Is Colombia reverting to chaos?

Two terror attacks which hit Colombia on Thursday revealed a scary new level of sophistication among the country’s ever present narco-terrorists – and threatened to return the country to the violence and chaos that many had hoped it had finally escaped.

The double terror strikes killed 18 people and involved a car bomb in Colombia’s third most populous city of Cali in which at least six people died, and an earlier drone downing of a police helicopter near the city of Medlllin – long notorious as Colombia’s drugs capital – in which 12 people died.

The use of a drone is thought to be the first time that the 21st century weapon has been used by terrorists in Colombia, and indicates that a worrying new level of sophistication has been reached by the ruthless so called narco-terrorists.

Colombia has been plagued for decades by violence perpetrated by drugs gangs controlled by millionaire barons who have made their fortunes producing and selling cocaine. At the same time until 2016 the country’s democratically elected governments were fighting a jungle war against the left-wing guerilla army the FARC and far right paramilitary groups.

Like many Latin American states Colombia has a long history of alternating between dictatorship and democracy, but the explosion in its production of illicit narcotics since the 1970s to feed the ballooning markets in the US and Europe has fuelled and fed these political conflicts.

Colombia was prostrated for ten years of civil conflict between 1948 and 1958 between the traditional ruling Liberal and Conservative parties. The fighting, known simply as “ La Violencia” killed an estimated 200, 000 people – or 1 in 50 Colombians.

Hardly had ‘La Violencia’ ended with the rival parties forming a pact of national unity when the influence of Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution in Cuba spawned guerilla rebellions launched by groups like FARC. At the same time the worldwide escalation in the demand for drugs saw the rise of drugs barons like Pablo Escobar, who accumulated so much wealth and bribed officials with their ill gotten gains that their criminal power came close to ousting elected governments. The Medillin Drugs cartel run by Escobar practically formed a criminal parallel regime to the legal government in the capital Bogota.

Escobar and his bodyguards died in a gun battle with police in 1993, but other drugs lords picked up his torch and it became increasingly hard to differentiate between purely criminal violence and the political terror caused by groups like FARC. In 2016, after years of tortuous negotiations, the government reached a truce with FARC and the following year the guerillas laid down their arms and announced that they were transforming themselves into a legitimate political party.

In 2022, the current President Gustavo Petro was elected as the first left-wing President in Colombia’s recent history and he has continued to pursue a peaceful path both with the far leftist groups who still use violence and the narco-terror criminal cartels.

The latest two acts of terror are a hammer blow to the ever fragile peace process, and many fear that so long as the rest of the western world does drugs in industrial quantities the violence will continue.