Former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe was sentenced to twelve years of house arrest earlier this month for alleged bribery and procedural fraud — a sentence he denounced as a political sham.
It might just seem like a classic case of leaders weaponizing the judiciary against the political opposition. But it has an even darker twist to it, as the recent shooting death of the main opposition candidate for president, Miguel Uribe (no relation), demonstrates.
In a nation now governed by former communist guerrillas, those who once fought against a narco-insurgency are being confined, whereas the kingpins who trafficked the drugs and roiled the nation with violence are being ushered into palaces and introduced into the vocabulary of reform. The threat in Colombia no longer radiates from stateless cartels and guerrilla armies in the jungle, but from Colombia’s very presidency.
For the U.S., partnership without strategic recalibration is no longer viable.
Under Petro, a former M-19 guerrillero, Colombia’s Ministry of Justice is giving away the store to his leftist friends and allies who did so much damage during their decades-long insurgency. It has proposed revisions to the 2005 Justice and Peace Law that extend benefits to narco-commanders, urban mafia leaders, and recidivists.
Sentences for these would drop to a maximum of eight years, served not in maximum-security prisons but in “agricultural colonies” — low-security compounds where their paramilitary command structures can persist. Confession and disarmament, once the moral core of these dangerous groups’ demobilization, have been displaced by bureaucratic compliance — enrollment in “territorial transformation” programs and good-conduct certificates. Under Petro, criminality is no longer being dismantled — it is instead being reclassified.
The policy’s symbolism is as revealing as its clauses. Petro recently shared a state stage with leaders of Medellín’s most violent armed groups — some of them escorted from prison, one even addressing the crowd.
Several had served five years, making them eligible for release under the proposed framework. To add insult to injury, the proposals would allow narcos who surrender assets to retain up to 12 percent of their ill-gotten gains. This will allow the nation’s worst criminals to launder, legally, hundreds of billions of pesos into protected capital, labeled as reparation.
Petro got himself elected despite being chummy with these criminals. This year, he made an unannounced visit to Manta, Ecuador — a trafficking hub associated with Los Choneros. Journalists reported a clandestine meeting with that organization’s fugitive drug lord. Petro declined to answer questions about it directly and never released his itinerary. Colombian authorities did not investigate.
To understand the pattern, one must trace M-19’s relationship with drug trafficking. At first, they sought to selectively extort drug traffickers by kidnapping them. When the paramilitary group MAS formed in response to strike back violently, M-19 risked annihilation. So it adopted a strategy of leveraging the narco-economy instead.
By 1985, that posture had matured into an alignment. In a covert pact with Pablo Escobar, M-19 received $2 million to storm the Supreme Court and destroy extradition records. Escobar supplied explosives and the late drug lord Fidel Castaño supplied rifles. More than 100 people died, including half of the justices.
At that point, the boundaries between insurgency and narco-terrorism collapsed.
Their joint logistics reinforced the fusion. They relied on maritime shipments — as on the Karina, one of the rare ships intercepted and sunk, laden with East German rifles. In the “Zar” case, a Cuban-linked flight carrying armaments was intercepted. These operations, tolerated by Cuba and Nicaragua, brought the Cold War together with the Drug War.
M-19 conducted fewer kidnappings than other leftist guerrilla groups like FARC and ELN — not from a sense of ethics, but because their cartel financing and smuggling routes made ransoms obsolete.
For decades, Colombia’s laws set a logical order: Armed groups had to stop attacks, follow basic humanitarian rules, and commit to compensating victims before the government would formally negotiate with them. Petro reversed that sequence with a series of warrant-suspension orders — first for 19 leaders of a FARC splinter group in March 2023, and later for six Clan del Golfo negotiators in July 2024. Each order paused arrests and extraditions before either group had been granted political status, turning a legal threshold into a discretionary amnesty.
Colombia’s intelligence service under Carlos Ramón González — now a fugitive believed to be hiding out in Nicaragua thanks to a corruption scandal — functioned less as a coordinator of intelligence and more as a tool of political control. Meanwhile, Petro shifted trillions of pesos to local committees operating in areas where criminal groups are entrenched — outside normal procurement rules. Sold as “democratization,” this has outsourced authority to para-legal networks, diluting sovereignty where the state is already weakest.
For the U.S., the consequences have been immediate. Colombia sits at the center of U.S. counternarcotics policy. If the presidency facilitates trafficking under the false pretext of peace, then the DEA, Justice Department and Southern Command face compromise of their surveillance activity, exposure of their sources, and contamination of their evidence. Cooperation with Colombia today is a liability.
Washington has tools to deal with this. The Kingpin Act enables sanctions against those materially assisting traffickers; the alleged $100,000 “peace” entry to obstruct extradition meets that standard.
The Global Magnitsky Act covers corruption and obstruction of justice. It authorizes visa bans for officials and relatives on credible evidence, no conviction necessary. The Foreign Assistance Act allows the suspension of aid if a government facilitates trafficking or fails to act; that only requires political judgment, not a court ruling.
Petro has not passively tolerated convergence. He has orchestrated it, and people close to him are neck-deep in the corruption. In many regions, the state no longer suppresses but actually franchises armed governance.
There are precedents for dealing with such situations. The most dramatic case was the 1989 indictment and ouster of Panama’s Manuel Noriega. In a less dramatic case, Tareck El Aissami, Venezuela’s vice president, was sanctioned under narcotics authorities.
The test is no longer whether Washington can pressure cartels at the periphery, but whether it will use its legal arsenal when the center of impunity is the presidency of a partner state gone rogue.
Carlo J.V. Caro trained in international security at Columbia University. He is a former vice president of a real estate and sustainability firm overseeing work across Latin America and Asia.
