Back to the Future: Security Situation in Colombia

By 2010, Colombia (Figure 1) had effectively won its war against a combination of ideological and criminal insurgents. Today, as we approach 2026, Bogotá has certainly lost the peace. It stands in possibly the worst situation since 1996.
That year had seen the transition to the war of movement (mobile warfare) by the largest and most powerful illicit actor, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC. Yet, from a position when the polity was viewed at one point as down on the canvas for the mandatory 8-count, the state rallied, and in the two decades that followed forced FARC to a 2016 reintegration into the political spectrum.[i]
Other groups, such as the much smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), as well as the various paramilitaries (of the United Autodefensas [self-defense groups] of Colombia or AUC) and criminal actors, had likewise been reduced to a nuisance rather than an existential threat. What followed was as disheartening as it was perhaps predictable (more to this below).
Collapse of Victory
 FARC’s surrender created a vacuum. Variously portrayed as a remnant taking the necessary steps to save what little organizational structure and power it had left, or as a vibrant organization making a principled decision for peace – only the first of these had any relationship to reality – the peace process nonetheless produced the same result on the ground: wholesale withdrawal from areas of ongoing and potential criminal gain that FARC had occupied and exploit...