Attachments
Author: Tiziano Breda
The start of the year in Colombia was marked by a rekindling of armed groups’ confrontations in several settings, notably in the Catatumbo region of Norte de Santander. In mid-January, the National Liberation Army (ELN) led an offensive against Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents who refused to sign the 2016 peace agreement. The fighting claimed the lives of over 80 people, mostly civilians, and prompted the government to declare a state of emergency for 90 days.1 Before this latest flare-up of hostilities, Colombia had started to experience a reduction in violence by armed groups targeting civilians. In 2024, these events decreased for the first time since 2019. Some adjustments in President Gustavo Petro’s Total Peace plans seemed to have contributed to the reduction: Despite the outburst of violence in Catatumbo, reported deaths from violence by armed groups decreased by 8% in the first 30 months of Petro’s administration.
Slight improvements in some dimensions of the conflict do not mean civilians experienced a respite from the violence (see map below). In fact, a growing number of Colombians were caught in the crossfire of heightened wars between expanding armed groups in 2024. In some of the places where this fighting was fiercer, civilians continued to be seen as military targets by armed groups and increasingly experienced forced recruitment, confinement, or displacement. They were exposed to landmines and IEDs used by armed groups with the aim of stopping enemy advances. While armed groups mostly targeted civilians to assert their authority in a new territory or when their territory was contested by a rival group, deadly displays of violence became less necessary when they achieved full territorial control. Armed groups also exerted their authority and targeted civilians to increase their revenue through less lethal expressions of violence, such as kidnappings.
How armed groups’ expansion impacts civilians
After increasing year-on-year since 2019, violence targeting civilians in Colombia dropped by 20% in 2024, when a total of nearly 1,500 events was recorded. Robust security operations in parts of Cauca and some progress in regional peace talks in Nariño may have contributed to this reduction in two of the country’s most violent departments. As a result, Cauca and Nariño experienced a more substantial decrease than the national average. In addition, one achievement of the Petro administration has been to reduce state forces’ abuses against civilians, both in the context of security operations and in the management of protests. ACLED records 37 events of security forces’ civilian targeting in the first 30 months of Petro’s term, resulting in 17 reported fatalities, down from 83 reported fatalities in 163 events in the same period prior. According to a human rights advocate who spoke to the author, this is no minor feat in Colombia, which is still dealing with the wounds left by the case of ‘false positives’ — a practice that spread in the early 2000s, when the army killed over 6,000 civilians, then claimed they were rebels.2
For their part, armed groups also resorted less to lethal forms of violence against civilians, possibly due to the rising political cost that deadly attacks might carry in negotiations with the government and in attracting security forces’ attention and response.3 This held true until the ELN’s offensive in Catatumbo, which raised doubts about the armed group’s commitment to peace talks, prompting the government to suspend the negotiations.4
Despite these trends, armed groups’ activity continued to threaten Colombia’s civilian population. During the first 30 months of Petro’s administration, 26.7 million Colombians were exposed to organized violence, 24% more than in the previous period (see graph below). But civilians were not only exposed to the fighting between armed groups; they were also directly targeted by armed groups. While there was a reduction in 2024, it came after 2023, the year with the highest number of incidents of armed groups targeting civilians — over 1,600 — since ACLED began collecting data on Colombia in 2018. Overall, more of these incidents took place in the first 30 months of the Petro administration than in the previous 30-month period.