Colombia Ends 'Total Peace,' Orders Five Extraditions, Bombs Dissident Camp Skip to main content

Colombia Ends 'Total Peace,' Orders Five Extraditions, Bombs Dissident Camp

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By Tanha Sagar | Published on

President Abelardo de la Espriella scraps Gustavo Petro's negotiating framework; a Guaviare airstrike's death toll rose from 8 to 11 as the government pushes a hard-line reset

Bogotá, Colombia — August 30, 2026

Colombia's new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has formally shut down the negotiating framework his predecessor Gustavo Petro called "Total Peace," ordering the extradition to the United States of five men who had served as negotiators for armed groups and confirming a military airstrike in the southern jungles. The strike, code-named "Operation Amón," was reported by the president on August 27 as killing eight fighters; Colombia's Attorney General's Office later put the toll at 11, including a commander who had once served as a peace-process delegate under Petro's government. Together, the announcements mark the clearest break yet from the negotiated-settlement approach Colombia's government has pursued, in various forms, since 2022.


What Happened

Speaking on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 26, from the Palacio de San Carlos in Bogotá — which had been serving as his government's Bogotá office, with Casa de Nariño's use still unsettled at the time — de la Espriella said his administration was "beginning to dismantle this model of false peace" and would replace it with what he called a policy of "security, legality and state authority." The announcement was reported by Colombian outlets including Semana and Infobae, both of which quoted the president directly: "Colombia needs a real peace, based on facts, justice and results — not a policy that ends up turning dialogue into a mechanism of impunity." Earlier that same day, he had also sworn in a new military and police high command.

The extradition order applies to five men whose transfers had already been approved by Colombia's courts in 2025 but suspended while they took part in Petro-era peace talks, according to El País (Cali) and corroborating Colombian reporting: Willington Henao Gutiérrez, alias "El Mocho Olmedo," a former second-in-command of a FARC-dissident front in Catatumbo; Carmen Evelio Castillo Carrillo, alias "Muñeca," a leader of the paramilitary successor group Los Pachenca (formally the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada); Geovany Andrés Rojas, alias "Araña," top commander of the Comandos de la Frontera dissident group near the Ecuadorian border; Gabriel Yepes Mejía, alias "HH," commander of Comuneros del Sur, a faction that split from the ELN; and Fredy Castillo Carrillo, alias "Pinocho," Muñeca's brother and also tied to Los Pachenca. The first three are in Colombian custody; Yepes and Castillo Carrillo remain fugitives whom the president has ordered captured before transfer can proceed.

The following morning, August 27, the president announced "Operation Amón," an airstrike on jungle camps in rural El Retorno, Guaviare, used by a faction of FARC dissidents commanded by Alexander Díaz Mendoza, alias "Calarcá." His initial post on X reported a preliminary toll of eight fighters killed and the seizure of eleven rifles, five machine guns and other equipment. Colombian outlets, including La Silla Vacía and El Tiempo, reported that the operation used five Kfir jets and six Super Tucano aircraft under the newly installed Joint Special Operations Command — the government's second bombing raid and the first under its new military leadership. By the same evening, Colombia's Attorney General's Office had raised the confirmed toll to 11, according to Infobae, among them Juan Antonio Agudelo Salazar, alias "Urías Perdomo," a close Calarcá associate who had briefly served as a Petro-government peace-process delegate in 2024 and carried a 400 million-peso bounty, and a second commander known as "Giovanni Bonito." A Colombian army helicopter was struck during the operation, without reported troop casualties.

Verified Fact, Official Position and What Remains Unclear

It is well established, from the government's own statements and multiple independent Colombian outlets, that de la Espriella has ended the Total Peace framework, ordered the five extraditions, and that a strike in Guaviare took place on August 27 with a toll that rose from an initial eight to a subsequently reported eleven. The government has not yet issued a single, final casualty figure; readers should treat 11 as the most recent reported count rather than a closed number. The characterization of Total Peace as having "failed" is the new government's political framing, echoed by critics of the policy, including the Bogotá think tank Fundación Ideas para la Paz — but it is a policy judgment, not an uncontested fact, and Petro-era officials have argued the deeper flaw was the absence of a legal framework for group demobilization rather than negotiation itself.

From War to Talks to War Again

Colombia's internal conflict traces to the 1960s and has killed roughly 450,000 people. The state signed a landmark accord with its largest guerrilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in 2016, but dissident factions that rejected the deal, alongside the ELN and drug-trafficking successor groups, kept fighting. Petro, a former guerrilla and Colombia's first leftist president, took office in 2022 promising to negotiate simultaneously with nearly every armed actor in the country under a legal framework branded "Total Peace."

The record was mixed. Some fronts produced partial agreements or the demobilization of small units, but talks with the ELN collapsed after a January 2025 massacre in the Catatumbo region, when Petro suspended — rather than formally terminated — that process, as Al Jazeera reported at the time. According to an August 2026 report from the Fundación Ideas para la Paz, total armed-group membership rose from 15,120 in December 2022 to 28,802 by July 2026 — a 90 percent increase — with the Clan del Golfo network growing fastest, at 152 percent, and the ELN growing 22 percent, from 5,851 to 7,123 members. The number of documented disputes between rival armed groups rose from seven in 2022 to fourteen by 2026, with 116 armed confrontations recorded in 2025 alone, the highest since 2016. The FIP researchers who compiled the report attribute the growth to several factors, including the recruitment of minors and territorial expansion, and describe Total Peace's failure as rooted in institutional and legal design flaws rather than any single cause — a distinction the government's framing tends to elide.

A Hard-Line Mandate, Delivered from Cali

De la Espriella, a lawyer and political outsider who previously represented defendants tied to right-wing paramilitary groups, won Colombia's presidency on June 21 by roughly one percentage point — about 251,000 votes, according to official results, 12,960,166 to 12,708,312 — over left-wing senator Iván Cepeda, Petro's Historic Pact successor. He was endorsed during the campaign by U.S. President Donald Trump and campaigned explicitly against negotiation. Cepeda accepted defeat and, under Colombia's Statute of Opposition, took a Senate seat reserved for the runner-up presidential candidate, from which he has said he will lead formal opposition to the new government.

Breaking with over a century of tradition, de la Espriella was sworn in on August 7 not in Bogotá but in Cali, in the volatile southwest — a deliberate signal, multiple outlets reported, of his security priorities. In his inaugural address at Cali's Cantón Militar Pichincha, he announced plans for seven high-security "mega-prisons" modeled in part on El Salvador's Bukele-era prison system, and declared the era of negotiation with armed groups over. His government has since moved on several fronts: on August 18 the National Narcotics Council repealed the 2015 resolution that had suspended aerial glyphosate spraying of coca crops — though the repeal, formalized in Resolution 0006 of 2026, does not by itself authorize spraying to resume, which still requires environmental permitting and prior consultation with affected ethnic communities; and Colombia joined the U.S.-driven Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, with the government saying Medellín will host the national headquarters of what it calls the "Escudo de las Américas" (Shield of the Americas).

U.S. Coordination Deepens

On August 26, U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan arrived in Bogotá to meet Colombia's new defense minister, Jorge Eduardo Mora, and top military commanders. According to SOUTHCOM's own account of the visit and Colombian press coverage, Donovan's multi-day trip also took him to the Colombia–Ecuador border region, where he joined the Colombian and Ecuadorian defense ministers in San Lorenzo, Ecuador, to discuss intelligence-sharing and coordinated operations against trafficking networks that cross both countries. No signed joint agreement or new funding commitment was announced during the visit. The Guaviare strike against Calarcá's faction took place the same week as Donovan's visit, but neither SOUTHCOM's statements nor Colombian officials have described the operation as jointly planned with U.S. forces; the timing is a documented coincidence, not a confirmed operational link.

How Armed Groups Are Responding

The ELN has signaled it will not stand down. After an earlier Colombian military operation in the Catatumbo region on August 11 — the government's first bombing raid under de la Espriella — Luz Amanda Pallares, known by her alias Silvana Guerrero and commander of the ELN's Northeastern War Front, appeared in a video accusing the government of falsely claiming to strike insurgent positions while actually bombing populated areas, and calling the operation a grave breach of international humanitarian law. The ELN's top command separately said the government's approach differed little from its predecessor's. Whether or how the group will respond to the Total Peace announcement and the Guaviare strike specifically had not been publicly addressed as of this writing.

Gerson Arias, a conflict researcher at Fundación Ideas para la Paz — one of the co-authors of its August report on armed-group growth — told the Bogotá Post that the announcements "ultimately shut the door on any prospect of continuing any of the Total Peace processes," and predicted armed groups would intensify military activity in the near term, with humanitarian consequences concentrated in areas where security forces mass. The International Crisis Group, in an early-August briefing published as de la Espriella took office, cautioned that a purely military-led campaign risks fueling new cycles of bloodshed, and argued that negotiation with illicit groups has, in the past, helped unwind some of them even amid Total Peace's shortcomings.

Why It Matters

The shift is more than rhetorical. Ending the legal protections tied to negotiation removes an incentive several factions had for staying at the table, and the extraditions — of men whose transfers Colombian courts had already approved but the previous government suspended — signal that participation in any future peace process offers less durable protection from U.S. prosecution than it did under Petro. Combined with the resumption of aerial strikes, the return of glyphosate spraying as a policy option, and deepened coordination with U.S. Southern Command, the policy represents a return to the security-first posture that characterized Colombian governments before 2022, though it remains too early to call it a full reversal given how much of the earlier framework — courts, environmental permitting requirements, and Congress — still constrains how quickly it can be implemented.

Risks and Scenarios

Analysts caution against confident predictions, but several scenarios are under active discussion. Most plausibly, in the near term, armed groups — particularly the ELN and Calarcá's dissident faction, both recently targeted by military operations — intensify attacks on security forces and infrastructure in contested departments, while weaker factions fragment further or seek local, informal accommodations with state forces, a pattern that had already begun late in Petro's term. An alternative path, consistent with Crisis Group's analysis, would combine sustained military pressure with quieter, decentralized local arrangements that reduce violence in specific territories without a formal national process. The higher-impact risk, cited by both FIP and Crisis Group, is broader escalation — sustained ELN offensives, retaliatory attacks tied to the extraditions or the Guaviare strike, and a documented rise in civilian displacement, confinement and recruitment of minors, patterns the FIP report and the Human Rights Watch World Report on Colombia have both tracked through the Total Peace years and describe as likely to worsen if military operations intensify without parallel civilian-protection measures. None of these is a confirmed outcome; they are informed scenarios, not forecasts.

What Authorities Should Consider

Drawing on the assessments of FIP and Crisis Group rather than announced government policy, analysts have pointed to several priorities as the shift unfolds: independent verification of strike tolls and civilian impact in conflict zones, given how quickly the Guaviare figure moved from 8 to 11; sustained humanitarian and displacement-response capacity in departments where operations concentrate; preserving individual or small-unit demobilization channels even as formal group-level talks end, since such channels produced some of Total Peace's few clear results; and continued transparency from Colombian and U.S. authorities about the scope of their intelligence-sharing, so that operations do not outpace verified targeting information.

Conclusion

Four years after Petro pledged to end Colombia's conflict through simultaneous negotiation with nearly every armed actor in the country, his successor is testing the opposite wager: that renewed military pressure, backed by Washington and unencumbered by negotiating protections, can succeed where talks did not. The extraditions and the Guaviare strike are the policy's opening moves. Two immediate questions will shape how it is judged: whether the Guaviare casualty count is finalized without further revision, and whether the ELN and the fractured FARC dissident factions respond with the escalation analysts expect or with the kind of local accommodations that produced Total Peace's few successes.

Sources

Semana — "Presidente De La Espriella inició el desmonte oficial de la paz total de Petro," Aug. 26, 2026: https://www.semana.com/politica/articulo/presidente-de-la-espriella-inicio-el-desmonte-oficial-de-la-paz-total-de-petro-esta-sera-la-nueva-politica-de-su-gobierno/202647/

Infobae — "De la Espriella anunció el desmonte de la Paz Total de Petro...," Aug. 27, 2026: https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/08/27/de-la-espriella-anuncio-el-desmonte-de-la-paz-total-de-petro-y-firmo-extradiciones-de-negociadores-de-las-disidencias-de-las-farc-los-pachenca-y-el-eln/

El País (Cali) — "Presidente De la Espriella firmó extradición de cinco integrantes...," Aug. 26, 2026: https://www.elpais.com.co/colombia/presidente-de-la-espriella-firmo-extradicion-de-cinco-integrantes-de-grupos-ilegales-que-hicieron-parte-de-los-dialogos-con-el-gobierno-petro-2653.html

La Silla Vacía — "Ocho disidentes de Calarcá muertos en bombardeo en Guaviare," Aug. 27, 2026: https://www.lasillavacia.com/en-vivo/ocho-disidentes-de-calarca-muertos-en-bombardeo-en-guaviare/

Infobae — "Sube a 11 los guerrilleros muertos en bombardeo en Guaviare...," Aug. 27, 2026: https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/08/27/sube-a-11-los-guerrilleros-muertos-en-bombardeo-en-guaviare-entre-ellos-urias-perdomo-gestor-de-paz-del-gobierno-petro-y-cercano-a-calarca/

U.S. Southern Command — "Gen. Donovan Visits Colombia," Aug. 28, 2026: https://www.southcom.mil/News/PressReleases/Article/4585871/gen-donovan-visits-colombia/

Fundación Ideas para la Paz — "El costo de negociar mal: 29 mil integrantes de grupos armados entre disputas y gobernanzas criminales," Aug. 6, 2026: https://ideaspaz.org/publicaciones/investigaciones-analisis/2026-08/el-costo-de-negociar-mal-29-mil-integrantes-de-grupos-armados-entre-disputas-y-gobernanzas-criminales

International Crisis Group — Briefing 56, "From 'Total Peace' to Iron Fist: Colombia's Risky Turn to Hard Security," Aug. 7, 2026: https://www.crisisgroup.org/brf/latin-america-caribbean/colombia-united-states/b56-total-peace-iron-fist-colombias-risky-turn-hard-security

Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026, Colombia chapter: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/colombia

Al Jazeera — "Colombia's Petro suspends talks with ELN rebels," Jan. 17, 2025: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/17/colombias-petro-suspends-talks-with-eln-rebels

Infobae — "Silvana Guerrero, comandante del Frente de Guerra Nororiental del ELN, se pronunció tras el primer bombardeo...," Aug. 12, 2026: https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/08/12/silvana-guerrero-comandante-del-frente-de-guerra-nororiental-del-eln-se-pronuncio-tras-el-primer-bombardeo-del-gobierno-de-abelardo-de-la-espriella-el-plan-es-el-mismo/

NBC News / AP — "Colombia's new president takes office in ceremony in Cali...," Aug. 7, 2026: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/colombias-new-president-takes-office-ceremony-cali-highlighting-hard-l-rcna591439

Semana — "Presidente Abelardo de la Espriella anuncia megacárceles de máxima seguridad en Colombia," Aug. 7, 2026: https://www.semana.com/politica/articulo/presidente-abelardo-de-la-espriella-anuncia-megacarceles-de-maxima-seguridad-en-colombia-este-gobierno-los-protegera/202619/

El País (Cali) — "Gobierno deroga resolución que suspendía la aspersión aérea con glifosato," Aug. 28, 2026: https://www.elpais.com.co/politica/gobierno-deroga-suspension-del-glifosato-para-aspersion-aerea-de-cultivos-ilicitos-2851.html

Infobae — "El jefe del Comando Sur de Estados Unidos llegó a Colombia para reforzar la cooperación militar con la nueva cúpula de De la Espriella," Aug. 27, 2026: https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/08/27/el-jefe-del-comando-sur-de-estados-unidos-llego-a-colombia-para-reforzar-la-cooperacion-militar-con-la-nueva-cupula-de-de-la-espriella/

Infobae — "El CNE avaló que Iván Cepeda asuma la curul de oposición en el Senado," July 7, 2026: https://www.infobae.com/colombia/2026/07/07/el-cne-avalo-que-ivan-cepeda-asuma-la-curul-de-oposicion-en-el-senado-cual-es-su-importancia/

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