Colombia’s Tragic Downward Security Spiral

Abstract

During the middle of May 2025, I had the opportunity to travel to Bogota, Colombia, to give addresses to the country’s National War College and the New Granada Military University, and to interact with senior Colombian security and defense personnel regarding the challenges facing the country.  The trip was particularly meaningful for me, insofar as my own work on Latin American security issues since the late 1990s has coincided with Colombia’s transformation from a country whose governance was once crumbling from the mutually reinforcing scourges of drug corruption and guerilla violence, to Colombia becoming the region’s foremost security success story, U.S. partner, and exporter of security to its neighbors. 

Colombia’s dramatic success during that period makes particularly tragic the reversals in the decade since Colombia signed a flawed agreement with the FARC, accelerated by the socioeconomic shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the disastrous “total peace” efforts of the nation’s current administration of Gustavo Petro.  Highlighting how sharply Colombia’s security situation has eroded in recent years, my visit coincided with a rash of targeted assassinations, called “Plan Pistola” (the “pistol plan”), because it was reminiscent of the assassinations employed in the 1990s against the state as a tool of terror by Colombian narco strongman Pablo Escobar.  By May 2025, Plan Pistola assassinations had taken the lives of 27 police and security officials across the country.  In recent months there have further been a rash of attacks using hand grenades across Bogota.