Weary of Insecurity, Colombia’s Voters Face a Choice Between ‘Total Peace’ and Total War

Colombia has more internally displaced people than Ukraine. Seven million of them. And the president who promised to end the conflict that created them is sitting at 28% approval with less than a year before voters go to the polls.

What is actually at stake in the May 31, 2026 presidential election is not just the fate of one man’s legacy. It is whether a country that has been at war with itself for six decades can find a path that neither militarization nor negotiation has managed to deliver. Gustavo Petro‘s Paz Total — Total Peace — was the most ambitious attempt at comprehensive conflict resolution in Latin American history. It is now, by almost any honest measure, in ruins. The question Colombian voters face is not whether Total Peace worked. It didn’t. The question is what comes next, and whether “what comes next” is anything more than a rebranded version of what came before.

How Six Decades of Colombian Conflict Made Petro’s Paz Total Both Inevitable and Impossible

To understand why Paz Total collapsed, you have to understand what it was trying to fix — and how much weight that history carries.

The 2016 peace accord brokered by President Juan Manuel Santos — who won the Nobel Peace Prize for it — was historic. It formally ended the FARC’s 52-year insurgency, the longest active guerrilla conflict in the Western Hemisphere. But implementation was always the gap between the document and reality. Rural land reform stalled. Coca eradication targets weren’t met. Former FARC combatants who laid down weapons found themselves without promised economic alternatives and, in dozens of documented cases, were assassinated. The accord created a vacuum, and vacuums in Colombia do not stay empty.

Petro — a former member of the M-19 urban guerrilla movement, a two-term congressman, a Bogotá mayor, and, since August 7, 2022, Colombia’s first-ever left-wing president — understood this history viscerally. His Paz Total doctrine was designed to be different: simultaneous dialogue with all armed actors, not just the groups the state found convenient to negotiate with.

The comparison is damning in its consistency. Every model has failed to deliver sustained peace. What has changed, going into 2026, is that Colombian voters are no longer willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to any of them.

The ELN Broke Its Ceasefire, the EMC Fractured, and Rural Colombia Is Bleeding Again

Petro’s Paz Total didn’t fail quietly. It failed loudly, in the departments that needed it most.

In January 2024, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) — the last surviving original guerrilla army, founded in 1964, with an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 combatants — formally broke its ceasefire with the government. The stated reason was government non-compliance on previously agreed terms. The operational reality was that ELN commanders in Arauca, Cauca, and Chocó had never fully honored the ceasefire anyway, using the pause to consolidate territorial control and tax coca trafficking routes.

Simultaneously, the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) — the largest faction of FARC dissidents, led by the alias “Iván Mordisco” — fractured internally and escalated violence across Nariño and Cauca, producing mass displacements of indigenous communities that made international headlines for their brutality. The Clan del Golfo (also known as AGC), the country’s most powerful drug trafficking organization, continued preliminary “acercamientos” with the government while expanding its criminal territory in parallel.

Here is what that looks like in concrete terms as of 2025:

• 500+ massacre and mass displacement events recorded in 2024 alone
• 7 million internally displaced persons — the third-largest IDP population on earth, behind only Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo
• 33 social leaders and human rights defenders killed in 2024 according to UN tracking; NGOs put the real number potentially three times higher
• 4% rise in Colombia’s national homicide rate in 2023 (UNODC data), reversing years of slow decline
• 5 active armed groups currently operating across Colombian territory with no comprehensive ceasefire in place

For rural communities in the Pacific corridor and Amazon basin, this is not statistics. It is the calculus of whether to send children to school, whether to plant crops, whether to stay. And those communities vote. The information disorder that shapes global politics is nowhere more acute than in conflict zones where armed groups control local narratives — and Colombia’s interior departments are living that reality in real time.

Petro, Uribe, Vargas Lleras, and the Ghost of Iván Duque: The Figures Shaping the 2026 Race

Gustavo Petro

Petro cannot run for re-election under Colombian constitutional law — a fact that simultaneously frees and diminishes him. At 64, with approval ratings hovering between 28% and 32% by late 2024, he is a lame duck who still controls the narrative terms of the race. His Pacto Histórico coalition will field a candidate, and whoever that is will be forced to answer for Paz Total’s failures while also inheriting whatever structural reforms — healthcare, land redistribution, pension changes — Petro managed to push through a hostile Congress. That is not an enviable position. Petro himself remains a genuine political force on the Colombian left, but the gap between his 2022 electoral coalition and his current approval suggests massive defection among moderate voters.

Álvaro Uribe Vélez

Álvaro Uribe Vélez is 72 years old, constitutionally barred from running, and more relevant to this election than almost anyone actually on the ballot. His “Democratic Security” doctrine — which ran from 2002 to 2010 across his two presidential terms — used massive military expansion, U.S. counter-narcotics funding under Plan Colombia, and controversial paramilitary demobilization to reduce violence metrics dramatically. Homicide rates fell. FARC territorial control shrank. The cost was profound: thousands of documented extrajudicial killings — the “false positives” scandal, in which soldiers murdered civilians and dressed them in guerrilla clothing to inflate body counts — and a paramilitary demobilization that recycled into today’s Clan del Golfo. Uribe’s Centro Democrático party is already calling Paz Total a “gift to terrorists.” His shadow will define the security debate on the right.

Germán Vargas Lleras and the Center-Right Field

Germán Vargas Lleras, former vice president and perennial presidential candidate, represents the technocratic center-right — skeptical of Paz Total’s breadth, but not a Uribista hardliner. He and figures like former health minister Alejandro Gaviria are positioning for a lane that says: honor the 2016 FARC accord’s implemented elements, abandon negotiations with the ELN and EMC as bad-faith actors, and restore military pressure selectively. It sounds sensible. It is also, essentially, what Iván Duque tried between 2018 and 2022 — and the result was an ELN that grew, a FARC dissident movement that metastasized, and a 2022 electorate so exhausted it elected Petro.

Vice President Francia Márquez

Francia Márquez — Afro-Colombian environmental activist, Goldman Environmental Prize laureate, and vice president — is a historic figure who has found herself politically sidelined in Petro’s government. Her influence on Paz Total policy has been limited. Her potential role in the 2026 race, whether as a candidate or coalition anchor for the left, remains genuinely uncertain. She represents constituencies — Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in the Pacific — who are among the most brutalized by the current violence and the most skeptical of military solutions.

Why Both the Left’s Idealism and the Right’s Toughness Have Already Failed Colombia

Let’s be direct about something the Colombian political conversation is reluctant to say plainly: there is no side here with a clean record.

The right’s “Democratic Security” framework killed civilians by the thousands. The paramilitaries Uribe demobilized reconstituted as the Clan del Golfo, which today controls more territory than the FARC did in the early 2000s. The argument that military pressure alone can defeat armed groups in a country with Colombia’s terrain, poverty levels, and coca economy has been tested for sixty years. The evidence is in.

But the left’s answer — that simultaneous negotiations with all armed actors is feasible, that groups like the ELN will negotiate in good faith if the structural conditions are addressed — has also been tested. And what the ELN did in January 2024 was not a negotiating tactic. It was a demonstration of strategic contempt for the process. The EMC’s expansion in Nariño and Cauca under the nominal cover of ceasefire talks was not an accident. These groups used Paz Total to buy time and territory. Centrist politicians who claim a hybrid approach is available should explain why the 2016 accord’s partial implementation produced the EMC in the first place.

Consider what Colombian voters actually know going into this election:

1. Military escalation (2002–2010) reduced violence metrics but created structural impunity and a paramilitary system that simply rebranded
2. The 2016 FARC accord was the most sophisticated peace process in the hemisphere — and its failed implementation seeded today’s dissident groups
3. Paz Total (2022–2025) attempted comprehensive dialogue and delivered the ELN’s return to full combat operations and the EMC’s territorial expansion
4. Insecurity is now the #1 voter concern in polling, ahead of unemployment and healthcare, for the first time in years

The honest assessment is that Colombia is not choosing between a good policy and a bad one. It is choosing between different versions of a problem that has defied solution for longer than most of its voters have been alive. As analysts working at the intersection of security and diplomacy have noted in other fragile-state contexts, the failure mode of peace processes is rarely ideological — it is institutional. Colombia’s state simply does not reach the territories where these groups operate. No negotiation or military campaign changes that without massive, sustained investment in rural governance.

Four Scenarios for What Colombia Looks Like After May 31, 2026

The 2026 election will function as a referendum on the entire post-2016 security framework. Here are the four realistic scenarios, in descending order of probability:

• Scenario 1 — Center-right victory, selective re-escalation: A Vargas Lleras or equivalent candidate wins, suspends ELN and EMC talks, restores U.S. counter-narcotics cooperation (badly damaged by the Trump administration’s 2025 deportation flight confrontation with Petro), and relaunches military operations in Cauca and Nariño. Violence spikes in the short term. Armed groups lose some territorial control but adapt. The 2016 FARC accord is nominally preserved but implementation funding collapses.

• Scenario 2 — Left/center-left continuation, revised Paz Total: Pacto Histórico fields a viable candidate who wins narrowly in a second round. Negotiation frameworks are restarted with revised terms. The ELN demands more than any elected government can concede publicly. Talks stall again within 18 months. Violence continues at current levels. International mediators from Cuba and Norway attempt to sustain the process.

• Scenario 3 — Hard-right surge, full Uribista restoration: A candidate explicitly aligned with Uribe’s Centro Democrático wins on a pure security platform. Full military mobilization, aerial coca eradication programs restarted, U.S. military cooperation restored at levels not seen since Plan Colombia’s peak. Ecuador and Venezuela-border operations escalate. Short-term violence reduction in urban areas; displacement intensifies in rural zones. The 2016 accord is effectively abandoned.

• Scenario 4 — Fragmented first round, unexpected centrist coalition: No candidate clears 30% in the first round. A coalition forms around a figure currently below the radar — possibly someone from the regional governorships or civil society — who runs on institutional strengthening rather than security posture. Least likely. Would require a degree of elite compromise Colombian politics has not demonstrated in a generation.

The regional dimensions compound everything. Ecuador has already experienced narco-group spillover from Colombia at a scale that destabilized its 2023 electoral process. Venezuela’s border provides the ELN with strategic depth no Colombian military campaign can easily reach. The Darién Gap migration corridor — through which over 500,000 people passed in 2023 — is now partly controlled by criminal networks with ties to Colombian armed groups. This is not a domestic election with international implications. It is an international security event dressed in electoral clothing. For broader context on how these dynamics fit into worldwide political news, the Colombian case is increasingly a template for what happens when peace processes outrun the institutional capacity to implement them.

The armed groups are watching the campaign. Carefully. The ELN and EMC have every incentive to calibrate their violence to influence the outcome — escalating to boost security hawk candidates if they calculate a hardliner will be easier to negotiate with from a position of military strength, or pulling back to give left-leaning candidates political cover. They have done this before. They will do it again.

Seven million displaced Colombians did not leave their homes because of a policy debate. They left because the state failed to protect them — under every government, with every strategy, across six decades. The 2026 election will not fix that. But it will determine which direction Colombia points itself in next, and how much more of that failure ordinary Colombians are expected to absorb before someone in Bogotá actually reckons with why the state never reaches the places where the fighting happens.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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