Will Abelardo De La Espriella Continue LatAm’s Militarization Trend?
Over the last decade, Latin American governments have turned to their armed forces to compensate for the security failures of civilian police. Abelardo de la Espriella intends to follow suit and apply militarization in Colombia. This Friday, the president-elect will be inaugurated in Cali, a city that has historically been an epicenter of violence. The message is deliberate: De la Espriella wants to reclaim territory lost to organized crime, and he will not hesitate to use Colombia’s military to do it.
The first signal of this new security doctrine is already visible in the logistics of Friday’s ceremony. More than 11,000 uniformed personnel, active-duty troops, police officers, and special operations units, have been mobilized across Cali and its surrounding areas. The operation also includes heavy drone deployment, live aerial surveillance, and electronic counter-intelligence platforms monitoring strategic points throughout the city.
This is, by all intents and purposes, a preview of what might be coming. Colombia is joining a regional trend that includes El Salvador’s permanent state of exception, Ecuador’s declaration of internal armed conflict, Mexico’s consolidation of military power over public security and parts of the economy, and Peru’s ongoing military deployments in urban centers.
Has militarization in Latin America actually worked?
To understand why governments across the region have turned to their armed forces, one must start from a basic premise: Organized crime in Latin America has operational and firepower capabilities that frequently overwhelm conventional civilian police.
The problem is that deploying troops in cities has consistently generated friction with the rule of law, human rights protections, and democratic stability, often without resolving the underlying security crisis.
Peru has leaned most heavily on the military for internal security. The army has maintained an active role since the state of emergency was declared under former president Jose Jeri, and is expected to consolidate further under newly elected President Keiko Fujimori.
Soldiers patrolling urban neighborhoods and controlling prisons are no longer unusual in Peru, but it is potentially uncomfortable in a country where its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission attributed nearly 30% of internal armed conflict victims to state agents.
Ecuador’s trajectory is similarly instructive. On Jan. 9, 2024, President Daniel Noboa declared an internal armed conflict. While his government succeeded in slowing the homicide surge that had made Ecuador one of the continent’s most dangerous countries, military deployment was also followed by a significant rise in allegations of systematic human rights abuses, deaths in military custody, and investigations into the forced disappearances of at least 43 people.
Organizations including Amnesty International have reported that investigations have stalled due to a lack of cooperation from military commands.
El Salvador represents the most extreme version of this approach. The state of exception enacted by President Nayib Bukele in March 2022 assigned the Armed Forces of El Salvador permanent operational roles in mass detentions and territorial blockades, resulting in the arrest of more than 85,000 people.
While the government credits these measures with dismantling street gangs, reports submitted to the United Nations document alleged crimes against humanity, including torture, arbitrary detention without due process, and widespread deaths in state custody.
The ‘Total Peace’ is over
De la Espriella’s turn toward militarization will begin, as expected, with the formal dismantling of the Paz Total (total Piece) policy that defined the Petro administration’s security approach. The president-elect has pledged to revive Alvaro Uribe’s Democratic Security doctrine, with the stated objective of restoring full territorial control across Colombia within 90 days.
His security strategy rests on three pillars. The first is the reactivation of direct military offensive operations through Plan Colombia 2.0, supported by advanced technological platforms including drones and artificial intelligence, alongside aerial fumigation targeting all 330,000 hectares of coca cultivation currently estimated to be in production.
The second is the creation of so-called Bloques de Defensa para la Seguridad Ciudadana, or Defense Blocks for Citizen Security, deployed across major cities and assigning active frontline roles to military veterans and reservists.
The third is a significant expansion of punitive prison infrastructure through the construction of maximum-security mega-prisons operated under private concessions, modeled explicitly on the Bukele approach to complete inmate isolation.
The foundational logic of De la Espriella’s security doctrine is that peace cannot be negotiated with illegal armed groups; it must be imposed through military force.
A key early signal of this commitment was his appointment of retired General Jorge Eduardo Mora as Minister of Defense, formalizing a strategic alliance between the incoming administration and organized sectors of the retired military officer class.
The Association of Retired Armed Forces Officers (ACORE) has already submitted operational roadmaps to the new government, outlining proposed military interventions in high-risk territories during the first 100 days and establishing direct coordination channels between senior retired commanders and local security decisions.
The trade-offs
None of this comes without cost, and De la Espriella’s security model forces several uncomfortable trade-offs that his administration, which has not officially started, has not yet fully reckoned with.
The most politically charged is the Defense Blocks themselves. Critics from the Pacto Historico argue that creating armed units of retired military personnel to patrol urban areas closely mirrors the Convivir cooperatives, civilian defense groups from the 1990s that eventually evolved into the AUC paramilitary networks responsible for some of the worst atrocities of Colombia’s armed conflict.
Beyond the historical parallel, there is genuine legal ambiguity: It remains unclear whether retired military personnel performing active patrol duties would fall under military or civilian jurisdiction. There is also a structural conflict with Colombia’s own constitution, which explicitly assigns urban citizen security to the national police, not the armed forces.
Then there is the fiscal contradiction. Large-scale military deployment, the creation of new security institutions, and investment in advanced aerial fumigation technology all require significant government spending. This sits in direct tension with the austerity framework De la Espriella championed throughout his campaign.
His economic plan calls for a fiscal adjustment of roughly 70 billion pesos (US$21.8 million)to achieve a primary surplus, alongside tax relief for private enterprise.
Funding a militarized security architecture simultaneously risks diverting resources from social programs in historically neglected regions, the precise communities where unaddressed poverty and state absence have historically provided the most fertile ground for organized crime.
Organized crime tends to adapt
Finally, there is the problem of criminal adaptation. Official data shows that over the preceding period, FARC dissident factions expanded their ranks by approximately 70%, while the Clan del Golfo grew by 60%. These organizations operate as flexible, decentralized networks whose primary revenues come from illegal mining, extortion, and drug trafficking.
Sustained military pressure, without equal emphasis on financial intelligence and anti-money laundering operations, frequently produces what security analysts call the “balloon effect”: criminal cells are displaced rather than dismantled, fragmenting larger organizations into smaller, more volatile urban gangs that prove harder to target and often more indiscriminately violent.
De la Espriella’s bet is that the military can break this cycle where negotiation could not. The regional evidence suggests the outcome is unlikely to be so clean.