Colombia Spent US$60 Million on Four Unfinished Jungle Airports
Four airports sit unfinished in some of Colombia’s most isolated territories: Bahía Solano on the Pacific coast of Chocó, Magüí Payán in the Nariño jungle, and Cumaribo and La Primavera in the plains of Vichada. While US$60 million of public money has already left government accounts, and the communities those airports were supposed to serve still wait, and in some cases still depend on the occasional small aircraft or multi-day river journey for any contact with the rest of the country.
The four projects form part of a larger initiative Colombia called the ASAES (Aeropuertos para los Servicios Aéreos Esenciales, or Airports for Essential Air Services) a program that the Petro administration identified as a flagship commitment to the communities most invisible to the state, and that now, with the government’s final weeks underway, stands as one of the most documented infrastructure failures of the last four years. The numbers make the failure unusually concrete: Colombia spent more than 60% of the total budget of US$103 million, and the most advanced of the four projects, Cumaribo, reached only 18.4% completion, while Magüí Payán never broke ground at all.
Why these jungle airports matter to remote communities
To understand why this failure lands so heavily, it helps to understand what an airstrip means in a place like Bahía Solano or Cumaribo, where roads either do not exist or become impassable for weeks at a time, and where rivers that serve as the primary routes can turn violent and unpredictable during rainy seasons.
For the approximately 122,000 inhabitants spread across the four territories, air connectivity is not a convenience but the channel through which medical emergencies reach hospitals, through which fresh food and medicines arrive, through which teachers, engineers, and public servants can reach communities without spending days in transit, and through which the economy of each region can grow beyond subsistence.
Colombia acknowledged all of this when it structured the ASAES program, identifying these four airports among the fourteen airstrips that most urgently needed modernization and committing to a delivery date of May 2025, a deadline that passed more than a year ago with none of the terminals in any condition to receive expanded operations.
How Colombia’s ASAES airport program went wrong
The ASAES project rested on a three-way arrangement between the Aeronáutica Civil (Colombia’s aviation authority, responsible for developing air infrastructure across the country), the Army’s Engineering Command (which supplied the construction labor and heavy machinery), and Enterritorio (the Empresa Nacional Promotora del Desarrollo Territorial, a state financial company created in 2019 to replace the discredited Fonade and act as the procurement and logistics manager for large public projects).
Enterritorio contracted directly with private suppliers without competitive bidding, using an interadministrative agreement (a direct contract between government entities that bypasses the standard public tender process). This mechanism made procurement faster and more flexible in regions where traditional contractors refused to operate, which made the arrangement’s logic seem sound.
What the structure actually created, however, was a chain of accountability gaps in which each party could point to another when things went wrong. The Army waited for materials that Enterritorio had contracted but not delivered, Enterritorio’s suppliers subcontracted their obligations to third parties who then disappeared without completing the work, and the Aeronáutica Civil escalated concerns through internal meeting minutes rather than opening formal legal proceedings.
The Procuraduría had already signaled concern about Enterritorio’s contracting practices by April 2025, when it opened a disciplinary investigation against a former official for irregularities in a separate technology contract, establishing a pattern of institutional problems that extended well beyond the ASAES program.
Documents reveal years of delays and mismanagement
The documentation Colombia’s aviation authority accumulated across two and a half years of project meetings tells the story of a collapse that unfolded gradually but consistently, with the first recorded delay appearing on April 29, 2024, when Enterritorio missed its deadline for assigning the material supply contracts for each airstrip, and with the problems compounding from that point forward without resolution.
By October 2024, Enterritorio still had not delivered the cost report for materials destined to La Primavera and Cumaribo, and calculation errors in the procurement plan for Bahía Solano remained uncorrected, while the Army’s Engineering Command was waiting for replacement parts for its machinery that never arrived. On November 22, 2025, by which point the project had consumed 55% of its total budget, the secretary of airport services placed on record that the physical construction progress stood at only 3%, a ratio so extreme that it represents not a delay but a near-total absence of visible output for the money disbursed.
The Army, for its part, sent at least fifteen formal written complaints to the aviation authority between late 2023 and mid-2026, documenting the failures in personnel contracting, material delivery, and quality certification and asking Colombia’s aviation authority to take administrative action against Enterritorio to prevent further damage to the construction schedule. In Bahía Solano specifically, the Army reported that it did not even have all the environmental permits required to proceed with certain construction phases, meaning that some work could not legally advance regardless of whether materials arrived.
Where the US$60 million went
The most difficult question the project raises is not why construction moved slowly, but why, while US$60 million produced so little infrastructure, and the answer that emerges from the technical committee meeting records involves a combination of inflated supplier prices, unauthorized fee payments, and a refusal to provide cost transparency that Colombia’s aviation authority repeatedly documented but never formally prosecuted.
The price inflation the aviation authority detected ranged from modest overcharges to figures that defy ordinary market logic: wooden stakes that a standard market values at US$0.28 per unit were billed at US$10.76; pavement baskets calculated at US$30.29 were invoiced at US$254.75; and a pavement cutting machine with a market price of US$1,981 appeared on a supplier invoice at US$7,359. For Bahía Solano alone, the aviation authority calculated that the total overcharges across materials, equipment, and services reached US$6.2 million, an amount large enough to have built significant runway infrastructure if directed to actual construction.
Alongside the inflated prices, Enterritorio was paying a 4.9% plus VAT intermediation fee, a commission (a percentage charged by an intermediary for managing a transaction) on all invoices for goods and services whose unit prices were not specified in the original contract, meaning that private operators collected more than US$1.18 million in fees that no committee ever approved, that the contract never authorized and that Colombia’s aviation authority discovered in June 2024 but still had not received adequate explanation for more than a year later. When the aviation authority asked Enterritorio to produce the cost breakdowns that would justify these payments, the entity refused, citing confidentiality obligations to its private contractors, a response that the aviation authority’s own documents described as generating inconsistency and undermining basic traceability of public resources.
How Enterritorio and Aerocivil responded
Enterritorio’s acting president admitted in conversation with Caracol Radio’s investigative unit that the project’s structural design was flawed, arguing that distributing responsibilities across the Army, a state logistics company, and multiple private operators created coordination failures that a single executor would have avoided, though she stopped short of acknowledging the specific irregularities documented in the meeting records.
She described the private operators Enterritorio selected, including the Organización Tiempos de Paz, a Cartagena-based foundation that received nearly US$1.13 million in contracts for food services and logistics simultaneously, and that the Personería of Bahía Solano accused of subcontracting its obligations and leaving local companies with unpaid debts, as “maravillosos” (wonderful) and experienced, rejecting calls for penalties against them. When Caracol Radio asked her to provide the amounts paid to each contractor alongside their corresponding completion percentages, she declined, citing confidentiality protocols with private clients.
The aviation authority acknowledged serious irregularities involving more than US$56.6 million but failed to report its findings to any prosecutorial or judicial authority. It explained that internal supervision and oversight mechanisms were resolving everything, and in April 2026, it extended Enterritorio’s contract for a fourth time, pushing the deadline to August 15.
That extension means Colombia’s next government, whoever wins the June 21 runoff, will inherit four unfinished airports, a disputed contract with an entity under multiple institutional investigations, and the outstanding question of what actually happened to the money that left government accounts and never became concrete, asphalt, or runway lights in the territories where 122,000 Colombians were promised something different.