The Colombian Peace Agreement and the Rise of the Right
On June 21, 2026, Colombians elected Abelardo de la Espriella as their next president. Taking office on August 7, De la Espriella promised a hard-right turn, departing from the progressive stances of his predecessor, Gustavo Petro. One of his signature policies is to dismantle the landmark 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement, which ended decades of conflict between the Colombian government and rebel forces. The Colombian Peace Agreement made sweeping changes to Colombian society, and the reaction to it largely fueled the rightward shifts in the country as reflected in the 2026 presidential election. However, different aspects of the deal produced different reactions, as the establishment right-wing president Iván Duque was elected in 2018 largely as a result of the backlash against the terms of the actual peace agreement, while the election of the more populist De la Espriella was largely the result of backlash against what the peace agreement produced (or failed to produce).
Background on the Colombian Peace Process
Colombia had been in internal conflict since 1964, and its origins largely stem from rural grievances. Areas in which peasants experienced land dispossession in the decades leading up to the outbreak of the conflict were more likely to see rebel activity (Lopez-Uribe and Sanchez Torres 2024). Land dispossession largely occurs because of the lack of state capacity to protect the rights of peasants, in favor of the elite landowners. The guerilla activity eventually consolidated into organized rebel groups, with the main one being the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and others including the National Liberation Army (ELN). Control of land, including control of the illicit drug trade, became a key mechanism of these rebel groups staying in power. The rebel groups were able to administer many rural areas due to the absence of government control. In the last decades of the 20th century, Colombia was one of the most violent places in the world.
Early attempts to make peace largely failed. Several smaller guerilla groups signed peace agreements with the Colombian government in the early 1990s. But attempts to reach a peace agreement with FARC failed in 2002 under the presidency of Andrés Pastrana Arango, who granted FARC a large demilitarized zone to facilitate talks. The failure of the 2002 talks led to the election of Álvaro Uribe as president, and he embarked on a hardline strategy against the rebel groups. Uribe engaged in a large-scale military campaign against the rebels, severely weakening them. The next president, Juan Manuel Santos, a protégé of Uribe, saw the weakened state of the rebel groups as a prime opportunity to negotiate with them, while maintaining military pressure, resulting in the landmark Colombian Peace Agreement in 2016, which ended hostilities with only the FARC. It was believed that once FARC, the largest of the rebel groups, made peace with the government, other groups would follow.
The Colombian Peace Agreement is the most extensive peace agreement to date. Besides simply ending hostilities between the FARC and the Colombian government, the agreement also included provisions on integral rural reform, political participation, illicit drugs, and transitional justice. The purpose of those provisions was to create the conditions to maintain peace and to address the root causes of the conflict, not just simply root out the FARC (Fok 2026). However, by negotiating with the FARC, the government also gave them concessions, including guaranteed political representation and conditional amnesty. Despite the potential to end a decades-long conflict, the concessions to the FARC were too hard to stomach for much of the Colombian people, which failed to approve the peace deal by a razor thin margin of 50.2% against and 49.8% in favor in an October 2016 referendum. After subsequent revisions, the agreement was ratified by both houses of Congress on November 30, 2016.
Iván Duque and the 2018 Election
Given the rejection of the Colombian Peace Agreement by the public, it should come as no surprise that the backlash against it would fuel the next presidential election. There were two schools of thought that affected how one viewed the FARC. Former president Uribe and his supporters, who came out against the agreement, viewed the FARC as a security issue. In their view, the agreement undermined the authority of the state. Santos and his supporters viewed the FARC as the natural result of the lack of state presence. They recognized that the conflict had political, socioeconomic, and territorial causes, which were addressed in the peace agreement.
Peace agreements naturally require concessions that are unpalatable to the public, and Uribe exploited those concessions to propel his handpicked candidate Iván Duque to victory in the 2018 election. Duque was a one-term conservative senator with limited political experience, so the willingness for Colombians to elect him president had much to do with his opposition to the peace agreement. The right-wing block criticized the Santos government’s decision to negotiate with the FARC before a unilateral ceasefire and derided the decision to treat both rebels and government forces accused to committing human rights abuses equally. They also denounced the transitional justice provisions in the agreement, believing that it would leave FARC militants off the hook for crimes they committed (Gamboa 2018).
External factors also propelled Duque to the presidency. The deepening crisis in neighboring Venezuela, run by the socialist Nicolás Maduro, led to rampant inflation, and by June 2018, over 800,000 Venezuelans had crossed the border into Colombia. The right used this unfolding crisis to illustrate what a leftist government led by Gustavo Petro, the socialist candidate in the election, would look like (Gamboa 2018). In the end, Duque won the runoff election and became president on August 7, 2018. While he was against the peace agreement, Duque understood that his government had the obligation of implementing it and did so without political conviction. The election of Duque therefore was the result of the backlash to the actual stipulations of the Colombian Peace Agreement, which was drastically different from the context that led to De la Espriella’s election to the presidency eight years later.
Abelardo de la Espriella and the 2026 Election
The election of Abelardo de la Espriella came almost a full decade after the ratification of the Colombian Peace Agreement, and his election was a response to the paradigm of peace—what peace actually looked like. As a result, De la Espriella’s election was the result of the failures of implementing the agreement. While Colombia saw a notable decrease in violence after the peace agreement was ratified, it has since seen an uptick due to policies from De la Espriella’s predecessor Petro’s paz total policies. Attempting to make peace with numerous rebel holdouts at once, Petro’s paz total initiative undermined the government’s leverage in dealing with the rebel groups. Despite a landmark ceasefire with the ELN in 2023, armed interactions between government forces and dissident groups increased significantly in the subsequent months (Breda 2024).
In addition, key aspects of the peace agreement remain unimplemented. There has been great progress—as of November 2024, around 53% of the agreement’s 578 stipulations have been implemented fully or intermediately (Quinn et al. 2025)—but people’s livelihoods have not improved as a result, especially in rural areas. In the past, FARC and other groups have controlled and managed rural areas, acting as a state authority in the absence of any real state authority. Now that they are no longer a major player, the state has failed to reestablish authority, meaning that people’s livelihoods have not improved. For example, one of the agreement’s provisions stipulated for voluntary crop substitution to stop coca cultivation. However, Duque’s administration embarked on a campaign of forced eradication (i.e. burning all the coca fields) without presenting an alternative. Therefore, many rural farmers did not view the new government authority as providing any opportunities to improve their livelihoods (Llorente 2026).
The coalition that supported the agreement could not deliver what the comprehensive nature of it promised to achieve. Ten years later, many lives had not improved, creating a discontent with the paradigm of peace that the agreement created. Given that, the Colombian public reacted negatively against the status quo, and elected someone who promised increased state presence. De la Espriella campaigned on increasing state security and forcefully eliminating remaining rebel forces, and that message appealed to Colombians who were tired from the lack of state presence after the ceasefire. A negative peace—the absence of direct violence—had come, but Colombians did not see improved livelihoods as a result, meaning that a true positive peace—the presence of values, norms, and actions that promote justice and well-being in a society (Amster et al.)—has not been fully realized.
The Anomaly of Gustavo Petro and the Role of the United States
The reactions to the Colombian Peace Agreement led to the elections of right-wingers Duque and De la Espriella, but it also transformed Colombian politics in other ways. The rightward shift since 2016 is also not inevitable, as the left-wing Petro was elected to the presidency in 2022. The political left was toxic prior to the agreement, but since the ceasefire took FARC out of the equation, people became more willing to consider socialist candidates. That resulted in a “flight from the center,” creating a more polarized society where moderate parties were nearly wiped out (Gamboa 2018). The gains on the right could easily be undone in a future election.
Finally, the United States, the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, can be considered indifferent to the regime in Colombia as long as the administration supports American interests. The United States’ main concern is drug trafficking, and Plan Colombia was its $7.5 billion USD strategy to combat it. Plan Colombia contributed to the professionalization of Colombia’s security forces, allowing for weakened rebels and drug trafficking networks, but it also led to the spraying of herbicides over large amounts of cropland in an effort to eradicate coca production. While the US was largely supportive of the peace process, its funding of forced eradication measures led to rural displacement without a government-led alternative, contributing to the discontent that led to the rise of Duque and De la Espriella.
The US worked with governments on both the right and left to combat drug trafficking. While the Trump administration did not approve of some actions of the leftist Petro government, it did nothing to undermine the peace agreement. De la Espriella has promised closer relations to Washington, but whether a long-term alliance between De la Espriella’s party and the Trump administration persists remains to be seen.
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References
Amster, Randall, Elsa Barron, and Liliana Pimental. 2026. “Positive Peace.” In Essential Concepts of Environmental Peacebuilding: An A-Z Guide, eds. Carl Bruch, Rachel Weaver, Richard Matthew, Erika Weinthal, and Larry Swatuk. London: Routledge. 253-255.
Breda, Tiziano. 2024. ‘Total Peace’ paradox in Colombia: Petro's policy reduced violence, but armed groups grew stronger. ACLED.
Fok, Bryan. 2026. Balancing Livelihoods and Human Health: Limitations of Environmental Provisions in Peace Agreements. Security and Democracy Forum.
Gamboa, Laura. 2018. “Latin America’s Shifting Politics: The Peace Process and Colombia’s Elections.” Journal of Democracy 29(4): 54-64.
Llorente, María Victoria. 2026. “The Unfulfilled Promises of Colombia’s Peace Process.” Americas Quarterly.
Lopez-Uribe, Maria del Pilar, and Fabio Sanchez Torres. 2024. “Ideology and Rifles: The Agrarian Origins of Civil Conflict in Colombia.” World Development 173: 106387.
Quinn, Jason, Madhav Joshi, Elise Ditta, Patrick McQuestion, and Cristian Saez Flores. 2025. “Verifying the Implementation of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement: A New Methodology and Dataset.” Journal of World Affairs: Voice of the Global South 1(1): 94-120.