Abelardo de la Espriella represents the return of a hard line to restore security in Colombia. The restoration of authority was the central idea of the campaign that brought him to power, set against a backdrop of renewed violence and the failure of the total peace policy with which his predecessor, Gustavo Petro, sought to negotiate simultaneously with all armed groups. The far-right president had promised a “shock plan” for his first 90 days in office, which conclude this week.
To project the image of a hard line, De la Espriella has allowed himself to be filmed with a pistol on his hip during an operation in Santa Marta, and has walked among the body bags of fighters from armed groups killed in military strikes. He has also turned police raids against urban crime — appearing on the scene with a radio and a bulletproof vest — into a cinematic form of government communication. Those outings are part of his nascent program to fight crime in cities, dubbed Urban Security Defense Blocks (BODSU).
Ten years after the peace agreement with the FARC, which disarmed about 13,000 guerrillas, the war still burns, only now in a more fragmented phase. De la Espriella, who rejects that historic pact, inherited on August 7 a country with nearly 29,000 members of organized armed groups and at least 14 active zones of contest between illegal actors, according to estimates from the Public Forces compiled by the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP).
Three months later, the government has intensified airstrikes (there have been at least six, in which at least eight minors have died), extraditions, and the pursuit of so‑called high‑value targets, as well as militarizing both Santa Marta (in September) and Cúcuta (last week) in response to separate security crises.
De la Espriella promised during the campaign to reclaim the “lost territories” within those 90 days, but later clarified that the deadline was for launching a “shock plan” that would include the capture of “10 major heads of narco‑terrorism and organized crime.” In other words, the so‑called high‑value targets. So far, the highest-profile case has been Naín Andrés Pérez Toncel, alias “Naín” or “Bendito menor,” one of the leaders of the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Forces (ACSN), who was killed two months ago in Riohacha, the capital of La Guajira. Although he was not the organization’s top boss, he became one of its most visible members because of his flamboyance, and that visibility made him a priority target for the government.
The president also proposed closer cooperation with the United States, including more extraditions — often publicized widely on his social media when signed — and the construction of new mega‑prisons modeled on what Nayib Bukele has done in El Salvador, projects that have yet to materialize.
“What we have seen in the first 90 days is a change in tone, alongside the will and initiative to take military action,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, who highlights the rise in extraditions as a sign of alignment between the agendas of Bogotá and Washington (De la Espriella has joined the Shield of the Americas, Donald Trump’s alliance of like‑minded leaders to fight drug trafficking). “There is a new political will regarding military operations, and that is something many officers in the Public Forces acknowledge and appreciate,” Dickinson adds. Replacing criminal governance with legitimate state governance in many territories will be the hardest part, the expert warns.
Jorge Mantilla, a conflict specialist, likewise emphasizes that the state has regained military initiative, reflected in increased operations, arrests, and clashes. He says the image of effective leadership has been conveyed. “This is a government where the narrative matters more than the data. And there you see the whole staging of the radio, the white bags, the pistol, the green military uniform,” he says. Amid tensions within Colombia’s right, he believes De la Espriella’s major political gamble is to take the “security torch” from former president Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010).
De la Espriella has also managed to reestablish regional dialogue, Mantilla notes, after a breakdown in communication between national and local authorities that had persisted until a few months ago, before he took office. “The president’s collaborative work with the governors and mayors, through various mechanisms, can create a virtuous cycle,” he predicts. There is now greater coordination.
Several important questions remain. “The first of these is how to prevent these groups or their leaders — who are currently being targeted — from being rapidly replaced, in connection with a phenomenon that this government must address but about which it has not said a single word: the issue of forced recruitment,” Mantilla notes. The shadow of the humanitarian impact also looms large, with the civilian population caught in the middle of the military offensive and terrorist attacks such as those that occurred over the weekend in the southwestern part of the country, leaving at least five people dead. Furthermore, he concludes, there is a considerable gap between striking at armed groups and actually dismantling illicit economies, as De la Espriella has promised.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
