The Colombian presidential election is now a theatre of attrition, with the country’s brutal civil conflict dictating the strategic calculus for both candidates. For decades, the war between the state, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and narcotraffickers has been a constant threat vector. Now, as the UK deploys peacebuilding frameworks, the question is whether this is a genuine attempt at stabilisation or a soft-power pivot to secure strategic interests in Latin America.
The UK’s advisory role, through the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, is a classic chess move: offer expertise to shape post-conflict governance while maintaining a foothold in a resource-rich region. But Colombia’s military readiness remains compromised. The armed forces are stretched thin, with a 2023 defence budget of just 3.4% of GDP, and the police are plagued by corruption allegations. The FARC dissidents and ELN have simply reconstituted their forces, exploiting the ceasefire loopholes. Meanwhile, the UK’s advice on transitional justice and rural land reforms is a textbook example of Western liberal interventionism, but it ignores the fact that the conflict is sustained by cocaine trafficking and illegal mining.
The real failure is intelligence: the UK underestimates the resilience of hybrid warfare. The ELN’s use of social media for recruitment and encrypted communications for logistics is a cyber warfare blind spot. Meanwhile, the Colombian state’s surveillance capabilities are fragmented, with a 40% attrition rate in intelligence personnel since the 2016 peace deal.
The election itself is a logistics nightmare. With over 1,200 municipalities, many in conflict zones, the threat of electoral violence is high. In 2022, attacks on electoral officials increased by 60%. The UK’s peacebuilding framework must integrate real-time threat monitoring, but the technical assistance is too slow. The UK’s deployment of a small team of advisors is a token gesture. Without a robust information warfare capacity, the advice is worthless.
For the UK, Colombia is a strategic pivot to check Chinese and Russian influence in the region. Both have been arming the state and non-state actors respectively. Russia’s Wagner Group has been linked to paramilitaries, while China provides digital surveillance tech to the government. The UK’s peacebuilding is, therefore, a geostrategic gambit. But the military hardware and logistical support are absent.
The threat of a collapse is real. If the candidate advocating for a hardline military solution wins, we could see a return to ceasefire violations and a new cycle of violence. If the progressive candidate wins, the peace process might get a boost, but the UK’s frameworks are too detached from the ground realities. The only way forward is a massive surge in military aid and intelligence sharing, not just policy papers. But the UK’s defence budget is overstretched with Ukraine.
This is a failure of strategic foresight. Colombia is not a secondary theatre. It is a hub for illegal resource flows that fuel global instability. The UK must treat this as a hard security issue, not a development exercise. Otherwise, the civil conflict will continue to define not just the vote, but the entire region’s stability.