Colombia

Colombia exists because Simón Bolívar won the Battle of Boyacá in 1819—and because the country has spent two centuries cycling through variants of the same civil war. La Violencia killed 300,000 between 1946 and 1957. The FARC insurgency killed hundreds of thousands more over five decades. Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel turned cocaine into a $25 billion empire. Each wave of violence reshaped the country without resolving the underlying conflicts between elites and peasants, centralists and federalists, order and extraction.

The Spanish established their first permanent settlement at Santa Marta in 1525. By 1717, Bogotá was capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, encompassing modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. On July 20, 1810, citizens of Bogotá created the first representative council to defy Spanish authority; Bolívar's forces achieved full independence by 1819. Gran Colombia lasted barely a decade before fracturing into its component nations, setting the template for Colombian politics: grand unifying visions that dissolve into fragmentation.

The twentieth century was defined by blood. The War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902) cost 100,000 lives and led to Panama's secession. La Violencia erupted in 1948 after the assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, becoming a ten-year orgy of partisan massacres. The 1958 National Front agreement ended that conflict by institutionalizing power-sharing between Liberals and Conservatives—and created the rigid two-party system that the FARC would rebel against starting in 1964.

Pablo Escobar exploited this instability. The Medellín Cartel, founded in 1976, was shipping 70-80 tons of cocaine monthly to the United States by the 1980s. Escobar briefly served in Congress, waged war against extradition, and bombed a commercial airliner. His death in a 1993 police shootout fragmented the trade rather than ending it. The FARC, having lost its Cold War patrons, turned to cocaine to fund its insurgency. By 2016, when the peace accord was signed, the distinction between political violence and criminal enterprise had long since collapsed.

President Gustavo Petro, Colombia's first leftist president, was himself a former M-19 guerrilla. His 'Total Peace' strategy of negotiating with all armed groups has low public support, partly because coca cultivation rose 53% from 2022 to 2023—reaching over 200,000 hectares—as former FARC territories became contested by dissidents and criminal organizations. About 1,200 FARC dissidents remain armed, often sheltering across the Venezuelan border.

The economy reflects these contradictions. GDP grew 2.0% in 2024 after barely expanding the year before. Petro declared an economic and social emergency in December 2024, issuing the national budget by presidential decree for the first time since 1904—in the aftermath of a civil war and the loss of Panama. The fiscal deficit hit 6.8% of GDP. His suspension of new oil and gas exploration licenses means Colombia must import natural gas for the first time in 40 years, while oil production has declined 23% from its 2015 peak of one million barrels per day. The pension reform passed in 2024 awaits Constitutional Court review; health and labor reforms remain stalled.

Colombia now hosts 2.81 million Venezuelan refugees—the third-largest refugee population in the world—contributing an estimated $529 million to the economy while straining public services. Petro restored relations with Maduro in August 2022, but Venezuela continues harboring armed groups and has replicated Colombian cocaine production methods.

By 2026, Colombia will likely remain trapped between ambitions and constraints: a leftist president without a congressional majority, peace agreements that freed territory for new armed groups, declining hydrocarbon revenues, and the world's largest coca crop. The pattern holds: each resolution creates the conditions for the next conflict.