Did you hear about the shooting of presidential candidate Miguel Uribe-Turbay? He was shot days ago campaigning and the country is falling apart. I've heard unconfirmed reports that he died, but let's hope for better news.

What's happening down in Colombia is that President Gustavo Petro has driven the nation to this level of insanity. This is from Joseph Addington:

While Colombia had managed to tame the worst excesses of organized crime within its borders -- steadily lowering the murder rate from over 80 per 100,000 in the 1990s to about 25 per 100,000 in 2024 -- in recent years progress on crime and internal security in the region has slowed and begun to reverse.

Colombia’s current president, Gustavo Petro, came to power on the platform of “Total Peace,” his name for a government program of open negotiation with all of Colombia’s revolutionary groups. Petro himself is a former guerrillero, having fought for the M-19 revolutionary movement in his youth until it signed a demilitarization agreement with the government, and is a strong proponent of convincing revolutionaries and guerrilleros to lay down their arms and rejoin civil society. 

This is not necessarily an absurd proposal; Colombia did secure some relief from its internal conflicts after president Juan Manuel Santos signed a peace agreement with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). But that relief has proven limited indeed -- many militants simply refused to demobilize, shattering the old organization into a multitude of independent fragments fighting over the territory and drug markets.

Humiliatingly for Petro, few guerrilleros in the country apparently share his enthusiasm for peace. His open negotiating table has been a complete failure; not even one militant group has signed a demilitarization agreement with the government. Instead, they have begun to ramp up their violent activities: In January, the largest guerilla movement in the country, the National Liberation Army (ELN) broke the ceasefire it had negotiated with the government and began a war with other cartels and revolutionary groups over lucrative coca-producing land in the Colombian wilderness.

Few of the guerrillas share a desire for peace? I guess that they didn't get the memo. President Petro was either naive or foolish to believe that criminals would change. They never do, even if the president is one of them or used to be one of them.

The chief culprit is narcoterrorism, something that the country had to deal with years ago. The situation is even worse in neighboring Ecuador, a smaller country with fewer resources, but at least they have a President who understands the threat.

The ball is now on President Petro's court, but few of my Colombian friends are confident that he wants to do anything about it. It's sad to say but Colombia may be headed for another round of violence and mass shootings. Sad but that's what most of my Colombian friends are saying.

Latin American may turn out to be a bigger headache for the Trump administration than any of us contemplated during the campaign.

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Image: National Police of Colombia