Renewed violence and criminal expansion reveal deep flaws in President Petro’s Total Peace plan.
On Jan. 16, 2025, the National Liberation Army (ELN), a Colombian rebel group, allegedly killed several members of a rival group, a faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). ELN leaders also threatened to kill a government peace negotiator.
This violence has since expanded to include civilian targets. Reports from the national Human Rights Ombudsman office detail accounts of ELN rebels searching homes and killing anyone suspected of having ties to the FARC. The fighting between the two groups has killed at least 80 people and forced more than 30,000 to flee the northeast region of Catatumbo, which borders Venezuela.
In response, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has suspended talks with the ELN, renewed arrest warrants against ELN leaders that were previously suspended as part of a broader peace process, and declared a state of exception. This allowed Petro to launch a military offensive, deploying Colombian troops to the region.
The current violence signals a breakdown in Petro’s signature Total Peace policy. The government reduced its use of the military to manage armed groups under ceasefire agreements. Yet they failed to extend the infrastructural and institutional resources to rural areas required to peacefully manage territory where armed groups operate. While the plan successfully created spells of reduced violence between armed groups and the government, it failed to prevent the groups from continuing to engage in a wide array of illegal activities.
Colombia’s landscape of armed groups
Since the 1960s, Colombia has been experiencing internal armed conflict. More than 20 armed and criminal groups are currently active in the country. Multiple rounds of peace processes in the first two decades of the 2000s led several key groups to demobilize. But some groups never came to an agreement with the government – and those that did often failed to uniformly demobilize. When Petro took office in 2022, he hoped to open new dialogues with Colombia’s armed groups.
The main paramilitary group active during the height of the conflict in Colombia, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), negotiated demobilization with the government in the early 2000s. However, rather than demobilizing, some of the ex-paramilitaries became the backbone of networks of criminal bands (BACRIM), such as the Gaitanistas, which emerged as dominant players in the country’s illegal economic activities, such as cocaine trafficking and illegal mining.
Around a decade later, the 2016 peace process between the government and the FARC led to the demobilization of approximately 7,000 rebels. However, as with the AUC demobilization effort, some FARC members refused to demobilize. A dissident faction, known as the Central General Staff (EMC), regrouped and remains active. This group is now involved in the illegal economy in Colombia and across the border in Venezuela.
Unlike these groups, the ELN never agreed to demobilize. In fact, according to Insight Crime, a think tank specializing in organized crime and security, the ELN is “Colombia’s last true insurgency and one of Latin America’s most powerful criminal organizations.” The ELN was able to expand after the demobilization of the FARC. Thanks in part to a warm relationship with the Maduro regime in Venezuela, ELN now controls swaths of the Colombia-Venezuela border.
Petro’s Total Peace plan
In August 2022, Gustavo Petro was sworn in as Colombia’s president, the country’s first president from a left-wing party. Petro came into office with considerable political experience. He had previously served as a congressman, a senator, and the mayor of the capital, Bogotá. In addition to this traditional political experience, he had also been a member of the M-19 revolutionary movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, Petro entered traditional politics after M-19 demobilized in 1990 through a highly successful peace process and formed a political party.
One of Petro’s first acts as president was submitting his Total Peace plan to congress in August 2022. One major spoke of the plan was a multilateral ceasefire involving not only the remaining leftist groups, but also Colombia’s criminal gangs. The plan was to engage the national leadership of all the major groups simultaneously in parallel negotiations.
The ceasefire agreements did yield some successes. Negotiations with the ELN led to a year-long ceasefire, for example. According to ACLED, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes conflict data, during the ceasefire “clashes between the ELN and security forces plummeted to historic lows, with only 11 events, compared to 67 recorded in the year before.” Likewise, during the three-month ceasefire the government negotiated with the EMC, ACLED recorded “nine violent events…compared to almost 100 in the previous three months.” More broadly after the implementation of the Total Peace plan, the national homicide rate declined slightly.
Cracks in the plan
Even from the outset, it was clear that the Total Peace plan would bump up against various barriers. For one, Colombia lacked the legal framework to negotiate with the criminal gangs, such as the Gaitanistas, as these groups are not politically oriented. In addition, a 2019 constitutional amendment prohibited granting amnesty for anyone involved in kidnapping and drug trafficking.
Another challenge for Petro’s strategy was the decentralized structure within some of the major armed groups. For example, the ELN is organized into fronts – and each front has considerable autonomy. This came to the fore in October 2023 when the ELN’s Northern War Front kidnapped the parents of a famous Colombian soccer player, in open violation of the ceasefire agreement. The national ELN leadership claimed it was a mistake and ordered the release of the father, who was held captive for 12 days.
The most significant issue, however, is that Colombia’s armed groups have abused the ceasefire agreements to expand their power. Under the agreements, armed groups committed to refrain from hostage taking and attacking government officials. However, the agreements did not specifically forbid armed groups from engaging in other types of criminal income generation, including cocaine production and trafficking. Meanwhile, the government committed to refrain from deploying the military against groups with which they had agreements. The agreements, thus, effectively freed armed groups from conflicts with the government and allowed them to focus their energies on expanding their territorial control, generating resources, and fighting rival groups.
In fact, ACLED data shows a 40% increase in violence between armed groups – and an additional 43 municipalities affected by armed group activity – in the first 27 months of Petro’s presidency, compared to the previous 27 months. The Colombian Human Rights Ombudsman’s office reported in November 2024 that the groups were restricting humanitarian aid, recruiting children, and distributing propaganda. And although many rural communities had experienced control by armed groups, community members in rural areas reported worsening conditions. Criticism of a group’s activities, or suspected collaboration with a rival group, has led to civilian displacements and assassinations. These dynamics allegedly led to the murder of one family in Tibú, in northeast Colombia, that set off this recent wave of violence.
What challenges lie ahead?
First, one of the main income sources for Colombian armed groups – drug production and trafficking – is extremely lucrative and involves complex global networks. The think tank Global Financial Integrity, which analyzes illicit financial flows, gave an estimated value of the global illegal drug market: $426 billion to $652 billion a year. Cocaine manufacturing alone functions as a complex commodity chain employing – even at conservative estimates – hundreds of thousands of people in countries across the globe.
The remote rural areas that struggle to bring perishable crops to market because of Colombia’s weak transportation infrastructure, “have achieved economic development thanks to the coca and cocaine market,” one expert noted. It is no surprise, then, that Colombian coca production has seen agricultural advances that increased yields. In fact, Colombian coca production has risen to record highs since 2020. It will be hard for the government to match the opportunities for economic development that coca/cocaine provides.
Second, the conflict between groups for control over these lucrative illegal resources and the renewed conflict between armed groups and the government is bad news for ordinary Colombians. As political scientist Eduardo Moncada notes, the time horizons of criminal groups change their behavior. When criminals are embedded in a particular place over time, their time horizons are long. This means they are more likely to use carrots rather than sticks to elicit cooperation from people in the territory in which they operate. When time horizons are short, criminal groups are more likely to use predatory tactics, such as extortion and violence, against civilians. Government crackdowns and competition from rival groups tend to shorten these time horizons, the research shows. Thus, we should expect criminal groups in Colombia facing both competition and crackdowns to be operating under shorter time horizons.
As part of the declaration of the state of exception, Petro will name a military commander for the region of Catatumbo. He has already signed several decrees setting up financial relief programs to alleviate the suffering of the tens of thousands of displaced Colombians.
Yet political science research suggests these moves will likely not be enough in the long term. Post-conflict reconstruction requires the extension of government institutions and infrastructure into the zones once managed by armed groups. Without these types of shifts, we should expect renewed contestation for control of rural communities – and continued victimization of civilians.
Heather Sullivan is a 2024-2025 Good Authority fellow.
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