Colombians returned to the polls this spring, facing a choice the candidates framed as stark: peace or war against organized crime. But Colombia’s history and the nearly even vote split between the presidential candidates in the June 21 run-off election suggest a false dichotomy. Research on Colombia indicates that neither force nor negotiation is sufficient on its own; what matters is whether the government can apply both effectively with the armed groups that threaten Colombia’s security. The simultaneous challenge is preventing governance vacuums and shifts in the criminal balance of power, while strengthening rule-of-law institutions and creating credible pathways out of violence.
In Colombia, voters expressed alarm at recent, rising threats. Coca cultivation is at record highs; armed groups now number roughly 27,000 members; and kidnapping, extortion, and displacement have all risen markedly. Yet Colombia’s homicide rate remains roughly 60-70% below its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, though public concern about the recent deterioration in security is now rising. As my book, Violent Victors, shows, when citizens feel insecure, they’re more willing to forgo civil liberties and vote on security for strongmen offering iron-fist policies, even those with ties to coercive groups.
Abelardo de la Espriella defeated progressive lawmaker Iván Cepeda by just 1 percentage point. De la Espriella’s populist right-wing platform promised to restore order. To make inroads on this campaign promise, research suggests that he will need both war and peace. Here are three big takeaways:
1. Why did the prior regime fall short?
Political science research suggests de la Espriella is correct about the need to shift the balance of power between the armed forces/police and the criminal groups back in the government’s favor. Every successful campaign against non-state armed groups in Colombia – from paramilitary to guerrilla groups, and criminal gangs – has happened when these groups saw themselves likely to decline in the future. Under Colombia’s incumbent president, Gustavo Petro, government security forces witnessed an erosion of experienced leadership through officer purges. Declining intelligence effectiveness was also a challenge, attributable, in part, to strained relations with the United States. As one senior military officer recently noted, “We are only just clawing back momentum.”
Petro’s Total Peace plan also paused military operations against the armed groups, which gave them breathing room to grow. Research links durable security improvements with rebuilding government capacity – including military and police capabilities, intelligence collection, prosecutorial institutions, and coordination with international partners. Studies of Colombia’s earlier security campaigns find that these investments are most effective when paired with professionalization of security forces, robust civilian oversight, and strong rule-of-law policies. This approach helps avoid the pitfalls of the past, including perverse incentives for body counts and delegating power to illicit groups. In Colombia, these false positive and the parapolítica scandals ultimately undermined government legitimacy as well as long-term security gains, according to academic studies.
2. Power vacuums and power shifts have always been problematic
No major armed group in Colombia’s modern conflict has actually been crushed; they have been weakened and negotiated their exit. Preventing resurgent violent activity, the research suggests, requires filling any resulting power vacuums, via a uniform application of both force and negotiation. Every past peace process has failed, in part, because shifting the balance of power between armed groups created incentives for opportunistic grabs and turf wars.
As my research for Organized Violence After Civil War also reveals, non-state armed groups in Colombia were able to exploit resulting gaps in governance. When the paramilitaries demobilized between 2003 and 2006, for example, vacuums and power shifts in some regions incentivized remilitarization. I spent months researching one of these groups in the Darién Gap on the Panamanian border. The group became the Clan de Golfo, currently Colombia’s most menacing drug-trafficking group.
When Colombia’s long-standing guerrilla group, the FARC, agreed to demobilize and withdraw from its strongholds nearly a decade ago, the government – including the police, courts, social services, and economic alternatives to coca and extortion – was too slow to fill the space it left. The ELN, the Gaitanista Army of Colombia, and an assortment of FARC dissident factions moved in instead – while drug gangs in Ecuador filled the regulatory void in the cocaine trade, spreading violence across Colombia’s southern border.
3. Decapitation policies alone aren’t successful
Research suggests that dismantling criminal organizations requires policy tailored to each level of the hierarchy – kingpins, mid-ranking commanders, and rank-and-file fighters respond to different incentives, and pose different risks. De la Espriella has promised to capture ten major crime leaders within his first 90 days in office. This kind of decapitation strategy is well known to backfire, triggering succession fights, opportunistic incursions by rivals, and turf wars. That is not an argument against capturing kingpins – often the worst human rights abusers and organizational leaders – but it does suggest pairing decapitation with a plan to contain the resulting chaos and dismantle the organization as a whole rather than just strike at the top.
Redirecting mid-ranking commanders, however, calls for a different approach. These are the leaders with the operational know-how and recruitment networks that keep criminal structures running. Putting these leaders in prison often lets them rebuild their networks from inside, and later emerge stronger than before. Colombia has one of the most developed demobilization and reintegration programs in the world, with a mixed but meaningful track record for rank-and-file fighters. Abandoning that tool in favor of de la Espriella’s planned Bukele-like mega-prisons would run against the findings of research.
Abelardo de la Espriella inherits a country that voted, very narrowly, to resume the war against drug kingpins and armed groups. Whether he governs that way is still an open question. Whether he ultimately succeeds will depend not only on the fight he brings to the armed groups, but on whether security policy avoids shifting power balances between armed groups. Other areas to watch closely include whether the government prioritizes training, intelligence, and efforts to bolster the judicial sector; whether it incentivizes exit from crime; and whether the government proves capable of holding the ground it takes back from armed groups.
Colombia’s long history of battling armed groups offers a broader lesson for democracies confronting organized crime. Political campaigns often reduce the choice to repression or negotiation, but durable security rarely comes from either alone. Instead, lasting peace and security often comes via a third route: security within the confines of democratic rule of law.
Sarah Z. Daly is associate professor of political science at Columbia University, and faculty fellow of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies (SIWPS) and Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS). She is the author of Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Organized Violence After Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
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