Colombia’s new president faces one of the most complicated criminal landscapes in the world. In this week’s InSight Take, Co-Director Jeremy McDermott and Senior Colombia Analyst Sara Garcia unpack what Abelardo de la Espriella inherits: powerful armed groups like the Gaitanistas and the ELN, record cocaine production, and booming illegal gold mining. They weigh Washington’s likely support, whether de la Espriella can match the Uribe-era security gains, and the human rights risks of a harder military push.
Jerry: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another Insight Take. I’m Jeremy McDermott, co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime. And joining me is Sara Garcia, one of our senior Columbia analysts. Hi, Sara. How are you?
Sara: [00:00:13] Hi, Jerry. Thank you for having me.
Jerry: [00:00:17] Good to have you. And we’re going to talk about Columbia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who took office on August 7th. He was elected, above all, on his promise to tackle the security situation, which has been worsening over the last few years. He inherits a really complex criminal landscape that’s actually been changing. We used to look at Colombia’s security situation through the optic of the civil conflict, which began in the 1960s here, which pitted Marxist rebels against right-wing paramilitaries. And then we had the US-backed government seeking to impose some sort of order on the country.
Jerry: [00:01:07] De la Espriella doesn’t recognize that Colombia is in a civil conflict. For him, it’s the government pitted against a series of criminal actors. No ideology, no politics involved. As well as the criminal actors, Colombia is looking at booming criminal economies, led particularly by the cocaine trade, which we’re going to deep dive into in a wee bit later in the program. So let’s start by looking at these criminal factions and their relative strengths. So can you run through them briefly? Starting in order of importance?
SEE ALSO: Colombia Criminal Profile
Sara: [00:01:49] Sure. Well, first we have the Gaitanistas, also known as the Gulf clan. That remains the most powerful criminal organization in Colombia, with an estimated 10,000 members. The group controls much of the country’s northern region, particularly the Caribbean departments, and it’s continued to expand to the Pacific coast and also the Venezuelan border.
Sara: [00:02:15] Second, we have the National Liberation Army, or the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), which is the country’s second most powerful armed group with an estimated 7000 members alone. The traditional stronghold of the ELN is the Colombian-Venezuelan border, the more than 2000 km of the Venezuelan border, and it also extends into Venezuelan territory.
Sara: [00:02:47] And lastly, we have the dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC, that, although there are several dissident groups, the two largest alone account for more than 7000 members.
SEE ALSO: Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC) Criminal Profile
Jerry: [00:03:07] Right. So. Dummy’s guide to this, so that myself and all our audience are clear. In the North, we have the Gaitanistas in a kind of U along the Caribbean coast on the Panamanian border and beginning to push down either side along the Venezuelan border, and along the Pacific coast. We have the ELN concentrated largely along the Venezuelan border, although they do have some fronts in some of the center parts of Colombia. And then in the South, we have the FARC dissidents who are in a kind of a U along the bottom Pacific coast border with Ecuador, Amazonian region, up to Venezuela.
Jerry: [00:03:52] Okay. So. Many of these groups and the AUC or the paramilitaries that led to the Gaitanistas go all the way back to the Medellin cartel. The ELN have been around since the 1960s. The FARC dissidents can trace their roots back to the FARC in the 1960s. So a lot of these groups have got a long pedigree. Sara. So why are we talking about the current landscape being different?
Sara: [00:04:24] Yes. Well, the first element is the fragmentation of the criminal landscape. As you just mentioned, the AUC, or the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the paramilitary blocks of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. And they signed a peace agreement with the government in 2006. And only after that, 30 factions emerge from that demobilization alone. The Gaitanistas are one of the groups that emerged from that demobilization, but not the only one. And just ten years from that, in 2016 – 2017, another fragmentation process began amid the peace accords with the FARC. Various dissident groups emerged and are now fighting each other as much as any other criminal rivals in the country.
Sara: [00:05:21] Another element that is interesting in the current scenario is that little ideology remains. Most illegal armed groups operating in Colombia today are primarily motivated by economical gain and territorial control, and they are seeking to dominate strategic areas linked to illicit economies such as drug trafficking and illegal mining. These groups are able to tap into a wide portfolio of criminal economies, obviously led by the cocaine trade. Colombia has never in its history produced as much cocaine as it is producing today. But to that, you can add the growing marijuana business, illegal gold mining, environmental crime, extortion, and kidnapping, and you have billions of dollars in earnings every year. And this is allowing the different groups to increase not only in size but also in territorial reach and also in sophistication. The use of drones and other emerging technologies has transformed the dynamics of the country, and that’s enabling criminal groups to innovate more rapidly and in several areas, stay one step ahead of the authorities.
Jerry: [00:06:40] Yeah, I still believe that the ELN cling to some ideology. Although I think many of their fronts or units on the ground may not so much. But if there’s any one of the players for me that’s still ideological. I think it would, it would be the ELN. But you broke down some of the criminal economies. Let’s focus for a second on cocaine. It’s probably the most lucrative, and it’s certainly what Colombia is most famous for, unfortunately. And as you said, Colombia’s producing more cocaine than ever before. The numbers are a little hazy because last year’s figures were not published because President Gustavo Petro, the previous president, didn’t want these numbers out there because he thought it’d make him look bad. And indeed, we’re pretty certain that it would have done. But what we are pretty certain of is that Colombia is producing more than 3000 tons of cocaine a year.
Jerry: [00:07:44] So we’ve got an enormous increase in supply. We’ve got this fragmented landscape that you’ve been talking about. I think it’s worth talking about the markets as well, because there’s been some massive changes there. Historically, cocaine went to the United States and it went to Western Europe. That is no longer the case, particularly now with such a huge supply, those two markets simply can’t absorb that amount of cocaine. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen huge drops in prices over recent years in the US and in Europe. Drug traffickers have been diversifying their markets in an aggressive strategy. Australia is perhaps the most notorious, one of the places where cocaine wholesale reaches its highest price, but also we’re seeing multi-ton seizures in Asia.
Jerry: [00:08:48] So there is a concerted effort to use all this extra supply to diversify the consumer markets. And the Colombians can’t do this on their own. And what they have done, to be honest right from the beginning, is partner up with other mafias. First of all, it was the Mexican mafias, the Guadalajara cartel, and then they became Sinaloa, you know, and that was for the US market. The Colombians and the Mexicans partnered up for that. Then we saw the Colombians moving drugs into Spain themselves. But then later they developed quite a close relationship, and it was actually the AUC who did this with Colombia’s Ndrangheta, now arguably the most powerful of the Italian mafias, thanks to the cocaine connect. But now we’re seeing all sorts of diverse actors, mainly Europeans, in the cocaine business.
SEE ALSO: FARC Dissidents Criminal Profile
Jerry: [00:09:47] We’ve got the Dutch, we’ve got French traffickers, British traffickers, Albanians, and other Balkan mafias. Even Scandinavian criminals have been caught over here in Colombia. And this has changed the nature of the cocaine trade because no one group, thanks to the fragmentation in Colombia, really controls national supply or even a significant percentage of national cocaine supply. So the Europeans are able to make deals with smaller Colombian groups. And the Colombians, of course, want the profit margin that comes from selling cocaine wholesale, be it in the US, be it in Europe, be it in Australia, rather than selling it for $2,000, which is the average price of a kilo of cocaine in Colombia. But what’s interesting is that cocaine actually does have a rival in terms of criminal earnings in Colombia, doesn’t it? And this is the gold trade. What can you tell us about it?
Sara: [00:10:55] Yes. Illegal gold mining has become a key element of the criminal activities of illegal armed groups in Colombia. And this particularly has to do with the surge in international gold prices, which has fueled the expansion of both legal and illegal mining across the country. Another factor that is making gold particularly attractive is that illegally extracted gold can be laundered and incorporated into the legal supply chains, whereas cocaine remains illicit throughout every stage of the production and distribution. And what’s currently happening is that the illegal armed groups are capitalizing on the boom of of illegal and legal mining, and they are extorting legal and illegal miners in gold-producing regions, gaining multi-million dollar revenues through extortion alone. And when you combine those profits from extortion with the profits they gain from the direct involvement in illegal mining, the scale of these illicit revenues becomes even more significant.
Jerry: [00:12:12] Yeah. And as you say, if you’re caught with a kilo of gold, no crime for the most part. You’re caught with a kilo of cocaine, which is worth less now than a kilo of gold. And you know, it’s straight to prison. So gold is the ideal criminal economy and criminal commodity because it’s very easy to legalize, as you say. Prices are very high, but also they can use it for money laundering and to move large amounts of wealth across borders, leaving absolutely no trace. And they can use it to pay off their subcontractors. Again, leaving no trace. So gold, I think, is hugely important now for every major criminal group in Colombia for all of these different reasons. So we’ve looked at criminal groups; we’ve looked at criminal economies. That’s a quick overview of the panorama that de la Espriella is facing. What’s he promised in terms of policies or strategy to tackle these different complex threats?
SEE ALSO: Illegal Gold Mining and Trafficking
Sara: [00:13:28] Well, during his presidential campaign, he stated that if elected, his administration will adopt a hardline security strategy, ruling out peace negotiations with illegal armed groups in favor of law enforcement and military approaches. And he actually also emphasized this in his inauguration speech on August 7th, in which he stated that he will seek to defeat the narco-terrorists, combat all criminal organizations, and that the only option available to illegal groups was to surrender or to face the force of the state. He also proposed resuming aerial eradication of illicit crops, coca crops using drones and bioherbicides. Although implementing such a policy will entail significant logistical, financial, and legal challenges for de la Espriella.
Sara: [00:14:29] It is important to note that most of these proposals are not new in Colombia. Similar security and counter-narcotics strategies have shaped the government policy for several decades now. But, however, criminal organizations have demonstrated a strong capacity to adapt, while illegal economies have remained resilient and even in some cases, continue to expand.
Jerry: [00:15:00] Yeah. His campaign and his inaugural speech very much seemed to come out of the Washington playbook. President Trump threw his support behind de la Espriella, and is promising to step up aid, but we’ll come on to that in a sec. But this military first, this hard line, this mano dura approach we’re seeing increasingly in different parts of Latin America. President Noboa in Ecuador has been at it for now almost three years. President Kast in Chile, obviously we’ve got President Bukele in El Salvador, President Milei in Argentina. De la Espriella, if you like, is the last or the latest example of this move to the right and hardline security echoing much of the messaging coming out from the Trump administration. Colombia, of course, has been Washington’s most loyal ally for decades, although the last four years under President Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla, were the exception that proved the rule. And Petro and President Trump ended up doing a lot of fighting over social media as well as on diplomatic forums. But can you just go back to Washington’s traditional role in Colombia? And then we’ll throw it forward and see what might change with the Trump / de la Espriella relationship.
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Sara: [00:16:49] Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Colombia has been the United States main ally in the fight against drugs in Latin America for a long time. And one of the defining moments in that relationship was the Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar initiative that was launched in the 2000s. The Plan Colombia was initially conceived as a strategy to combat drug trafficking organizations, and reduce coca production. But in the context of armed conflict in Colombia, it quickly evolved into a broader security partnership between the two countries. Much of the assistance provided by the US focused on strengthening Colombia’s security forces through training, military equipment, intelligence capabilities, and also counternarcotics programs. And the reality is that the results were mixed because US assistance contributed to a major transformation on Colombian security institutions and helped the government weaken several major armed factors. But while coca cultivation declined at certain points, production shifted geographically, and criminal organizations adapted to those changing conditions. So the strategy was effective at targeting the leadership and military capabilities of armed groups. But it was less effective at addressing the deeper economic and institutional factors that allow the illegal economies and criminal networks to persist.
Jerry: [00:18:36] Yeah, I think as a counter-narcotics strategy, Plan Colombia was not hugely successful, but as a counterterrorist and in post-9-11, Sara, it really did become a principally counterterrorism initiative. I think it was successful, quite markedly successful. And people forget that it was US aid that really tipped the balance for the Colombian state and, I feel, forced the AUC and the FARC to negotiate. So from that perspective, I think there is some success to the US aid on that front. But let’s talk about US aid now.
Jerry: [00:19:25] The messaging out of Washington is that de la Espriella’s election, the relationship between Washington and Bogota, is going to reach new heights. There’s talk of up to $1 billion in aid coming down the pipe. Colombia is signing up to the Shield of the Americas, which is President Trump’s initiative to tackle principally the drug trade, mainly from a military perspective. Colombia needs money. De la Espriella is facing a fiscal crisis. There’s a huge hole. The debts, Colombia’s debts and debt levels, are at very high levels. There’s not much wiggle room for him in terms of being able to find money for what sounds like a very ambitious security force policy that is going to require high levels of operations, new recruitment, lots of training, etc., etc.. So if US money does come down the pipe, it needs to come down quickly. And it needs to come down in quite significant amounts.
Jerry: [00:20:35] I’m a little skeptical about this happening anytime soon. One, because President Trump seems to promise quite a lot of stuff like Patriot missiles to Ukraine or licensing to do those, and then changes his mind. But also, he’s got the midterms coming up. And my feeling is his focus is very much on those. And he’s already asked Congress to vote more money for the Iran operations and rebuilding their missile stockpiles, etc. So bunging another billion dollars on top of Congress may require a wee bit of time before that’s approved. De la Espriella really needs to use this 100 days to move the dial in some way, and I’m worried that he won’t be able to start the coca eradication as quickly as he wants because of constitutional and environmental issues, that he’s not going to have any money to unleash the military in the way that he’s been discussing. And there’s also this emphasis on military action, which, of course, at InSight Crime we think is really only one part of a much wider toolbox that is needed to contain transnational organized crime and then begin to dismantle it. But, based on the last 30 years of experience and based on what de la Espriella has promised, what is your reading of how efficient and how effective his security policy could be?
Sara: [00:22:36] Well. To give the current scenario the benefit of the doubt, there is a clear trend toward a territorialization of Colombia’s criminal dynamics. So the violence is increasingly concentrated in specific areas that are strategic for criminal economies, particularly drug trafficking and illegal mining. And in this scenario, that territorial concentration could present an opportunity for Abelardo de la Espriella. Actually, several experts I have interviewed are that security policies should be far more targeted, grounded in a detailed understanding of local conditions, and tailored to the specific dynamics of the territories that are most affected by violence and also criminal governance. So in that case, that territorialization may help him.
Sara: [00:23:37] And the same logic applies to coca cultivation. Although coca is grown across several regions in the country, the vast majority of cultivation is concentrated in just ten municipalities. So this geographic concentration could make it easier to design and implement interventions focused on areas where they are likely to have the greatest impact. However, as I mentioned earlier, these measures have really already been used in the past, and drug trafficking has continued to grow, as has organized crime. So as you mentioned, the toolbox has to be more comprehensive than just the military approach or the counter-narcotics approach.
Jerry: [00:24:24] Yes. I’m going to reveal my age now. I remember going down to Putumayo, which is one of the main coca-growing regions in the late 90s, just as Plan Colombia was being designed and then implemented in 2000. We’ve been here before, Sara. And yes, I agree that if he’s able to do a very quick and very extensive coca eradication program within the ten municipalities that you mentioned, he could certainly make a dent in production. But we’ve seen what happened before when this was attempted with the aerial spraying; the crops just spread around Colombia. The fields got much smaller, so they didn’t provide a target for the aircraft. The yield per hectare went up. So on its own it might have a short-term effect, but organized crime has already adjusted to this once before and will do so again, I suspect with even greater agility and speed than than it did before.
Jerry: [00:25:40] President Petro, the previous president, had kind of an interesting approach to drug policy. He switched from concentrating on the eradication of drug crops to seizures and trying to target the higher links in the cocaine trade. His argument, which was a powerful one, was, why are we punishing the poor cocoa farmers who make the least money in all of this, and are often simply victims of civil conflict and violence? Why don’t we concentrate on the upper links in the chain? Makes sense. He wasn’t able to execute this, and he wasn’t able to contain coca growth and cocaine production. So. What do we think is going to change with De la Espriella? And do we think that he really can, in the four years of his term, change the dynamics of the cocaine trade?
Sara: [00:26:59] Well, you mentioned Petro’s approach, and it was certainly an interesting idea. And I do think that it was important to open the discussion about which measures can effectively target those upper links in the drug trafficking chain, where the majority of profits are being made. And as you also mentioned, unfortunately, the implementation of that drug policy faced significant challenges, particularly due to the lack of coordination with other security policies and the total peace, and also for the international context and the struggles between the relationship with the United States. Well, de la Espriella has stated, as I mentioned earlier, through his campaign and reiterated in his inaugural speech that he will resume aerial eradication of coca crops. Okay. That’s something that has been made in the past, but history has shown us that these measures alone are insufficient. Focusing only on coca crops in certain regions can lead to a balloon effect that you mentioned earlier. And that may lead to an increase of cultivation in other parts of the country. And again, the coca crops are only one part in the drug trafficking chain. And it’s not the part that generates the highest profits for the whole transnational cocaine trafficking.
Sara: [00:28:49] We have seen in the past in different countries across the region that more effective approaches include comprehensive strategies, for example, including international cooperation, intelligence sharing, and judicial collaboration, dismantling of money laundering networks, following the money, following the brokers, among other measures.
SEE ALSO: Can A New President’s Hard-Line Approach Stop the Spread of Coca in Colombia?
Jerry: [00:29:19] Ironically, I think the United States had the right approach in previous administrations, where they balanced the security and hardline aspects with supporting the judiciary with obviously training, but also via USAID, engaging with local communities in the violent areas involved in the coca trade. And people don’t really give them the credit that is due. This actually had a very significant effect. And I believe that one of the reasons that coca is concentrated just in ten municipalities now, where the Colombian government doesn’t have much control, is because in other parts of the region there was systematic engagement. There was the arrival of all the organs of the state, not just police and army, but education and health and everything else. That, for many areas, was the first time they’d actually seen all of the presence of the state.
Jerry: [00:30:33] So anyway, we’ve been concentrating on the countryside. We talk about coca crops, the rural actors, and mining. But this isn’t just about the countryside. The cities are also suffering high levels of violence in some cases, and have their own criminal dynamics that President de la Espriella is going to have to deal with. Tell us a little bit about that.
Sara: [00:30:57] Yeah. Actually the urban conflict is one of the more underappreciated parts of the picture in Colombia, because even if the armed conflict remains concentrated in rural areas, we’ve seen that criminal dynamics are increasingly affecting Colombia’s major cities, for example, through extortion, homicide rates, robbery, and criminal intimidation, and that has been contributing to the growing perception of insecurity in the cities. In the cities, we have seen the presence of smaller criminal networks, but also the cities have become increasingly important for larger criminal networks because they concentrate strategic assets, for example, drug trafficking; they concentrate the ports, the transport infrastructure, financial services, and they concentrate consumer markets. And the reality is that criminal organizations are investing more in urban operations not only to generate revenue, but also to secure logistics, recruit members, launder money, which means that the reality today is that we can’t understand the security challenges that the country is facing if we don’t include in that understanding the dynamics of the urban areas.
Jerry: [00:32:30] What we’ve learned also over the last 30 years is that Colombia’s criminal groups are extremely agile, and they’re not going to take this new hardline policy lying down. There’s so much money at stake that we’ve discussed. Many of the groups have so much military experience. Think of the ELN that’s been resisting US-backed military offensives for decades now. What’s your thought on the adaptability of criminal groups to resist the switch in policy?
Sara: [00:33:10] Without a doubt. Colombian criminal groups have decades of experience in how to confront governments, how to push their own agendas and interests through violence, and also how to respond to these military approaches that de La Espriella is hoping to implement. If we have in mind, only this weekend, the weekend of the presidential inauguration alone, there were about 12 armed attacks in different parts of the country, mostly committed by the ELN, but also by FARC dissidents. And I do think that the message behind this may be that the groups are showing their operational capacity and signaling their operational capacity, but also their willingness, and sending the message to the government that they are willing to maintain the pressure on the pressure through violence, on civil society, on communities, but also on the armed forces.
Jerry: [00:34:22] The last president who used a lot of this, this hard-line dialogue, was President Alvaro Uribe. He was president from 2002 for two terms, two four-year terms. What we saw there, unfortunately, was the unleashing of the military also led to some systematic abuses of human rights, and the Colombian military doesn’t have the greatest human rights record. And much of Colombia’s civil conflict going back to six decades is linked to abuses by the state and the lack of political opportunities, political violence, etc. tell us a little bit about this dark history and whether there’s a risk of history repeating itself.
Sara: [00:35:12] Well, as you say, unfortunately, we will need much more time to fully discuss Colombia’s long history of state abuses. Under the previous governments, the country witnessed the consequences of stigmatizing social protest, the emergence of false positives that were these perverse incentives that led the military to murder civilians and falsely present them as members of illegal armed groups in order to claim operational rewards. We have seen the collaboration between the state actors and paramilitary groups, the persecution, and the extermination of political movements. So yeah, we definitely have a long story of state abuses. And unfortunately, this legacy continues to shape Colombia’s political landscape. The risk has not disappeared. We had the assassination of a presidential hopeful last year. Some of the underlying conditions that contributed to these abuses, such as the weak state present in certain territories, the institutional vulnerabilities, the polarization, the use of violence as a political tool. Well, those are elements that remain unresolved in the current scenario.
Jerry: [00:36:37] When I look back at President Uribe and his democratic security policy and then President Santos, who came after him, their great success wasn’t just the hard-line military and security force operations. It was that, in tandem with negotiations, President Uribe managed to demobilize the paramilitaries; 30,000 of them handed over weapons. President Santos managed to demobilize the FARC. 13,000 guerrillas. De La Espriella has refused to countenance any kind of negotiation. And my feeling is he’s slightly shot himself in the foot, because what, if anything, Colombian history shows us with the fragmentation that you’ve talked about is so long as the criminal economies remain intact on the ground, somebody’s going to manage them. And you’ve got to negotiate with the big groups, and then you’ve got to replace their presence and develop the legal economy. So, I want to be optimistic. Sara, I really wish President de la Espriella the greatest success in the world in reducing violence and tackling some of the immensely complex criminal threats that he’s facing. But we know there’s no silver bullet. We know that the criminal economies and revenues seem to be going up, not going down.
SEE ALSO: Peace Never Had a Chance: Colombia’s ELN in Venezuela
Jerry: [00:38:25] Anyway, Sara, I’m sure after the first 100 days of this administration, we will sit down again, and we will have a chat about the success or not of this current Colombian strategy of President de la Espriella.
Jerry: [00:38:43] Thanks a lot for joining me for this fascinating chat. Thank you, our audience, for joining us. If you want to go deeper on any of these issues that we’ve been discussing, the ELN, the Gaitanistas, the history, it’s all on our website. Please go to InSightCrime.org, browse at your leisure. There’s all sorts of goodies there for you to read.
Jerry: [00:39:09] You’ve watched the Insight Take, a weekly video chat analysis of the biggest crime stories in Latin America and the Caribbean. You can find the links to this on our website in the multimedia section or on YouTube and Spotify. If there’s a story you want us to talk about that we haven’t already tackled, please send us a message at flagship@insightcrime.org, and we’ll see if we can put something together for you. We’ll be back next week with another insight take. Bye for now.