that they come up with solutions that would involve the entire population.
That is, precisely, one of the principal demands from the communities. After decades of promises, they don’t have much faith in the majority of the administration’s proposals.
“In this region the people say, ‘we’ve seen this movie and it wasn’t any good’. What they need is a reasonable plan and making a start on its implementation. There are opportunities because the people are tired of the violence by the armed groups, and in spite of the tensions in the past, they are accepting it when the Armed Forces come in. It’s an opportunity to build confidence, but the plan has to be well thought out,” says Dickinson.
With the countdown in opposition, in the territories that have been hit the hardest by the violence, there is still hope that programs can materialize, and that change will arrive in their lives and economies. That is the expectation that Petro seeded in his Presidential campaign, but that, for now, is far from coming to pass.