JUAN MANUEL SANTOS, Colombia’s president, won a Nobel prize in 2016 for ending a 52-year war with the left-wing FARC guerrilla group, but criminals with guns still terrorise parts of the countryside. That alarms people in cities, where most people live. Some 12,000 FARC fighters have disarmed and moved into designated zones, as envisaged by the peace accord. But the space they left has been partly filled with other gangs, including dissident members of the FARC, the ELN, another guerrilla group, and Clan del Golfo, a mafia whose origins are in right-wing paramilitary groups that demobilised in the 2000s (see map).
Their fights with each other and with security forces are caused in part by competition over the cocaine trade, which was one of the FARC’s main sources of income. In 2016 coca, the raw material for cocaine, grew on 146,000 hectares, three times the area it covered in 2012. Most of the fighting took place in about a quarter of the country’s municipalities. Just 5% of that area is now under...Continue reading
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