Abelardo’s body-count politics: Colombia is being marched back toward a dirty war
Colombia’s new president did not merely promise to be tough on crime. Abelardo de la Espriella campaigned on a measurable body-count logic, proposing that authorities in every department capture or kill ten leaders of armed groups. The difference between “capture” and “kill” is legally enormous. His slogan deliberately folded them into a single target.
In an interview with El Tiempo before the election, the then-candidate said: “En cada departamento dar con la captura o la baja de diez cabecillas.” Colombia has 32 departments: applied literally, that means 320 proposed captures-or-deaths nationwide. It does NOT mean he ordered 320 killings or that 320 have died. It means he made a numerical quota for forcibly removing human beings into a centerpiece of presidential security messaging.
The bodies behind the spectacle
On August 30, an operation in Miraflores, Guaviare, subsequently identified as Operation Azarías, left 23 suspected members of a FARC dissident group dead and six people captured, according to the government’s reported tally. Among the 23 dead were reportedly two minors. The president appeared in a video walking past bodies laid out under sheets. It was government triumphalism staged against a line of corpses.
Those 23 deaths are a documented official claim from a specific military operation, not an independently verified cumulative count of everyone killed under his government. In a separate La Guajira operation involving the figure known as Bendito Menor, four more deaths were reported. Journalistic reporting has questioned whether the official description of that incident as a firefight is reliable; those are unresolved allegations requiring independent forensic investigation. Counting these two announced actions yields 27 reported dead, not a definitive death toll for his entire counterinsurgency campaign.
Meanwhile, the wider armed conflict has not paused for the cameras. Indepaz recorded 97 massacres with 376 victims between January 1 and October 9, 2026—its highest annual massacre count in a decade. That number covers the year before AND after De la Espriella took office on August 7, and killings by varied perpetrators. It cannot honestly be labeled “376 killed by Abelardo.” The government also cited more than 132,000 killings since the 2016 peace accord, a decade-wide national figure that plainly cannot be attributed to a president in office for two months.
Colombia has seen this accounting system before
Why does a promised capture-or-kill quota matter? Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace says its provisional evidence identifies 6,402 people allegedly murdered between 2002 and 2008 and falsely presented as enemy combatants killed in action. Many were civilians. The scandal became known as the “false positives.” The tribunal has documented how pressures to display operational results could corrupt military conduct and incentives.
That history does not prove the new administration is carrying out the same crime. It does establish a concrete reason to reject body counts as a measure of justice. A state seeking security should report weapons seized, communities made safe, prosecutions secured, victims protected and illegal revenue networks dismantled—not turn the dead into campaign advertisements.
The peace institutions themselves are under attack
At the same time, legislators aligned with the new right-wing president are advancing cuts to transitional-justice institutions. Reuters reported an approximately 17% proposed reduction for the JEP’s 2027 budget and a 22% reduction for the unit charged with searching for missing people. The proposal remains part of a congressional budget fight; it is not yet a completed abolition of either institution. The practical stakes are thousands of exhumations, investigations and victims’ claims.
On October 13, the JEP brought new war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity charges against ten former FARC commanders over crimes against Indigenous communities. That development is precisely why a functioning independent justice system matters. Armed organizations have committed atrocities; accountability for guerrilla crimes and accountability for state crimes are not competing causes.
Whose security doctrine?
De la Espriella’s geopolitical allegiances are unusually explicit. In the same campaign interview, he advocated a new “Plan Patriota” partnership with the United States and the State of Israel for weapons, artificial intelligence, drones and military intelligence. Donald Trump endorsed his candidacy. He won a legitimate but fiercely contested runoff by about 252,000 votes, later confirmed in the official count. A close victory and electoral challenges are evidence of polarization, not proof the vote was stolen.
The new government has also moved close to Trump’s regional security agenda, while proposing fiscal cuts that may restrict Colombia’s peace and search institutions. The political direction is clear: greater power and resources for coercive institutions; less political space for negotiated settlement and, if the proposed cuts pass, less money for independently establishing what those institutions have done.
Who benefits? U.S.-aligned security suppliers and political elites promising an authoritarian shortcut to public safety have obvious opportunities. That is an inference from announced alliances and policy priorities—not proof of a secret foreign command structure. The people who bear the danger are civilians in conflict regions, prisoners, young people vulnerable to recruitment, and families already looking for the disappeared.
The question is not whether Colombia has a genuine armed-group crisis. It does. The question is whether a president who counts enemy “bajas,” poses with the dead and weakens institutions for finding the truth is solving that crisis—or rebuilding the incentives that made Colombia’s past dirty war so deadly.
Documents and reporting
Photo credits: lead image Isaac Castillo / Presidency of Ecuador (Public Domain Mark); inline October 2016 march / MAFAPO archive, Wikimedia Commons. Cropping, if any, is for presentation only.
Comments