President Gustavo Petro’s “Total Peace” policy had a difficult 2023. Not only did it fail to persuade the country’s most important armed groups to lay down their arms, but it also led to a reshaping of Colombia‘s criminal landscape.
The Total Peace policy is Petro’s bold bid to bring the criminal activities of Colombia’s main armed groups to an end. Since its inception in late 2022, it has sought to negotiate with more than 20 armed and criminal groups, ranging from the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN) guerrillas to paramilitary offshoots such as the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia – AGC), also known as the Gaitanistas, and smaller urban criminal gangs.
In 2023, the government has managed to engage only five groups in negotiations. Talks with the ELN and the Central General Staff (Estado Mayor Central – EMC) of the ex-FARC mafia — a confederation of dissident groups of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC) guerrillas — are the most advanced. The talks have led to multiple ceasefires with the government, significantly reducing clashes with state security forces across the country.
Colombia’s ‘Total Peace’ 1 Year On: Less State Violence, Stronger Criminal Groups
The state of the other negotiations, however, is uncertain. One of the most difficult challenges in advancing negotiations lies in the fact that the criminal groups are unwilling to submit themselves to the country’s judicial processes after the government’s proposed bill failed to pass in Congress. Public support for Total Peace has been crumbling in the last year.
The obstacles facing Total Peace are significant. While the state appears as far as ever from achieving a military, political, or financial victory over any of the country’s armed groups, some of those armed groups appear to be growing stronger.
The policy is facing its toughest test yet after the ELN recently kidnapped the father of an internationally famous soccer player, Luis Díaz, in the country’s northeastern department of La Guajira. Around the same time, tensions increased between the army and the EMC in the southwestern department of Cauca. Following these events, Petro removed Danilo Rueda from his post as Peace Commissioner and appointed Otty Patiño, who had until that point been the government’s delegate in negotiations with the ELN.
Below, InSight Crime looks at Total Peace’s impact on the restructuring of Colombia’s criminal groups in 2023.
Effect on Major Criminal Economies
Total Peace has had a deeply undesired effect: it has given new impetus to the fight to control Colombia’s strategic criminal economies, including coca cultivation. Abandoning these incomes is not a necessary condition to negotiate with the government, and the state cannot use the military against any group with which it has agreed to a ceasefire.
Some groups, such as the EMC, have managed to consolidate strategic corridors in Cauca and other regions in the south of the country. But this has also led to clashes. In some coca-growing areas, for example, violence has deepened the coca crisis caused by the fall in coca prices, although the drug trafficking business remains profitable.
In the departments of Cauca, Nariño, Norte de Santander, and Putumayo, disputes between criminal groups over sections of the drug trafficking chain appear to have driven away national and international buyers of coca paste and cocaine, keeping coca prices low and increasing oversupply in production areas.
“In places like Cauca, where there are many actors, there is a lot of insecurity. That doesn’t attract international actors, who need stability,” Luis Fernando Trejos, professor of political science and international relations at the Universidad del Norte, told InSight Crime.
As a result, some of these groups have sought to expand their sources of illicit income with other criminal economies such as gold mining, extortion, and kidnapping. The ELN has continued kidnapping and refused to give it up, despite it being prohibited under the ceasefire. This has been yet another source of tension with the government.
Coca prices appear to have fallen less in areas where there is one dominant criminal actor. In Bajo Cauca, Antioquia, a key area for the AGC, the price per kilo of coca paste has dipped slightly from $880 to $780, according to Carlos Zapata, president of the Popular Training Institute (Instituto Popular de Capacitación – IPC), a civil society organization specializing in human rights.
The group has also sought to profit from other illegal economies, such as illegal mining in Bajo Cauca, northeastern Antioquia, and southern Bolivar, as well as migrant smuggling through the Darién Gap.
Incentivizing Crime
The Total Peace policy was also one of the major contributing factors to the rapid evolution of crime in Colombia.
Ceasefires have been crucial to the change in criminal dynamics in the country, giving respite to armed groups from military operations against them. This pause has allowed them to concentrate on fighting rival organizations for control of strategic territories.
“Total Peace generated perverse incentives for the groups,” said Trejos, who explained that the ceasefires were “an unplanned truce [with the state] that left them a free battle front to move towards a more horizontal war with other armed groups without the state participating.”
In fact, according to data from the Ideas for Peace Foundation (Fundación Ideas Para la Paz), confrontations between armed groups increased by 85% and expanded to other areas under Total Peace.
These clashes continue in places where criminal economies, including illegal mining, extortion, and drug trafficking, proliferate. Some of these territories, like Chocó, Antioquia, Nariño, Arauca, Putumayo, southern Bolívar, and Cauca, were FARC strongholds. The group’s demobilization in 2016 left a power vacuum that triggered battles for control.
In some of these territories — such as southern Bolívar and Chocó — it has become clear that criminal groups that do not have ongoing negotiations with the government, such as the AGC, are expanding and fueling an upsurge in violence.
There have been some positive developments in security, including a slight decrease in murders of social leaders and lower numbers of displacement and confinement. However, taken as a whole, Total Peace has failed to prevent the strengthening of the main criminal groups or curb their territorial expansion, recruitment, or the diversification of their income. All of this has led to increased violence between armed groups.
Bureaucratic Challenges
The lack of support for Total Peace within Congress has been one of the Petro administration’s greatest obstacles.
In March, the president presented the bill laying out the legal framework that would enable the government to negotiate with non-political criminal structures, such as urban criminal gangs, the AGC, and the Conquering Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra (Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada – ACSN), also known as the Pachenca.
In June, the bill collapsed due to a lack of support, leaving the government without the legal structure it needed to move forward with negotiations it had already begun, such as those with urban gangs in Medellín and Buenaventura.
During the year, tensions between the government’s Total Peace approach and the aims of key government ministries, including the defense and justice ministries, also became apparent.
Disagreements between the Colombian military and the Peace Commissioner over negotiations with the ELN and the EMC were particularly apparent during regional elections, which took place on October 29.
For example, the army did not enter or provide electoral materials to the town of El Plateado, a township in the municipality of Argelia, Cauca, and a key stronghold for EMC factions in the Cañón del Micay, until two days before the elections. This was to avoid a confrontation with the EMC, General Helder Giraldo Bonilla, commander of the military forces, told El Tiempo.
Then, the army hung about following the elections, increasing tensions in the area. The army was eventually pushed out of the town by the community — but the delay led to the EMC suspending peace negotiations for 10 days, arguing non-compliance by the government and complaining about the drawn-out presence of the army, according to a communiqué issued by the group on November 5.
This situation also highlighted the difficulty in reconciling Total Peace and the implementation of the government’s drug policy. The policy seeks to attack the main criminal structures dedicated to drug trafficking and the infrastructure of both drug production and trafficking, while also bringing opportunities to the communities most affected by this illegal economy’s dynamics.
But in key drug trafficking territories where groups such as the ELN and the EMC are the dominant actors, the ceasefires decreed under Total Peace may hinder the actions of the security forces against drug trafficking and the dismantling of the infrastructure that supports it. In the Cañón del Micay, the army was forced to halt a major anti-drug operation due to the ceasefire in mid-October, a setback in the fight against drug trafficking in this strategic enclave.
Considering these contradictory policies and disagreements within the government, the outlook for Total Peace looks bleak.