Colombia in the 21st century

In 2000 the U.S. Congress approved a controversial aid program that supplied Colombia with military assistance to help control the cocaine trade. The FARC continued to expand coca production, however, and economic uncertainties and the spectre of political violence remained major issues at the end of Pastrana’s term. Álvaro Uribe Vélez, an independent, was elected president in 2002 on promises to end the long-standing and violent conflict with guerrilla groups and restore security to the country. In December 2003 a peace agreement was negotiated between the government and the AUC, and by 2004 AUC members had disarmed. Some members of the FARC and the ELN gave up their weapons as well in exchange for a “lighter punishment.” Uribe was reelected in 2006.

Overall, Uribe’s intensive security operations against the FARC were productive, as the number of crimes, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks in Colombia significantly decreased during his tenure. Political tensions in the region escalated in 2008 when the Colombian military crossed the border into Ecuador to raid a FARC encampment. Uribe was constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term, but the June 2010 presidential election to replace him was won by Juan Manuel Santos—the minister of defense from 2006 to 2009, who was one of the principal founders of the Social Party of National Unity (Partido Social de Unidad Nacional), which was created by supporters of Uribe, most of whom, like Uribe, had left the Liberal Party. In July 2010 relations with Colombia were severed by Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez in response to Colombian allegations that Venezuela was harbouring FARC rebels. However, bilateral relations were restarted after a conciliatory meeting between Santos and Chávez in August. In September the FARC suffered a major blow when one of its top leaders, best known by his nom de guerre, Mono Jojoy (but also known as Jorge Briceño or Luis Suárez), was killed in a military air strike.

In February 2011 the FARC announced that it would cease kidnapping civilians for ransom to finance its activities. In April it released the last 10 policemen or soldiers it had been holding (some of them for as long as 14 years). Peace talks between the government and the FARC began in Norway in August and were continued in Havana in October. At the start of those talks, the FARC had initiated a unilateral cease-fire; however, there were accusations that the cease-fire was violated by the FARC several times. A formal announcement of the end of the cease-fire came in January 2013, followed in a matter of days by the kidnapping of a pair of policemen. Nevertheless, the peace talks continued, though without a bilateral cease-fire they came under heavy criticism from conservative sectors of Colombian society—including former president Uribe. The talks were a pivotal issue in the 2014 presidential campaign, which resulted in Santos’s victory in a June runoff election. He captured about 51 percent of the vote to defeat rightist Oscar Ivan Zuluaga (the winner of the first round of voting), who advocated forcing the FARC’s hand for a time and had proposed suspending the talks if the FARC did not cease fighting and end its criminal activity. Talks were suspended in mid-November 2014 when a high-ranking army officer was kidnapped (along with two other people) by the guerrilla group, but they resumed immediately when the FARC released him some two weeks later. On December 20 the FARC initiated another unilateral cease-fire, which was still holding in mid-January 2015 when Santos directed negotiators in Havana to open discussions regarding a bilateral cease-fire.

Although Santos refrained from declaring a bilateral cease-fire in response to the FARC’s cease-fire, he did order a cessation of bombing of rebel camps. However, he resumed bombing after FARC guerrillas attacked an army patrol in the department of Cauca in mid-April, killing 11 troops. A combined air and ground operation by government forces on May 21 resulted in the deaths of 26 guerrillas, prompting FARC to rescind its cease-fire, though the organization said that it remained committed to negotiations.

By July both sides were once again extending olive branches, with the FARC declaring a monthlong cease-fire that was matched by the government scaling back military operations, including initiating another moratorium on bombing. The FARC countered in August with an open-ended extension of its cease-fire. September 23 brought the earthshaking announcement by Santos and FARC negotiators, meeting in Havana, that they had pledged to reach a final peace agreement within six months. Important details remained to worked out, but several long-standing points of contention had been resolved, most notably a mutually satisfactory formula for administering justice for war-related crimes.

In the same week, the government resolved what had been an escalating dispute with Venezuela. In August 2015 the Venezuelan government had closed the country’s border with Colombia and deported some 1,500 Colombians whom it had accused of involvement in smuggling subsidized Venezuelan goods into Colombia for sale. Tensions between the neighbouring countries had risen quickly, and both had withdrawn their ambassadors before a meeting between Santos and Venezuelan Pres. Nicolás Maduro resulted in steps toward normalizing relations.

In June 2016 in Havana, Santos and Rodrigo Londoño (“Timoleón Jiménez” or “Timochenko”), the FARC’s leader since November 2011, signed a permanent cease-fire agreement, laying the groundwork for the final peace treaty. The agreement called for FARC forces to demobilize under United Nations (UN) monitoring within 180 days of the final treaty’s signing. Although details remained to be ironed out in the final treaty, the country’s constitutional court ruled in July that the treaty could be put to the people for approval in a referendum. Meanwhile, a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional; ELN), continued its armed struggle against the government.

Less than a week after Santos had signed a historic final peace agreement with the FARC on September 26, 2016, the Colombian electorate shockingly rejected the agreement by the narrowest of margins (50.21 percent to 49.78 percent) in a plebiscite on October 2, 2016. “No” voters, led by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, generally cited what they considered to be the too-lenient terms for the FARC rebels as the reason for their opposition. The defeat of the referendum was a major blow to Santos, who had largely staked his presidency on brokering the peace agreement. Both the government and the FARC announced that they would continue to honour the cease-fire that was already in place as they prepared to turn to further negotiations.

In late November a renegotiated accord, which included many changes that had been demanded by opposition leaders, was ratified by the House of Representatives and the Senate (both of which were dominated by Santos’s ruling coalition). However, the opposition denounced the accord, which they had not been allowed to review and which failed to include some of their key proposals. Nonetheless, the process by which FARC guerrillas were to concentrate in some 20 transition zones and turn over their weapons to UN monitors was largely peacefully under way at the beginning of 2017.

On August 15, 2017, the Colombian government declared an official end to its conflict with the FARC as the last of the group’s accessible weapons (some 900 weapons remained in caches in remote areas) were turned over to UN representatives. In all, more than 8,100 guns and 1.3 million cartridges had been decommissioned. The weapons were to be melted down to be recast as three peace memorials to be located in Colombia and Havana and at the UN headquarters in New York City. The FARC moved forward with its transformation into a political party that was guaranteed 10 unelected seats in the Colombian legislature until 2026. In November FARC leader Londoño announced that he would run for president in 2018. In March 2018, however, he ended his candidacy, citing ill health.

For its part, the ELN had begun peace negotiations with the Colombian government in Ecuador in February 2017. In October the two sides undertook a temporary cease-fire.

In early November 2017 Colombia agreed to a deal with the UN that provided for payments to farmers to grow crops such as coffee or cacao rather than coca, the raw material of cocaine. Only days after the signing of the agreement, Colombian police seized some 12 tons of cocaine that had been buried at four banana plantations. The interdiction was the largest drug seizure in Colombian history.

In elections for the federal legislature in March 2018, no party was able to gain a clear majority in either chamber. The Democratic Center Party (DC), founded by Uribe, took the most seats in the 108-seat Senate with 19, followed by Radical Change with 16 seats, the Colombian Conservative Party with 15, and the Colombian Liberal Party and the Social Party of National Unity with 14 each. The Colombian Liberal Party finished first with 35 seats in the 172-seat House, ahead of DC, which won 32 seats, Radical Change with 30 seats, the Social Party of National Unity with 25 seats, and the Conservative Party with 21 seats. Although its share of the vote in both chambers was negligible, the FARC was guaranteed 5 seats in both bodies.

More than 19 million Colombians voted in the presidential election in May, the largest turnout in some two decades. Santos was constitutionally prohibited from running for another term. Former senator Iván Duque, who had been handpicked by Uribe to represent the CD, finished first in the crowded field with about 39 percent of the vote, short of the 50 percent needed to prevent a runoff. His commitment to restructuring the peace agreement with the FARC stood in marked contrast to the wholehearted support for the agreement of former Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro, who finished second in the polling with some 25 percent of the vote, just ahead of former Medellín mayor Sergio Fajardo, who tallied about 24 percent. With the leftist Petro, a onetime member of M-19, set to meet conservative Duque in the June runoff, Colombians were offered a choice of political polar opposites.

When voters returned to the polls on June 17, they handed a sweeping victory to Duque, who captured some 54 percent of the vote, compared with about 42 percent for Petro. The runoff predictably proved to be divisive, but the president-elect promised to heal divisions, saying, “I will not govern with hatred.” His pledge to revamp the peace agreement, however, left many Colombians anxious. Nonetheless, Petro accepted the election result, as did the FARC’s Londoño.

After Duque assumed the presidency, he was accused of half-heartedly carrying out the peace process and failing to protect the former FARC rebels (more than 200 of whom were killed) as well as political opponents (a number of whom also became murder victims). His critics also argued that Duque’s administration had failed to either facilitate the reintegration of the former rebels into Colombian society or to implement the necessary agricultural reform. Accusations of corruption also dogged Duque and his administration, including the allegation that his presidential campaign had accepted financial contributions from drug traffickers.

In November 2019 Colombians took to the streets en masse to demand action on an array of issues, ranging from demands for protection for political activists to health care and education reform. Although Duque appeared willing to take on these issues, his efforts to do so were forestalled by the outbreak of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic of 2020. Duque was praised for his science-based approach to combating the public health emergency, but it was the country’s mayors who took the lead in implementing lockdown and social-distancing measures aimed at slowing the spread of the virus. Cases of COVID-19, the often deadly disease caused by the virus, began climbing in Colombia in June 2020 and generally remained on the rise for the next year. By June 2021 nearly 3.8 million cases of COVID-19 had been recorded in the country, and more than 95,000 Colombians had died of causes related to the disease.

At the end of April 2021, in violation of pandemic lockdown orders, Colombians took to the streets en masse to protest a plan by Duque for tax reform that would have squeezed the middle and working classes. In the weeks that followed, the demonstrations grew to include demands for an overhaul of the health care system, an end to police violence, and the provision of a guaranteed minimum income. Demonstrators established roadblocks that impeded the movement of food and supplies, which caused shortages in some parts of the country. Moreover, violence erupted that resulted in the loss of dozens of lives.

Central to these demonstrations was widespread disenchantment with Colombia’s growing income-inequality gap, which had been exacerbated by economic consequences of the pandemic and which would play a pivotal role in the country’s presidential election in 2022. In the first round of voting in May, two nontraditional politicians emerged from a field of six presidential candidates after none of the six received the 50 percent of votes required to preclude a second round of voting. Gustavo Petro, the former mayor of Bogotá and a onetime member of the M-19 rebel group, finished atop the field in the first round, followed by Rodolfo Hernández, a populist conservative millionaire, who became Petro’s opponent in the June runoff election. Petro, who stood to become the first leftist to lead Colombia in the country’s history, advocated greater government involvement in a greener, more equitable economy that would shift its emphasis from oil exploration to tourism and knowledge-based industries. His critics claimed that he would lead Colombia down what they characterized as a disastrous road toward Cuban- or Venezuelan-style socialism. Although conventional wisdom held that the runoff would be an exceptionally tight contest, Petro won convincingly, capturing more than 50 percent of the vote, compared with just over 47 percent for Hernández. Petro’s running mate, Francia Márquez, was to be the first Black woman to serve as Colombia’s vice president.