Adaptation or Reversal: Colombia's Election and the Future of Total Peace

On 25 April, an improvised explosive device planted by the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), a dissident bloc of the now-defunct non-state armed group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), killed at least 20 civilians in Colombia’s Cauca department. The incident marked part of a wider escalation of attacks by the group against the security forces in southwest Colombia, ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for 31 May.

Candidates on both sides of the political spectrum have used the attacks to galvanise support for their security policies and discredit the opposition. Left-wing President Gustavo Petro (2022-present) and Iván Cepeda, the candidate of Petro's Pacto Histórico coalition, have both accused the EMC of colluding with ‘the extreme right and fascism’ to sow chaos during the run-up to the election. Meanwhile, the right-wing opposition has blamed the government’s ‘total peace’ policy for failing to contain the armed violence.

According to a February poll, public order is the issue that most concerns 30% of Colombians, with 60% of respondents feeling that the country ‘va por mal camino’ (‘is going down the wrong path’). Security has therefore been a prominent topic of discussion among candidates and a source of contention, exacerbated by high-profile assassinations like that of conservative senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay in June 2025. Yet candidates’ visions for what it would take to guarantee security are sharply differentiated along political lines.

Polling in April put Cepeda – who would largely continue Petro’s legacy – at a strong lead with an estimated 44.3% of votes, followed by right-wing candidates Abelardo de la Espriella and Paloma Valencia, polling at 21.5% and 19.8% respectively. Both right-wing candidates have been harsh critics of Petro’s policies and would stand a real chance of winning if the vote goes to a second round.

Making ‘Total Peace’

Cepeda and the right-wing candidates diverge most clearly on Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict. The Petro government’s response, paz total, or total peace, has sought to negotiate with all the country’s remaining armed groups to address the structural drivers of violence.

This vision was highly ambitious. Since the historic 2016 Peace Accord between the Colombian government and FARC, a complex amalgamation of armed actors emerged to fill the territorial vacuum, generating violent competition in key strategic nodes for extortion, drug trafficking and other illicit economies, like illegal gold mining.

These included the EMC and the Segunda Marquetalia, FARC dissident blocs that abandoned the peace process, citing discontent with the terms of the Peace Accord and its lack of implementation under President Iván Duque’s conservative government (2018-22). Other key actors include the left-wing insurgent group Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), and the Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia (EGC) and Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), both of which comprise former paramilitaries.

Making peace with such plurality of groups with competing interests proved to be a substantial challenge, in part due to legal challenges, misunderstandings and poor planning, but also because of the internal structure of armed groups and their systems of governance. Beneath their central leadership, each group is divided into regional factions with diverging territorial interests, centred around control of illicit economies and relations with communities. This has led factions to repeatedly break ceasefire agreements to further their interests, such as expanding into new territory or competing with rivals. Although attacks between armed groups and security forces reduced, local communities have experienced increased assassinations, forced displacement, extortion, kidnappings and child recruitment as groups vie for control of territory.

As a result, the negotiation process has fragmented and localised. In Cauca, for example, the government has entered talks with some EMC factions but restored a military offensive against more belligerent fronts. Similarly, in Nariño, the Comuneros del Sur faction splintered from the ELN to pursue negotiations with the government, leading to some breakthroughs at the local level but jeopardising talks with the ELN.

The territorial expansion of these groups and continued violence against the general population has created scepticism over whether these actors are truly committed to peace. Because of this, de la Espriella and Valencia have pledged to completely abandon total peace and take a harder line against armed groups by deploying the military to regain territorial control – a strategy becoming the default for governments across the region to respond to organised crime. However, Colombia’s long history of counterinsurgency has demonstrated the limitations of such approaches.

From Forced to Voluntary Eradication

Another point of disagreement between candidates, closely interrelated with total peace, is around strategies targeting cocaine production, one of the main sources of revenue for Colombia’s armed groups.

The Petro government’s National Drug Policy 2023-33 marked an important shift in Colombia’s counternarcotics strategy, away from a predominantly militarised approach. Critically, the policy document recognised that not only had long-held US-led ‘War on Drugs’ strategies of forced eradication of coca crops failed to impact cocaine production, but that they also had negative repercussions for the health and security of Colombia’s rural poor, which had grown dependent on income from coca cultivation due to poverty and lack of state investment and alternative livelihoods.

Instead, the policy advocated for targeting strategic, high-value actors in criminal networks and their finances rather than coca farmers, the most accessible link in the chain. It therefore sought to address cocaine production through voluntary substitution by implementing the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (Plan Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos de Uso Ilícito: PNIS), introduced in the 2016 Peace Accord.

The logic of voluntary substitution programmes is to reduce the dependency of rural communities on illicit crops by offering a legal alternative livelihood. However, such initiatives have been criticised for being too surface-level and failing to understand the historical and political economy dimensions of marginalisation and criminalisation that drive participation of communities in coca cultivation, and not going far enough to create enabling conditions – such as the legal, economic and security infrastructure – for them to transition away from illicit economies. Sure enough, substitution policies have proven persistently challenging to implement at the national level, with substitution levels remaining low.

With the slow implementation of substitution programmes, Petro’s administration has faced scrutiny – both domestically and internationally – for allowing hectares of illicit crops to increase under its watch. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which releases an annual report on the presence of coca crops in Colombia, estimated there had been a 50% increase from 2022 to 2023. Petro has criticised the statistical method used to reach this estimation, instead citing Colombian police data, which found a 56.9% reduction in cultivations since the start of his tenure, and pointing to his government’s record number of cocaine seizures to demonstrate commitment to countering drug trafficking.

Nonetheless, the UNODC figures led the US to decertify Colombia in October 2025 for the first time since 1997, describing Petro’s counternarcotics policies as ‘disastrous and ineffective’. Decertification typically results in US aid cuts, making it a powerful foreign policy tool that has added to the increasing political pressure Petro has faced from US President Donald Trump.

In this context, de la Espriella and Valencia have both pledged to resume forced eradication and aerial fumigation of crops with glyphosate – which Colombia’s Constitutional Court has banned due to health concerns – likely driven by an interest in restoring positive relations with the US by aligning more closely on enforcement priorities. Taken together, these two policy reversals on negotiation and eradication would mark a wholesale rejection of the Petro framework.

Adaptation or Reversal

Paz total has, in practice, produced a mixed and largely disappointing record, with fragmented negotiations, broken ceasefires and an expansion of armed groups’ territorial footprint. The escalation of attacks by the EMC in April epitomises this failure. While the diagnosis underpinning total peace itself is sound, its implementation has left much to be desired. A Cepeda presidency would be forced to learn from these mistakes and refine the approach of his predecessor.

However, de la Espriella and Valencia would dismantle paz total entirely, and with it the hard-won recognition that Colombia’s armed conflict is sustained by structural socioeconomic drivers that six decades of military pressure have repeatedly failed to resolve. Returning to a security policy centred around military deployments and eradication metrics would risk undoing important progress in decriminalising vulnerable communities and instead exposing them to greater levels of violence – a recurrent pattern in Colombia’s counterinsurgency history.

Such a shift to Colombia’s domestic landscape would have significant implications for the wider region. Latin American governments are increasingly embracing punitive security models, a trend exacerbated by the clear preferences of the Trump administration for a mano dura approach. By following suit, Colombia might improve relations with the White House and some of its neighbours, but it would close off one of the few remaining experiments in addressing organised violence through development and negotiation rather than through brute force. Whatever paz total's failures, abandoning the analytical framework that produced it would be the more consequential outcome of this vote.

© RUSI, 2026.

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