Failures in Colombia’s health system were highlighted this week after a young boy died from “completely preventable” complications from blood condition after going off treatment for two months.

Seven-year-old Kevin Acosta was rushed to hospital in Pitalito, Huila, on February 8 after falling off his bike and hitting his head, a situation complicated by his hemophilia.

According to his mother Katherine Pico, the boy required regular injections of clotting factors to prevent the genetic condition that can cause fatal bleeding if untreated.

But due to failings by his health insurer, Nueva EPS, Kevin had missed his regular injections for two months, and on the day of his accident he was denied emergency doses even while bleeding from his head in the hospital in Pitalito.

When the health insurer finally agreed to evacuate Kevin by air ambulance 24 hours later to Bogotá, where clotting factors were available, the blood loss was severe. Kevin died four day later in the Intensive Care Unit of the Hospital de la Misericordia in Bogotá.

Since then, Kevin’s death has caused huge indignation in Colombia both among medical experts who claim the death was preventable and critics of the current government’s political intervention in the health system which has left many users worse off.

Get off your bike

Adding to the furor, President Gustavo Petro waded into the debate blaming the mother for allowing Kevin to ride a bicycle.

“A hemophiliac child shouldn’t ride a bike; it’s a matter of prevention. We need to know if the doctor or the health system isn’t providing education, because mothers don’t learn about it, especially given the low educational levels in Colombia,” he said.

His own health minister, Guillermo Jaramillo, added: “Children with hemophilia should be restricted from activities that can generate violent trauma,” he said.

These comments were challenged by patient’s rights groups, who pointed out that cyclists with hemophilia have competed in the Tour de France, and medical experts who emphasized that in recent decades in Colombia prevention has been based on weekly or monthly injections of “clotting factors” which allowed hemophiliacs to lead normal lives.

Many medical experts concurred that children with regular prophylaxis to prevent excess bleeding could, and should, integrate in physical activities.  

“The child died from the accident, but the reason he died was because he didn’t have the medication,” Dr Sergio Robledo, president of the Colombian League of Hemophiliacs, told Blu Radio.  “Prevention in hemophilia means having the drugs, not locking the child up at home.”

“For more than 20 years in Colombia we have not had any [hemophilia] deaths specifically due to a lack of medicine,” Robledo continued.

Chaotic plan

Kevin’s case was symptomatic of problems in Colombia’s health system which had worsened under the Petro government, Denis Silva told the Bogotá Post this week.

Silva, spokesperson for Paciente Colombia, a coalition of 202 patients’ rights groups, said Kevin’s death was “100 per cent avoidable”.

“If Kevin had been given the prophylaxis or given the treatment when he went to the clinic to coagulate his blood, the situation would have been different”.

Kevin’s mother had been asking Nueva EPS for the life-saving medicines since December, he said, but they were never delivered because the EPS had “failed to pay the clinic” that administered the drug in Pitalito.

Blame for these errors should bounce back to the Petro government, said Silva. State entities had forcibly intervened in Nueva EPS in 2024, claiming fraud in the huge health insurer, and were thereafter legally responsible for managing the entity that covered 11 million Colombians.

Interventions in EPS insurers was not unusual in Colombia, he said. Previous governments had done the same to avoid a crisis for patients.

But were timely actions to “administrate, improve and, where necessary, rescue” the health insurers, though in some cases they were shuttered and patients moved to other companies. Petro’s current takeovers were more chaotic and linked to political overhaul of the health system, he said.

Health system in crisis

This agenda was heavily criticized in an opinion article ‘How Politics Destroyed Colombia’s Model Healthcare System’, by Colombian-based journalist Luke Taylor and published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in January.

Referring to President Petro’s “bungled reforms”, the story claimed that maternity wards and neonatal units were shutting their doors, emergency departments becoming overwhelmed, and training programs for specialist doctors being shut down.

It also quoted the Colombian president as stating that health companies were being “run by crooks”, even as the his government’s interventions triggered a slew of complaints by patients suddenly finding their health care a lot worse.

For patients with chronic ailments reliant on monthly checkups and regular medical supply, the decline was becoming an existential threat, said Colombia’s ombudsman, Iris Marín, this week.

Kevin Acosta was “yet another victim of the failures in the availability and access to medicines that thousands of Colombians face today, in order to access timely treatments that are crucial for their health”.

According to documents released by Nueva EPS, Pico had tried to transfer her son’s care from Huila to Santander department, then switched back to Huila, suggesting a paperwork logjam had delayed the treatment. In another statement, it denied suspending the prophylaxis.

Need for treatment

This was “a big lie” said Pico, talking to Semana, since even before the administrative switch the local clinic treating Kevin had told her in early January that Nueva EPS had ended its contract. Without payments from the EPS, the clinic was forced to suspend treatment.

“By January we had no medication, no appointments, nothing,” said Pico.

Her position was supported by the fact that, across the country, other chronic or rare disease sufferers – including hemophiliac suffers in Pico’s same family – were reporting the same shortages, in many cases linked to contractual or payment problems with health suppliers. 

ACHOP, the Colombian Association of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, warned in a public communication that children and adolescents “were not receiving in a timely and continuous manner the essential medicines to preserve their lives in conditions of dignity”.

These shortages fell mostly on patients with the state-intervened Nueva EPS, confirmed hemophilia specialist Dr Jorge Peña, who said he regularly treated dozens of children with the condition.

Talking to Caracol Radio, Dr Peña said that children with other insurers were receiving their prophylaxis on time and were “happy, free from bleeding, and going to school as usual”.

“In comparison Nueva EPS patients are not getting the medicines, and I see them every day with bleeding. They can’t go to school.”

Leaked records

Meanwhile attempts by the government and President Petro to push back on Pico even while grieving her son’s death caused condemnation across the political spectrum, particularly since the state had taken over Nueva EPS.

“The responsibility is clear: when the state intervenes and controls, it is held accountable,” said Senator Jorge Robledo on X.

“The healthcare system already had problems, but under this government it’s worse. And meanwhile, more and more Colombians are suffering from illnesses that medicine knows how to treat.”

More criticism piled on President Petro after he leaked details from the Kevin Acosta’s medical records during a speech in La Guajira. Patient spokesperson Denis Silva called on the government to respect patient confidentiality

“These are confidential in Colombia,” said Silva. “By law the EPS insurer should guard the medical records, and no-one should access them without permission from the family”.

The leaks came even as the state agency overseeing the system, the Superintendency of Health (also known as Supersalud), announced an investigation into the Kevin’s care, including looking at “administrative barriers and the delivery of medication by Nueva EPS and the service provider”. This audit should clarify differences in accounts from the family and Nueva EPS.

But even with results pending, President Petro again doubled down in a speech claiming the family was primarily responsible for Kevin’s health outcomes.

“It’s the family that first of all cares for its children,” he said, “Not everything is the responsibility of the state, because the state can’t respond to everything, otherwise we lose our liberty”.  

Colombians living with hemophilia might want those liberties to include the right to life-saving drugs – and to ride a bike.

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Judges ordered the recapture this week of a Violeta Arango Ramírez, a prime suspect in the 2017 bombing of Bogotá’s Andino shopping mall, after she lost her legal protections as an ELN peace manager.

The Colombian attorney general’s office requested that Arango, thought to be active in the ranks of the ELN guerrillas, “be found immediately to comply with an order for prison detention” based on accusations she was a key participant in the attack that left three dead and 10 more injured.

Arango, a sociologist, was previously arrested in 2022, but then released from prison to assume the role of a gestora de paz (‘peace manager’) during peace talks between the ELN and the the Petro government.

The controversial release was criticised at the time by survivors and families of victims of the Andino attack as Arango remained a key suspect. By being nominated as a gestora de paz, Arango was allowed both her freedom and temporary avoidance of homicide and terrorism charges while whe was “collaborating with the peace process”.  

This week’s recapture order followed breakdowns in government talks with the ELN with the Justice Department officially removing many combatants’ designations as peace managers. The news gave a glimmer of hope for justice after nine years of uncertainty as to who was behind the attack.

Arango herself has always denied any involvement in the attack, pointing to a plot from within the state prosecutors’ office to frame left-wing activists during the political fallout from the 2016 FARC peace deal.

Pamphlet bombs

The Andino attack unfolded during the evening of Saturday, June 17, 2017, inside the crowded women’s restroom of the busy shopping mall at a peak hour. It was the eve of Father’s Day.

A bomb placed in a toilet cubicle exploded killing one French and two Colombian citizens and maimed at least eight more women in or around the restroom.

Police investigators quickly blamed the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo or MRP, a left-wing group that had evolved in Bogotá’s public universities and was dedicated to mediatic events such as dangling flags from buildings and letting off weak explosives that launched political leaflets into the air.

Over the space of two years the MRP had targeted public spaces outside tax offices, health insurers and banks with messages such as: “Today in Colombia the peace process is a business plan”, and “Health in Colombia is a problem of democracy”.

In the months following the attack, a dozen suspects accused of being linked to the MRP were rounded up, detained over many months, then tried and released after none of the evidence against them could be proven in court.

Meanwhile an alternative theory emerged: that the Andino bombing was part of a right-wing plot carried out to destabilise the then-Santos government’s closeness to left-wing guerrilla groups in the wake of the historic 2016 peace process with the FARC, previously Colombia’s most powerful armed group.

False positives

In this narrative, the MRP, with its history of small-scale attacks and rumoured links to the larger ELN guerrilla group, made a convenient scape-goat.

Investigators claimed to have found similarities between the Andino bomb and the pamphlet explosives, but an analysis by news website Las2Orillas at the time pointed out that the attorney general’s office at the time “had a long history of fabricating evidence” to bring down left-wing political targets, partly as a distraction from their own implications in high profile corruption cases.

Violeta Arango, an activist with links to left-wing causes, found herself officially accused of being an MRP leader and coordinator with the much larger ELN guerrilla group.

She avoided capture and publicy declared herself the victim of a “falso positivo”, or false positive, referring to the practice by the Colombian military of murdering civilians and disguising their bodies as guerrilla combatants.

“This legal persecution I am suffering, along with my family who are being harassed and abused, is nothing more than a setup by the police and the attorney general’s office,” she wrote in an open letter, before fleeing Bogotá.

What happened next is subject to speculation. According to Arango herself, she escaped into the arms of the ELN (literally, as she became the romantic partner of a senior commander) fearing for her life in the face of “political persecution”.  

But her smooth transition into the ELN guerrilla’s Darío Ramírez Castro Front – active in the conflict zone of Sur de Bolívar – also seemed to vindicate the prosecution’s narrative of her links to urban terrorism.

Alias ‘Talibán’

Meanwhile in Bogotá, 10 other people were detained as suspected MRP members linked to the attack.

After searches of their homes, some were accused of carrying false IDs, carrying weapons, and, in some cases, having printed plans of the Andino shopping centre showing entrances and exits, and notes which appeared to show preparations for the bombing, and USB sticks with messages from the MRP.

But in many cases the police arrests and searches were themselves found to be illegal and without due process which, added to the flimsy evidence presented in court, lead to the the cases falling apart under legal scrutiny.

Some of these investigations were later examined in a documentary called Andino File: A Judicial Set-up? produced by journalism collective La Liga Contra el Silencio. One of the main accused, Iván Ramírez, described how the police produced CCTV used to identify him “scoping out the Andino”. This “evidence” later turned out to be video of a regular mall worker with a similar look.

In another twist, Ramírez described how the police themselves invented the aliases to which the suspects were presented as a “terrorist cell” to the media; for example, ‘El Calvo’, ‘Japo’, ‘Aleja’ and, in the case of the bearded sociologist, ‘Talibán’. The scary name stuck and Ramírez was thereafter referred to by Colombia media as ‘alias Talíban’.

He was also constantly described by prosecutors as the “explosives expert” of the MRP cell, a charge he consistently denied.

Ramírez was released from custody in 2021 after spending four years in pre-trial detention, during which time every case against him collapsed. But even after his release he continued to be “linked to the investigation”.

Peace managing

Then in June 2022, Violeta Arango, now in the ELN, was captured in the Sur de Bolívar in the same military operation that killed her partner, known as Pirry.

According to a post on X by the then minister of defence, Diego Molano, alias Pirry was “one of the top ELN commanders responsible for attacks on the civilian population, forced recruitment, and terrorism”.  

Arango was jailed for her guerrilla links even while the process continued against her for the Andino bombing.

That panorama changed when Petro Gustavo took the presidency in August 2022; with peace talks in the air, and after a visit from a Cuban and Norwegian delegation to her jail, Arango was released to her gestora de paz role in November that year. She resurfaced a month later in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of the ELN talks with the Petro government.

This appearance caused anger among the Andino victims. Pilar Molano, who lost a leg in the explosion, told Vorágine magazine that “it’s insane that they let her out and put her in the peace negotiations with the ELN”.

Six years after the Andino attack, in April 2023, the prosecutor’s office again filed charges against Arango based on evidence that prior to the bombing she had downloaded plans of the shopping mall from the Internet.

Cell structures

The indictment formally accused Arango of the “detailed planning” of the bomb attack. It further alleged that Arango was a senior member of the MRP “responible for attracting new members to the criminal organization in Bogotá and apparently participated in at least 21 terrorist attacks against EPS headquarters, public transport and infrastructure”.

With this week’s recapture order the case can move ahead – assuming she can be found.

Any trial could shed light on the who and why of the Andino bombing, and also the complex backstory of ‘Violeta’. But, given the shambolic history of the judicial process, it could also put the investigation back to square one.

In interviews in the intervening years leaders of MRP have repeatedly denied their groups involvement, as well as denying any links to the ELN, or any connections to the original suspects.

But the truth might be hard to find even within the two armed groups; both the ELN and the MRP are known to work in cell structures which plan autonomous actions often without the co-members or leaders aware.

Such was the case with the devastating car bomb that killed 20 young police recruits in Bogotá in 2019, initially denied by the ELN – their leadership claimed not to know of the plot – but eventually taking responsibility.

An unusual element of the Andino bombing is that no armed group or political movement has ever taken responsibility. And so far the prosecutors have not only failed to pin the attack on the MRP, but also ignored alternative lines of investigations such as a false flag operation by paramilitary or right-wing groups.

Lawyer for the Andino victims and survivors Franciso Bernate, said this week that “on behalf of the 11 female victims we hope Violeta is found so she can respond to these grave accusations”.

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Stark figures show expansion of fighting groups under ‘Paz Total’.

Colombia’s illegal armed groups have grown by 84 per cent during the three years of the Petro government’s Paz Total plan, thinktank Fundacion Ideas para la Paz (FIP) announced last week.

The alarming data showed the country’s main guerrilla factions and organised crime gangs totalled 27,000 active members at the end of 2025, adding 5,000 new recruits in just 12 months.

And humanitarian crises associated with the expansion of illicit economies, such as combats, displacements or confinement of communities, attacks on social leaders and extortion were also on the rise.

According to Gerson Arias, co-author of FIP’s El Deterioro de la Seguridad Marca el Inicio de 2026 (Deteriorating Security Marks the Start of 2026), the endless peace talks played out under President Petro’s expansive Paz Total policy had only incentivised armed groups to grow in terms of fighters, weapons and territory.

“Paz Total was based on a state ceasefire – but without any conditions put on the groups, such as ceasing recruitment, including child recruitment, or ending expansion,” he told The Bogotá Post.

“As such, the policy gave a gigantic strategic advantage to the armed groups to strengthen their fighting forces.”

Big surge

The biggest surge was in the organised crime group Clan de Golfo, up by 30 per cent to 9,840 active agents, reported FIP (see chart below).

Next in terms of size was the ELN, the guerrilla group dominating the eastern borderlands of Colombia, with 6,810 members, an increase of 9 per cent.

Dissident FARC groups also grew, some by almost a quarter, such as CNEB (Coordinadora Nacional Ejercito Bolivariano) which despite drawn-out peace talks with the Petro government – and numerous plans for a disarmament – ended the year 25 per cent bigger than started, now numbering 2,089.

And these were probably underestimates, said Arias. The FIP figures were based on military and intelligence data collected annually since 2002,and generally considered to be lower than the actual numbers.

“We tend to undermeasure illegal activity. It’s impossible to say with precision, but we would say the real data could be 20% or 30% higher,” he concluded.

Unlucky 13

These numbers included both armed fighters – often uniformed and carrying heavy weaponry – and support members tasked with infiltrating civilian communities to “ensure compliance”, often carrying pistols. Armed groups were increasingly deploying explosives by drones.

According to the FIP report, none of the negotiation processes had managed to curb their recruitment capacity.

Territorial expansion had also triggered disputes over illegal gold mining, coca, and trafficking routes. The FIP report identified 13 zones where two or more groups were facing off, more than twice the number of disputed territories that Petro inherited from the Duque government in 2022.

Top in terms of combat last year were Catatumbo in Norte de Santander, and areas of Guaviare, Cauca, Nariño, Valle and Arauca (see map).

But even departments considered peaceful in recent years, such as Tolima and Huila, were being drawn back into the fray, said Arias.

This rise in conflict brought a host of humanitarian impacts. Armed groups strictly controlled their zones, at times displacing or confining populations, but also imposing daily controls such as travel permissions and ID cards.

Last year, according to UN figures quoted by FIP, one million mostly rural Colombians were affected by armed group controls, tripling the number recorded in 2024.

Civilians in the crosshairs

And according to Arias, the government had itself increased the risks to civilians by involving them as third parties in the peace talks while failing in any robust plan to pacify the zone.

“Petro reached partial agreements with the groups – even while they were still armed, still controlling, extorting, confining and pressuring civilian communities. There was no cost to the armed groups,” said the researcher.

Part of the problem was that Paz Total had initially failed to link to any coherent military strategy that could had protected civilian communities. This had put civic leaders “in the crosshairs of armed groups” as one side accused them of siding with the other.  

The statement is backed by a graph showing a year-on increase since 2022 in attacks both between armed groups, and against civilians and state forces. Last year there were 150 attacks on civilian targets.

In fact, by Arias’s estimate Colombia had gone back to 2011 in terms of the numbers of non-state armed actors – 27,000 – potentially in conflict.

That compared to a recent low of 12,800 combatants in 2018, two years after former president Santos signed the 2016 peace deal with the FARC guerrillas.

From bad to worse

In fact, to explain the current situation, Arias pointed to failures in the both the current administration and the previous right-wing government under Ivan Duque.

Taking over in 2018, Duque rolled back many of the agreements made with the FARC sending many ex-combatants back to the bush along with a wave of new combatants.

But then left-leaning Gustavo Petro, taking over in 2022, surprised even his own military advisers by declaring a unilateral ceasefire. This was the opening salvo of the Paz Total policy which announced negotiations with armed groups and criminal gangs on multiple fronts – in some cases even without informing them.

Petro’s plan was conceived “with good intentions”, said Arias, but had put misplaced trust in armed groups busy enriching themselves by illegal activities and with little incentive to demobilize.

By comparison, during the 2013-16 process with the FARC, the military forces under Santos had continued operations against the guerrilla up until the final signing: “This pressure incentivised the FARC to take serious decisions in terms of the peace process,” he said.

Too little, too late

The failings of Paz Total were apparent on the ground in the first few months of inception in 2022, with community organisations raising the alarm over the increased fighting between groups.

It took until late 2024 for the state military to step up offensive actions in areas such as Cauca, with battles against the dissident FARC factions of Ivan Mordisco. Then, in early 2025, the Catatumbo region of Norte de Santander caught fire with fierce combat between the ELN and FARC 33, leading to the largest humanitarian crisis in Colombia’s recent history.

But it took until August last year for President Petro himself to acknowledge that the policy had “not achieved peace”.

During 2025 military actions increased by 30 per cent, but with reduced state forces – many experienced soldiers and commanders had left – facing stronger armed groups, said Arias.

“The offensive came slowly and without an analysis of what was required to combat the strengthened armed groups.”

“Years of intelligence capacity was lost, along with military presence and air deployment. This explains why – despite the offensives – there are few concrete improvements for many communities.”

For soldiers on the ground, the job got harder under Paz Total with a strengthened enemy and less military intelligence to rely on. According to President Petro’s own presentation to the Trump Whitehouse early this month, 360 state forces have been killed “in the fight against drug trafficking” in the last three years, with 1,680 wounded.

But even away from the front line, Paz Total was not up to the monumental task of negotiating peace with multiple armed groups given that most governments had failed to pacify even one.

At whatever cost

“Paz Total never evaluated the institutional capacity required. It’s good to say: ‘we have to negotiate with everyone’. But that requires a method,” said Arias.

The government often pushed talks ahead even without any legal framework that would allow, constitutionally, the state to make peace with certain criminal gangs, or groups of recycled combatants that had previously demobilised. This created a credibility gap which continued to undermine the peace initiative.

“Even today, no group has taken a serious position on disarming or demobilisation or reducing violence,” said Arias.

FIP also questioned the government’s own seriousness in finalizing any negotiations, terming Paz Total an “electoral peace”; endless rounds of talks through the upcoming election period.  

It’s a strategy Arias condemned: “This government seems intent on continuing the process at whatever costs and put the burden of resolution on the next government. This is politically irresponsible.”

Lack of concrete results could also taint future processes, he said.

“The poor results have thrown doubt on the idea that political solutions to conflict is the best route, which is very worrying, and eventually exposes communities to more risk.”

His main message – and the key finding of the FIP report – was that ending conflict in Colombia required more than goodwill, he told The Bogotá Post.

“It’s incoherent to talk of ‘peace or security’. We need to talk of ‘peace and security’. Without that, we’ve gone backwards.”

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We analyse recent homicide figures in Colombia’s capital.

Last month we looked at the latest homicide data for the city: in 2025 violent deaths went down 3.4% on the previous year. These 1,165 killings gave Bogotá – with a population of around 8 million – a homicide rate of 14.8 deaths per 100,000 of the population.

This month we look deeper into this statistic.  Why homicides? Though an imperfect indicator, murder rates do give an insight into insecurity in a zone as they are often the extreme outcome of robberies gone wrong, gang feuds, political violence, domestic violence, fights, targeted killings, drugging of victims and bungled kidnappings. Put simply, the number of bodies means the amount of crime.  

Crime patchwork

Where are homicides happening? In our own analysis of Bogotá’s 20 districts (see map below) the gritty downtown area of Sant Fe has the highest rate of 54 killings per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by nearby Los Martíres with 47, and Ciudad Bolívar with 33.

Sant Fe, like many Bogotá districts, is a patchwork of agreeable barrios, such as the touristy Las Aguas for example, and historic La Candelaria (with just three homicides last year) juxtaposed with crime-ridden neighborhoods.

But in the southwest corner of Santa Fe lies San Bernardo, or ‘Samber’ as it is known locally, generally recognized as the most dangerous barrio in Bogotá, a hub for gangs selling drugs to street people and the scene of several fatal grenade attacks in 2025.

Santa Fe is a reminder that in Bogotá safer streets are often just a block away from no-go zones. Rolos and long-term residentslearn to navigate these invisible barriers.

To emphasize this point, Santa Fe, statistically the most dangerous district in the city, lies adjacent to the leafy district of Teusaquillo with a homicide rate of 5 per 100,000 in 2025 (amounting to nine deaths), which according to this metric makes it the safest district in Bogotá.

Less grim up north

Other districts registering less than 10 killings per 100,000 in 2025 are the more upmarket northern districts of the city: Chapinero, Usaquén, Suba, Fontibón and Engativá. And as in most years, there is a gradient towards safer barrios in the north, with the dividing line running roughly along the Avenida El Dorado (Av Calle 26).

But in terms of reducing crime, there are success stories in the south. While still the most dangerous district, Santa Fe has reduced its homicide rate by 28 per cent in 2025 alongside Bosa, Usme and Antonio Nariño, all with reductions in double digits.

These results are hard to assess; organized criminal gangs are present in all these areas, so the peace could be transitory and a result of rival gangs declaring a truce, or one gang leveraging control, rather than societal shifts or better policing.

In some cases, large-scale operations have had an impact, combing security and social services in a carrot and stick approach called megatomas. In Santa Fe, for example, following the grenade attacks, the Bogotá administration both militarized the barrio and flooded it with development programs to support the huge homeless population there. This approach seems to have worked, at least temporarily.

On the negative side, three central districts (Puente Aranda, San Cristóbal and Rafael Uribe Uribe) have seen a spike in killings, a reminder of the balloon effect; pushing down on crime in one zone just forces it to pop up somewhere else.

Sicario scenarios

What’s behind the killings? Police databases do not reveal motives, but media coverage and occasional analyses by Bogotá’s Secretaría de Seguridad give insights into the city’s mean streets. 

Targeted killings, usually carried out by paid hitmen (sicarios), are for the city the visible tip of an underworld iceberg of organized crime. Hits are carried out often on the street or public spaces against identified victims by professional gunslingers sometimes recruited specifically for the job with promises of cash.

Clear-up rates are low: in June last year city councilors complained that in the first half of 2025 out of 521 homicides, 156 were targeted hits, for which only 16 people had been arrested. “In other words, 90 per cent of assassinations on Bogotá go unpunished,” pointed out councilor Julián Espinosa in one debate.

This was despite the city police’s vaunted Plan Candado – Padlock Strategy – of mobile rapid response teams and drones to quickly catch perpetrators by locking down zones within minutes of a major crime.

The most high-profile killing was the gunning down of senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe, shot in the head during a walkabout in a Bogotá park. The police quickly apprehended the small-time gangsters behind the shooting in June 2025, including the 15-year-old shooter, but today despite nine arrests are no closer to revealing the paymasters behind the hit.

Another unsolved assassination was the targeted killing of emerald czar Hernando Sánchez, shot dead while walking with his family in a leafy northern suburb of Usaquén in April last year. The military-style killing, by a sniper hiding in nearby woodlands, was identical to the mysterious murder nine months before of a fellow emerald baron, known as Pedro Pechuga, also unresolved.

Weapons of choice

Despite Colombia having restrictions for private ownership of firearms, the majority of 2025 killings were with guns, at 703, according to the police database. Other weapons recorded were knives (304), blunt objects (84) and grenades (6).

This pattern has persisted for decades; Colombia, and its capital, are flooded with illegal firearms, many of them from the estimated 600,000 guns smuggled south across the border from the U.S. each year.  Just in the first four months of 2025, police confiscated 8,466 illegal weapons across the country

According to Carolina Ortega, a political scientist at the National University, and quoted by  UPI, illegal guns were used in 78 per cent of killings in Colombia.

Easy access to guns also raised the risk of spontaneous killings, according to data from the Secretaria de Seguridad which showed that40 per cent of Bogotá homicides followed a dispute, argument or scuffle.

Most of these happened outside on the street, late in the evening, and “amidst scenes of revelry and excessive alcohol consumption”, said the report, released as part of a media campaign called “Take a second before you shoot…”.

Violent machismo

Femicides went down on 2025, both in Bogotá and at national level, according to data released this week by the Observatorio de Mujeres y Equidad de Género de Bogotá.

In Bogotá during 2025 there were 97 females killed, around 8% of total violent deaths. Of these, 20 were classified as femicides. This was slightly less than in 2024 (22 deaths) and mirrored a similar reduction (7%) nationally. Nationally, approximately one killing in five of a female was later classified as a femicide, the “violent expression of machismo”, said the study.  

A study by Bogotá’s Secretaria de la Mujer found that in 49 per cent of cases in the capital, the women had suffered physical violence in the weeks before the murder, and 40 per cent had previously sought help from the police.

According to observatory data, last year Secretaria staff supported 142,688 women, of which 48% were facing violence, a slight reduction on the previous years. The 2025 figures were a reminder that although more warning signs were being detected, timely intervention was not always possible, said the report.

“Femicide does not arise from nothing: it is foreshadowed, repeated, and often normalized before reaching its most tragic outcome,” it concluded.

Pay up – or pay the price

In 2025 many Bogotá murders were linked to extortion demands, with gangs ruthlessly gunning down small business owners if they failed to pay protection money. Sometimes shop staff or a passerby were also killed or injured, in some case with grenades or explosives.

Protection rackets are nothing new in the city, but cases and killings skyrocketed post-pandemic partly because of turf wars between gangs diversifying from the drug trade and Venezuelan gangs linked to the transnational group Tren de Aragua with names like Las Satanás and Los Coyotes.

Extortion reached epidemic proportions in 2024, with an average of 200 cases a month, and continued into 2025 with a rash of crimes such as the killings of informal minibus drivers in the south of Bogotá.

Overall, Bogotá in 2025 saw extortion go down by 20 per cent compared to 2024, though it was still higher than any year during the previous decade. And already in the first month of 2026 there have been several murders linked to extortion demands including a grenade attack on a nightclub in Los Mártires last week which killed one and injured a dozen more.

Millionaire’s ride

Another death last week, that of a university professor found dead and incinerated on the outskirts of the city, highlighted increased cases of Bogotá’s infamous Paseo Millonario, where armed gangs working with taxi drivers attack and extort passengers, often torturing them to reveal bank details while they empty their accounts.

Victims are often targeted late at night leaving bars or restaurants. In a chilling twist, recent cases pointed to victims being subdued with ketamine, with the drug either killing or severely incapacitating the victim.

According to data from the GAULA (Anti-Kidnapping and Extortion Group), 40 Paseo Millonario cases were reported in 2025, a rise of 207 per cent on the previous year. Even that figure was thought to be a huge underestimate since many victims were too scared to come forward. Hotspots were in Chapinero, Kennedy, Bosa, Ciudad Bolívar, and Fontibón.

In one case a taxi gang held a victim for 19 hours, prompting the Attorney General’s Office to reclassify such crimes as “kidnapping” with a potential 42-year prison sentence. In theory this prompted the police to start responding more robustly to a crime that has plagued Bogotá for decades.

Perpetrators of these high-impact crimes were also more likely now to get locked up, with 47 imprisoned last year out of the 52 captured, which was way above average jailing rate of 6 percent of criminals arrested, according to Bogotá police chief Giovanni Cristancho, talking to RCN News last week.

But he also admitted that the understaffed police force was struggling to keep up with constantly emerging kidnap gangs, usually small teams of four or five people which could easily move around the city.

“As soon as we reinforce one area, such as around Calle 85, the modus operandi shifts to other zones,” he told RCN.

It’s that randomness, and the risk of being drugged – or worse – that makes the Paseo Millonario one of the most feared crimes in Bogotá. And for 2026, the one to watch.

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ELN guerrillas have announced the recovery of iconic revolutionary Camilo Torres. They now want his body returned to Bogotá’s National University.

Colombia’s largest rebel army, the ELN – at war with the state since 1964 – have alerted the world to the likely discovery of the long-lost remains of Camilo Torres.

The fighting priest, killed in combat with the army 60 years ago, has been found by government forensic teams in the department of Santander, the ELN said in a press statement this week.

The ELN leaked the news before the Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas Dadas por Desaparecidas (UBPD) could finalize technical tests, but it was widely expected that the search is now ended for the respected cura and university professor who became a revolutionary martyr.

The ELN said they hoped his remains “would be respected and returned to the Bogotá campus of the National University”.

In the early 1960s, the young Torres was a chaplain, professor and founder of the faculty of sociology at the tempestuous Universidad Nacional. Today, the charismatic priest still figures strongly in campus iconography with his image and quotes decorating many walls.

From priest to combatant

An exponent of liberation theology – a strand of Catholicism calling for social justice in an era of extreme poverty in Latin American – Torres took to the hills in 1965 with the ELN, then a fledgling guerrilla group aligning itself with Marxist ideology.

Calling himself Argemiro, the priest quickly became an influential link between the rebels and the church, respected across the political spectrum, and a spiritual influence on socialist movements across the continent.

His most famous quote, still echoing through liberation theology, was: “If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrillero”.

A photo of Torres appeared in a flyer printed by the ELN in January 1966, with the academic pictured in uniform clutching a rifle alongside the words: “From the mountains of Colombia, I intend to continue the fight, weapons in hand, until I achieve power for the people. Not one step back! Liberation or death!”.

Friends divided

The latter came quicker than expected. Torres was killed in combat aged 37 on February 15, 1966, in his first action against state forces. The firefight took place in the rugged terrain around El Carmen de Chucurí, Santander.

Ironically, the army operation that killed Torres was led by General Álvaro Valencia Tovar, a childhood friend of the rebel priest. In an old article on Las 2 Orillas, the general described the pair’s friendship over many years, even while taking separate political paths; a potent reminder of personal ties tested by Colombia’s civil conflict.

According to Valencia Tovar, the ELN had prepared a deadly ambush in a jungle gorge with 35 fighters – including Torres – lying in wait for an army patrol. But the soldiers, even while taking heavy fire, outflanked the guerrillas and killed five of the ELN fighters. Torres was among the dead.

Thereafter the story was muddled: according to Valencia Tovar, the general himself took Torres’ remains to a military pantheon close to Bucaramanga, the regional capital of Santander, perhaps a form of honour for his former friend. But the exact location was never disclosed, a bone of contention with the guerrilla group who wanted to mourn their martyr.

In another historical twist, years later a video emerged of a young Juan Manual Santos – the future centre-right president of Colombia – declaring he was an “acolyte” of Torres, who was in fact his uncle.

In 2016, the then president Santos, perhaps as a gesture towards his own deceased uncle, but also as a signg of good faith during a peace process with the ELN, promised a state search for the remains of his fallen uncle. That peace process failed, like many others.

Playing for time

Over 70 years of conflict the Ejército de Liberación Nacional has proved hard to pin down: the on-off negotiations with the current Petro government mark the seventh cycle of peace talks spanning seven presidential terms since 1992, with the guerrillas still fighting.

Today, many observers see these negotiation cycles as cynical ploys by the Marxist-Leninist rebels to hold off military pressure while expanding their own territory and illicit activities, which today extends to cocaine production, illegal gold mining, extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking.

According to a profile by thinktank InsightCrime, in the last 20 years the ELN have become increasingly active in neighbouring Venezuela where they act as a mercenary army for the Chavista regime with a strong role on controlling the borders.

That dynamic shifted after the U.S. military operation in early January in Venezuela to detain autocratic leader Nicólas Maduro.

Now less welcome in Venezuela, and facing an increasingly hostile Petro government, even while entangled in a turf war with dissident FARC groups in northeast Colombia, the ELN fighters are feeling the pressure.

Blood and fire

On January 12 this year, the ELN proposed another bite at the peace apple with a new ‘national accord’. This though was quickly rejected by President Petro, who wrote on X that the guerrillas had to renounce their illicit activities – primarily gold and cocaine – before coming to the table.

During the first three years of his term, Petro suffered several perfidies by the ELN such as their surprise attacks on rival groups in the coca enclave of Catatumbo last year that left hundreds dead and thousands displaced.

Responding to the ELN offer Petro, said he had “already offered an agreement, but they destroyed it with blood and fire, and by killing humble peasants”.

It is likely the Colombian president is now holding off until after his meeting with the Trump administration in Washington scheduled for February 3.  Any reconciliation between Petro and the U.S. president – their relationship has been rocky – could open the door for increased military support to combat the ELN, designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department since 1997.

Colombia’s ‘Che‘

Such a deal, combined with changes in Venezuela, could tilt the conflict in favour of Colombian state forces. And while still a potent fighting force, the ELN could prefer an escape route via the negotiation table in 2026 if talks open up with Petro or his successor.

With that in mind, it is probable that finding of Camilo Torres – miraculously close to the 60th anniversary of his death – is no coincidence, but rather a strategy in the poker game between state and guerrillas.

The wait now is for final confirmation of the remains by the UBPD.  Meanwhile the search unit is keeping mum on how, where, and when the body was found.

And if the ELN are claiming Torres as their own, then so is Petro: “The body of Father Camilo Torres Restrepo will be respected and laid to rest with honours,” he said on X this week, painting the priest as a national hero.

Perhaps putting him in the spotlight is a nod to Petro’s own rebel credentials as a former member of M-19 guerrilla group. And Torres is a timely reminder of how the ELN rebels – recently accused of human slavery in illicit mining camps  – are far removed from their ideological roots.

Where both sides agree is that his final resting place should be the National University campus in Bogotá. That´s a start. Sixty years after his death the fighting priest, seen by some as Colombia’s Che Guevara, could have a new role in bringing peace.

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A simmering spat over candidates for government posts boiled up this week with revelations that a Bogotá university was faking professional titles for workers in Petro’s administration.

According to congress members revealing the scandal, 24 public servants got top contracts using dodgy titles from Universidad Fundación San José, a mold-breaking higher education institute once famed for accessible courses, but now under scrutiny for selling degrees.

They also accused Petro and his education chiefs of dragging their feet in investigating the university for the suspected fraud case.  

“Petro’s promises for education come to nothing,” said house representative Catherine Juvinao after she claimed to have identified 24 cases where officials and contractors in top government entities appeared to have been hired with diplomas from the Univerisity Foundation San José without all the tests.

One stand-out case was a government functionary who, according to university records, graduated in four quite different degrees – Business Administration, Industrial Engineering, Public Accounting and International Marketing – on the same day.

“This is one of the most serious cases. Who graduates with four degrees on the same day?,” the representative said in an interview with Semana magazine.

According to Juvinoa, the university handed out diplomas to students who had failed to complete the independent technical tests, known as PruebaPro, and in some cases had not studied at all.

Fake titles for plum jobs?

Although academic fraud has occured regularly in Colombia – and similar scandals have rocked previous governments – the investigations by Juvinao and her team are targeting an administration that promised to turn its back on corruption.

This week’s revelations followed last year’s political dogfight over the proposed appointment of 23-year-old Juliana Guerrero as vice-minister of youth. The candidate, who was close to both Petro and his education minister, was already embroiled in controversies over private use of police planes. Then in September she was found to have falsified her accounting qualifications at the university.

After public pressure the university rescinded the degree, and Guerrero herself told Caracol news that she intended to take the independent exams to regain her title in November.

Further investigations revealed a bigger suspicion: that the Petro government was routinely using the university – with which it had contracts – to fudge academic requirements for candidates favoured for plum jobs.

This week Juvinao accused  Petro government or running a “Cartel of Dodgy Diplomas” in cahoots with the San José university. “It’s bad news that our first left-wing government ended up being a monument to mediocrity, captured by an institution,” she said.

The state was “closing the door to those who studied hard by merit,” she said, while calling for a probe by the Attorney General’s office, adding that: “we have all the evidence to support any investigation”.

Political Attacks

For its part, the Ministry of Education announced this week it was investigating the University Foundation San José related to the case of Guerrero, Petro’s preferred candidate for the Ministry of Youth.

In the same communication, the ministry strongly denied it had any link to “illicit activities related to the expedition of academic titles”.

The Colombian president repeatedly defended Guerrero’s nomination for the post last year even after her degree was pulled by the university. Her only error was to claim her title before taking the final exam, he said, suggesting a storm in a teacup. The attacks were personal and political, he added.

“So, Juliana’s graduation exam, after completing her studies, was registered for in July and is scheduled for next November. Is that the summary of this scandal?” he wrote on X.

At first view Petro’s gesture seemed on target; young candidates, particularly female, get torrents of abuse in the rough-and-tumble of Colombian politics, often facing a public scrutiny less applied to old-school politicos.

But looking back that defence now seems misplaced: financial data revealed this month showed Guerrero had paid for her degree course long after receiving her diploma – almost unheard of in Colombia – while the university itself confirmed that she “never went to classes or presented exams nor complied with the accounting program”.

Doubling down

This week Petro doubled down on his defense of the University Foundation San José, claiming the accusations by the opposition unfairly focused on “poor single mothers” trying to get ahead.

“Private universities…allow these working women to study faster,” he said. “[Politicians] to gain votes shouldn’t destroy working women. I expect a public apology from these congresswomen to the working women of Colombia.”

To complicate the president’s narrative, referring to the Guerrero case, the university announced it had “detected and denounced a fraud” and had itself requested the attorney general’s office to investigate. It also promised to “stregthen internal audits” to prevent future cheating.

Representative Juvinao told Semana told Semana magazine that the Guerrero case suggested corruption in the form of cash for qualifications, and was likely “the tip off an iceberg”.

“There is a deliberate strategy to fabricate qualifications to fit the needs of Petro’s government departments,” she said.

In a country where people struggle for further education – and value highly their hard-earned academic qualifications – what started as an online spat over a youth representative is becoming a scandal with much more scope.

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Bogotá’s mayor and security chiefs celebrated some positive results last week with stats showing an overall reduction of high-impact crimes in the city during 2025, with the murder rate dropping in the city even as violent deaths increased across Colombia.

“In Bogotá in 2025, there were fewer homicides robberies, fewer vehicle thefts, fewer motorcycle thefts, fewer cases of extortion, more drug seizures, more weapons seizures, and more arrests,” said Bogotá´s mayor Carlos Galán, presenting a security scorecard showing security shifts in the first two years of his administration.

Some decreases were significant, such as extortion cases dropping by 20 per cent, stolen car cases by 22 per cent and commercial theft by 30 per cent. Others were less impressive: street robberies only reduced by 6 per cent, and cases of sexual violence by 8 per cent.

Homicides, perhaps the most significant metric, reduced last year by just 3.4%, with 1,165 killings recorded on the national police database compared to 1,214 in 2024. This gave Bogotá – with a population of around 8 million – a current homicide rate of 14.8 deaths per 100,000 of the population, according to the standard formula used to compare deaths across varying population sizes.

Limited success

This was way short of Mayor Galán’s stated goal of 8 deaths per 100,000 during his four-year tenure, but a better result than the national one. At 14.8, Bogotá’s homicide rate was considerably lower than Colombia’s national figure of 25.9 deaths per 100,000 of the population, based the alarming total of 12,484 violent deaths reported nationwide – a two per cent increase on the previous year.

City security secretary César Restrepo also pointed out that Bogotá had proportionally less murders than other major cities such as Bucaramanga, Cartagena, Barranquilla, Pereira and Cali (see table below). Medellín, however, bested the capital with a reduced rate of 11.7 per 100,000.

And in our own comparison with cities worldwide, Bogotá’s homicide rate was lower than Washington D.C. (17 per 100,000) Baltimore (23 per 100,000) or New Orleans (33 per 100,000) but much higher than most European cities such as London (currently at 1 per 100,000) or Berlin (3 per 100,000).

Backdrop of violence

The challenges facing Bogotá in reducing violence against a national backdrop of increasing insecurity were highlighted in a recent study by think tank Centro de Paz y Seguridad Externadista which compared homicides rates between recent national governments.

The current Petro government reported 40,633 violent deaths during its first three years, an increase of 11 per cent over the same period for the Juan Manuel Santos government (2014 to 18) and seven per cent higher than during Ivan Duque’s tenure from 2018 to 2022.

The data pointed to a failure of the Petro’s Paz Total (‘Total Peace’) process which reduced military pressure on illegal armed groups allowing them to expand their range and illegal activities in the last three years, concluded the report.

“Although the government insists that the national conflict is de-escalating, the figures point to another scenario: homicidal violence remains at high levels,” said study leader Andrés González in December presenting the findings on YouTube.

González also pointed out that while most territorial battles took place in rural areas, the effects reflected in urban hubs where local crime groups – often with links to larger armed groups – used lethal violence in conflicts linked to extortion and micro trafficking.

Catch and release

Another challenge for Bogotá’s security was the low conviction rate for captured criminals, according to city police chief Giovanni Cristancho in an interview with El Tiempo. Out of 33,000 criminals arrested in the city in 2025, less than 10 per cent ended up in jail, he said.

Criminals showed little fear of the justice system, and many caught by the police were multiple offenders, said Christancho, with the police having to “catch the same person 20 times”.

Recycling criminals back on the streets was “outside the control of the district government”, security chief Restrepoalso told  El Tiempo last week, but recognised it reflected badly on the city administration.

“Most citizens express their annoyance because criminals are either released or not convicted. As long as these other conditions remain unresolved, all the results we announce will continue to generate frustration among the public,” he said

This chimed with a common perception in Bogotá that even if the police are clamping down, the justice system as a whole is failing the city. Those concerns were echoed in a recent public survey by city watchdog Bogotá Como Vamos that found that a  62% of respondents perceived Bogotá as less secure, the highest figure recorded since 2008.

Catch and kill

Low conviction rates could explain the resurgence of vigilante justice being meted out by frustrated rolos in recent years, with groups of citizens organizing to capture and beat offenders, sometimes tying them to lampposts or parading them naked through neighborhood and posting videos on social media.

Barrio justice has long been a problem in Bogotá; a study from 2016, reported in The Bogotá Post, showed an average of one lynching death every three days over a 12 month period in the city.

A more recent phenomenon in the city is the rise of fleets of armed private security guards mounted on motorbikes chasing down stolen vehicles.

One company, Self Security GPS, uses satellite tracking and immobilizer devices to recover stolen vehicles, but also regularly posts alarming videos of their ‘commandos’ taking down car thieves, sometimes with dramatic shoot-outs on the street with passers-by diving for cover.

According to data from the mayor’s office, at the last count, there were 150,000 private security guards “supporting security in Bogotá” – far outnumbering the 17,500 uniformed police.

Increasingly though, frustration among everyday citizens has boiled over into drastic reactions to street crime. Such an attempt at instant justice ended in tragedy last week with three deaths after a Bogotá driver was robbed at gunpoint by two masked robbers on a motorbike; the victim gave chase and crushed the fleeing assailants with his pick-up truck. In the ensuing multi-vehicle crash one of the robbers was killed, along with two innocent travelers who also lost their lives.   

Statistically, not a good start to 2026.  

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Electronic jamming and missiles are two of the risks identified by US regulators.

Major airlines cancelled flights from Bogotá to Caracas this week after US regulators warned of “heightened military activity” around Venezuela.

Avianca and LATAM suspended flights through Venezuelan airspace, along with at least five other airlines, as a response to a Federal Aviation Authority NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) that reported “Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) interference” around Maiquetía “Simón Bolívar” International Airport, which serves nearby Caracas.

The warnings were linked to military exercises under way in Venezuela, a response to threats from US forces massing in the Caribbean and aerial attacks on suspect drug boats, some originating from Venezuelan waters.

Colombia’s own airline regulator, Aeronáutica Civil de Colombia, repeated the FAA’s warning but said that air operators in Colombia could take “autonomous decisions” over flights to Venezuela.

On Monday several airlines were continuing direct flights from Bogotá, such as Wingo, Avior (a Venezuelan airline) and Satena (a commercial airline linked to the Colombian Ministry of Defense). Copa offered connections via Panama.

Mobile missiles

The list of airlines suspending flights continued to grow on Monday night with TAP, Turkish Airlines, Iberia and GOL being joined by Air Europa and Plus Ultra.

This came despite pushback from Venezuela’s Instituto Nacional de Aeronáutica Civil (INAC) which threatened to punish airlines for following the FAA’s recommendations.  According to a report in Aviation Online, airlines avoiding Caracas could in the long term lose access to the country’s airspace.

INAC also issued an ultimatum for airlines suspending flights “to resume services within a 48-hour period” or risk losing their landing permits.

Meanwhile the US FAA issued a more detailed FAA backgrounder clarifying that Venezuela had “at no point expressed an intent to target civil aviation”.

It did, however, seem concerned that the current context could trigger an air accident.

Venezuela, it said, had mobilized “thousands of military and reserve forces” with access to shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles, or MANPADs (man-portable air defense systems), capable of downing low-altitude aircraft.

This followed comments by Maduro last month that his military were in possession of Russian-made Igla-S missiles “with no fewer than 5,000 of them in key anti-aircraft defense positions to guarantee peace, stability, and tranquility”.

Jammers and spoofers

The more immediate risk was to electronic systems, said the FAA documents, with several civil aircraft recently reporting interference while transiting Venezuela, in some cases causing “lingering effects throughout the night”.

“GNSS jammers and spoofers can affect aircraft out to 250 nautical miles [450 kilometres] and can impact a wide variety of critical communication, navigation, surveillance, and safety equipment on aircraft.”

The FAA said it would “continue to monitor the risk environment for US civil aviation operating in the region and make adjustments, as appropriate, to safeguard U.S. civil aviation”.

In fact, the US airlines stopped all direct commercial and cargo flights into Venezuela as part of an order issued in 2019, related to sanctions against the Maduro regime, widely seen as illegitimate, with the US State Department offering a bounty of US$50 million “for information leading to the arrest and / or conviction” .

Open to talks

Commentators on US – Venezuelan relations this week said that FAA announcement was not necessarily a sign of imminent US military action. Former Associated Press analyst Dan Perry told News Nation that the FAA warning was “a message that they [the FAA] expected the country to become unstable”, but did not point to a ground invasion.

For most observers, the NOTAM was a continuation of the maximum pressure strategy pursued by Washington against the Maduro regime, including a recent decision to declare the Cártel de los Soles — a disconnected group of corrupt military officers who facilitate drug shipments — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Last week Maduro said he was open to talks with Washington, according to AP News, though US President Trump underscored that military action was “still on the table”.

In recent months the US has sent eight navy ships, a submarine, an aircraft carrier and 10,000 service members to the Caribbean. And since August, US firepower has killed at least 83 people in aerial attacks on speedboats suspected of running drugs; for anyone arriving in Venezuela, air is still safer than sea.

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