The Colombian Conflict

On May 27, 1964 the Colombian military launched Operation Marquetalia, an assault on a self-governing peasant enclave in the mountains of Tolima that had been organized by communist-aligned farmers since the 1950s. The operation, planned with U.S. counterinsurgency advice, dispersed the community but did not destroy its armed nucleus, which survived in the mountains and formally reconstituted itself in 1966 as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. The organization adopted a Marxist-Leninist program of land reform and rural revolution and grew over decades into an estimated 16,000-20,000 strong force with a political wing and control over rural municipalities. The date is officially regarded as the start of the conflict, which had deeper roots in the bipartisan civil violence of the 1950s. FARC's founding shaped Colombian politics for the next half century.

Location: Marquetalia, Tolima, Colombia

In 1965 a second insurgent organization, the National Liberation Army, ELN, was founded by students and intellectuals influenced by the Cuban revolution and liberation theology. Unlike FARC's peasant base, the ELN drew heavily on university networks and Catholic radicalism, and its early leadership included figures such as Fabio Vásquez and, later, the Spanish priest Manuel Pérez, who led it for two decades. The ELN operated mainly in the northeast and along the Venezuelan border, financed from the outset by kidnapping, extortion, and later by oil infrastructure attacks. It rejected FARC's eventual focus on territorial control in favor of a more mobile insurgency and never entered a comprehensive disarmament agreement. The ELN remains a major armed actor and has been a party to several rounds of negotiations with successive Colombian governments.

Location: Colombia

On November 6, 1985 commandos of the M-19 movement seized the Palace of Justice in downtown Bogotá, taking the Supreme Court's judges hostage during a morning session and demanding a political trial of the president. The Colombian military stormed the building the next day, and the siege ended with roughly 100 dead, including 11 of the 25 Supreme Court justices and most of the M-19 fighters. In the aftermath, thousands of pages of case files on criminal proceedings, including records related to drug trafficking prosecutions, were destroyed by fire, and allegations of a state cover-up and of torture of surviving hostages persisted for decades. The event traumatized the Colombian judiciary and hardened the state's stance toward insurgency. M-19 later demobilized in 1990 and became a legal political movement, but the siege remains one of the most scrutinized episodes of the conflict.

Location: Bogotá, Colombia

From the mid-1980s the Medellín cartel under Pablo Escobar turned cocaine trafficking into a parallel war inside the conflict, assassinating judges, ministers, and presidential candidates and bombing civilian targets, including the 1989 in-flight bombing of Avianca Flight 203 that killed 107 people. The cartel's campaign against extradition to the United States forced the Colombian state into a negotiated surrender policy for traffickers in the early 1990s, a policy Escobar exploited by building his own prison, La Catedral. After his escape in 1992, a joint U.S.-Colombian manhunt tracked him down, and he was killed on December 2, 1993 on a rooftop in Medellín by the Search Bloc, with U.S. technical assistance. His death broke the Medellín cartel but did not end the drug trade, which reorganized into smaller networks that later financed paramilitaries and guerrillas alike. The cartel era overlapped and complicated every stage of the counterinsurgency.

Location: Medellín, Colombia

In July 2000 the U.S. Congress approved Plan Colombia, a multi-billion dollar aid package designed to strengthen the Colombian military, eradicate coca cultivation, and interdict drug trafficking. The program supplied helicopters, training, and intelligence support, and it marked the deepest U.S. military involvement in the conflict to that point. Its backers credited it with weakening FARC militarily and cutting coca cultivation in targeted provinces, while critics pointed to continued coca displacement, fumigation's environmental and livelihood effects, and documented abuses by units that had received U.S. support. Plan Colombia shaped the strategy of the Pastrana and Uribe administrations and set the template for subsequent U.S. security assistance. It remains one of the largest U.S. aid programs in the hemisphere and a continuing subject of policy debate.

Location: Bogotá, Colombia / Washington, D.C.

In 1999 President Andrés Pastrana granted FARC a Switzerland-sized demilitarized zone in southern Colombia and opened formal peace talks there, the most ambitious negotiation attempt to that point. The talks produced no agreement: FARC used the zone to regroup, and the process collapsed on February 20, 2002 after the guerrillas hijacked an aircraft to kidnap a senator, prompting Pastrana to end the dialogue and order the military to retake the zone. The failure discredited negotiation in Colombian public opinion and set the stage for Álvaro Uribe's election later that year on a platform of all-out military pressure. It also preceded the guerrillas' period of escalating attacks on civilians, including a 2002 church bombing in Bojayá that killed dozens of civilians sheltering inside. The Caguán collapse became the reference point against which the later Havana process was judged.

Location: San Vicente del Caguán, Colombia

On March 1, 2008 Colombian forces crossed into Ecuador and bombed a FARC camp, killing Raúl Reyes, the organization's second-in-command and chief international spokesman. The raid, backed by U.S. intelligence support, seized laptops whose contents were later used to document FARC's relations with Venezuela and Ecuador, triggering a regional crisis in which Ecuador and Venezuela briefly broke diplomatic relations with Colombia and sent troops to their borders. The operation followed the 2007 killing of FARC's third-ranked commander, Álfonso Cano's predecessor in the secretariat, and came amid a broader security offensive under President Álvaro Uribe. The incident sharpened scrutiny of cross-border operations and of the intelligence sharing behind them. It is regarded as the turning point that began FARC's rapid military decline.

Location: Sucumbíos, Ecuador

On July 2, 2008 the Colombian military rescued 15 hostages from a FARC camp in Guaviare, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who had been held for more than six years, and three U.S. military contractors. The operation, code-named Checkmate, used infiltrators to convince the guerrilla commanders that the hostages were being moved by helicopter for a supposed humanitarian transfer, and the aircraft simply flew them to safety without a shot being fired. The rescue came weeks after the death of FARC's longtime leader Manuel Marulanda and the release of several high-profile hostages, and it marked the high point of the Uribe government's campaign against the insurgency. Betancourt's captivity had been a global cause, and her release shifted international perceptions of FARC's strength. The operation is studied as a model of intelligence-led hostage rescue.

Location: Guaviare, Colombia

On September 26, 2016 President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC commander Timoleón Jiménez signed the Final Agreement to End the Conflict in Cartagena, concluding four years of secret and then formal negotiations in Havana. The accord covered rural reform, political participation for the guerrillas, a ceasefire and disarmament timetable, a transition of FARC from drug trafficking, a special peace tribunal for war crimes, and recognition of victims' rights. It followed a June 2016 bilateral ceasefire monitored by a U.N. political mission, the first such verification arrangement for a Colombian peace process. Santos had won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2016 in anticipation of the agreement. The signing set up a plebiscite four days later that its supporters expected to ratify it easily.

Location: Havana, Cuba / Cartagena, Colombia

On October 2, 2016 Colombians voted in a referendum to ratify the peace accord, and in a result almost every poll had failed to predict, 50.2 percent voted against it, defeating the agreement by a margin of under 54,000 votes out of more than 13 million cast. Opponents, led by former president Álvaro Uribe, argued the deal was too lenient on guerrilla commanders and conceded too much political power, while turnout was unusually low at under 38 percent, partly due to heavy rain in the referendum's strongest opposition regions. The rejection stunned the government, the FARC leadership, and international observers, and threw the peace process into limbo. Within days FARC publicly reaffirmed its commitment to the ceasefire, and negotiators from both sides returned to Havana to renegotiate the text. The vote is now studied as a case of referendum risk in peace-making.

Location: Colombia

On November 24, 2016 the government and FARC signed a revised accord in Bogotá's Colonial Theater incorporating changes demanded by the referendum's opponents, including clearer limits on guerrilla political participation, stronger provisions on drug trafficking, and a more explicit role for victims' testimony. Because time was short before the outgoing administration's term, Congress ratified the new text on November 30, 2016 by legislative vote rather than by another popular referendum, a route critics called undemocratic and supporters called constitutionally permitted. The accord entered into force, and FARC began the U.N.-verified process of concentrating fighters in transitional zones. The ratification ended the legal uncertainty and allowed implementation to begin, though the political rift over the referendum's outcome persisted. The episode reshaped Colombian debates over direct democracy and peace legislation.

Location: Bogotá, Colombia

During 2017 roughly 13,000 FARC fighters handed over weapons under U.N. verification, completing the demobilization in August of that year and dissolving the organization as an armed force. The accord's justice provisions created the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, JEP, to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity on a restorative model that trades reduced sentences for full truth-telling, and the Truth Commission to document the conflict's toll. The Commission's final 2022 report estimated roughly 450,000 deaths between 1985 and 2016 and identified more than 8 million displaced persons, with state forces, paramilitaries, and guerrillas all named as responsible parties. A FARC political party was formed, though dozens of its candidates and ex-combatants were assassinated in the years that followed. Demobilization did not end violence, as dissident factions rejected the accord and continued fighting.

Location: Colombia

After the FARC accord, the ELN and dissident FARC factions remained active, and in 2022 President Gustavo Petro launched a "Total Peace" policy that resumed formal talks with the ELN, which produced a partial truce and negotiations in Caracas and Mexico City through 2024. At the same time, armed activity by dissident groups such as the Clan del Golfo and FARC dissidents continued, including a January 2025 attack on a military base in the Catatumbo region that killed dozens and displaced thousands. The government's approach of negotiated ceasefires with multiple armed actors drew both support for reducing violence and criticism for failing to demobilize the ELN and for repeated truce violations. The conflict's post-2016 phase has become a subject of continuing scholarly and policy analysis, with the JEP's prosecutions and the Truth Commission's recommendations still in progress. The war's overall arc from 1964 to the present remains the hemisphere's longest-running insurgency.

Location: Colombia