The war that the inauguration promised began before the week was out. Three days after taking the oath in Cali, the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, reported that operations over the weekend had left six members of armed groups dead. The dead include a commander of a FARC dissident faction; the announcement, delivered by the president himself, was framed as the first installment of the campaign he ran on.
The largest operation took place in and around Mapiripan, a municipality in Meta, in central Colombia, where soldiers and the Colombian Aerospace Force killed Hernando Forero Mosquera, alias El Ruso. The president called him an explosives expert; the French agency AFP described him as the second-in-command of a dissident faction known as the Comandos de la Frontera; military intelligence identified him as the head of the dissident FARC unit called Front 28, which answers to Ivan Mordisco’s command. Three of his men died in the same action. Separately, in the northwestern department of Antioquia, two men from the Clan del Golfo, the country’s largest drug cartel, died in a firefight with troops, one of them a commander. The military reported seizing rifles and military equipment, and four suspected cartel members were arrested in Necocli.
Espriella presented the results himself, two days after the operations, in the tone he used on the campaign trail. He said the killings sent a clear and powerful message to all bandits that there was nowhere for them to hide. The message was also delivered, within the same weekend, in the other direction. On Saturday a car bomb destroyed a tollbooth on the Pan-American Highway in Cauca, injuring two security guards, in an attack blamed on FARC dissidents. On the same day, explosives dropped from a drone hit a police post in the north, killing one officer. The new government’s first weekend was a two-way exchange: the state killed six, and the groups killed one and wounded two more.
The operations are the opening moves of a policy that reverses four years of Gustavo Petro’s approach in a single stroke. Where Petro negotiated, Espriella has declared the negotiating option completely exhausted. Where Petro’s “total peace” kept talks alive with dissident factions, the new government has made the same factions military targets, and it has already transferred 117 people held from earlier peace negotiations into maximum-security prisons. The new president has promised relentless bombing of what he calls narco-terrorism, with backing from the United States and Israel, mega-prisons on the Salvadoran model, and no corner of the country where criminals feel safe. Washington endorsed the program on inauguration day with a security package worth about a billion dollars, announced by the State Department as part of a new era in relations, and Colombia has joined the US-led Shield of the Americas grouping.
The first week suggests the shape of the war ahead. The state is hunting leaders, and it is finding them: Forero was a specialist in explosives, and his death removes a man who built bombs. The groups, for their part, have shown they can answer from the air with drones and on the highway with car bombs, and they did so within hours of the new government taking office. Neither side waited. That is what a security policy looks like when it is declared as a war rather than a process.
The numbers so far are small. Six dead is not a strategy, and the first operations of a presidency are the easiest ones, conducted against targets the intelligence services had already located. The hard questions begin when the named commanders are gone and the groups adapt, as they have adapted to every campaign of the last fifty years. The president’s own standard for success, stated at his inauguration, was that no criminal would feel safe anywhere in Colombia. By that standard, the first weekend was a start; by the standard of the families who bury the six, and the one policeman whose funeral follows, it is also a beginning the country has seen before.
The Tiger promised to bring the fight to them. By the end of his first weekend in office, he had. The open question is what the fight brings back, and what Colombia’s civilians pay while the two sides trade opening moves.