The ghosts of Colombia’s bloody past are crowding the ballot box. As the country heads to the polls for a presidential election that feels more like a referendum on war and peace, there is a name that cannot be spoken aloud in campaign rallies: the decades-long internal conflict that has left a quarter of a million dead and millions displaced. But the bodies are still piling up. And Whitehall is watching nervously.
For the British government, this is not a distant foreign story. Colombia is a key trading partner in Latin America. But more than that, it is a crucible for the kind of hybrid warfare that keeps intelligence chiefs awake at night. Drug cartels, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries. The lines between them have blurred. The peace deal with the FARC in 2016 was supposed to be a turning point. But implementation has been patchy, to say the least. And now the campaign has turned ugly.
The two leading candidates are Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla turned leftist standard-bearer, and Rodolfo Hernández, a populist property magnate. But this is not a simple left-right choice. It is a choice between two different visions of how to end a conflict that has metastasised into a hydra of criminal economies. Petro wants to fully implement the 2016 peace accord and open talks with the ELN, the last active guerrilla group. Hernández vows a hardline crackdown, promising to put the army back on the streets and negotiate from a position of strength. Both face a daunting question: can they actually deliver?
Inside the corridors of the Foreign Office, the mood is one of cautious dread. The worry is not just that the conflict will continue. It is that it will spill over. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine. The instability there feeds criminal networks across the region, from the Caribbean to the Southern Cone. And as Britain tightens its borders, the drug trade finds new routes. The port of Liverpool, the streets of Glasgow. The connection is direct. A cartel war in the Colombian jungle can end in a gangland shooting in Hackney.
The polls are too close to call. But the real story is the violence that surrounds the voting. Dozens of candidates and activists have been murdered in the run-up. The message to voters is simple: choose the wrong person, and you could be killed. This is not hyperbole. It is the brutal arithmetic of Colombian politics. The power brokers are not politicians. They are the armed groups who control the cocaine labs and the smuggling routes. They have a vested interest in chaos.
What the UK wants is stability. A government that can at least contain the violence and keep the drug flows manageable. But that may be a forlorn hope. The conflict has become self-perpetuating, a perpetual motion machine of violence and grievance. Whoever wins will inherit a country where the state does not hold a monopoly on force. That is a dangerous thing. And it is a danger that does not stop at the border.