xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoA stillness hung over the muddy waters of the Caguán River, on the fringes of the Colombian Amazon. In the town of Cartagena del Chairá, boats rested against the riverbank, and silence had swallowed the rumble of engines that would ordinarily sputter along the dirt roads. “People are scared. We are in a very difficult situation. We can’t move for food, supplies or anything. Many children can’t even go to school,” said resident David Rincon, who asked to use a pseudonym. Days earlier, on May 12, community members received an audio message banning any movement by road or river. The message had come from the Carolina Ramirez Front of the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), one of the many groups fighting in a long-simmering conflict that has gripped Colombia since the 1960s. The restrictions had effectively cut off parts of the department of Caqueta. Defying orders was not an option. “If you don’t comply, they threaten you — or worse,” Rincon told Al Jazeera. But an end to the decades-old conflict has proven elusive for the government of Colombia's outgoing president, Gustavo Petro. And that could weaken his left-wing coalition ahead of the country's presidential election on May 31. “There is no peace or calm for anyone,” Rincon said. “You don’t know what will happen next. You just don’t know what to do.” Petro, Colombia's first left-wing leader, was elected in 2022 on a promise of delivering "total peace" to the conflict-ravaged country. That phrase became the name of his flagship policy, aimed at negotiating solutions with armed rebels and criminal groups to end the fighting. But Petro has yet to achieve lasting peace. Since he took office, the number of active fighters in the conflict has more than doubled, rising from about 13,000 in 2022 to roughly 27,000 by the end of 2025, according to the Colombian think tank Fundación Ideas Para la Paz (FIP). Violent incidents have escalated too, with the number of disputes last year between armed groups reaching their highest level in a decade, an increase of 34 percent over 2024. Now, what was once one of Petro’s most ambitious policies has become one of his most contested. In Sunday's presidential race, only one leading presidential candidate has committed to continuing the "Total Peace" plan. The others have pledged to abandon it. Experts warn that the policy is widely seen as a political liability. "Total Peace is in the red," said Javier Florez, the director of conflict and security at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz, a think tank. "It owes results to the country but leaves it with armed groups and networks of organised violence that are stronger, with greater territorial expansion and technological sophistication." Petro's government has pointed to several challenges that have stood in the way of the "Total Peace" plan. Among them was the fracturing of Colombia's armed rebel groups over the past decade. In 2016, Colombia's government struck a peace deal with the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). But not all the FARC fighters agreed to surrender their weapons. Some splintered off and formed their own groups. “From one day to the next, there wasn’t one FARC any more, but three or four FARCs," said Yezid Arteta, a former FARC member who is now part of the government's negotiation teams. In the years since the 2016 peace deal, Colombia’s armed conflict began to look different. The fight was no longer centred on a small number of hierarchical organisations. Instead, it had become a patchwork of smaller groups competing over territory and illicit economies. “When President Petro came to office, what remained were the [smaller] groups — fragments of war, scattered pieces of conflict across the country,” Arteta explained. Experts say these fragmented groups are less driven by ideology and more motivated by building criminal economies. The fragmentation also made negotiations more difficult. For a ceasefire to last, it had to involve not only the government but also rival armed groups. Arteta called Petro's initial approach “somewhat romantic”. It assumed a left-wing government could more easily bring armed groups to the table — which it did — and drive social transformation. But the armed groups and criminal networks came to the negotiating table with their own demands. At first, some baulked at the prospect of ending kidnappings for ransom, a major source of income. Others resisted efforts to disrupt coca production — the raw material in cocaine — during periods of negotiations and ceasefire. One group, the Clan del Golfo, also pushed to be treated as a political actor rather than a criminal organisation in order to secure judicial leniency, including reduced sentences and protection against extradition. “It’s harder because groups set the bar much higher. Their expectations were higher,” Arteta told Al Jazeera. That said, the Petro government did manage to mint deals with several prominent armed groups. In 2023, for instance, it struck ceasefires with the Clan del Golfo and the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), a FARC offshoot. Within months, however, several agreements had already begun to break down amid attacks on security forces and renewed violence in key regions. Florez, the think tank director, notes that Petro approached these negotiations differently than some of his predecessors.
Original Source: Al Jazeera
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