Key Points
- Colombia’s left-wing president ordered his first-ever airstrike against the ELN guerrillas — hours after shaking hands with Donald Trump at the White House and agreeing to hunt down three cartel and rebel leaders within two months.
- The country’s most powerful drug trafficking organization, the Clan del Golfo, immediately froze its peace negotiations in protest, fracturing the government’s signature policy of negotiating with all armed groups at once.
- The battleground is Catatumbo, a jungle region producing over 100,000 acres of coca that feeds roughly two-thirds of the world’s cocaine — and where 100,000 civilians have been driven from their homes in barely a year.
Gustavo Petro was not supposed to be a wartime president. When he won Colombia’s presidency in 2022 — the country’s first left-wing leader, a former guerrilla fighter himself — he staked everything on a radical idea: negotiate peace with every armed group simultaneously. He called it “Total Peace.”
On February 4, 2026, at midnight, two fighter jets bombed a guerrilla camp in Catatumbo, a jungle corridor along the Venezuelan border where armed groups have fought over cocaine routes for decades.
Seven ELN rebels were killed. It was the first time Petro had ever struck the ELN — the 60-year-old guerrilla army he had spent years trying to bring to the table.
What changed? The day before, Petro sat across from Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The two men had spent a year exchanging insults — Trump called him a “sick man,” Petro accused him of human rights abuses.
But their two-hour meeting ended with handshakes, a modified MAGA hat, and a joint commitment to neutralize three named criminal leaders within sixty days, including the heads of the ELN, FARC dissidents, and the Clan del Golfo.
Peace strategy falters as violence surges
The Clan del Golfo — a nearly 10,000-strong cartel that earns an estimated 68 million dollars annually just from controlling migrant smuggling through the Darién Gap — responded within hours by suspending its own peace talks with Petro’s government, accusing him of betrayal.
This matters far beyond Colombia. Catatumbo alone holds 44,000 hectares of coca, the raw material for cocaine that reaches every continent.
Since January 2025, fighting between the ELN and rival FARC dissidents has killed at least 166 people and displaced over 100,000 — what the UN called the worst single mass displacement event in its Colombian records.
The right sees vindication: Petro’s peace policy, they argue, let armed groups double their ranks and deepen their grip. The left warns that bombs without schools, roads, and crop alternatives have never worked in Catatumbo — they just create more refugees.
Colombia votes for a new president in May. The peace architecture is fractured. And 300,000 people in Catatumbo are still waiting for someone to offer them something other than war.
