Colombia is a country in north-western South America. It is the world's largest producer of cocaine and has a long history of armed conflict.
Between 1986 and 1990, five presidential candidates were assassinated. Political violence has been rising again since 2022, though it had been largely contained at a local level until June 2025, when Miguel Uribe, a 39-year-old senator from the right-wing Democratic Centre party and presidential contender, was shot in the head by a 15-year-old gunman while campaigning in Bogotá. He died on August 11th 2025, in Colombia's worst act of political violence for 35 years. Days later, at least eight people were killed in a wave of explosions and gun attacks across the south-west, including bombs at police stations in Cali, the country's third-largest city. Authorities are investigating a rebel group operating on the Pacific coast, led by a warlord known as Iván Mordisco.
Mr Uribe's mother, Diana Turbay, a journalist and daughter of a former president, was killed on the orders of Pablo Escobar in January 1991. Miguel Uribe was four years old at the time. Bogotá's mayor, Carlos Galán, declared three days of mourning after Mr Uribe's death; he himself was 12 when Escobar's hitmen murdered his father, a presidential front-runner, in 1989.
Armed groups in Colombia boast perhaps 22,000 members, up by 45% since Petro took office in 2022, though they were already expanding under his predecessor, Iván Duque. At least one armed group is present in more than half of the country's municipalities, according to Pares, a think-tank in Bogotá. The number of people displaced by violence is up by 230,000 since Petro took office, according to the UN. Extortion rose by 50% between 2021 and 2024, and kidnapping by 75%. Attacks on the armed forces in 2025 had already outstripped the total for any full year in at least a decade. Despite vestigial Marxist names, the country's armed groups are drug-traffickers, not freedom fighters; cultivation of coca, from which they make cocaine, is at record highs. The homicide rate is around 25 per 100,000, higher than every other South American democracy except Ecuador. In the early 1990s, as Pablo Escobar terrorised the country, it was 86 per 100,000; in the early 2000s, because of violent rebel groups, it ran at over 70.
Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with the Marxist FARC guerrillas was negotiated by Juan Manuel Santos, president from 2010 to 2018. Under its terms the FARC disbanded. Mr Santos argues the accord has not been fully implemented by either Mr Petro's government or the previous one, and that had its security guarantees for the opposition been honoured, Miguel Uribe would not have been killed.
Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla outfit, is Colombia's left-wing president. He is pursuing a policy of "total peace" with the country's gangs and armed groups, but the policy is failing: guerrilla groups are growing again, drug gangs are more powerful, and kidnappings have increased. The government has shifted towards military operations to kill prominent commanders. Citizens cite security among their main concerns. Mr Petro is itching to call a referendum to write a new constitution, following the model of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
On August 1st 2025, Álvaro Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010 and founder of the Democratic Centre party, was sentenced for bribery and perverting the course of justice to 12 years under house arrest—the first Colombian president to be convicted in court. His security build-up in the 2000s, which recovered territory from the FARC and paramilitaries, enabled his successor Juan Manuel Santos to reach a peace agreement with the weakened FARC. On October 21st 2025 the conviction was overturned. Colombia was once known for moderate, consensual politics.
Colombia's right lacks a strong presidential candidate after Miguel Uribe's death. The conservatives must find and rally behind a new figure ahead of the election in May 2026.
On October 26th 2025 nearly 2.8m Colombians voted in primaries for a candidate to lead Petro's Historic Pact coalition into the presidential election in May 2026. Iván Cepeda, a senator, won 65% of the votes, beating Diana Carolina Corcho, a former health minister. The turnout was relatively high for a primary; Donald Trump's decision to impose economic sanctions against Mr Petro probably motivated voters. Mr Cepeda faces a further primary against other left and centre parties in March 2026 to determine the unified candidate of the left. Colombia's constitution bars Mr Petro from seeking re-election.
Armed groups in Colombia have adopted weaponised drones, marking a new phase in the country's conflict. The Gulf Clan, a drug gang, was using drones for smuggling as early as 2016; the ELN, a paramilitary group, began using them for surveillance in 2018. Weaponised use by gangs did not begin until 2023. In 2024 a ten-year-old boy became the first person in Colombia killed by a drone after one dropped a grenade on a football pitch. ACLED, a research group, recorded more than 80 drone attacks by non-state groups in 2025 (to late November), up from fewer than 20 in 2024. Drone attacks now vastly outnumber air strikes from helicopters and planes, which remain the preserve of the armed forces.
Cheap commercial drones, mostly manufactured in China, are modified to carry bombs. The war in Ukraine was a "watershed moment", according to Henry Ziemer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies: videos from that conflict showed Latin American armed groups what was possible. Thousands of Colombian fighters have joined the conflict in Ukraine as mercenaries, some reportedly enlisting in Ukraine's foreign legion to gain experience with drones.
In January 2025 the ELN launched an offensive in Catatumbo in the east, using drone strikes against soldiers. In July a FARC faction hit a navy patrol boat with a first-person-view (FPV) drone in what was perhaps the first deadly use of FPV drones in Colombia. The armed forces have begun to respond: a state-run aerospace firm developed the Dragom, Colombia's first domestically produced attack drone, and in October 2025 the air force started its own drone unit. The government has spent $25m on American-made jamming equipment, but Colombia's dispersed conflict zones make it hard to counter drones with jammers without disrupting civilian communications.
Weaponised drones are spreading beyond Colombia: in September 2025 a drone attacked a prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and gangs in Brazil used drones to launch grenades at police during a raid in Rio de Janeiro.
Colombia's total fertility rate dropped to 1.2 births per woman in 2023, far below the replacement level of 2.1. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks it may have fallen as low as 1.06 in 2024. In Bogotá the rate is just 0.91, lower than in Tokyo. The UN had expected a rate of 1.63 and saw only a 2.5% chance of a reading below 1.4. See global population decline.
Colombia is among the world's most unequal countries. In a 2018 study by the World Bank, it had the lowest intergenerational income mobility among a group of 75 countries. About 60% of workers toil in the informal economy, where they get fewer benefits, do not pay taxes and are less productive. The government's fiscal space is narrowing: the deficit is some 7% of GDP and public debt above 60%.
GDP is set to grow by 2.4% in 2025. Tourism is booming: some 7m people visited Colombia in 2024, up by 2m in two years. But investment is low and growth mostly consumption-led, and the government's ban on new oil and gas exploration is putting off foreign investors. The minimum wage is worth over 90% of the median wage, by far the highest ratio in the OECD; by making it expensive to hire formally, it has incentivised more informality.
About 1m Colombians appear to have left the country permanently in the three years to September 2025, double the number in the three years before covid-19.
On September 15th 2025 Donald Trump declared that Colombia had "failed demonstrably" to meet its counter-narcotics obligations—a declaration which would have ended much American assistance had the Trump administration not simultaneously issued a waiver, making it more symbolic than practical. Since September 2025 the United States has bombed at least nine small boats in the Caribbean as part of a campaign against drug-traffickers, killing at least 37 people. On October 19th Mr Trump called Petro an "illegal-drug leader" on social media, promising to end all aid and impose tariffs on Colombian exports. The outburst followed Mr Petro's accusation that an American strike had killed an innocent Colombian fisherman. Colombia has long been America's closest ally in the region.
Colombia's health-care system is administered by 27 private insurers. Only seven have enough financial liquidity to meet regulators' demands. The system provides cheaper health care than in most Latin American countries. Since Petro increased the state's role, maternity wards and emergency rooms have been closing or refusing new admissions.
Colombia hosts almost 3m Venezuelan migrants, far more than any other country. It handed out large numbers of work permits to Venezuelans after Venezuela collapsed into chaos, making it one of the more progressive host countries for refugees in the developing world. If Venezuela spirals into further chaos following Nicolás Maduro's capture in January 2026, hundreds of thousands more people could spill over the border.
Colombia is the world's largest producer of cocaine. Cocaine production hit a record 3,001 tonnes in 2024, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 13% more than in the previous year and more than double the figure for 2021. Cultivation of coca is at record highs, with some 253,000 hectares of coca-leaf plantation and almost 70% of the world's cocaine made in border regions. The ELN, a Colombian rebel group designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, traffics serious amounts of cocaine. Colombian coca yields have almost doubled since 2005, to about 8.5 tonnes of leaves per hectare; in some areas they reach 11.7. The savviest farmers test the soil and apply fertiliser by drone. Production is now heavily concentrated in lower-lying border areas near Ecuador, for easier access to the port of Guayaquil. In Cartagena port, cocaine has been found infused into recycled plastic, mixed into ground coffee and dissolved inside carefully resealed coconuts. Divers weld "parasite" pods of cocaine onto ship hulls so often that port watchmen are paid to sit in a tiny boat offshore all day and night to look for telltale bubbles; to keep the job they must pass a polygraph test every six months. The Colombian navy recently seized a narcosub drone equipped with a satellite link to transmit live images. See cocaine trade.
The government claims to have intercepted 2,840 tonnes of cocaine between Mr Petro's inauguration in August 2022 and the end of 2025, 61% more than his right-wing predecessor managed over a comparable period. Police commandos have raided more than 18,000 coca-paste laboratories in three years, but their efforts only knock out production for as long as it takes criminals to haul another batch of chemicals into the jungle. Mr Petro disputes the UNODC's "opaque" methodology (in place since 1999) and has blocked publication of its latest report because its contents make him look bad. In January 2026 he threatened to sideline the UNODC, saying Colombia's police would take over monitoring instead.
Colombia is the main source of cocaine shipped through Ecuador, where cocaine-export routes shifted after increased security at Colombian ports. The two countries' gangs are closely linked, though President Petro's approach to negotiations with armed groups has strained relations with Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa. On January 21st 2026, Mr Noboa announced a 30% "security tariff" on Colombian imports, sparking a trade war.
The island of San Andrés is one of Colombia's most popular tourist destinations, lying 750km north of the mainland. In 2025 more than a million people visited, mostly Colombians, drawn by the "sea of seven colours". The island's indigenous Afro-Caribbean inhabitants, known as Raizals, blame mainlanders for destroying the environment, appropriating land and erasing Raizal identity. English Puritans were the first to settle the archipelago in the 17th century, and some Raizals still look to England as the "mother country". Unemployment is 13%, and locals turn to drug-smuggling to make ends meet; drug gangs have brought violence. An overcrowded prison dumps sewage into the sea.
In 1991 Colombia's constitution recognised the Raizals' ethnic rights, but they complain of scant improvement. Documents leaked in 2012 revealed that Colombian intelligence had been monitoring Raizal leaders; the report suggested keeping Raizal islanders as the minority. In 2023 President Gustavo Petro appointed five Raizal islanders as Colombia's ambassadors to Caribbean nations. Some radicals advocate detaching San Andrés from Colombia and making a "free association" with another Caribbean nation—Nicaragua and Panama are both closer—but most of the island's population is not Raizal and would not support secession.
Colombia is a leader in reef restoration. After Hurricane Iota devastated the barrier reef around Providencia, a Colombian island in the western Caribbean, in November 2020, $3m in government funds helped scientists and locals rebuild 200 hectares of reef along the country's coasts by 2023. "One million corals for Colombia" is one of the largest reef-restoration projects in the world. Building on that success, a coral-propagation laboratory opened in Santa Marta in May 2025, funded by local foundations, Conservation International and CAF, a regional development bank. It uses "coral IVF"—divers collect eggs and sperm during spawning, fertilise them in the lab, seed the hatchlings onto floating nurseries and transplant the adolescent corals into the wild about six months later. By August 2025 researchers had fertilised almost 600,000 eggs. The lab can grow a new hectare of coral for $36,000, roughly a third of the regional average. The Caribbean has lost more than 50% of its corals since the 1970s.
Colombia is a major hub for human trafficking, both for sexual exploitation and forced labour. The cocaine economy built the smuggling routes, money-laundering networks and corrupt officials that sustain a broader web of illicit business. In tourist hubs like Medellín, gangs that peddle cocaine to tourists now also market women. Medellín had 1.5m visitors in 2023—seven times more than a decade ago. Arrests of foreigners for commercial sexual exploitation of minors in the city rose 11-fold between 2023 and 2024. In frontier cities such as Cúcuta, an illicit webcam industry exploits Venezuelan women who arrive with nothing. Colombia has not secured a conviction for labour trafficking since 2018.
Colombia's biggest gold mine, Buriticá, is the site of a stand-off between its Chinese operator and 2,000 miners linked to the Gulf Clan, a gang that stole $200m worth of ore from the mine's tunnels in one year. Since 2019 some 18 miners have died there. Gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics in Colombia. After a government crackdown in Bolívar, an illegal-mining hotspot in northern Colombia, the Gulf Clan retaliated by killing more than 20 soldiers and policemen.
Record numbers of Colombians have been drawn into conflicts far from home. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, at least 3,000 Colombians have passed through the country, fighting on both sides, making them one of the largest foreign contingents. Others have turned up in Sudan's civil war or have been recruited into Mexico's violent gangs. Perhaps 10,000 Colombians are involved in foreign conflicts. See private military companies.
Colombia's veterans are in demand because of decades of experience fighting rebel groups such as the FARC, and familiarity with NATO-standard weapons from close military co-operation with the United States. Colombia boasts South America's second-largest army, after Brazil's, with more than 260,000 active troops. The army expanded sharply in the early 2000s during the campaign against guerrilla groups; that cohort is now reaching retirement. More than 13,000 soldiers have left the armed forces voluntarily since Petro became president in 2022. Unlike other countries with large veteran populations, Colombia has no comprehensive veterans' policy; pensions are modest, typically around $400 a month. Foreign contracts promise to pay many times that.
Colombians have been implicated in serious crimes abroad. In July 2021 about 20 Colombian nationals took part in the assassination of Haiti's president, Jovenel Moïse. Colombia apologised to Sudan's government after reports surfaced that at least 300 Colombians were fighting for the Rapid Support Forces. In December 2025 the United States imposed sanctions on a network accused of recruiting Colombian ex-soldiers for that conflict, where they were accused of training child soldiers. Late in 2025 the government ratified the United Nations' anti-mercenary convention. Some veterans have been sent to Ukraine by criminal gangs to acquire combat skills, including in drone warfare, which are being used by armed groups back in Colombia.
If this is a service economy, why is the service so bad?