INZA – Thirteen Colombian Army soldiers remain stranded near the site of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crash in the mountainous municipality of Inzá, Cauca, on Wednesday, October 21, as difficult terrain and adverse weather have complicated rescue efforts.

The soldiers are spending a third day in a remote mountainous region after the aircraft, identified as Black Hawk 2175, crashed on October 19 while carrying out a military supply and troop transport mission.

Although all personnel aboard survived, several sustained injuries, including fractures. Two of the most seriously injured soldiers were transferred to Bogotá’s Military Hospital for immediate medical attention, while the remaining personnel await evacuation from the difficult-to-access area.

The National Army has rejected suggestions that the soldiers have been abandoned, saying that a rescue plan is underway and that the delay reflects the challenging geographical and climatic conditions confronting the operation.

The incident has also drawn attention to the security situation in this part of Cauca, where dissident factions of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), including groups associated with alias ‘Iván Mordisco’, maintain a presence.

The Army confirmed Wednesday that the crash was not caused by an attack or an assault by illegal armed groups. Nevertheless, the reported presence of armed dissidents adds a security consideration to operations in the region, although no direct connection between those groups and the evacuation delay has been established.

The immediate priority remains reaching the 13 soldiers, assessing their condition and bringing them to safety. As the operation continues, the central question is how quickly rescue teams can overcome the combined challenges of steep mountain terrain, adverse weather and limited access to the crash site.

The operation was carried out by Colombia’s National Police through its Anti-Narcotics Directorate (DIRAN), under the Esmeralda Strategy, according to an official statement from the Presidency. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), working with Colombian police through its Special Investigative Unit (SIU) and Bogotá office, also confirmed the seizure. The traffickers had concealed the cocaine with powdered unrefined cane sugar – panela –  to evade detection law enforcement.

The cocaine was destined for the Netherlands. The DEA estimated the shipment’s street value at US$42 million.

President Abelardo de la Espriella described the seizure as a major victory in the campaign against drug trafficking, praising the National Police for identifying the shipment and intercepting it before it could reach its destination. In a statement, the president said the operation represented “the biggest blow recorded in the last 10 years”.

Accompanied by Minister of Defense General (ret.) Jorge Mora, De la Espriella emphasised the financial impact of the seizure, declaring: “More than 42 billion pesos taken away from criminal finances and more than 19 million doses that will not reach the streets.”

A broader anti-narcotics campaign

The president also issued a direct warning to drug traffickers over their efforts to conceal narcotics and circumvent inspections. “Let this be clear to drug traffickers: it does not matter how you hide the drugs or what methods you use to try to deceive our authorities. We will find you and hit you where it hurts most: your criminal structures and your finances!” he said.

He concluded by recognising the officers involved in the operation: “My recognition to the men and women of our National Police for this decisive result.”

The president also cited the seizure as evidence of the government’s wider anti-narcotics efforts. In a separate statement, he said Colombian security forces had seized 132 tonnes of cocaine during the administration’s first 75 days, assigning the total a value of US$6.108 billion.

“Every dose we prevent from reaching the streets saves lives, and every dollar we take away weakens their criminal structures,” he said, arguing that drug-trafficking revenues fuel multiple forms of violence.

DEA underscores cooperation with Colombia

The DEA confirmed that its SIU and Bogotá office had worked with Colombia’s National Police in the operation. “DEA stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our partners to fight drug trafficking,” the agency said. The case also highlights the methods traffickers may use to disguise cocaine within commercial cargo, as well as the role of coordinated intelligence and inspections in disrupting shipments intended for overseas markets.

The Port of Cartagena on Colombia’s Caribbean coast is an important node in international maritime trade. Intercepting cocaine shipments there can disrupt trafficking networks seeking access to European markets and other international destinations.

The official statements released so far do not identify the shipping company, the precise origin of the cargo, any arrests linked to the seizure, or criminal structures behind the drugs shipment.

The museum was closed, as it is every Monday. But the controversy continued through Clase a la Calle (“Class on the Street”), a programme of public discussions running through October 24 on censorship, historical memory and the museum’s role in representing a country shaped by political violence and cultural diversity.

The government says a review of museum displays is necessary to ensure national institutions represent the entire country and respect victims of violence. Critics argue that changing exhibitions without sustained curatorial debate risks excluding communities and histories that have long been marginalised.

Culture Minister Paola Holguín set out the administration’s position over the weekend, saying the government would review “the museography, museology, and curatorship of this and all other museums under the government’s responsibility.”

“We will ensure that the National Museum preserves, restores, protects, and disseminates our culture,” Holguín said. “A culture that represents the entire nation and not just one sector.”

She also reaffirmed the government’s commitment to victims’ rights to “truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition,” pledging to oppose any “manifestation that constitutes the glorification of crime.”

“Preserving the country’s memory—its tragedies and its achievements—requires efforts from society and public authorities,” she said, arguing that the state must act against displays that dishonour victims or invert “social values and historical responsibilities.”

For the museum’s critics, however, the question is whether the pursuit of a national narrative can accommodate the country’s competing and sometimes painful histories.

Andrés Góngora, one of the museum’s curators, said the response should begin with knowledge rather than confrontation. “We must combat ignorance with knowledge,” he said, warning that the humanities, social sciences and arts are increasingly being discredited.

Góngora described the museum’s older narrative as a procession of “big moustaches”: a chronological account of national history dominated by prominent white men, excluding people who did not fit a conservative vision of nation-building.

He linked that tradition to la Regeneración, the late-19th-century political project associated with Rafael Núñez and Miguel Antonio Caro. “Remember that word, because it may soon become fashionable again,” he said. “What we are experiencing now could be understood as a new Regeneración.”

That is Góngora’s political interpretation. His broader argument is that the museum should bring different histories into dialogue rather than separate them or privilege one version of the nation.

In the renovated Memoria y Nación (“Memory and Nation”) gallery, a ceremonial staff belonging to a Wayuu palabrero, or traditional mediator, was displayed alongside an ancestral stone necklace associated with the Wayuu, a gold fountain pen used to sign Colombia’s 1991 Constitution and an ingot made from weapons surrendered by the M-19 during its peace process.

For Góngora, the juxtaposition connects Indigenous heritage, constitutional democracy and the transition from armed struggle. He also noted that one object missing from the display had been removed before the latest controversy, making it important to distinguish earlier changes from the current intervention.

“Renewing a museum also means renewing its collections,” he said.

Historian Paolo Vignolo said the dispute threatens a process of institutional change that began decades ago.

“What is happening is outrageous because it brings to a halt a process that has been under way since the 1990s: the effort to bring institutions such as the National Museum into alignment with the 1991 Constitution.”

Vignolo stressed that the museum’s evolving approach was not simply a project of Gustavo Petro’s administration, but the result of work by generations of museologists, historians, anthropologists and communities. He described the recent intervention as “something that looked like a police operation and was, in fact, a presidential blitz.”

He also acknowledged that decisions under Petro, including changes in institutional leadership, had disrupted cultural and curatorial processes. The museum, he argued, should encourage debate rather than become an instrument of any administration.

For Ana María Forero, a philosopher and anthropologist at Universidad de los Andes, the National Museum has a responsibility that distinguishes it from institutions primarily devoted to displaying art.

“The National Museum represents something different from the Banco de la República museums or the MAMBO,” she said. Its constitutional role, in her view, is to represent Colombia’s multi-ethnic and multicultural identity through historical narratives that do not exclude entire communities.

Paola Castañeda, a professor at Universidad de los Andes, said the galleries under discussion had developed over several administrations, including initiatives during Iván Duque’s presidency. The changes, she argued, should not be reduced to a project imposed by one political camp.

“The danger here is not Petro versus Abelardo. It is a particular ideology against the diversity that is Colombia,” noted Castañeda.

She warned that a national narrative centred on a white or mestizo, Catholic, male and Andean ideal cannot marginalise Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, women and LGBTQ people. Recognising victims of guerrilla violence, she added, does not mean erasing those who suffered at the hands of paramilitaries or state actors.

Artist and professor Beatriz Eugênia Díaz likewise argued that the controversy concerned more than artworks. “What was removed included symbolic objects,” she said.

Díaz, 61, recalled supporting Carlos Pizarro’s presidential campaign in 1990. The former M-19 commander, who demobilised before running for president and was assassinated during the campaign, remains for her “a symbol of peace.”

“This is a country that is diverse — diverse in race, diverse in gender identities, and neurodiverse,” she said. “We are one of the most diverse countries, and that is a source of pride.”

The dispute cannot be resolved simply by declaring one political camp the guardian of historical truths. Whatever their format or medium, works that challenge established narratives, unsettle audiences or force uncomfortable questions should remain part of sustained public and curatorial debate. The answer to a difficult or controversial work need not be its removal, but a deeper examination of what it represents, whose history it tells and how it belongs within – or outside –  the national story.

Art was never meant simply to make us comfortable. Its power lies in its ability to disturb, provoke thought and bring conflicting experiences into view. In a country as polarised as Colombia, a national museum should not seek consensus by smoothing over differences, nor deepen divisions by apologising for violence or imposing ideological revisionism on history. Or as a Spanish columnist Salúd Hernández-Mora believes: “The time will come when Colombia understands that we will not rid ourselves of violence if we continue down the path of glorifying criminals and eroding our values and principles. Nor will we overcome it by branding critics of a poorly conceived peace process as “war vultures” while praising those responsible for crimes against humanity.”

Its challenge for the new administration of President Abelardo de la Espriella is to reconcile spaces where difficult works and competing memories can be confronted, debated and understood — and where art might still help bring a nation together, however divided it remains.

Speaking at the Ministry of Culture on Thursday, alongside Holguín, De la Espriella declared that his government would no longer tolerate what he characterised as the glorification of terrorism in state institutions.

“Here, terrorists will never again have a place as if they were national heroes,” the president said, instructing the minister to ensure that representations of Pizarro and other former guerrilla figures disappeared from public spaces. “I do not accept the glorification of terrorism,” he added, according to reports of his remarks.

The directive was part of a broader campaign against what De la Espriella calls wokismo, which he argues has infiltrated Colombia’s cultural institutions and distorted the country’s national identity. He also announced plans to rename the Ministry of the Cultures, the Arts and Knowledge as the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, reversing a change made under former president Gustavo Petro.

But beyond the dispute over language and institutional names lies a more consequential question: whether Colombia’s recent history has been rewritten in ways that elevate former insurgents while marginalising the civilians who suffered at their hands.

Whose history is being told?

The controversy gained momentum after Bogotá councillor Andrés Barrios criticised displays at the National Museum following a visit with his daughters. Barrios objected to campaign posters featuring Pizarro and historical accounts that, in his view, offered justifications for the emergence of guerrilla organisations while relegating their victims to the margins. “Terrorists are given justifications; their victims are given a corner,” was the substance of his complaint, as reported by Caracol Radio.

De la Espriella subsequently took up the issue, directing Holguín to act against material he considers an endorsement of political violence.

Pizarro was the last commander of the M-19, the guerrilla organisation that demobilised in 1990 and entered electoral politics. He became a presidential candidate but was assassinated on April 26 that same year.

The M-19’s transition into democratic politics is an important part of Colombia’s modern history. It does not, however, erase the organisation’s record of armed insurgency, kidnapping and violence. Nor should its eventual participation in electoral democracy render the experiences of its victims secondary to the political rehabilitation of its former commanders.

That distinction has become central to the dispute over the historical narrative promoted during Petro’s presidency. Petro, himself a former M-19 member, has brought the movement’s legacy into public debate, presenting its revolutionary mission as part of Colombia’s political transformation.

A majority of Colombians argue that the emphasis on reconciliation and political redemption hasovershadowed the suffering inflicted during the internal armed conflict, especially since the November 1985 storming of the Palace of Justice by the M-19.

The politics of cultural memory

The controversy also reaches back to Petro’s 2024 decision to recognise Pizarro’s hat as an item of national cultural heritage, a gesture associated with the former commander’s close legacy with the country’s first leftist president.

That designation encountered a legal setback on September 30, 2026, when the Council of State provisionally suspended it. The court action concerned the heritage designation; it should not be confused with a final judicial determination of Pizarro’s broader historical legacy.

De la Espriella’s latest directive now takes the argument beyond a single object to the imagery and historical representations displayed in public institutions.

The president also used his visit to announce a wider cultural reorientation, including a renewed emphasis on national identity and religious heritage and a rejection of inclusive-language policies that he associates with the previous administration.

Holguín, whom De la Espriella has tasked with leading this cultural campaign, now faces the practical question of how to implement his instructions. The president has not publicly identified every display or work to be removed, leaving the precise scope of the directive unclear.

There is also a distinction between historical documentation and political glorification. A museum can document a guerrilla’s existence, its leaders and transition into civilian politics without endorsing its armed campaign. The question is whether the current displays adequately acknowledge the victims who suffered, and died, because of that at the hands of the M-19.

For Colombia, the stakes extend beyond a collection of posters, a hat or a ministry’s name. They concern the responsibility of public institutions to present a history in which victims are not eclipsed by the subsequent political ideology of those who once took up arms against the state.

De la Espriella’s announcement marks a direct challenge to the historical reset advanced under Petro. Whether his government can correct what it sees as a cultural imbalance without replacing one selective narrative with another will depend on the evidence it presents, the changes it implements and the space it leaves for a fuller understanding of Colombia’s decades-long conflict.

The ceremony in Jerusalem, attended by Colombian Foreign Minister Omar Bula and his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Sa’ar, was followed by an official reception featuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader welcomed Colombia’s return as a diplomatic partner, while de la Espriella used a video message to underline the political significance of the decision. “We are not simply talking about a diplomatic headquarters; we are opening a new door for Colombia and Israel to be closer,” highlighted the Colombian leader.

Netanyahu, who has sought to strengthen Israel’s relationships with governments across Latin America, offered an emphatic response to Bogotá’s change of direction. “Colombia stands with us,” he declared at the reception, thanking the Colombian government for its support. “We stand firm for civilization, for life, for hope, and we will combat the barbarians, and we thank those who stand with us, and Colombia stands with us,” he said.

His remarks captured the political dimension of the inauguration. For Israel, Colombia’s decision represents more than the restoration of diplomatic relations: it is a public endorsement from a country that, under Petro, had become one of the region’s most outspoken critics of the Israeli leadership and military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu also praised de la Espriella’s decision to choose Jerusalem, describing the Colombian president as “a leader with courage and vision”. The Israeli Prime Minister’s welcome reflected the significance Israel attaches to Jerusalem, and Colombia becoming the tenth country to have an embassy in the contested city, joining the United States, Fiji, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Somaliland.

The reception, organized by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, brought together Netanyahu, Sa’ar, Bula Escobar, Colombian ambassador to Israel Tania Gilinski and Israeli ambassador to Colombia Vivian Aisen, alongside other diplomatic representatives.

For Bula, the inauguration was an opportunity to establish a new foundation for bilateral cooperation after the rupture of 2024. “Today, we are taking a concrete step towards restoring diplomatic relations between our countries, relations that should never have been broken,” the foreign minister said. “Israel is a strategic partner. It always has been, and from now on, it will be an even stronger one.”

In his official address, Bula described the Embassy as “a visible expression of our determination to restore dialogue, strengthen mutual trust and build an agenda that delivers tangible benefits to our citizens.”

He said the diplomatic mission would serve Colombia’s national interests, provide assistance to Colombian citizens and promote a practical programme of cooperation. Areas identified by the government include security and defence, the fight against transnational crime, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, technological innovation and investment.

The economic reset had already begun before the inauguration. Colombia and Israel restored their free trade agreement on Tuesday, adding a commercial dimension to the diplomatic rapprochement. The government is also seeking to expand opportunities for Colombian exports, including agricultural products, flowers, coffee and manufactured goods, while attracting Israeli investment in technology and innovation.

The Embassy’s location, however, carries implications beyond bilateral commerce. Despite Jerusalem being the state capital of Israel, most countries maintain diplomatic missions in Tel Aviv. In 1980, Colombia withdrew their embassy from Jerusalem due to a non-binding UN resolution, and which the U.S. described as non-mandatory.

The shift stands in sharp contrast to Petro’s presidency. In May 2024, his government severed all diplomatic relations with Israel and summoned anti-Israel protests in Bogotá’s historic Plaza de Bolívar. He relentlessly labeled Netanyahu a “war criminal” which also strained an already tense relationship with U.S President Donald Trump.

The political consequences of the rupture were visible in Colombia on Wednesday, when approximately 8,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Bogotá in an anti-government rally with a cameo appearance by the ex-President. Heavy rain and hail battered the capital’s historic centre as trade unionists and other protesters voiced opposition to the new administration.

Palestinian flags and pro-Palestinian chants provided a striking counterpoint to the on-going celebrations in Jerusalem. While Colombian officials presented the Embassy as a step towards renewed strategic cooperation, the demonstration in Bogotá, quickly dissipated with the inclement weather, leaving many observers to question why there were more Palestinian flags among attendees than the Colombian tri-color.

The two events reflect Colombia’s place in the world depending on the deep political divide. De la Espriella’s administration is seeking to rebuild alliances that deteriorated under his predecessor, placing security cooperation, trade and commercial interests and closer relations with Israel at the centre of a new foreign policy. Petro and his supporters will continue to champion a more radical different approach, one that placed opposition to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza at the forefront of Colombia’s foreign policy narratives.

With the embassy now open and return of coal shipments to Israel, the diplomatic reversal has moved from political promise to institutional reality. The challenge for President Abelardo de la Espriella will be to translate the renewed relationship into measurable economic and security benefits for Colombians and new administration that must also contend with Petro’s return to the streets.

The demonstrations, called by Colombia’s main trade union confederations, teachers’ organizations and left-wing movements, come as the government prepares to implement new regulations governing public demonstrations. They also follow a two-hour security meeting chaired by De la Espriella on Tuesday at the Directorate of Police Intelligence (DIPOL) in Bogotá.

The president used the meeting to reinforce his administration’s security priorities, instructing the National Police to anticipate criminal activity, dismantle criminal organizations and restore public confidence in the authorities. “Go one step ahead of criminals, dismantle their structures and restore peace of mind to Colombian families,” De la Espriella told senior police officials.

The preparations reflect the government’s stated determination to maintain public order on Wednesday while ensuring that demonstrations can proceed peacefully. Petro’s announcement that he will attend the Bogotá marches is viewed by critics as a means to deflect attention to recent scandals involving his estranged wife and former First Lady Veronica Alcocer.

A line between protest and violence

In a televised address to the nation on Monday evening, De la Espriella sought to reassure both those planning to demonstrate and Colombians concerned about the impact of the marches on their daily lives.

“I want to speak to you with absolute clarity, both to those who will take to the streets and to those who will need to work, study, attend a medical appointment or travel across the country that day,” stated the president. “The right to peaceful protest is a constitutional guarantee. There is no debate about that. It does not depend on whether someone agrees with the president or with the decisions of this government. Anyone who thinks differently has the right to express their views, and be heard.”

The president said he had instructed authorities to coordinate with protest organizers and local governments on mobility, prevention, emergency response and public protection.

He also highlighted that police intervention should follow the principles of necessity and proportionality, with the protection of life taking precedence. “The priority is to protect lives, prevent violence and allow the day to unfold peacefully,” he said.

De la Espriella warned that the right to demonstrate did not give protesters permission to endanger others, damage property or obstruct emergency services. “Protest does not authorize anyone to assault other citizens. Protest does not authorize the destruction of property, threats against workers or preventing ambulances and emergency services from gaining access,” he said.

Authorities would respond to conduct constituting criminal offences in accordance with the law, supported by evidence and subject to judicial oversight, the president added. “We will under no circumstances confuse legitimate discontent with violence,” he said.

The remarks establish the administration’s stated position ahead of the first day under the new protest regulations. Wednesday will put that commitment into practice, with authorities expected to balance the protection of peaceful demonstrators against the need to respond to violence or serious disruption.

Bogotá prepares for disruption

The nationwide marches have been summoned by Colombia’s principal labor confederations, including the Central Unitary Workers’ Union (CUT), alongside the Colombian Federation of Education Workers (Fecode), the Capital District’s teachers’ association and other social and political organisations.

Among the concerns driving the demonstrations are public education, teachers’ healthcare, employment conditions and social benefits, alongside wider opposition to government policies. The mobilisation is expected to extend beyond Bogotá to other major Colombian cities.

In Bogotá, the District Education Workers’ Association has confirmed a 10 a.m. gathering at Parque Nacional, with demonstrators expected to march towards Plaza de Bolívar. Other scheduled activities include a march involving the CUT, CTC, CGT, CDP, Fecode, Pacto Histórico and Alianza por la Vida, to Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar.

A separate march on Tuesday afternoon, billed as “¿Cansado de los sionistas?” (“Tired of the Zionists?”), is scheduled to gather outside the US Embassy before proceeding towards Plaza de Bolívar, adding to the potential for traffic disruption along the Avenida El Dorado.

Plan journeys carefully

For Bogotá residents, the immediate concern is mobility. The expected police deployment and planned marches make it prudent to allow additional travel time, particularly during morning rush hour and around the city centre.

Potentially affected areas include the corridors around Parque Nacional, Carrera Séptima, Carrera Décima, Calle 26 and Plaza de Bolívar. TransMilenio services and other public transport routes could face diversions or delays if demonstrations affect major roads or exclusive bus lanes. The district government has advised residents to monitor official mobility updates and plan journeys in advance.

De la Espriella has taken a firm position against road blockades, but the extent of any disruption will depend on how the demonstrations unfold and how authorities respond. For commuters and anyone with medical appointments, checking updates from the Bogotá Secretariat of Mobility, TransMilenio and the police before leaving home will be essential.

Wednesday’s marches will test two commitments the president has made publicly: that peaceful dissent will be protected and that violence will not be tolerated. For Bogotá’s authorities, the challenge is to uphold both while preventing the vandalism of public transport infrastructure and private property that has repeatedly marred demonstrations in defense of Petro’s embattled presidency.

Ajay Bhatnagar, 51, a radiation oncologist of Indian heritage who lived and worked in the United States, died at approximately 5 p.m. on Monday after developing medical complications while attending the highly-promoted outdoor music and dance carnival.

According to Colombian media outlets Bhatnagar was rushed to the Clínica El Rosario on Sunday, where his condition initially stabilized. Investigators are examining whether the emergency was associated with the suspected consumption of high doses of amphetamines and alcohol. A definitive cause of death has not been released by the National Forensic Institute – Medicina Legal.

The renown doctor’s death followed that of Costa Rican Ismael Gerardo Méndez Huertas, 27, who was found unconscious and experiencing severe breathing difficulties during the festival on Saturday night. He was transported to Pablo Tobón Uribe Hospital, where he died in the early hours of Sunday.

Meanwhile, Australian national Frank Stephen Ramírez, 46, was found seriously injured in the Laureles neighbourhood during the early hours of Sunday, reportedly after attending the festival. Local media reported that he had sustained 25 stab wounds. He was taken to hospital and remained in serious condition in the latest reports, as police investigated the circumstances of the attack and a possible robbery.

The three cases involve foreign nationals during a single weekend, but authorities have not established a connection between the Australian’s assault and the two deaths. The cases remain separate investigations.

Prominent medical career

Bhatnagar’s death is notable not only because of the circumstances surrounding the festival but also because of his professional background.

Born in London, he spent much of his childhood in Pennsylvania before studying bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated magna cum laude. He subsequently obtained a medical degree and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh, completing postgraduate training in radiation oncology at the university’s medical centre.

He founded the Prostate Cancer Institute of Arizona and worked with hospitals through Alliance Oncology. His clinical practice included prostate brachytherapy, a treatment that uses radioactive implants placed within the prostate to target cancer cells. In 2023, he was named in the Nationwide Registries’ Top Doctors of America Honors Edition, according to his professional biography.

EDC’s Colombian debut

The festival’s arrival in Medellín had been promoted as a major milestone for Colombia’s electronic music scene and the city’s international entertainment ambitions.

Organized by Insomniac in partnership with Colombian live entertainment company Páramo Presenta, EDC staged its first Colombian edition at the Atanasio Girardot complex on October 10 and 11. The event featured more than 80 artists across seven stages and drew a reported audience of more than 94,000 over the two days. EDC is known internationally for its large-scale productions, immersive light displays and performances by leading electronic music artists. Its arrival reflects Medellín’s growing appeal as a destination for international events and visitors.

But the reported deaths and violent assault have raised questions about the risks facing attendees and the arrangements in place to respond to medical emergencies and crime surrounding a major festival.

Questions over safety and accountability

Méndez Huertas’s father, Javier Méndez, told El Colombiano that his son was not an addict and called for the circumstances of his death to be clarified. Friends of the Costa Rican have also raised questions about security checks and the apparent availability of illicit substances inside the venue.

In the case of the Australian, investigators were reviewing security-camera footage and witness accounts to reconstruct his movements before he was found injured in Laureles. One reported line of inquiry concerns a possible robbery, but the motive had not been confirmed.

The cases also raise questions about the effectiveness of emergency medical provision at large-scale events, the detection and prevention of dangerous substance use, and the safety of international visitors moving between festival venues and accommodation.

According to Medellín’s Health Secretariat over 100 persons received medical assistance during the two-day carnival.

For Medellín, which has worked to strengthen its reputation as a destination for tourism, nightlife and international cultural events, the distinction between promoting a successful festival and ensuring public safety has come under scrutiny.

Evidence so far does not establish that EDC’s organisers are implicated in any of the three incidents. Nor does it demonstrate that the cases share a common cause. But the concentration of two deaths and a serious knife attack involving foreign nationals over one weekend shows how  foreigners remain exposed in Colombian to external security risks, including drug-related crimes. For Bhatnagar’s family and medical colleagues, the loss is that of a physician whose career was devoted to treating cancer.

Scopolamine, a substance used in some robberies and assaults to incapacitate victims, has featured prominently in travel advisories to tourists about accepting drinks, food or other substances from strangers. While there is no evidence that scopolamine was involved in the EDC cases, however, the deaths and reported knife attack underscore the importance of visitor safety across Colombia.

For Medellín, the tragedy raises broader questions about a city seeking to move beyond an international image indelibly linked to Pablo Escobar, the Medellín Cartel and narco-tourism. As the city courts international audiences through major cultural and entertainment events, its ability to ensure their safety remains central to its ambitions of becoming a global tourism destination.

The image is even more striking when one considers that the man who once commanded Latin America’s oldest insurgency is now participating in work connected to the recovery and identification of human remains and the search for Colombia’s disappeared. The cemetery assignment began on September 21 as part of sanctions imposed on former members of the FARC’s last Secretariat for their responsibility in thousands of kidnappings.

The measures are intended to contribute to reparation and reconciliation, although many victims have challenged the tribunal as to whether the work adequately addresses the suffering of those kidnapped by the guerrilla.

Yet Londoño’s appearance at the cemetery is only one part of a much larger reckoning with the FARC’s past. On October 8, a new U.S. indictment against former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, again placed the former guerrilla commander’s name in an international criminal case.

According to the allegations described in the court filing, Maduro and Flores met with Londoño and other senior FARC leaders in 2013 to discuss a debt allegedly arising from a drug-trafficking arrangement. Subsequent reporting has described allegations that the debt was to be settled, in part, through the provision of explosives from Venezuela’s military stocks.

The distinction is crucial: Londoño’s appearance in the account of an alleged meeting does not, by itself, mean he has been charged in the United States. Nor have the allegations been proven in court. But the reported transaction raises serious questions about the alleged relationship between Venezuela’s political leadership, the FARC’s wartime command and the illicit economies that helped sustain Colombia’s armed conflict.

The Alleged Debt

The alleged meeting, described in reporting on the 30-page superseding indictment filed in Manhattan federal court, took place shortly after the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in March 2013. Alongside Londoño, the document reportedly identifies Luciano Marín Arango, known as Iván Márquez, and Seuxis Pausias Hernández Solarte, known as Jesús Santrich, as participants.

According to the allegations, Maduro and Flores met with the three FARC commanders to discuss money allegedly owed to the guerrilla organization through an arrangement connected to drug trafficking. One reported proposal to settle part of the debt involved the transfer or sale of explosives from Venezuelan military reserves to the FARC.

The allegation is consequential because it describes more than a political relationship between Caracas and Colombia’s insurgency. It suggests a potential exchange between a senior Venezuelan political figure and an armed organization that financed its campaign through illicit activities. If substantiated, such an arrangement would raise questions about the use of state resources and the extent to which Venezuela’s military infrastructure may have been exploited to support an armed group operating across the border.

The published reporting also describes allegations of oil sales and operations involving gold mines as possible means of providing financial resources to the FARC. The reported oil transactions allegedly continued until approximately 2015. The precise value of the alleged debt, the details of any transfer and the extent of the involvement of each individual would need to be established through the evidence presented in court.

Londoño’s name appearing in the account does not establish that he personally negotiated, authorised or received any shipment of explosives. Nor does it mean that he is a defendant in the new case against Maduro and Flores.

Havana Peace Negotiations

The alleged 2013 meeting also carries a particular weight for Colombia’s decade-old peace process. By that time, FARC and the government of President Juan Manuel Santos were negotiating an agreement intended to end a conflict that had lasted more than half a century.

The negotiations culminated in the 2016 Final Accord, which morphed FARC into a political movement with congressional representation. Londoño subsequently became the public face of the former guerrilla’s transition to civilian life.

The U.S. allegations now place an alleged discussion of a narcotics-related debt against that historical backdrop. They raise questions about the relationship between FARC’s political leadership, its wartime finances and its contacts with Venezuelan officials during a period in which the guerrilla was publicly negotiating an end to the conflict.

However, the reported meeting alone does not establish that the peace negotiations were a cover for continued arms transfers, or that the alleged arrangements were part of the negotiations themselves. Those conclusions would require evidence beyond the reported account of the meeting.

The distinction matters in a country where the peace agreement remains a central point of political contention. For victims of kidnapping, forced displacement, recruitment and other abuses, the question of accountability extends beyond the formal demobilization of an armed group to the disclosure of what sustained its military operations and whether those responsible have fully acknowledged their actions.

 Maduro’s Network

The indictment’s significance extends beyond the ex-FARC’s Secretariat. U.S. prosecutors also describe alleged relationships between senior Venezuelan figures and other armed or criminal gropus, including Colombia’s National Liberation Army, or ELN.

According to reporting on the filing, the allegations include claims that Cilia Flores offered contracts linked to Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), to groups aligned with the ELN. Other passages reportedly describe extortion in territories where armed groups exercised control and alleged arrangements to facilitate the movement of cocaine through Venezuela.

One official identified in the indictment as CC-3 is alleged to have travelled to areas near the Colombian border under ELN control to help ensure the passage of cocaine shipments. The reported allegations also refer to contacts between representatives of the official and Colombian narcotics traffickers continuing into 2025.

For Colombia, the security implications are immediate in geographical terms. Its 2,300-km long border with Venezuela has repeatedly been a concern for authorities confronting armed groups, trafficking routes and illicit economies. The October 8 indictment also adds a separate dimension to the proceedings against Maduro and Flores: allegations of conspiracy to commit torture against political opponents and U.S. citizens.

The U.S. Department of Justice says the superseding indictment describes alleged abuses including electric shocks, asphyxiation, sexual violence, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, deprivation of food and psychological torture through threats against victims’ families. Prosecutors allege that state security and intelligence structures were used to suppress perceived opposition and consolidate political power.

Back in Pitalito, Londoño’s work at the cemetery is part of a judicial process designed to address the consequences of the Colombian conflict. The restorative sanctions imposed by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace require former members of the FARC Secretariat to undertake work connected to the search for disappeared people and the construction of historical memory.

The measures are intended to contribute to reparation, but they have also drawn criticism from some victims who question whether the sanctions adequately reflect the scale of the suffering caused by kidnapping and other abuses. Their concerns underline the difficult balance between restorative justice and the demands of those who want fuller recognition of the crimes committed against them.

The sight of a former guerrilla commander clearing vegetation among graves is a powerful image of Colombia’s attempt to reckon with its past. The new U.S. allegations serve as a reminder that the history of the conflict may extend beyond the battlefield and peace table, into the networks of money, weapons and political relationships that prosecutors are now seeking to reconstruct.

Whether the allegations concerning Maduro, Flores and the former FARC leadership withstand judicial scrutiny remains to be seen. For now, the indictment has reopened questions about a period in which Colombia was pursuing peace while, according to U.S. prosecutors, illicit relationships involving armed groups and Venezuelan officials flourished. And relationships that now lead to a U.S District court and an abandoned graveyard in southern Colombia.

The coincidence is difficult to ignore. The political vehicle created to bring the FARC into the democratic fold has failed to establish a durable electoral constituency. The judicial institution designed to hold perpetrators accountable is under pressure to demonstrate that its exceptional powers can produce meaningful results before its mandate expires.

Neither development invalidates the peace agreement, however. But both raise a fundamental question: after years of institutional guarantees, hefty public expenditure and political polarization over impunity, can Colombia show that the promises made back in 2016 have translated into lasting political legitimacy and timely justice for victims?

For one of FARC’s most high-profile hostages, Ingrid Betancourt, JEP should now be “shut down.” In a social media post, the former presidential candidate claims, that the tribunal “was created as a business to enrich many in exchange for guaranteeing impunity to FARC”. She then goes on to state that ‘ending JEP is an opportunity to do what was promised to us and never fulfilled: to finally guarantee the victims’ right to truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition.”

The end of Comunes

This week Colombia’s National Electoral Council (CNE) also confirmed the loss of Comunes’ legal status through Resolution 4006. The decision followed the March congressional elections, in which the party secured some 114,000 Senate votes, falling far short of the constitutional threshold of 3% of valid votes. The ex-FARC commander Sandra Ramírez, known by her alias “Griselda Lobo Silva” and a former senator who was seeking re-election, received just 10,505 votes.

As stipulated in the Final Accord, over two legislative terms, from 2018 to 2026, the former guerrilla movement would benefit from having a political voice, with five seats in the Senate and five in the House of Representatives. Those arrangements were transitional by design. They were intended to give a former armed group an opportunity to establish itself within Colombia’s democratic system, and not to provide permanent parliamentary representation regardless of electoral performance.

That distinction matters. The end of Comunes’ legal status is not the expulsion of former combatants from democratic politics. Nor does it mean that the peace agreement has been formally repudiated. It is evidence, however, that the political project born from the Havana accord failed to build even the most marginal support among a 40 million-strong electorate to sustain its institutional existence.

The ballot box on March 8 delivered its verdict on Comunes as a party. Its former representatives are now free to pursue lawful political participation through other arrangements, but the exceptional guarantees that once secured their presence in Congress have ended.

Justice cannot remain perpetual

The more consequential test may lie with the JEP. Established as part of the agreement’s transitional justice system, the tribunal was tasked with investigating serious crimes committed during the armed conflict, including kidnappings, forced disappearances, sexual violence and extrajudicial executions. Its purpose was not simply to process cases, but to establish the truth, determine responsibility, provide justice to victims and help prevent renewed violence.

The need for such a mechanism was undeniable. Colombia’s conflict claimed more than 260,000 lives, displaced millions and left communities across the country enduring decades of violence. A negotiated settlement was a historic milestone, and the decision to bring the FARC into civilian politics represented a significant departure from a conflict that had resisted military and political solutions for generations.

But a historic mandate cannot become an excuse for indefinite delay.

The JEP issued its first sentences in 2025, years after the agreement was signed. Its major investigations, known as macro-cases, concern crimes committed on a scale that demands painstaking evidence-gathering and complex judicial proceedings. The gravity of those crimes justifies rigorous investigations. It does not remove the obligation to deliver decisions within a credible timeframe.

On October 1, former president Juan Manuel Santos, the architect of the peace agreement and  Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said critics of the tribunal’s slowness had considerable justification. He called on the JEP to accelerate its work and said it should fulfil its mandate by 2028, preferably earlier.

Santos’ intervention is significant precisely because it comes from the man who negotiated the settlement and defended its institutional design. His criticism cannot easily be dismissed as hostility to the peace process. It reflects a problem at the heart of the agreement: transitional justice must eventually transition from investigation to accountability.

Santos subsequently clarified that the tribunal’s budget should be guaranteed through 2033, consistent with the longer period contemplated for its judicial work. His position is therefore not a demand to abandon the JEP, but a call to make it deliver within the agreed framework.

The cost of unfinished justice

The budget dispute has sharpened the confrontation. A proposed reduction of COP 170 billion in the JEP’s 2027 allocation has drawn warnings from the tribunal that the cuts could seriously disrupt its operations and prevent it from completing much of its work before the March 2028 deadline.

The government of President Abelardo de la Espriella argues that public resources must also address the weaknesses of the ordinary justice system. That is a legitimate policy concern. Colombia’s conventional courts face serious problems of capacity, delay and access to justice, and the victims of crimes outside the JEP’s jurisdiction have no less claim on the state.

Yet cutting a transitional tribunal’s resources while demanding that it accelerate its work risks producing precisely the outcome its critics condemn: more delay, fewer completed cases and greater frustration among victims.

The alternative is not to give the JEP an unlimited budget or an open-ended mandate. Public institutions must justify their expenditure, explain their delays and demonstrate results. A tribunal created to deliver accountability should be subject to scrutiny, particularly when its work involves extraordinary arrangements for those responsible for grave crimes.

But accountability cannot be measured solely by the number of years elapsed or the money spent. The relevant test is whether the process produces credible findings, meaningful consequences and tangible outcomes for victims. If the JEP cannot meet that test, it must explain why.

Even Humberto de la Calle, Colombia’s former High Commissioner for Peace and chief peace negotiator with FARC, acknowledges that JEP has “made mistakes” and will have to face the budget cuts announced by De la Espriella. De la Calle pointed out that the “challenge now will be for JEP to deliver results”.

The peace agreement was never meant to be an end in itself. Its success – or failure – depends on what follows: a political system in which former combatants compete without special guarantees, a justice system that establishes responsibility without endless delay, and a government that can deliver for victims rather than asking them to wait indefinitely.

The disappearance of Comunes is one marker of that transition. JEP’s approaching deadline is another. The question now is whether Colombia can complete the work of peace before public confidence erodes even further.

The warning comes as the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC) prepares for four days of demonstrations and meetings under the slogan “Indigenous Summit and Social Mobilization for Life.” The gathering is being organized in Caldono, a town under frequent attack from FARC dissidents and in department where indigenous and other vulnerable communities face persistent threats from illegal armed groups, including the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla.

Speaking after a lengthy cabinet meeting at the Casa de Nariño, De la Espriella said the government respects Colombia’s indigenous peoples and remains prepared to engage directly with their legitimate authorities. But he drew a clear distinction between the right to demonstrate and actions that obstruct transportation or seek to impose political conditions through pressure. “One thing is Colombia’s indigenous peoples, and something very different is the CRIC.”

The president said his government “deeply respects” indigenous communities and is willing to maintain dialogue with their legitimate authorities. But he added: “We are not going to negotiate under pressure. We are not going to negotiate through actions outside the law, and certainly not under threats.”

De la Espriella’s warning comes against an unusually difficult security backdrop in Cauca. The department remains one of the principal areas affected by illegal armed groups and has become a major centre of child recruitment by FARC dissidents.

The Colombian Ombudsman’s Office registered 14 cases of forced recruitment of children and adolescents in Cauca between January and May 2026, second only to Norte de Santander, which recorded 15. Nationally, the Ombudsman’s Office registered 51 cases during the same period.

The scale of the problem is considerably larger when viewed over several years. According to recent Colombian government data at least 1,500 children had been recruited nationally since 2021, with FARC dissident groups responsible for the vast majority of reported cases. More than half of the documented cases were concentrated in Cauca, while indigenous children accounted for nearly half of reported victims despite representing only a small proportion of Colombia’s population.

The security threat also extends to one of the country’s most important transportation corridors.

The Pan-American Highway, which connects southwestern Colombia with the rest of the country, has repeatedly been targeted by illegal armed groups. In August, just one day after De la Espriella took office, a car bomb exploded at a toll plaza on the highway, injuring two security guards and damaging nearby homes. The Army attributed the attack to FARC dissidents.

In September, another explosive attack on the Pan-American Highway near the Cauca-Nariño border killed one soldier and wounded two others. Authorities said the device appeared to have been used as a lure to attract members of the security forces to the site.

Against this backdrop, any disruption of the Pan-American Highway during a major mobilization would have consequences extending well beyond the immediate area of protest.

De la Espriella also announced that his government would also investigate the COP$1.13 billion pesos that the leftist government of Gustavo Petro gave CRIC to appease its leadership. “Peso by peso, we are going to review contract by contract and agreement by agreement.”

The president said that Colombians have an unquestionable right to demonstrate peacefully, but that this right cannot be used to deprive other citizens of their own rights. “Anyone who wants to demonstrate peacefully will have every guarantee, but we will not allow blockades of any kind, violence or actions intended to paralyze regions in order to impose conditions on the government.”

He went further, explicitly linking the right to protest with the rights of other Colombians to move freely, work and access essential services. “Protest ends where the rights of others begin. No one can prevent another Colombian from working, studying, reaching a hospital or moving freely.”

The President then issued his strongest warning: “Those who march peacefully will have every guarantee. Those who block roads, destroy property or attack the security forces or citizens will have to answer for their actions and face the full force of the state.”

He immediately qualified that statement by saying that authorities would operate within the law. “The authorities will act within the Constitution and the law, without excesses, but also without permissiveness.”

The distinction is significant in Cauca, where indigenous communities themselves have been victims of violence by illegal armed groups and where the Indigenous Guard operates as a community-based territorial protection structure.

Previous mobilizations in Colombia’s largest cities, including Bogotá, have resulted in the occupation of public parks, media outlets, and government buildings as well as   infiltration by criminal groups and masked vandals – encapuchados. The security concern, however, is unavoidable in a region where illegal organizations have demonstrated their ability to recruit children, threaten communities and attack key infrastructure.

The October mobilization will therefore provide an early test of the De la Espriella government’s approach to protest in one of Colombia’s most difficult security scenarios.

The immediate issue is whether the four-day mobilization can proceed as a peaceful civic demonstration without disrupting strategic food supply chains or creating conditions for violence in a territory already under pressure from narco-terrorist groups.

For De la Espriella, the message is clear: peaceful protest will be protected, but paralysis of public roads, any act violence and political coercion will not be accepted as negotiating tactics.

On Monday afternoon, October 5, a powerful electrical storm swept across the city after temperatures climbed to 24.6°C during the morning. Within hours, heavy rain and hail transformed parts of western Bogotá into a landscape of ice, while lightning disrupted operations at El Dorado International Airport.

According to Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), satellite observations recorded 264 electrical discharges over Bogotá and 1,973 lightning strikes across the Bogotá savanna, principally between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. The most concentrated activity occurred around Pacho, Subachoque and La Peña.

The storm brought a sudden whiteout to parts of Engativá, Kennedy, Fontibón and Suba, where streets and parks were buried beneath hail. The District Institute for Risk Management and Climate Change (IDIGER) reported five fallen trees, flooding and water accumulation, as well as damage to lightweight roofs and structures.

At El Dorado, the storm became an aviation emergency. Aerocivil imposed a temporary ground stop because of severely reduced visibility and failures in airport communications. More than 10 departing flights were cancelled and 58 arriving flights delayed.

The apparent contradiction is at the heart of Bogotá’s extraordinary weather this week.

Colombia is experiencing a strong El Niño event, and the dry conditions have already heightened concern about vegetation fires. In Cundinamarca alone, authorities reported 755 forest fires during the first eight months of 2026, affecting approximately 2,711 hectares, with August accounting for almost 80 percent of the year’s affected area.

In Bogotá itself, authorities had issued high-risk warnings for vegetation fires because of low precipitation and elevated temperatures. Yet El Niño, expected to last into 2027, does not mean that rain disappears.

IDEAM meteorologist Carolina Rueda explained that El Niño reduces the amount of rainfall expected over the longer term but does not eliminate individual episodes of intense precipitation. Monday’s storm developed when unusually warm conditions were followed by the arrival of moist air, creating a highly unstable atmosphere.

That instability could remain a feature of Bogotá’s weather through October and November, precisely when the capital enters its second traditional rainy season.

IDIGER has warned that intense rain and hail could continue during those months, urging residents to prepare drainage systems, inspect roofs and avoid trees or lightweight structures during hailstorms.

The result is a city caught between two extremes: a landscape dry enough to raise alarms about forest fires, yet an atmosphere capable of producing sudden torrents, hail and thousands of lightning strikes within a matter of hours.

And Monday’s storm will not be the last. IDEAM forecasts continued, intermittent rainfall across the Andean region through November 30, while meteorologists are warning Bogotá residents to take shelter during electric storms.

For a city accustomed to saying that Bogotá can experience four seasons in a single day, the latest weather has offered a more dramatic reminder: even during a period of drought, the sky can still arrive with extraordinary force.

The new emphasis emerged from the third national formation course for exorcists, held in Bogotá under the title “Liberate and Care: The Ministry of Exorcism from a Culture of Care.” The meeting held last week in the Colombian capital brought together over 80 priests and representatives from ecclesiastical jurisdictions across the country, with contributions from national and international specialists.

Rather than presenting exorcism as an immediate response to unusual or disturbing behaviour, the Church is insisting that priests first determine what may actually be happening.

Father Carlos Guillermo Arias Jiménez, director of the Department of Doctrine of the Colombian Episcopal Conference, explained that exorcism forms part of Catholic doctrine but that not every unusual situation should be interpreted as possession or demonic influence.

Before an exorcism is considered, there must be a process of discernment and a moral certainty that a possible malign influence exists. That assessment can involve psychological and psychiatric professionals, reflecting the Church’s insistence that spiritual questions should not automatically eclipse medical, psychological or social explanations.

The distinction is central to the new approach.

The course addressed the need to avoid premature spiritual interpretations of circumstances that may have psychological, psychiatric, medical or social dimensions. It also examined possible abuses in the use of the ritual and stressed the importance of theological and canonical training, prayer and interdisciplinary work.

For Monsignor José Mauricio Vélez García, auxiliary bishop of Medellín and president of the Episcopal Commission for Doctrine, the priest who performs an exorcism also requires protection and support. “We must not only value the figure of the exorcist, but also care for him,” he said.

The exorcist, according to the Church, is not an independent religious practitioner. He is a priest appointed by the bishop and authorized to exercise the ministry. The Church therefore wants greater clarity about who is legitimately authorized to perform exorcisms and who is not.

Monsignor Rubens Miraglia Zani, an exorcist from the Diocese of Bauru in Brazil and one of the international speakers at the Bogotá meeting, emphasized the institutional nature of the ministry. “We do not act in our own name, but in the name of the Church, and therefore we must follow what the Church itself asks of us,” highlighted the official.

That warning has practical significance. The course noted that people seeking immediate answers to distressing experiences can be vulnerable to individuals who present themselves as exorcists without having received authorization from the Church.

The emphasis on vulnerability was one of the strongest themes of the meeting.

Father Iván José Ruiz Vidal, delegate for the Ministry of Exorcism of the Archdiocese of Cartagena, said that incorporating a culture of care into the ministry can help prevent people from being harmed again. “To the extent that we adopt care within our ministry, we avoid becoming involved in re-victimization,” emphasized Ruiz.

The concept of care extends beyond the person seeking an exorcism. The Church is also examining the responsibilities of the teams that accompany exorcists, including their selection, formation, discretion and understanding of the limits of their role.

Father Gabriel Londoño Sepúlveda, an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Bogotá, described that responsibility as operating in two directions: caring for those who come seeking assistance and caring for the minister himself. He stressed truth, love, sound doctrine, listening and pastoral accompaniment as essential elements of the work.

The training also addressed the risks associated with practices of occultism and certain alternative therapies, arguing that education and prevention are necessary so that Catholics can develop their own criteria for distinguishing between different spiritual practices.

At the same time, the Church is seeking to discourage protagonism and self-referential behaviour among exorcists. The priest’s physical, psychological and spiritual wellbeing was included in the discussion, along with the importance of maintaining communion with the bishop and the wider Church.

The latest course continues a process begun through two previous national training programmes focused respectively on exorcism and prayers of liberation, and on discernment and spirituality as foundations for the priest and his team.

Eight working groups organized according to Colombia’s ecclesiastical provinces examined practical challenges, canonical norms and areas of competence. Their conclusions will subsequently be systematized by the Colombian Episcopal Conference.

For Ruiz, the process points toward continuing education and a larger pool of properly trained priests.

“It is important that we continue to train ourselves, and hopefully we will also have the possibility of continuing to train a greater number of priests,” he said. He stressed that the ministry cannot be reduced to an exclusively spiritual understanding of the situations affecting people, but must also take into account their social circumstances and human dignity.

The Church’s message is therefore less about expanding the practice of exorcism than about establishing boundaries around it. In Colombia, the Ministry of Exorcism is being presented as a specialized pastoral responsibility requiring authorization, formation, discernment and interdisciplinary cooperation.

At its centre is a principle that extends beyond the question of whether demonic influence exists: people who arrive seeking help must not leave more vulnerable than when they came.

For the Colombian Episcopal Conference, the future of its Ministr of Exorcism rests on a culture of care — combining spiritual and doctrinal formation with canonical responsibility, professional discernment and protection of human life.

Two fledgling months, however, is not a litmus test of a new Colombian presidency, but it is long enough to understand its direction. And on security, De la Espriella has left little room for ambiguity.

The rupture with Petro’s erratic governance is complete.

The new president has repeatedly stated that his government will not negotiate with illegal armed organisations and will not use intermediaries to establish political channels with groups that continue to traffic drugs, extort civilians, recruit children and challenge the authority of the Colombian state.

It is one of the clearest ideological breaks between the two administrations.

Petro’s Total Peace sought to bring multiple armed and criminal organisations into a negotiating framework, arguing that Colombia’s cycle of violence could not be resolved through military force alone. De la Espriella has rejected that premise. For his government, illegal armed groups are not potential political interlocutors but criminal and security threats whose territorial power must be confronted.

That distinction is now being played out on the ground.

In Santa Marta, the government’s decision to strengthen military operations has provided an early test of the new doctrine. The message is unmistakable: the state intends to recover territory and confront criminal organisations rather than negotiate its way out of the problem.

For a country where extortion, drug trafficking, displacement and armed groups have expanded into territories where the state remains weak, the policy has obvious political appeal.

But it also raises the first major test of the De la Espriella presidency: can military pressure produce lasting security?

Soldiers can regain control of a neighbourhood or territory. They cannot, by themselves, replace police forces, prosecutors, judges and functioning local government.

The government’s promise to construct Colombia’s first mega-prison belongs to the same security philosophy. It reflects the belief that the country’s criminal organisations have become too powerful for an overstretched justice and prison system to contain.

But here again, symbolism will eventually give way to results. The question will be whether a new mega-prison can actually help dismantle criminal networks rather than simply create another enormous facility that organised crime learns to penetrate.

And this is where the second half of the government’s first 60 days becomes important.

A “Miracle Week” in Manhattan

While soldiers have been deployed against criminal organisations, Vice President José Manuel Restrepo and Commerce Minister Mauricio Gómez Amín have been pounding the pavements of New York in search of international investment.

Dubbed La Semana de la Patria Milagro, or “Miracle Week,” the recent shoring-up of investor confidence in Colombia captures the government’s economic strategy almost perfectly.

The administration knows that its security ambitions will cost money. It also inherited a difficult fiscal situation, including high public debt and significant spending pressures following Petro’s ideologically-infused economic policies.  f

De la Espriella therefore faces a delicate balancing act: increase spending on security while persuading investors and international markets that Colombia can restore fiscal discipline.

That makes the New York meetings more than diplomatic theatre. Colombia needs capital, infrastructure, industrial investment and jobs. The real measure of the government’s investor offensive will not be the number of meetings held on Wall Street or Park Avenue but the number of projects that eventually materialise.

The same search for a new direction is visible in foreign policy.

The relationship with Washington has been fundamentally recalibrated after four years in which Petro’s challenged the United States over drugs, security and foreign policy and interference in Colombia’s 2026 presidential campaign.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent visit to Barranquilla offered perhaps the most visible symbol of the change.

De la Espriella is seeking a much closer strategic relationship with Washington — one based on security cooperation, counternarcotics, intelligence, trade and investment. His government’s strengthening relationship with Israel forms part of the same broader geopolitical repositioning.

The message to Washington and international investors is straightforward: Colombia is once again presenting itself as a security partner, an investment destination and a reliable strategic ally.

But the inheritance remains formidable. And this is the real test of the next 60 days.

The first two months have established the doctrine. No Total Peace. No intermediaries. No negotiations with illegal armed groups. A stronger military response at home, a stronger relationship with Washington and an aggressive search for investment abroad.

The question now is whether ‘The Tiger” doctrine can deliver and a revamped relationship with both Washington and Tel Aviv can translate into concrete economic and security gains.

After 60 days, De la Espriella has made the break with Petro unmistakable. Now comes the harder part: turning rupture into results.

José Jaime Uscátegui, a congressman from the right-wing Centro Democrático party, formally asked the national government to militarize the Bogotá localities of Ciudad Bolívar, Kennedy and Bosa, saying the military should support police operations in areas affected by criminal organizations and serious violence.

“I respectfully request that the government order the militarization, through the deployment of the Armed Forces, in support of the police in the areas most affected by criminal organizations and serious acts of violence,” Uscátegui said in his request to the Administrative Department of the Presidency, or Dapre.

His proposal calls for a special security plan involving operations against criminal organizations, weapons and explosives controls, action against illicit economies and protection of commercial areas affected by extortion.

Uscátegui has made military deployment in Bogotá a campaign issue. During the election campaign, billboards featuring him making a military salute appeared under the slogan “Bogotá must be militarized.”

The congressman says Ciudad Bolívar, Kennedy and Bosa were the three Bogotá localities with the highest number of homicides in 2024. They have continued to record high levels of violence this year. In 2026, Ciudad Bolívar has registered 126 homicides, followed by Kennedy with 105 and Bosa with 61, according to figures cited in the proposal, for a combined 292 killings.

The request comes as De La Espriella has made a more visible military presence a central part of his response to criminal violence. On Sept. 22, after the killing of José Luis Pérez Villanueva, alias “Cholo,” the second-in-command of the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada, the president ordered Santa Marta to be militarized following threats and a so-called armed strike by the group.

The government subsequently said more than 500 soldiers and 600 police officers were deployed in Santa Marta, with additional security forces sent to nearby Ciénaga.

Uscátegui’s proposal has, however, met resistance from Bogotá’s administration.

César Restrepo, the city’s security secretary, said the Army already participates in security operations in the capital through coordinated work with the Metropolitan Police and the Army’s 13th Brigade.

“To think that the Army has not participated in building security in Bogotá is either a failure to understand the city’s conditions and the work being done here or, on the contrary, a poor reading of the strategic panorama,” Restrepo said.

Restrepo said the priority should be to increase the number of police officers and investigators rather than present the military’s participation as a new security strategy. The national government has not announced a new military deployment in Bogotá, and Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán has not said the city will formally request one.

The debate is complicated by the sheer size of the three localities.

Kennedy has more than 1 million inhabitants, Bosa about 734,000 and Ciudad Bolívar about 667,000, according to population figures cited in the security discussion. Together they account for roughly 2.4 million people, close to 30% of Bogotá’s population.

That scale raises questions about whether military personnel can meaningfully supplement the police in densely populated urban areas without blurring the distinction between military and civilian policing.

The debate in Congress will focus primarily on either strengthening the National Police, which has specialized units dealing with narcotics, public order, kidnapping (Gaula), intelligence (Dijin) and other forms of organized crime.

“Clearly, that is what the National Police is there for,” believes Colombian political commentator Hassan Nassar, arguing that the Army is designed primarily for external combat and protecting the nation’s sovereignity from external threats.

Nassar said the proposed expansion of police staffing — including an annual intake of 10,000 auxiliary officers, with 5,000 intended for rural areas and 5,000 for urban areas — would itself represent a major logistical challenge for the Ministry of Defense.

Additional police numbers, however, will not solve the problem of crime without stronger intelligence and more robust judiciary. ‘”Police operations ultimately depend on prosecutors and judges being able to build effective cases without the impunity we are seeing on out streets,” noted Nassar.  “Bogotanos are tired of seeing the same people — thieves, those involved in express kidnappings and ‘millionaire rides’ – commit  crimes and not be prosecuted, only to end up committing crimes over and over again.”

The issue, therefore, extends beyond whether soldiers should patrol Bogotá’s streets. It is also about how police, military, intelligence agencies, prosecutors and courts divide responsibility for confronting organized crime.

Uscátegui’s proposal, backed by a broader political campaign for increased military involvement in Bogotá, now puts that institutional question before the national government: whether the response to urban insecurity should involve a substantially expanded military role, or whether existing military support should remain complementary to a larger and more specialized police force that can respond to the needs of each community.

Uscátegui’s proposal, backed by a broader political campaign for increased military involvement in Bogotá, now puts that institutional question before the national government: whether the response to urban insecurity should involve a substantially expanded military role, or whether existing military support should remain complementary to a larger and more specialized police force capable of responding to the specific security needs of each community.

One alternative would be a Metropolitan Task Force combining all specialized police units with direct support from the Attorney General’s Office, or Fiscalía, to ensure that people caught in the act of committing violent crimes or vandalizing public or private property are promptly captured, investigated and prosecuted.

For now, Bogotá’s district administration, including Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán, is arguing for a softer stance, one centered on strengthening the police, investigators and judicial response, rather than expanding the military’s role in the city’s streets. But Abelardo de la Espriella has the final word, as the President can decree Uscátegui’s petition without the immediate backing of lawmakers.

Among the week’s principal events is the Bogotá debut of The Tallis Scholars, the British vocal ensemble founded and directed by Peter Phillips, who has spent more than five decades developing one of the world’s most distinctive approaches to Renaissance choral music.

The ensemble performs on Thursday, October 1, at 6:30 p.m. at San Ignacio Church in Bogotá’s historic La Candelaria district. Their programme, Da Pacem: Paz en nuestros tiempos, brings together works by Palestrina, Gombert, Orlando di Lasso and Arvo Pärt around the theme of peace as both a spiritual and human experience.

Ahead of the concert, Phillips spoke with The City Paper about The Tallis Scholars, the sound he has pursued since founding the ensemble in 1973 and why, after more than half a century, very little has changed about what they do.

“We haven’t changed what we do,” Phillips says. “Over more than a half-century we have devoted ourselves almost entirely to Renaissance polyphony. What we were doing when we started is not very different from what we are doing now.”

The sound in his head

Phillips was still a second-year undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford, when he founded The Tallis Scholars in November 1973. He had fallen in love with Renaissance choral music, but there was little opportunity to hear it outside the context of a church service.

He wanted to hear it in concert — and already had a very precise idea of how it should sound.

That idea became the foundation of The Tallis Scholars, grounded in the 16th Century English composer, Thomas Tallis.

Phillips’s approach emphasised exact intonation, vocal purity and transparency, avoiding the embellishments, swoops and fluctuations that can obscure the individual lines of Renaissance polyphony. The objective was clarity: every voice should be audible, balanced and part of a larger musical architecture.

“Our sound is still the sound I had in my head,” Phillips has said. “The music [is] sung with no embellishments, where you hear all the sounds clearly and transparently, evenly across the voices.”

It is an aesthetic that has remained remarkably consistent through generations of singers.

Phillips also resists describing The Tallis Scholars simply as part of the Early Music movement. For him, the ensemble occupies a different territory. “I don’t really think of us as part of the Early Music movement,” he says. “That was always about instruments, and we are only voices. Each and every individual singer is an instrument.”

Nor has his approach been based on recreating an imagined authentic Renaissance sound.

“It was never designed to be authentic,” Phillips says. “We have no idea what the choirs sounded like then. We have no idea what a choir sounded like inside the Sistine Chapel, back then.”

Instead, the project has been to make the complex architecture of Renaissance polyphony audible to modern ears.

That commitment has led The Tallis Scholars to remain unusually focused. There has been little interest in crossover projects, fragmented repertoires with a potpurri of musical genres and styles. For Philips, the repertoire on which Tallis Scholar was built is at the crux of the ensemble’s reputation.

The exception in Thursday’s Bogotá programme is Arvo Pärt, whose contemporary music is profoundly informed by the spiritual atmosphere and musical language of earlier centuries. “We aim to create musical atmospheres. The atmosphere is part of a musical narrative,” explains Phillips.

Pärt’s presence alongside Palestrina, Gombert and Orlando di Lasso gives Da Pacem a connection across time: Renaissance polyphony and contemporary sacred composition brought together around the idea of peace.

The final week of La Concordia

The Tallis Scholars’ concert is one of six major events marking the final week of FIMSAC 2026, whose 15th edition has been organised around the theme La Concordia.

The week began on Monday, September 28, at the León de Greiff Auditorium of the National University of Colombia, where the Coro Nacional del Perú, conducted by Javier Súnico, performed Alejandro Núñez Allauca’s Missa Andina. The work combines the structure of the traditional Mass with musical elements rooted in Andean cultures, creating a dialogue between Christian spirituality and Latin American identity.

On Wednesday, September 30, the Bogotá Philharmonic Choir and the Women’s Philharmonic Orchestra perform Cuban composer José María Vitier’s Misa a la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre at the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes. The work, written 30 years ago, brings together liturgical tradition and the musical roots of Cuba.

Then, on Thursday, The Tallis Scholars take the festival into the Renaissance and contemporary European sacred traditions.

The festival’s programme turns toward Mozart on Friday, October 2, when the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia begins a three-concert celebration marking the 270th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

At San Ignacio, under the direction of Spanish conductor and violinist Roberto González-Monjas, the orchestra will perform Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Requiem in D minor, K. 626, in Robert Levin’s revised and completed version. The performance, with the Coro Nacional del Perú, marks the Colombian premiere of this version of the Requiem.

The Mozart celebration continues on Saturday, October 3, also at San Ignacio, with González-Monjas performing Mozart’s Violin Concertos Nos. 2, 3 and 4 with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia.

The festival closes on Sunday, October 4, with two concerts.

At 11 a.m. in the Luis Ángel Arango Concert Hall, the German duo Belli & Schmeding — trombonist Frederic Belli and organist Martin Schmeding — presents Que los ángeles nos acompañen, exploring the spiritual dialogue between trombone and organ.

The final concert takes place at 4 p.m. at San Ignacio, where the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia and the Coro Nacional de Colombia, again under González-Monjas, perform Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Coronation Mass, K. 317.

Fifteen years of sacred music

The final week brings to a close a festival that has spent five weeks presenting sacred music across Bogotá. This year’s edition has brought together more than 1,000 artists from 16 countries at 25 venues across the city, placing Latin American, European and other sacred traditions in dialogue.

The festival’s theme, La Concordia, has been conceived not simply as a musical concept but as an invitation to encounter different cultures, periods, traditions and communities through music.

That idea is particularly resonant in the arrival of The Tallis Scholars.

For more than five decades, Peter Phillips has remained committed to a musical language first imagined while he was a student in Oxford: Renaissance polyphony sung with precision, transparency and restraint.

The sound he had in his head in 1973 has since become the defining sound of his renown vocal ensemble. On Thursday in San Ignacio, Bogotá will hear it for the first time.

Visit the festival’s official site www.festivalmusicasacra.com for the complete listing of concerts and ticket prices.

The first attack occurred at the former Tunía toll station in the municipality of Piendamó, Cauca, on the Pan-American Highway between Popayán and Cali.

Preliminary reports indicated that the attack involved gunfire, explosions and drones carrying explosives. At least 10 members of the security forces were reported wounded, although the precise extent of their injuries was still being established as authorities coordinated their evacuation to medical facilities.

Earlier reports had put the number of wounded at six before a subsequent preliminary assessment raised the figure to at least 10.

Authorities attributed the attack initially to FARC dissidents under the command of alias Iván Mordisco, although investigations remain underway to establish the circumstances and those responsible.

The Pan-American Highway was closed between Cali and Popayán following the attack. Traffic was also halted between Santander de Quilichao and Popayán, with authorities directing travellers toward alternative routes while security operations continued in the area.

The closure affects one of southwestern Colombia’s principal transport corridors, linking Cali with northern Cauca and Popayán.

Second drone attack in two days

The attack at Tunía came only two days after another drone attack involving explosives was reported in the same area, underscoring the growing use of remotely operated aircraft by armed groups against the security forces.

The attacks form part of a wider pattern of drone warfare in Colombia. Military figures reported earlier this year that more than 100 attacks involving explosive-laden drones had already been recorded in 2026, while subsequent reporting has documented their continued use by both ELN and FARC dissident structures.

The use of drones allows armed groups to attack police and military installations without having to approach them directly, adding a new dimension to the armed conflict in areas where illegal armed organizations compete for territorial control.

Police station attacked in Condoto

Hours after the attack in Cauca, a second drone attack was reported in Condoto, Chocó.

A drone carrying three grenades targeted the municipality’s police station, according to preliminary reports. An inspector was wounded and initially taken to the San José de Condoto Hospital.

Intelligence reports initially attributed the attack to members of the ELN, which has an established presence in the region. Authorities were continuing to verify the circumstances and responsibility for the attack.

The incident has heightened concern among residents of Condoto, a municipality already affected by the broader humanitarian and security crisis in the San Juan region.

The attack comes less than two months after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia on August 10, with its epicentre near San José del Palmar in Chocó. The earthquake caused extensive damage across western and central parts of the country, with communities in the region subsequently facing the additional pressure of armed conflict and displacement.

In July, the police station in nearby Tadó was also attacked with explosives carried by drones. Colombian authorities attributed that attack to the ELN; no police officers or civilians were reported injured, although the station suffered structural damage.

Colombia’s highest displacement figure

The attacks come as Colombia’s humanitarian authorities report continued displacement and confinement caused by the armed conflict.

According to the latest report from the Defensoría del Pueblo, 111 mass forced-displacement events were documented between January and August 2026, affecting 23,931 people. In August alone, 11 displacement events affected 5,976 people.

Cauca, where Tuesday’s attack occurred, recorded the country’s largest number of people affected by forced displacement during the first eight months of the year, with more than 6,700 people displaced. It was followed by Norte de Santander, with more than 4,350; Antioquia, with more than 3,150; Nariño, with more than 2,550; and Magdalena, with more than 1,900.

The figures require some context.

While the number of mass-displacement events increased from 83 during January-August 2025 to 111 during the same period this year, the number of people displaced fell sharply. The 2025 figure was exceptionally high because of the humanitarian crisis that erupted in Catatumbo, where tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes.

The Defensoría’s figures therefore point to an increase in the frequency of displacement events, rather than an overall increase in the number of people displaced compared with the same period last year.

More than 80,000 confined

The humanitarian picture becomes considerably larger when confinement is included.

Between January and August, the Defensoría documented 63 mass-confinement events affecting 80,369 people. Unlike displacement, confinement leaves communities in their territories but restricts their ability to move, obtain food and essential goods, access health services or maintain normal economic activity.

Chocó recorded the country’s highest number of people affected by confinement, with 15,641, followed by Cauca with 13,350, Putumayo with 12,646 and Caquetá with 11,651.

Taken together, more than 104,000 people were affected by either forced displacement or confinement during the first eight months of 2026.

The Defensoría says the continuing violence is principally associated with armed groups competing for territorial control. Its assessment identifies FARC dissident structures and the ELN among the groups having the greatest impact on events resulting in forced displacement.

Tuesday’s attacks in Cauca and Chocó illustrate the dual nature of the crisis: while armed groups increasingly use drones and explosives to strike security forces, civilians in the same territories continue to face the consequences through displacement, confinement and restrictions on movement.

For vulnerable communities in Cauca and Chocó, the attacks represent another layer of insecurity in regions already struggling with the consequences of Colombia’s prolonged internal conflict, as the country rceently marked the 10th anniversary of the Final Accord signed with FARC on November 24, 2016.

A decade after the agreement, FARC dissident factions that rejected or later abandoned the accord have gained vast territorial control, while the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla continues to control drig trafficking corridors across the Chocó. The expansion of illegal armed groups, coupled with the increasing use of drones and improvised explosives, underscores the deep security and humanitarian crisis that was exacerbated during the four years of former President Gustavo Petro’s leftwing government.

The anniversary arrives not as a celebration of an uncontested peace, but amid a confrontation over the future of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, or JEP, the tribunal established to investigate and judge the gravest crimes committed during the country’s armed conflict.

At the centre of the dispute is money, but the argument is ultimately about something larger: what does justice mean after a decades-long internal conflict?

President Abelardo De La Espriella has made clear that he intends to challenge the JEP’s role and cost while respecting its constitutional existence. In his inauguration speech in August, he said Colombia could not accept a justice system becoming “a mechanism of indulgence” for those responsible for the deaths of Colombians.

He also argued that the JEP was born from a process that had failed to win popular approval.

The original agreement between President Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the FARC was signed in Cartagena on September 26, 2016. Six days later, Colombian voters narrowly rejected it in a plebiscite, with 50.21 percent voting No and 49.78 percent Yes. A revised agreement was subsequently signed in Bogotá on November 24.

For De La Espriella, that vote remains central to the legitimacy debate. “I will respect the existing legal order,” he said at his inauguration, while warning that this would not prevent him from reviewing “with absolute rigor” the “nature and effects” of a jurisdiction that, in his words, was created without acknowledging the will of the people.

His position has since extended beyond the question of the JEP’s budget and into one of the most painful legacies of Colombia’s armed conflict: the recruitment of children.

Speaking in a televised address on Sunday, September 27, from the government headquarters in Barranquilla, De La Espriella said he will protect children and adolescents recruited by criminal organizations while pursuing those who use them to commit crimes.

Children at the Centre of the Conflict

The president said that recruiting a child amounts to taking away their childhood, education, home and family environment, and questioned the use of children and adolescents for different tasks within criminal structures. “A recruited minor is a daughter or son whose school, childhood, innocence, home and family have been stolen,” he said.

The remarks add a sharper dimension to De La Espriella’s challenge to the transitional justice model. While he has questioned what he describes as the JEP’s substantial demands on public funding, his government is also presenting the protection of children and the direct pursuit of those who recruit them as a central responsibility of the state.

That tension goes to the heart of Colombia’s unfinished business with peace: how to reconcile restorative justice, accountability and reparations for victims with a government determined to demonstrate that those who continue to exploit civilians — particularly children — will face the full force of the state.

His security-focused government is now proposing a COP170 billion reduction in the 2027 budget allocation for the transitional-justice system. The proposed reduction includes COP30 billion in operating expenditure and COP140 billion in investment. The government says the measure is intended to rationalize spending under Colombia’s fiscal constraints while preserving the resources necessary for the JEP’s core functions.

JEP president Alejandro Ramelli has described the proposed transfer of resources as a form of financial “asphyxiation.”

The timing could hardly be more consequential.

The JEP has finally reached the stage at which senior former FARC commanders are receiving some punitive sanctions. The tribunal’s restorative model was never intended simply to reproduce ordinary criminal justice. Instead, perpetrators who acknowledge responsibility can receive sanctions based on restricted liberty, truth-telling and restorative work.

That model is now being tested against the expectations of victims.

For many Colombians who suffered kidnapping, forced displacement, disappearance, recruitment of children and other crimes, the central question is not simply whether a tribunal has established responsibility. It is whether justice has produced something tangible: truth, acknowledgement, reparations and restoration.

This is where the anniversary becomes particularly uncomfortable.

Does Justice Serve Victims?

The JEP was created to place victims at the centre of the peace process. Yet after a decade, there remains frustration over the pace of proceedings and the delivery of reparations. At the same time, thousands of victims have participated in the tribunal’s proceedings and have used it to obtain recognition and information about crimes that might otherwise have remained hidden.

The tribunal’s defenders therefore argue that its work cannot be measured simply by prison sentences.

That argument received significant international backing Monday from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.

Türk called Colombia’s restorative measures “a global achievement for transitional justice” and highlighted projects in which former FARC members and members of the Colombian armed forces are working together to locate and identify people disappeared during the conflict. He urged Colombia to ensure that the JEP and the Unit for the Search of Missing Persons have sufficient resources to fulfil their mandates.

The contrast is stark.

For De La Espriella, the question is whether Colombia can continue financing an expensive special jurisdiction when ordinary justice and security systems also face enormous demands.

For the JEP and the United Nations, the question is whether Colombia can afford to weaken a system precisely when its restorative mechanisms are beginning to produce concrete results.

And for victims, the question is more elemental: after ten years, what has actually been repaired?

That may ultimately be the most important question Colombians now ask themselves.

The FARC no longer exists as the unified insurgency that fought the Colombian state for more than half a century. But splinter armed groups – Second Marquetalia and EMC – proliferated under the leftist government of Gustavo Petro. These criminal organizations continue to recruit children, displace communities and control vast swathes of territory. President De La Espriella has made child recruitment a particular focus of his security policy, arguing that children must be treated as victims while those who recruit them face prosecution.

Ten years after the fanfare in Cartagena, Colombia therefore finds itself confronting the unfinished business of peace.

The country must now decide how much weight to give punishment, restoration, truth, reparations, security and public expenditure — and whether those objectives can coexist within the extraordinary judicial experiment created by the 2016 agreement.

The tenth anniversary is consequently less a moment of closure than a test of whether Colombia still believes in the bargain it made with the FARC a decade ago.

Instead, the president entrusted his first address to the UN to Vice-President José Manuel Restrepo, who delivered a speech written by De La Espriella and used the international stage to outline the new administration’s priorities on security, economic growth, sovereignty, human rights and Venezuela.

“I have asked the Vice-President of the Republic, José Manuel Restrepo, to read this message on my behalf,” Restrepo said at the beginning of the address. “I have done so because I assured the Colombian people that I would not leave the country during the four years of my mandate. I am keeping that promise.”

The decision breaks with the recent practice of Colombian presidents personally attending the annual gathering in New York. Restrepo had travelled to the United States ahead of the General Assembly, combining the UN appearance with an economic and diplomatic agenda focused heavily on attracting investment to Colombia.

The speech opened with the August 10 earthquake, which struck Colombia just days after De La Espriella took office.

“We can fall, we can suffer and we can cry. What we cannot and do not know how to do is surrender,” Restrepo read.

He said the government had been forced to respond to both the natural disaster and what it described as a broader crisis of confidence and security. “We had to act and we acted,” he said, while acknowledging international assistance received after the earthquake.

Security a central theme

Restrepo said De La Espriella had given the security forces an “unequivocal” instruction to recover territorial control and restore the authority of the state. The president’s message also established a deliberately broad definition of the armed organisations the government intends to confront.

“Organisations that murder, kidnap, use explosives, recruit minors and deliberately resort to terror to subdue society are terrorist groups,” Restrepo said. “That is what we call them and we are confronting them with all the legitimate force of the state, within the Constitution and the law.”

The government also called for greater international cooperation against drug trafficking, arguing that Colombian-produced illicit drugs do not remain within Colombia and that transnational criminal threats require an international response.

But the most pointed section of the address was directed at the United Nations itself.

De La Espriella has previously been critical of the organisation, and his government used its first appearance before the General Assembly to question whether the UN is delivering the results expected of it.

“Is the UN fulfilling those purposes with the effectiveness that today’s world requires?” Restrepo asked. He said Colombia believes in the organisation precisely because it is legitimate to question whether its institutions are responding adequately to contemporary problems.

“My country wants a United Nations whose effectiveness is measured less by the volume of documents it produces and much more by the results it achieves,” he said. Restrepo also criticised the use of human rights as a selective political instrument.

“I categorically reject the idea that human rights are used as flags raised against some and kept down against others,” he said. “They cannot become an instrument that rewards friends, punishes adversaries, or, worse, remains silent in the face of circumstances.”

The Colombian government, he added, wants an international system that is “serious, coherent and demanding with everyone.” Venezuela was another significant element of the speech.

Restrepo explicitly called for a political transition in Colombia’s neighbour, saying: “We trust in a prompt, safe and profound democratic transition in Venezuela.”

The statement places the new Colombian government more clearly behind a democratic transition in Venezuela while also calling for a re-examination of the international institutions involved in managing regional crises.

Economic growth formed the other major pillar of Colombia’s message in New York.

Before his appearance at the General Assembly, Restrepo presented a portfolio of 176 investment projects valued by the government at more than US$150 billion. The projects cover energy, infrastructure, logistics, agro-industry, tourism, industry, technology and critical minerals, as part of the administration’s “Misión Crecer” strategy and its ambition to raise Colombia’s economic growth rate to 6 percent.

At the UN, Restrepo extended that invitation directly to international investors.

“I want to invite you to look at Colombia,” he said. “We have access to two oceans, energy resources, enormous biodiversity and a government that defends private initiative.”

The broader message was that security and economic opportunity are inseparable. The government argues that confronting criminal organisations must be accompanied by investment, employment and development in territories vulnerable to illegal economies.

“Governments do not decree economic growth,” Restrepo said. “Their task is to create the conditions for it to happen.”

For De La Espriella, the arrangement allowed him to maintain his pledge to remain in Colombia while placing Restrepo at the centre of the government’s first major international diplomatic and economic presentation.

For Colombia, meanwhile, the 2026 General Assembly produced an unusual opening statement from a new administration: delivered not by the president, but by the vice-president, and directed as much at the effectiveness of the international system as at the country’s security and economic ambitions.

Across the old city, colonial streets that would normally be filling with residents, tourists and workers remained largely empty. Shops stayed shuttered, restaurants kept their doors closed and the usual movement through the historic centre was noticeably reduced.

The military presence was impossible to miss.

It was the morning after President Abelardo De la Espriella arrived in Santa Marta wearing a bulletproof vest, carrying a pistol and accompanied by heavily armed security personnel as he toured neighbourhoods affected by threats attributed to the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), known to locals as ‘Los Pachenca’.

The president had ordered the militarization of the city after the group announced a 48-hour armed strike in retaliation for the death of José Luis Pérez Villanueva, alias Cholo, described by the government as the organisation’s second-in-command and financial operator. Cholo was killed during a security operation in the rural Guachaca area on Monday, along with several other members of the organisation.

But by Wednesday, the immediate question in Santa Marta was no longer simply whether the armed forces could occupy the streets. It was what happens next.

The government says the city is under control. The Army confirmed Wednesday that a military deployment remains in place at strategic points across Santa Marta and its rural districts, in coordination with the National Police, following the threats and intimidation attributed to the armed group.

Yet the empty streets tell another part of the story.

The -Paro Armado – or armed strike imposed by the ACSN has already disrupted commerce, transport and tourism, with reports of businesses being ordered to close and vehicles being attacked or burned. On Monday and Tuesday, authorities reported intimidation of traders in several neighbourhoods, gunfire directed at commercial premises. By 4:00 pm on Tuesday, Colombia’s Air Force had dispatched 4 Kfirs from Barranquilla to fly over Santa Marta. The government’s response has been deliberately uncompromising.

De la Espriella travelled to Santa Marta on Tuesday night to personally oversee the response, chairing a security meeting with military and police commanders and Mayor Carlos Pinedo. He subsequently appeared in videos patrolling neighbourhoods including Cristo Rey and 11 de Noviembre, promising that the armed forces would remain on the streets.

“We’re going after every one of these criminals, without mercy,” the president said during his late-night walkabout. At another point, speaking from inside a protected vehicle in Gaira, he urged residents to return to their normal activities, saying the city was militarized and that the government would protect them.

But restoring confidence is different from deploying troops.

For a city whose economy depends heavily on tourism, restaurants, hotels, transport and street commerce, the longer-term test will be whether residents and visitors feel sufficiently secure to resume normal life once the immediate security operation recedes.

That question is particularly important because the government’s confrontation with Los Pachenca is not confined to Santa Marta’s urban perimeter.

The organisation’s principal territorial base is in and around the Sierra Nevada, and the government’s own account of Monday’s operation points to a continuing effort to locate other senior commanders, including Fredy Castillo Carrillo, alias ‘Pinocho’, as well as other identified leaders.

The military deployment in Santa Marta therefore represents only one part of a broader offensive.

The government has already made clear that it intends to pursue the ACSN rather than revive the negotiating framework that under Petro’s failed “total peace” agenda included the illegal armed group. In August, De la Espriella announced the termination of the government’s dialogue process with all criminal groups, saying his administration would pursue the restoration of territorial control and the dismantling of organized crime.

Santa Marta is now the first major test of that approach in a tourist city.

The immediate operation has demonstrated that the state can rapidly put large numbers of security personnel into the streets. The Army says the deployment remains active, while authorities have also reported arrests and the seizure of material allegedly intended for attacks.

But the harder task may be making the soldiers less visible.

A successful return to normality would mean more than empty streets becoming busy again. It would mean merchants reopening without intimidation, buses and taxis operating normally, tourists moving freely between the historic centre and the coast, and residents no longer making decisions about whether to leave home according to warnings circulated by an armed organisation.

For now, Santa Marta remains caught between those two images: a government determined to demonstrate that the state controls the city, and a city centre that has yet to fully behave as though the crisis is over.

De la Espriella came to Santa Marta to show that the government would not allow an armed group to dictate the city’s life. On Wednesday, the next question is harder to answer. Can the hardline government persuade Samarios that a city free from rampant extortion is possible?

The emergency, which began on September 19 in the La Castellana area and on the San Marcos hillside overlooking Villa de Leyva, has expanded dramatically over four days. The latest assessment by Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, UNGRD, estimates that approximately 1,200 hectares have been affected across the region, including about 715 hectares inside the Iguaque sanctuary.

Authorities say the wider fire is approximately 75% controlled, and the flames have been confined in areas close to homes. But the most difficult section of the emergency has shifted higher into the mountains, where steep terrain is making access for ground crews particularly difficult.

Two active fronts remain, prompting continued operations by land and air.

The advance into Iguaque has transformed what initially threatened the tourist town of Villa de Leyva into a major environmental emergency.

The Santuario de Fauna y Flora Iguaque covers 6,889 hectares between the municipalities of Chíquiza, Arcabuco and Villa de Leyva. It protects a mosaic of páramo, high-Andean forest and glacial-origin lagoons in the Eastern Cordillera.

The sanctuary’s importance extends far beyond biodiversity.

Its high-altitude ecosystems help regulate and store water, while vegetation contributes to the recharge of aquifers supplying rural and urban water systems in the surrounding region. According to Parques Nacionales Naturales, Iguaque is the protected area within Colombia’s national parks system that supplies the largest number of municipal aqueducts, benefiting more than 30,000 people.

That makes the wildfire a threat not only to forests and wildlife but also to one of the region’s critical natural water systems.

The municipality of Sáchica has called for urgent reinforcement from the UNGRD, requesting additional aerial, ground and technical resources as the fire moves through areas surrounding the sanctuary.

Frailejones at risk

Among the species facing the greatest concern are the frailejones, the distinctive plants that dominate many Colombian páramo landscapes and play an important role in the capture and regulation of water.

Parques Nacionales identifies several species in Iguaque, including Espeletiopsis garciae, Paramiflos glandulosus and Espeletia tunjana. The latter is classified as endangered.

The ecological damage from a wildfire is not necessarily limited to plants directly consumed by flames. Fire can alter soils, destroy surrounding vegetation and change the conditions required for natural regeneration in fragile high-altitude ecosystems.

The sanctuary is also home to white-tailed deer, brocket deer, tigrillos and the ulamá, as well as more than 170 bird species. Among them are the Andean guan, páramo eagle and 19 species of hummingbird.

The emergency response has expanded as the fire has moved into increasingly difficult terrain.

According to the latest UNGRD report, around 250 people are involved in the operation, including firefighters, soldiers, police, Civil Defence personnel, Red Cross teams and national emergency agencies.

Three helicopters have been deployed for aerial firefighting: an MI-17 contracted by the Boyacá government, together with UH-60 Black Hawks operated by the Colombian Aerospace Force and the Army.

During the latest operation, the aircraft carried out 75 water drops over the fire zones. Authorities are also preparing to insert specialised personnel by air into areas that cannot easily be reached from the ground.

More than 20 park rangers have been working in the area since the weekend. On Monday night, another 15 forest-fire specialists arrived from Chingaza and Tama national parks and the Guanentá Alto Río Fonce Flora and Fauna Sanctuary to reinforce the response.

The ongoing threat to Iguaque carries both environmental and cultural significance. According to Muisca traditions, Bachué, regarded as the mother of humanity, emerged from the sacred waters of the Iguaque lagoon with a child who would become the ancestor of the pre-Columbian peoples.

The lagoon lies at around 3,599 metres above sea level, surrounded by páramo vegetation and the high-Andean landscape protected by the sanctuary. Parques Nacionales describes Iguaque as a territory where natural ecosystems and Muisca cultural traditions remain closely connected.

The sanctuary was declared a protected area in 1977 and today forms part of Colombia’s national system of protected areas.

Its ecosystems are particularly important in a country where páramos provide critical water-regulation functions. The vegetation captures moisture, slows its movement through the landscape and helps maintain water supplies during drier periods.

Fire moves beyond colonial enclave

For several days, the international focus of the emergency centred on Villa de Leyva, one of Colombia’s most visited colonial destinations.

The fire threatened homes, hotels and tourism infrastructure around the town, while residents and volunteers joined firefighters in trying to stop the flames advancing through the surrounding hills.

By Monday, however, authorities reported that the fire around the urban area was largely contained. The principal concern had shifted to the upper mountain slopes leading towards Iguaque.

The UNGRD says the fire is 75% controlled, but the figure does not mean the emergency is over. Two active fronts remain, and difficult terrain is preventing easy access to the highest areas.

Boyacá Governor Carlos Amaya has called for additional aerial support and appealed for continued resources to confront the remaining fire fronts. “Literally, a tragedy is being experienced,” he wrote on X, describing the images from the affected area as among the most painful seen in his department in recent years.

The immediate objective is now to prevent the remaining fire fronts from advancing further into Iguaque and to extinguish the areas already burning inside the protected zone.

The operation is expected to continue as long as weather, visibility and safety conditions permit. For Villa de Leyva, the fire has moved away from the immediate threat to its historic centre and patrimonial homes.

For Iguaque, however, the emergency is entering a more consequential phase.

What began as a wildfire on a hillside above a colonial enclave has become a fight to protect one of Boyacá’s most important high-altitude ecosystems – and the water systems, wildlife and cultural heritage that make this territory so unique for Colombia.

José Luis Pérez Villanueva, alias “Cholo”, described by authorities as the second commander and financier of the ACSN, was killed Monday during a security operation in rural Santa Marta. Six other alleged members of the organisation were also killed and three were captured, according to the government.

The operation immediately triggered reprisals attributed to the ACSN, including blockades along the Troncal del Caribe and the burning of buses. Intermunicipal transport and services toward La Guajira were suspended, while schools and businesses closed amid fears of an armed strike announced by the group.

De La Espriella travelled to Santa Marta late Monday night accompanied by a fleet of helicopters that could be seen flying over the Colombia’s oldest city. The president called a security council as authorities maintained a Unified Command Post to coordinate the response.

“[They] lost one of their principal commanders, we hit their finances and seized a powerful arsenal,” De La Espriella said in a message posted on X. “Now, defeated and cornered, they intend to terrorise the population with an armed strike. I will not allow it.”

The president added: “We are going after all the narcoterrorists of the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada and the Clan del Golfo. One by one.”

The Police National said the operation took place in the Quebrada del Sol sector of Guachaca, in the rural area of Santa Marta. It involved the Directorate of Anti-Narcotics, police investigators, Jungla commandos and police aviation, working with the Attorney General’s Office and with support from the Colombian Air Force.

Authorities said the operation produced seven deaths and three arrests. Among those killed was “Cholo”, identified by the government as one of the most important figures in Los Pachenca, another name used for the ACSN.

The group is a powerful armed criminal organisation operating across the Sierra Nevada and parts of the Caribbean region. Authorities associate it with drug trafficking, extortion and control of illicit economies and territory along the Troncal del Caribe, the principal road connecting Santa Marta with La Guajira. The government has portrayed the operation as a major blow against the organisation’s command structure and finances.

But the immediate consequences have been felt by civilians.

Communities in and around Santa Marta reported a sharp deterioration in security following Monday’s operation. Streets were left largely empty, commercial activity was disrupted and public transport was suspended. Indigenous communities in the Sierra Nevada have also faced confinement and heightened security risks amid the confrontation between armed groups and government forces.

Indigenous authorities have previously warned of the risks of forced displacement, confinement and the use of civilians as human shields in areas where armed groups operate. They have called on the state to strengthen protection for communities living in ancestral territories.

The president’s response has been uncompromising. According to eye-witness reports, on Monday armed gunmen could be seen shooting at shops that dared to open. Many of the city’s more affluent residents began leaving on Monday to nearby Barranquilla, in fear of potential violence.

In a video released after the operation, De La Espriella described the result as an “exceptional” achievement by the security forces and singled out “Cholo” as one of the region’s most feared armed figures.

He then turned his attention to the ACSN’s top leadership.

“They have been falling like rats: ‘Bendito Menor’, ‘Cholo’, and very soon ‘Pinocho’,” the president said, referring to Fredy Castillo Carrillo, identified by authorities as the organisation’s maximum commander and financier.

“Pinocho, you have an expiration date and we are after you,” De La Espriella added.

Castillo Carrillo is a key figure in the government’s campaign against the ACSN, whose influence extends beyond Magdalena into neighbouring La Guajira and Cesar.

The killing of “Cholo” follows the recent death of another senior ACSN commander, alias “Bendito Menor”, further intensifying pressure on the organisation’s leadership.

For Santa Marta, however, the immediate challenge is preventing the security operation from becoming a wider confrontation affecting civilians and one of Colombia’s most important Caribbean transport corridors.

With the Troncal del Caribe disrupted and authorities on heightened alert, the government now faces a test of whether its offensive against the ACSN can restore control without provoking further reprisals against the population.

For De La Espriella, the message is already clear: the campaign will continue. And after the death of “Cholo”, the president has publicly identified his next target.

In a world defined by acceleration, information overload and increasing disconnection, the ritual has taken on a renewed significance. It can be a ceremony, a prayer, a meal, a journey, a medicinal preparation or simply a repeated act that connects one person to another, or to a place.

It is this idea that lies at the heart of Rituales, a new exhibition at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango’s Casa Republicana in Bogotá, bringing together 19 works recently acquired by the Banco de la República between 2023 and 2026.

The exhibition considers ritual not simply as an inheritance from the past but as a living practice through which individuals and communities create meaning, preserve memory and negotiate their relationship with nature, territory and one another.

The works explore ceremonies of healing, religious practices, symbolic landscapes, funerary traditions and ancestral knowledge. Together, they move between the intimate and the collective, examining identity, memory, resistance and the ways in which cultural knowledge survives across generations.

The selection also reflects the breadth of the Banco de la República’s art collection. More than 200 works have been incorporated into the collection over the past three years, spanning a period from the 17th century to 2025 and encompassing a wide range of techniques, formats and artistic approaches.

 Spirituality and resistance

Among the works on display are two videos by Medellín-born artist Astrid Milena González, whose practice explores Afro-Colombian knowledge and spirituality.

In Hablar a plantas, singing, medicinal plants and knowledge transmitted through Afro-Colombian communities become forms of resistance to poverty, violence and displacement. Traditional medicine appears not simply as a means of treating illness, but as a network of physical, spiritual and communal relationships with the natural world.

In Dale el señor el descanso eterno (2022), a black priest in a white cassock leads the viewer into a symbolic territory where Catholicism, Afro-descendant traditions, magic and memory intersect. The work constructs a ritual universe in which human, natural and supernatural forces coexist.

Gabriel Silva’s large-format painting similarly enters a dreamlike territory. Mythological and fantastical figures appear as silhouettes within an intensely coloured landscape, their bodies merging with an orange geography. The figures seem to participate in an enigmatic ceremony taking place in a primordial world.

For the late Colombian artist Luis Fernando Zapata (1951–1994), ritual becomes a metaphor for the final transition. His sculptural object evokes both a sarcophagus and a chrysalis, contrasting its substantial three-dimensional presence with the fragile materiality of paper. The work becomes a meditation on introspection, mortality and transformation.

Peruvian artist Adriana Ciudad takes the idea of passage into the landscape. Developed from research and fieldwork with communities on Colombia’s Pacific coast, her work draws on funerary and farewell rituals in which rivers are understood as pathways connecting different worlds. Painting becomes a means of exploring the relationship between memory, territory and spirituality, with the river functioning as a space of transition, encounter and transformation.

The theatre of nature

In El privilegio de las sobras (2024), Barranquilla-born artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor creates drawings that resemble the stage of a 19th-century European theatre. The curtain remains closed and lamps illuminate the scene, but the audience is not human. A tropical jungle occupies the stalls. The absurdity of the encounter creates a tension between European architectural opulence and tropical vegetation, suggesting a ritual about to begin but whose participants and purpose remain deliberately uncertain.

Bogotá artist Andrés Quintero’s Lenguas de alta montaña y aerolito ovino (2023–2024) takes ritual into the territory of the journey.

The installation, combining sculpture and video, began with a newspaper report about Raquel Vivas, born in La Floresta, Boyacá, and connected to the Nasa community, who participated in covering the interior of Apollo 11 with sheep’s wool.

From this unlikely connection between the Colombian highlands and the American space programme, Quintero began searching for meteorites in Boyacá. The journey became an exercise in attentive listening, observation and walking through the landscape.

Along the way, he encountered sculptural mounds of salt patiently shaped by sheep repeatedly licking them. The resulting installation transforms an apparently ordinary rural activity into a kind of ceremony.

Sacred and profane

The collision between ancestral traditions and contemporary urban culture is central to the work of Tahuanty Jacanamijoy, whose family heritage comes from the Sibundoy Valley in Putumayo and whose artistic formation has included Bogotá and London. In Tears in the club (2022), painting and neon bring together the sacred world of the Amazonian forest and the profane atmosphere of electronic nightlife.

A two-headed serpent, with one head resembling a bird and the other a jaguar, evokes complementary forces of light and darkness. Within Amazonian cosmologies, such forces contribute to the balance between different realms of existence.

In Testigo, a red neon sun fills the exhibition space with an otherworldly glow. It functions simultaneously as a sacred and spiritual figure and as an emblem of the nocturnal urban world.

The domestic sphere provides another entry point into ritual.

Medellín artist Yuli Andrea Cadavid’s Brebajes (2022–2023) consists of engraved aluminium cooking pots. The images depict plants associated with care and healing, while the worn surfaces of the vessels evoke the heat, intimacy and accumulated memory of the household.

Cadavid’s research into plants, cooking and regional traditions is closely connected to female lineages and the forms of knowledge transmitted through everyday life. The kitchen becomes a place where cultural memory is preserved and passed on.

Joyce Rivas’s photographic series Bien querer revisits archival material from the Inquisition concerning Afro-Caribbean women accused of witchcraft during the colonial period. Rivas reconstructs rituals of love magic, spells and ancestral knowledge involving plants and objects, treating them not as remnants of superstition but as forms of cultural resistance and survival.

The work establishes a dialogue between history, botany and contemporary art, reclaiming knowledge that was once persecuted and reframing it through questions of identity and memory.

In Semilla (2003), Santa Marta-born sculptor Teresa Sánchez reduces the idea of transformation to its most elemental form. Made from native marfil and cedar wood from Puerto Asís, the sculpture captures the moment of germination.

The enlarged seed becomes a metaphor for origin and passage. Its vertical growth connects earth and sky, turning a simple biological process into a meditation on spirituality and existence.

Elsewhere, ritual becomes intensely personal.

Daniela Acosta Parsons’s La Habitación (2019) emerged from the artist’s experience of hospitalization following a depressive episode. Through drawings of furniture, bedsheets, curtains and changing light, the work reconstructs fragmented memories of an institutional interior.

The room becomes both a physical space and a psychological landscape. Acosta transforms private experience into a visual diary, using drawing as an act of mourning, communication and reconstruction.

Across Rituales, these different approaches converge around a deceptively simple proposition: rituals are ways of making sense of being alive.

Some belong to communities and have been transmitted across centuries. Others are invented or rediscovered in kitchens, landscapes, nightclubs, bedrooms and journeys through the countryside.

What connects them is their capacity to create a pause.

At a moment when daily life is increasingly shaped by speed, distraction and information, Rituales suggests that repetition, memory and attention can themselves become acts of connection.

Rituales: Adquisiciones recientes en la Colección de Arte del Banco de la República runs from September 9 to October 19, 2026, at the Casa Republicana of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá. Calle 12 No.4-37. Admission is free.

Visit BanRep’s official site for more information: https://www.banrepcultural.org/exposiciones/rituales

The blaze, which began on Saturday afternoon near the cusp of the San Marcos mountain, has affected almost 300 hectares of vegetation and spread towards populated areas and the surrounding mountains. The latest official reports put the fire at approximately 50% controlled, although several active fronts remain and changing winds could reignite areas already treated by firefighters.

The emergency has brought together more than 400 people, including firefighters, Civil Defence personnel, police officers, residents and volunteers. Four helicopters have also been deployed in the aerial operation, carrying out about 170 water drops over the affected areas.

The Colombian Air Force which deployed a UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter, has carried out approximately 35 water drops on the most active areas. According to Brigadier General John López, commander of the Military Air Transport Command, the aircraft released about 53,000 litres of water, or roughly 14,000 gallons, in an effort to reduce the intensity of the flames and prevent the fire from advancing into other sectors.

The aerial operation forms part of a broader response involving military aircraft, firefighters from Bogotá and Tunja, the Boyacá emergency services and hundreds of local volunteers.

Fire reaches edge of colonial Villa de Leyva

The fire has been particularly threatening because of the proximity of San Marcos to Villa de Leyva’s historic centre, one of Colombia’s best-preserved colonial landscapes with its emblematic Virgen del Rosario church.

The town, known for its large cobbled Plaza Mayor, whitewashed colonial buildings and surrounding Andean countryside, is one of the country’s principal tourist destinations. Smoke and flames have been visible from the town itself as the fire has moved across the hillsides above the settlement.

Some homes and hotels have been evacuated, while authorities have urged residents and visitors to remain away from the fire lines and to follow instructions issued by emergency agencies.

Classes were suspended across the municipality on Monday, September 21, and tourism and recreational activities in areas affected by the emergency were cancelled. The municipal coliseum has been designated as an alternative medical and emergency assistance centre.

Police commander Colonel James Totena urged residents to follow evacuation orders when issued.

“When we tell them they have to evacuate, think first about life and personal safety and then about material possessions,” Totena said, stressing that police would remain deployed to protect evacuated properties.

Authorities investigate possible arson attack

The cause of the fire has become a central part of the investigation.

Boyacá Governor Carlos Amaya said Monday that residents had reported circumstances that, in their view, did not resemble a naturally developing wildfire. He said witnesses described an unusually intense initial flare-up and reported seeing activity at different points on the hillside.

Amaya also said firefighters had reported what they considered suspicious behaviour while fighting the flames, including people in other locations who appeared to be intensifying rather than extinguishing fires.

The governor has stopped short of presenting those accounts as proof of arson, but the authorities are investigating the possibility that the fire was deliberately started.

The Boyacá government has offered a reward of up to 45 million pesos for information that helps establish the origin of the fire and identify those responsible. The information, officials said, will be handled confidentially.

Environment Minister Fabio Arjona has also said that preliminary information indicates the fire may have been deliberately caused, while stressing that authorities are carrying out the necessary verification.

Hotel owners appeals for help

Among the most distressing consequences of the fire has been the destruction suffered by residents and businesses on the outskirts of the town.

Hotel owners have appeared in videos circulating on social media attempting to fight the flames alongside neighbours and visiting tourists. On Sunday morning, authorities evacuated the Hotel and Convention Center Duruelo as smoke engulfed the property. Tourists could be seen scurrying down the long ramparts to reach the safety of the large open areas.

Government mobilises as fire is only partly controlled

The national government has pledged to deploy the resources necessary to contain the emergency. President Abelardo De La Espriella said late Saturday that Villa de Leyva was “not alone” and that state resources would be mobilised to protect the town and its residents.

Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara has been overseeing the national response, while Bogotá Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán sent firefighters from the capital to reinforce crews already working in Villa de Leyva and surrounding areas.

The latest operation includes approximately 207 firefighters and Civil Defence rescuers on the ground, together with roughly 200 residents and volunteers supporting different fronts of the emergency.

The four helicopters involved in the aerial response have made approximately 170 water drops, releasing an estimated 240,000 litres of water over the affected areas.

Despite the scale of the operation, strong winds remain a major obstacle. Authorities have warned that gusts could reactivate apparently contained areas and create new fronts.

Villa de Leyva declared a state of public calamity as the scale of the wildfire became clear, allowing authorities to coordinate additional resources and emergency measures.

The fire began on the afternoon of Saturday, September 19, and rapidly developed into a major emergency as flames moved across the San Marcos hillside.

By Monday morning, the fire had affected between approximately 290 and 300 hectares, depending on the latest operational assessment, with around half of the fire considered controlled.

The emergency has also affected wildlife, prompting police carabineros and specialised personnel to search for animals caught in the fire.

The crisis comes only days after Villa de Leyva hosted the Festival de las Ideas, which brought hundreds of politicians, academics, journalists and civil-society figures to the historic town.

It has also placed renewed attention on the town’s vulnerability to wildfire, particularly as dry vegetation and strong winds allow flames to spread rapidly through the surrounding hills.

For now, the municipality must attend to the immediate task of protecting lives, homes, businesses and the surrounding landscape. The strong seasonal winds that make Villa de Leyva a favorite destination for kiteflyers are fanning a disaster three-hours north of the Colombian capital. Disaster that also threatens an agricultural heartland known for its flower farms, tomato orchards and vineyards.

And then there is the opening night.

The inauguration of ARTBO has become something of a ritual on Bogotá’s cultural calendar, when a particularly concentrated collection of artists, collectors, gallery owners, cultural grandees, celebrities, socialites and the city’s have-to-be-seen crowd descends on Ágora. It is one of those Bogotá evenings when being seen looking at art can sometimes seem almost as important as the art itself.

For the art aficionados, however, the fair is serious business. And for four days ARTBO becomes a meeting point for the people who make, exhibit, collect, discuss and sell contemporary art across Colombia and Latin America.

The 22nd edition of ARTBO Feria Internacional de Arte will take place from September 24 to 27, bringing together 50 galleries from 20 cities, 228 artists, more than 30 institutions and more than 40 publishers across five floors of the convention centre.

Now one of the established dates on Bogotá’s cultural calendar, ARTBO is as much about the business of art as it is about looking at art. Works are exhibited and sold, emerging artists seek visibility, established galleries court collectors, and institutions use the fair as a meeting point for conversations about the direction of contemporary art in Colombia and Latin America.

This year’s fair has expanded from 44 galleries in 2025, with greater representation from South and Central America, including galleries from Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Guatemala.

“ARTBO is much more than a fair: it is a meeting place that connects Bogotá with Colombia, Latin America and the world through art,” said Ovidio Claros, president of the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce (CCB), which organises the event. He said the fair demonstrates Bogotá’s capacity to attract talent, creativity, investment and knowledge while strengthening the circulation of Latin American art.

Contemporary art will dominate the fair, accounting for around 80 percent of the offering, with painting sharing the floor with photography, video, installation, performance, printmaking, drawing, ceramics, sculpture and multimedia. Of the participating artists, 65 percent are Colombian and 35 percent international.

Bogotá’s international art fair returns for its 22nd edition with 50 galleries, 228 artists and seven sections at Ágora Bogotá — while a new AI-powered platform aims to bring more visitors into the world of collecting.

ARTBO 2026 is divided into seven sections, giving the fair a broader remit than its commercial galleries alone.

Galerías, occupying the fourth and fifth floors of Ágora, is the principal commercial section, with 50 galleries from 12 countries presenting their artists and works.

Instituciones, on the second floor, brings together museums, foundations, magazines and other cultural projects, alongside launches and publications.

On the third floor, Encuentro Editorial, curated by Relámpago, focuses on publishers, distributors and specialist bookstores working with art and visual culture.

Conversaciones, curated by Benedicta Badía, provides a forum for critical discussion and debate around contemporary art.

Trayectoria, an ARTBO–Bauer collaboration, turns the spotlight this year on Colombian artist Fanny Sanín, with José Roca as curator and the support of Galería Alonso Garcés.

Artecámara, a collaboration between ARTBO and Whitman, continues its focus on emerging artists without commercial representation. The section is curated this year by Melissa Aguilar.

And Ruta Diseño extends ARTBO beyond Ágora for the first time, taking activities into Bogotá’s La Macarena neighbourhood and connecting the fair with another of the capital’s creative circuits.

ARTBO Conecta

The most conspicuous innovation of the 2026 edition is ARTBO Conecta, an artificial-intelligence-powered tool designed to make the process of finding and buying art less intimidating.

The platform matches a visitor’s preferences, budget and expectations with works available from participating galleries, helping guide visitors through the fair and identify artists and works that might correspond to their interests.

For ARTBO, the technology is intended in part to address one of the perennial challenges of an international art fair: making the market accessible to people who may be interested in buying art but do not necessarily know where to begin.

“We want visitors to ARTBO not only to discover new proposals and artists, but also to find tools that help them take the step towards collecting,” said Jaime Martínez, director of ARTBO. “With ARTBO Conecta, we are especially accompanying those who are beginning this journey.”

The initiative comes as ARTBO continues to position itself not simply as a marketplace but as a broader cultural event — one where buying, collecting, publishing, exhibiting and discussing art overlap.

The programme will also include guided tours, activities for children and families and a publishing programme involving more than 40 editorial projects. Two anniversaries will receive particular attention: the 50th anniversaries of ArtNexus and Taller Arte Dos Gráfico, both of which have played significant roles in the development of art and graphic culture in the region.

For Bogotá, ARTBO has become an annual ritual as recognisable as the city’s other major cultural gatherings. There is the art, naturally, and then there is everything that gathers around it: the collectors inspecting the latest acquisitions, the gallerists making their pitches, the emerging artists hoping to be noticed, the aficionados comparing notes and the familiar faces who seem to appear at every opening in town.

Missing the ARTBO inauguration is, in certain Bogotá circles, almost an act of cultural absenteeism.

But beneath the social theatre is a serious art market and an increasingly international platform for Colombian and Latin American artists. For four days, ARTBO offers the city a concentrated view of what is being made, exhibited, discussed and collected across the region — and, for those who simply come to look, a pretty good excuse to spend an afternoon wandering around Bogotá’s contemporary art world.

ARTBO 2026 runs from September 24–27 at Ágora Bogotá, Calle 24 #38-47. Opening hours are noon–8 p.m. from Thursday to Saturday and noon–6 p.m. on Sunday. General admission is COP25,000. Entry is free for students, minors, people over 60, people with disabilities

Admission is free to the two-day festival, which brings together 13 participating nations and the UN Mission in Colombia in a celebration of food, culture and international exchange.

The festival is a social project sponsored by ACONDIP, the Association of Diplomatic Spouses Accredited in Colombia, and forms part of the District’s Sabor Bogotá 2026 agenda. The initiative seeks to connect Bogotá’s international diplomatic community with residents, visitors, local entrepreneurs and cultural organizations through one of the city’s most universal forms of cultural expression: food.

For Angela Garzón of the Instituto Distrital de Turismo (IDT), the festival also speaks to the relationship Bogotá residents have with their city.

“It is special for those of us who live here, for Bogotá residents. It is a way of loving the city,” Garzón said, describing the idea behind Sabor Bogotá and the initiative led by the capital’s First Lady Carolina Deik and Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán.

Garzón also emphasized the growing role of gastronomy in Bogotá’s tourism economy. According to figures cited, the capital received more than 4.6 million visitors last year, including almost two million international visitors.

She highlighted that gastronomy is an important reason for visiting Bogotá, with more than 65 percent of international visitors identifying the city’s food culture as a reason for their trip. Among Colombians travelling to the capital from other parts of the country, she said, more than 40 percent come because Bogotá offers a different gastronomic experience, including cuisine from countries around the world.

For the IDT, supporting El Mundo is therefore part of a broader effort to use cultural and gastronomic events to generate tourism and social cohesion. “These are events that bring thousands of national and international visitors and move tourism within the localities of the city,” she said.

The festival will also feature entrepreneurs from Hecho en Bogotá and Corazones Productivos, programmes of the District’s Secretariat of Economic Development. Garzón noted that such events have become opportunities for entire families to spend a weekend discovering different parts of the Colombian capital while supporting local businesses and start-ups.

A taste of the world

The festival’s international character will be reflected in a menu that stretches across Latin America and beyond. Visitors will be able to try baleadas and yuca with chicharrón from Honduras, alongside mixed Chalaco ceviche and chocotejas from Peru.

Guatemala will present dishes including jocón, tipucas, chuchitos and tostadas with filled mole, while Ecuador will offer encebollado and dishes featuring cheese. The programme also includes macarrón from Lebanon, Costa Rican chifrijo, and Turkish mercimek, köfte and baklava.

The participation of diplomatic communities gives the event a dimension that extends beyond the restaurant table. By presenting national cuisines in a public setting, the festival creates an informal space for cultural exchange and for Bogotá residents to encounter traditions from countries represented in the city.

The Sabores of Bogotá

The event forms part of the wider Sabor Bogotá 2026 programme, which will continue later in September with an awards gala at the Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on September 29.

Santiago Trujillo, Bogotá’s Secretary of Culture, highlighted the importance of cooperation between public institutions, private businesses, communities and civil-society organizations in developing major projects for the city.

At the September 29 gala, Sabor Bogotá will present awards celebrating local culinary traditions, including prizes for the city’s best ajiaco and empanada.

The El Mundo festival will also include a solidarity component following the recent earthquake disaster in Colombia. At the direction of the mayor, six businesses and entrepreneurial initiatives from Valle del Cauca and Colombia’s Pacific region will participate in the event, following the cancellation this year of the Festival Petronio Álvarez.

The inclusion of Pacific and Valle del Cauca producers alongside international participants adds a Colombian dimension to a festival whose central theme is global cultural exchange.

For ACONDIP and its participating diplomatic communities, the weekend will offer an opportunity to introduce Bogotá audiences to their countries through food and culture. For the city, it forms part of a growing calendar of gastronomic events that link tourism, entrepreneurship, culture and open public spaces.

As Bogotá increasingly presents itself as a destination for food as well as art, history and nightlife, El Mundo en el Corazón de Bogotá offers a particularly international expression of that identity: 13 nations, the UN Mission in Colombia and Bogotá’s own diverse culinary community sharing the same table.

The Festival Gastronómico y Cultural El Mundo en el Corazón de Bogotá takes place September 19 and 20 at Parque El Country, with free admission.

Parque El Country: Calle 127 No.11D-90.