Colombia’s Ministerio de Defensa Nacional (Ministry of National Defense) lifted the decade-long general suspension on firearm-carry permits on September 8, 2026, through Decree 1368 of 2026, signed under the authority of President Abelardo de la Espriella. The decree took effect September 9, the day after its publication in the Diario Oficial (Official Gazette), and restores the ability of citizens who already hold a valid porte de armas (carry) permit to move through Colombian territory with their weapon, without the special individual authorization the suspension had required since 2015.

The suspension traces to Decree 2515 of December 24, 2015, issued under then-President Juan Manuel Santos, and was renewed by successive governments — including those of Iván Duque and Gustavo Petro — for nearly 11 years before de la Espriella’s decree ended it. Finance Colombia reported on the decree’s signing and the political reaction to it on September 8. What follows is a closer look at what the decree actually changes in the permitting system, who qualifies to carry a firearm under it, and how Colombian doctrine on ownership, carrying and self-defense compares with the framework used in the United States.

What the decree does, and explicitly does not do.

Decree 1368 is narrow by its own terms. Article 1 instructs Colombia’s military authorities to lift the general suspension nationwide. Article 2 states plainly that doing so “no crea nuevos derechos, no autoriza el libre porte de armas de fuego, ni modifica los requisitos legales, condiciones, restricciones y controles previstos” in Decree-Law 2535 of 1993 — it creates no new rights, does not authorize the free carrying of firearms, and does not alter the legal requirements, conditions, restrictions or controls already in force. What changes is procedural: permit holders no longer need the special, individual authorization the suspension had layered on top of an otherwise valid permit.

That narrow framing reflects Colombia’s underlying constitutional structure. Article 223 of the Constitution establishes a state monopoly over weapons, munitions and explosives and specifies that no one may possess or carry them without authorization from the competent authority. Decree-Law 2535 of 1993 — the framework law both decrees invoke — states in Article 3 that private citizens may possess or carry weapons only “de manera excepcional” (exceptionally), through a permit issued under the “potestad discrecional” (discretionary power) of the competent authority. Colombia’s Constitutional Court upheld that discretionary framework in Sentencia C-031 of February 2, 1995, and separately upheld the government’s authority to impose a general suspension in Sentencia C-867 of November 3, 2010; the preamble to Decree 1368 cites both rulings.

Ownership, carrying and use are three separate permissions.

Colombian law does not treat buying, keeping, carrying and using a firearm as a single bundle of rights that comes with ownership. Decree 2535 draws a sharp line between two base categories. Article 16 defines tenencia (possession) as keeping the weapon and its ammunition inside the specific property registered on the permit, for personal defense; the permit authorizes use of the weapon only within that property. Article 17 defines porte (carry) as the act of carrying the weapon, or keeping it within reach, for personal defense, under a separate permit issued by the competent authority.

Retired Major General Fernando Murillo Orrego, who directed the National Police‘s Dirección de Investigación Criminal e Interpol (Directorate of Criminal Investigation and Interpol, or DIJIN) from 2020 to 2022, described the practical difference in a broadcast interview the day the decree was signed: tenencia is bought from the state and kept in one place — a residence, a business, a farm, a store — and cannot be transported in a vehicle or carried on one’s person, while porte is acquired specifically so the weapon can accompany the holder through their personal or work activity.

A third, narrower category complicates the ownership-equals-use assumption further. Article 9 of Decree 2535 allows restricted-use weapons to be authorized to cash-transport companies, corporate security departments and specialized security services, subject to the Superintendencia de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada (Superintendency of Private Security and Surveillance). An employee issued a firearm under one of those institutional permits can hold and carry it on the job without being authorized to use it for their own personal defense — the permit belongs to the employer’s security function, not the individual. Murillo pointed to that gap directly, calling Colombia “the only country” where a weapon can be sold to someone legally who still cannot use it for their own personal protection, because the permit is tied to their employer’s business activity rather than to them as an individual.

This article is informational only, and does not constitute legal advice. Seek guidance from competent experts and authorities!

Who can apply, and what the process requires.

Under Decree 2535 and the rules the Departamento Control Comercio de Armas, Municiones y Explosivos (Department for the Commercial Control of Arms, Munitions and Explosives, or DCCAE) applies today, an applicant for an individual carry permit must be a Colombian citizen at least 25 years old, according to recent reporting from El Colombiano and Infobae. Article 33 of the decree requires the applicant’s cédula de ciudadanía (citizenship card), a judicial background certificate, and a medical certificate of psychophysical fitness; Article 34 additionally requires the applicant to justify the necessity of carrying a weapon for their own defense and physical integrity. In practice, DCCAE also requires a certified firearms-handling course.

General Murillo, describing the same vetting process, told interviewers the requirements come down to a psychological examination, personal references and a clean judicial record, all reviewed by a committee rather than decided by a single official. Meeting every requirement does not guarantee approval — Article 34’s “necesidad” (necessity) standard leaves the final decision to the discretion of the military authority. Permits are not issued for a uniform term: Murillo said validity runs one, three or 10 years depending on the type of firearm involved.

Renewing a lapsed permit:

Citizens whose permits had already expired can revalidate them through the DCCAE’s online platform, which the department’s own site identifies as SIAEM 2.0 (Sistema de Información de Armas, Explosivos y Municiones, or the Weapons, Explosives and Munitions Information System), reachable through the department’s 36 regional seccionales (branch offices). A spokesperson for the department said in a video statement that the platform runs verifications against the National Police, INTERPOL, the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) and the DCCAE itself, under Law 2535 of 1993.

DCCAE’s published fee schedule sets a graduated fine for late revalidation of a carry permit: one-quarter of a month’s minimum wage for a renewal filed within 45 days of expiration, half a month’s minimum wage between 46 and 90 days, and a full month’s minimum wage — $1,750,905 COP at 2026 rates — beyond 90 days. The department spokesperson’s own public description on camera was less precise, describing a flat fine equal to one month’s minimum wage for any permit expired more than 30 days; the published schedule on the department’s site is the more current and specific figure.

What the decree does not revive:

Article 6 of Decree 1368 excludes several categories of permit holders from the benefit of the lifted suspension. Carrying remains prohibited where:

• the permit has expired;
• the permit was individually suspended;
• the permit was canceled or revoked;
• the weapon has been seized or is subject to a judicial or administrative measure;
• a legal or judicial prohibition applies; or
• the permit authorizes only tenencia and not porte.

Article 7 preserves, without change, the inspection, control and seizure powers of the National Police and other competent authorities. Carrying a firearm without a currently valid permit remains porte ilegal (illegal carrying), a criminal offense, regardless of the general suspension being lifted.

Where non-citizens and permanent residents stand

Neither Decree 1368 nor Decree 2535 sets out a distinct application path for foreign nationals who hold Colombian residency. The requirement in Article 33 is specifically for a cédula de ciudadanía — the identity document issued to Colombian nationals, whether by birth or naturalization — rather than the cédula de extranjería issued to foreign residents. The only foreigner-specific provisions identified in Decree 2535 concern accredited diplomatic personnel, a separate and narrower category under Article 29. Neither decree, nor the coverage of Decree 1368 reviewed for this article, documents an equivalent civilian route for a foreign permanent resident.

This is a reading of what the published regulation does and does not say, not legal advice. A foreign national or permanent resident weighing a firearm permit in Colombia should raise the question directly with the DCCAE rather than rely on this or any other secondary account.

How Colombian doctrine diverges from the US framework

The contrast with the United States is structural, not just procedural. The US Supreme Court has treated the Second Amendment, since District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, as protecting an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, a right the Court incorporated against state and local governments in McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010. In 2022, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen extended that right to carrying a firearm outside the home and replaced the balancing tests lower courts had used with a historical-tradition standard, pushing most US states toward “shall-issue” or permitless carry regimes in which an applicant who meets objective, listed criteria is entitled to a permit.

Colombia has no analogous individual constitutional right to test a permit denial against. Article 223’s state monopoly, and Decree 2535’s framing of civilian possession and carrying as an exceptional grant made at the “discretionary power” of the military authority, mean that even an applicant who satisfies every documentary requirement is not entitled to a permit as a matter of right — the Constitutional Court upheld exactly that discretion in Sentencia C-031 of 1995. A valid Colombian carry permit is a conditional, revocable authorization, not a constitutional entitlement.

General Murillo framed the policy in terms of shared responsibility rather than individual right, telling interviewers that Colombians bear a corresponsabilidad (shared responsibility) for their own protection alongside the state, and that a citizen’s legal access to a firearm can itself deter criminals who know it exists.

“The mere fact that today’s ordinary criminal knows there are citizens who legally carry firearms is a deterrent against all the violent acts we are seeing.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Fernando Murillo Orrego, former director, DIJIN

That view is contested inside Colombia: former President Gustavo Petro criticized the decree in terms Finance Colombia reported on September 8, and Colombian security analysts remain divided on whether broader carrying reduces or increases armed violence. This article takes no position on that policy question; it describes what the regulation itself permits.

Carrying, using and Colombia’s “legítima defensa” doctrine

Colombia’s Penal Code (Law 599 of 2000) recognizes legítima defensa (self-defense) in Article 32, numeral 6, as a ground for the absence of criminal responsibility when a person acts to defend a right of their own or of another against an actual or imminent unjust aggression, using proportionate means. Colombian criminal attorney Javier Arévalo, speaking alongside host Felipe “Pipe” Caballero in a recorded legal discussion of the decree, addressed a scenario the new rules raise directly: if a person disarms an attacker and uses that weapon to repel the attack, Arévalo said, that does not by itself amount to illegal weapons carrying, because illegal carrying requires the voluntary, conscious decision to take up and carry a firearm in public without authorization — not merely the act of taking a weapon away from an aggressor in self-defense.

Arévalo was more cautious about firearms used to defend property alone. Shooting someone who breaks a car window to steal a bag, he said, would generally read as disproportionate; a firearm response becomes more legally defensible, in his account, only where the aggression also threatens the victim’s life or physical integrity, not merely their belongings. He also confirmed that legítima defensa extends to defending a third party, including a stranger, once the threat is real or imminent — but drew a firm line against citizens capturing a suspect and then assaulting or torturing them instead of turning them over to police, which he described as a separate, more serious offense than the original crime.

That proportionality-driven, case-by-case standard has no exact equivalent in Colombian statute to the “stand your ground” or expanded castle-doctrine laws adopted in some US states, which remove a legal duty to retreat before using force in self-defense in specified circumstances. Colombian doctrine keeps the proportionality analysis in place regardless of where the confrontation occurs, and Article 7 of Decree 1368 leaves Colombian police with full authority to stop, inspect and seize weapons independent of whether the carrier’s underlying permit is valid.

Above photo © Loren Moss

The new Article 339D of the Criminal Code, known informally as the Ley No Más Zoofilia (Spanish for “No More Zoophilia Law”), defines the offense as carnal access to an animal — legally, penetration by a human sexual organ or by any other body part or object. The statute separately defines “acto sexual” (sexual act) as any other sexual conduct imposed on an animal that stops short of penetration, but does not attach an independent criminal penalty to that term in the text as enacted. That is narrower than the original version of the bill, filed in Congress in August 2024, which would have criminalized “acto sexual con animales” on its own, with a lighter 12-to-36-month sentence.

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Beyond prison time, anyone convicted faces special disqualification of two to four years from any profession, trade or business involving the care, possession or handling of animals, an absolute ban on acquiring, possessing, caring for or sheltering animals, and a fine of 30 to 50 salarios mínimos mensuales legales vigentes (the monthly legal minimum wage, or SMMLV) — $52,527,150 COP to $87,545,250 COP, roughly $16,800 USD to $28,000 USD at the Banco de la República‘s exchange rate this week of about 3,126 pesos per dollar.

Sentences increase by half to three-quarters, up to the 140-month ceiling, when the offense is committed by two or more people, involves more than one animal, takes place in a public space or for profit, is repeated against the same animal, is committed by someone abusing a position, job or profession that gave them particular trust over the animal’s care, or is recorded and shared through media, a digital platform or social network in a way that promotes or glorifies the crime. The law also treats abuse carried out with cruelty; as revenge, retaliation, a threat or another form of coercion against an animal’s owner, holder or possessor, or for a base or trivial motive; or against an animal already under institutional custody or in a vulnerable state — because of age, illness, disability, pregnancy, abandonment, recovery from a prior injury or its inability to defend itself — as aggravating circumstances.

The statute explicitly exempts licensed veterinary and zootechnical procedures, along with diagnostic techniques used in animal reproduction and productivity, from criminal liability — a carve-out relevant to Colombia’s livestock and artificial-insemination industries, since practitioners in those fields are also the group facing the law’s professional disqualification if convicted of the new offense. Judges may additionally order convicted offenders into mandatory restorative-justice programs or animal-welfare education, though the law specifies that these measures can never substitute for or reduce the prison sentence and other penalties.

The law gives the national government six months to design a public-education campaign on the new offense, led by the Ministerio de Justicia y del Derecho (Ministry of Justice and Law) in coordination with the health and culture ministries, working with animal shelters and welfare organizations. In the same window, the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) must issue a unified investigative protocol for gathering evidence in these cases and train animal-rights activists and organizations to assist prosecutors in that work.

The bill was sponsored by senators Iván Cepeda and Esmeralda Hernández of the Pacto Histórico coalition, who first introduced it in August 2024. At the time, Hernández pointed to Fiscalía data — 61 cases of sexual violence against animals logged nationwide by the Fiscalía’s Grupo Especial para la Lucha contra el Maltrato Animal (GELMA, or Special Group for the Fight Against Animal Abuse) as of February 2024 — and to research linking abusers of animals to a heightened risk of later sexually abusing vulnerable people. “There is technical and scientific evidence indicating that some rapists of human beings previously engaged in sexually abusive conduct toward animals,” Hernández said when she filed the bill, according to Infobae. The measure cleared its final debate in the Colombian Congress in June 2026 and was sent to the president’s desk for signature on August 6, 2026.

Hernández, the bill’s lead sponsor, told El Tiempo that the new offense’s most significant feature is its exclusion from bail.

“It is the only crime against animals in Colombia that does not qualify for release from custody.”

— Sen. Esmeralda Hernández, the law’s lead sponsor

Sen. Andrea Padilla, a separate animal-rights legislator not among the bill’s listed sponsors, also welcomed the signing on X: “The law that criminally punishes the sexual abuse of animals in Colombia has been sanctioned! Thank you, Mr. President,” she wrote, adding that her own team had worked to make the law’s criminal provisions “penalmente robusta” (criminally robust) — a contribution Finance Colombia could not independently verify.

Colombia’s lack of a specific criminal charge for sexual abuse of animals had already drawn national attention once before. In July 2023, a ceramic sculpture titled Mi Primer Amor (“My First Love”), created by the artist Sebastián Bohórquez, went up in Sincelejo, the capital of Sucre department on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, with a plaque describing it as a tribute to the “hombre costeño ‘mamaburra'” — a phrase referring to a persistent regional folk belief that rural men on the Caribbean coast had their first sexual experience with a donkey. Sincelejo officials ordered the sculpture removed, and it came down within a week of going up, citing the lack of a permit for the public space it occupied, according to Infobae. The episode set off a national debate over a custom long associated with parts of the Caribbean coast; Hernández’s own 2024 bill announcement cited the sculpture as a recent example of the broader conversation her legislation was meant to address.

Within Título XI-A of the Criminal Code — the section covering Delitos Contra los Animales (“Crimes Against Animals”) — Law 2627 also renames its single chapter as Delitos contra la vida, la integridad física, emocional y sexual de los animales (“Crimes Against the Life, Physical Integrity, Emotional Well-Being and Sexual Integrity of Animals”), folding sexual abuse into the same chapter as animal cruelty while keeping it a distinct, more harshly penalized offense within it.

The decree, issued by the Ministerio de Defensa Nacional (Ministry of Defense), ends the additional special authorization that holders of an individual carrying permit had to obtain on top of their existing license during the suspension. It does not create new rights, authorize unrestricted or indiscriminate carrying, or alter the licensing requirements, restrictions and controls set out in Decree Law 2535 of 1993, Colombia’s foundational arms statute, according to the decree’s text. The state’s constitutional monopoly over weapons, war ammunition and explosives under Article 223 of the Constitution remains in force.

“For years, the citizen who obeys the law was restricted, while criminals kept arming themselves illegally to the teeth. That has to change,” de la Espriella wrote on his X account. He added that the change “does not mean indiscriminate carrying” and that strict controls, requirements and permits from the competent authorities remain in place. “What ends is the general suspension that turned the prohibition into the rule,” he wrote. “To the law-abiding citizen who strictly complies with the law, guarantees within the law. To the criminal illegally armed, the full weight of the law and the full legitimate force of the State.”

Firmé el decreto que levanta la suspensión general de los permisos para el porte de armas de fuego en Colombia.

Durante años se restringió al ciudadano que cumple la ley mientras los criminales siguieron armándose ilegalmente hasta los dientes. Eso tiene que cambiar.

Las cifras… pic.twitter.com/dsZAshWMWS

— DE LA ESPRIELLA STYLE (@DELAESPRIELLAE) September 8, 2026

The suspension traces to Decree 2515 of 2015, signed by then-President Juan Manuel Santos on December 24, 2015. “Colombians deserve a calm and safe Christmas and New Year,” Santos wrote on Twitter at the time, according to El País, which reported the measure was meant to guarantee tranquility and security for Colombians over the holiday season. It initially ran through January 31, 2016, but Santos’s government kept extending it, and every administration since has renewed it in turn. The measure was formalized into a standing, annually revisited policy under Decree 2362 of 2018, signed during the government of Iván Duque, which cited a declining trend in homicides and injuries linked to firearms between 2016 and 2018 as grounds for continuing it. Its most recent extension came from Decree 1482 of December 31, 2025, signed by then-President Gustavo Petro, which pushed the suspension’s expiration to December 31, 2026. Decree 1368 repeals both the 2018 and 2025 measures outright.

The general suspension power itself derives from Article 41 of Decree Law 2535 of 1993, as modified by Law 1119 of 2006, which authorizes Colombia’s competent military authorities to suspend the validity of carrying and possession permits nationwide. Colombia’s Constitutional Court upheld that authority in a 2010 ruling, finding it consistent with the state’s constitutional monopoly on arms.

De la Espriella defended the decision with seizure figures covering January 1 through September 3, 2026: Colombia’s security forces confiscated 15,700 firearms in that period, 14,179 of them linked to the commission of crimes, according to El Tiempo. Of the total, 980 weapons were tied to FARC dissident factions, 551 to the Clan del Golfo and 339 to the National Liberation Army (ELN), the president said, adding that the weapons linked to dissident groups alone included 380 rifles and 65 60-millimeter mortars.

“There is no justification for bandits being armed to the teeth while decent people cannot defend themselves.”

— President Abelardo de la Espriella

The decree specifies that the lifted suspension does not extend to weapons whose permits have expired, been individually suspended, canceled or revoked, been seized or placed under a judicial or administrative measure, or that are subject to a separate legal or judicial prohibition, nor to permits that authorize only possession rather than carrying. Colombia’s military authorities retain their power to issue, renew, suspend, cancel or revoke individual permits, the Policía Nacional (National Police) keeps its inspection and seizure authority, and the Ministry of Defense’s Departamento Control Comercio de Armas, Municiones y Explosivos (Department for the Control of Arms, Ammunition and Explosives Trade) will continue to maintain the registries used to verify which permits remain valid.

The distinction that matters going forward, according to attorney Fabio Humar, is between possession and carrying. “Proving you are licensed to have a weapon requires a permit. But possession is different from carrying, which is what was restricted. What this decree does is authorize carrying,” Humar told El Tiempo.

Former President Gustavo Petro, whose own government signed the most recent extension of the suspension in December 2025, criticized the repeal in a two-word post on X: “La necropolítica,” or “necropolitics” — a concept, Infobae noted, that links state policy to violence and exposure to death.

Above photo: © Loren Moss

Bogotá’s 32nd Court for the Execution of Sentences and Security Measures (Juzgado 32 de Ejecución de Penas y Medidas de Seguridad de Bogotá) ruled that Cepeda, along with Holmer Pérez Balmaceda of the Catatumbo Farmers’ Association (Ascamcat) and Clímaco Carmelo Landazuri Preciado of the Corporación Étnica Ambiental del Pacífico Sostenible (Capacs), had not shown a current violation of their rights or irreparable harm attributable to MinTIC or Inravisión. The court found the stations had not been shut down and their frequencies had continued operating.

“Inravisión has not issued any administrative act or directive aimed at suppressing, closing or eliminating the Peace Radio Stations, canceling their frequencies or permanently ending their operation.”

— Bogotá’s 32nd Court for the Execution of Sentences and Security Measures

The dispute traces to August 17, 2026, when Inravisión — the name the public broadcasting system readopted earlier this year after two decades as RTVC — instructed the directors of the 20 stations by WhatsApp message to halt their regular programming, according to reporting by El Armadillo. The order also reached 11 decentralized stations in the Radio Nacional de Colombia network, covering more than 70 frequencies in total. Since then, the affected signals have carried only music from Bogotá in place of locally produced news, culture and community programming. One of the 20, in Ituango, Antioquia, was among the first two Peace Radio Stations to go on air, in 2019, alongside a sister station in Chaparral, Tolima, and is the only one of the network’s stations in Antioquia department, according to Las2orillas.

Cepeda, who lost the presidency to Abelardo de la Espriella in the June 21 runoff, announced on August 21 that he would sue, writing on X that the suspension “disregards that these stations were created under Section 6.5 of the Final Peace Agreement and the duty of state authorities to comply in good faith with what was agreed,” according to El País (Cali). The Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (FLIP), the Misión de Observación Electoral and the Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias (AMARC) all publicly rejected the suspension, and separately argued it affected more than 463,000 listeners, mostly in rural, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities.

The Peace Radio Stations were created under the 2016 accord between the Colombian government and the demobilized FARC guerrilla group to produce content on peacebuilding and the accord’s implementation in municipalities hit hardest by the armed conflict; roughly 90 percent of their programming has consisted of locally produced content rather than national feeds, according to Inravisión staff cited by Infobae Colombia. The network had previously been cited as the one commitment of the 2016 accord to reach full implementation.

The suspension followed the August 7 inauguration of de la Espriella and the August 12 appointment of Ángela María Mora as Inravisión’s new manager. On August 16, MinTIC issued a statement declaring the end of what it called “the propaganda apparatus in Colombia’s Public Media System,” announcing an “immediate action plan” with Minister Alexandra Falla to overhaul programming, review contracting and eliminate the news and opinion slots across the system’s radio and television offerings, according to Semana. Mora and Falla said the review covers more than 1,051 contracts worth over $100 billion COP signed in 2026, including roughly $7,255 million COP in advertising, planning and digital-content services under separate scrutiny, according to Las2orillas. Findings are set to go to Colombia’s Inspector General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Nación) and Comptroller General’s Office (Contraloría General de la República). The former Inravisión manager, Hollman Morris, had faced a Procuraduría disciplinary investigation opened in June over allegations that the outlet was used to favor the previous Petro government’s political agenda. Senator Enrique Gómez, of the Salvación Nacional movement that backed de la Espriella’s campaign, said on August 21 that the stations were “the official megaphones of the FARC for indoctrinating regions” and a “nest of propaganda,” a characterization FLIP rejected, warning that stigmatizing the stations’ journalists could increase their risk of attack, per Las2orillas.

In its ruling, the court also rejected the censorship claim, finding the programming change applied uniformly across all 20 stations without singling out particular content, programs or people, and that the plaintiffs had not specified what information had gone unreported or what concrete impact the centralization had caused. On the stations’ role under the peace accord, the court acknowledged they serve as “an instrument intended for pedagogy and reconciliation in territories affected by the conflict” but found the shutdown did not rise to an actual, current violation of the right to peace, since the infrastructure, frequencies and underlying contracts had all remained in force. The government has described the change as a temporary programming scheme adopted while a review and reorganization of the schedule is carried out, rather than a final decision to end the service.

Although it denied the tutela, the court urged Inravisión — without making it binding — to define and publish a timetable for reactivating the stations’ local news programming. Cepeda has said he will appeal the ruling to a higher court, according to Cablenoticias. Colombia’s Congress has already taken up the underlying dispute: Representative Alejandro Toro, of the opposition Pacto Histórico, filed a control-hearing request, joined by 18 other representatives, to question Falla and Mora over the decision.

Headline photo: Illuminated signage on the Inravisión — Sistema de Medios Públicos headquarters in Bogotá.

The recording is now the subject of a preliminary criminal inquiry by the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) and a separate disciplinary inquiry by the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office), both opened in June against Rueda, former Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, former National Intelligence Director Jorge Lemus and former Counterintelligence Chief Ricardo Rey Rosanía. Rueda has said the meeting was part of an exploratory phase, not a formal negotiation, and that the freeze-tag comment was a metaphor. The recordings, the numbers and the officials’ own public statements are on record; what follows is drawn from them.

Pérez, whose organization also goes by the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia and answers to top commander Jobanis de Jesús Ávila, alias “Chiquito Malo,” opened the meeting by citing a unilateral ceasefire the Clan del Golfo had declared on August 7, 2022 — Petro’s inauguration day — and asked the government for a reciprocal gesture: the withdrawal of special infiltration units and undercover operations from the group’s territory. “If the organization says there’s been a ceasefire since August 7, then there should also be a gesture from the government, withdrawing the special operations and infiltration units in the area,” Pérez said, according to the recording. “We’re working on that,” Rueda replied.

“There are things that don’t get said outright, because nobody wants to show they’re conceding. Everyone wants to say, ‘I’m strong.’ We know you, we recognize you. Calm down. Look, in another region — what did we achieve? You control up to here. Let’s play frozen. So all three of us stay frozen. Now, if someone decides to move, that’s when the trouble starts.”

— Danilo Rueda, then Colombia’s high commissioner for peace, in a recorded September 2022 meeting with a Clan del Golfo representative

Rueda then went further, according to the recording, offering “two messages: one, a halt to bombardments; two, a decision to clean house in police intelligence.” He tied the bombing halt directly to Velásquez, saying: “We knew there were bombing operations under way. I found out, and we spoke with the minister, and orders were given, for your group and others.” Velásquez’s public position at the time was narrower — that bombing was restricted only where minors might be present. Ministry of Defense data cited by Noticias Caracol shows no aerial bombardments against the Clan del Golfo for roughly two years after the meeting; the first came in late 2024, followed by five more in 2025.

Five days after Petro’s inauguration, on August 12, 2022, the government retired 35 generals and colonels in the largest shake-up of Colombia’s military and police command in recent history. On the recording, Rueda cited that purge to Pérez as evidence of good faith, and went further: three colonels who had been assigned to strategic posts in intelligence, the judicial police directorate and anti-narcotics units — believed to be John Arbey Alzate Duque, Juan Miguel Thiriat Tovar and Zaid Eduardo Pabón Ortega, according to El Colombiano, all tied to the anti-Clan del Golfo operation Agamenón — were removed within about a week of their appointments. “Three were vetoed who had the mission of sabotaging everything,” Rueda said on the recording. “But information came in, and then they criticize the president… because there’s information I can’t share with you.”

Extradition came up last. Pérez asked for a “lifting of arrest warrants” and “extradition orders” as a condition of trust. “All of that gets done,” Rueda replied. Asked for de-escalation of operations in the group’s territory “so there’s trust,” Rueda said: “Yes… that’s possible.” Nearly four years later, in 2026, the government’s peace office formally asked Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo to lift arrest warrants against 29 Clan del Golfo members, including Ávila, the group’s top commander, who is wanted for extradition by US courts on drug-trafficking charges. Camargo declined, citing insufficient verification of the group’s compliance with the negotiations and Colombia’s international extradition obligations; the Supreme Court backed her decision, according to El Colombiano.

Gerson Arias, a researcher at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz (Ideas for Peace Foundation), told Noticias Caracol that the Clan del Golfo “expanded and grew stronger in the midst of these initial explorations,” pointing to “a premature ceasefire, the elimination of bombing operations, and the reduced effectiveness of military, police and judicial operations resulting from a weakening of the intelligence capabilities the Colombian state had built up over years.” Juanita Goebertus, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, drew a similar conclusion from her organization’s own field documentation, saying the combination of an absent security policy and “the perverse or unintended effects” of the total-peace strategy has been linked to armed groups gaining “greater territorial and population control.” By 2025 the Clan del Golfo operated in 23 of Colombia’s 32 departments through four blocs and 25 armed fronts, with trafficking cells reaching Spain, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, El Colombiano reported; in Antioquia alone, the departmental government put the group’s growth at 60 percent.

The disclosure drew an immediate legal response. Representative Christian Garcés, of the opposition Centro Democrático party, filed a criminal complaint with the Fiscalía days after the recordings surfaced, naming Rueda, Velásquez and Rey Rosanía on charges including concierto para delinquir (conspiracy to commit crimes), revealing state secrets and misuse of privileged information. “If the government committed military decisions, intelligence operations or institutional benefits to favor the Clan del Golfo, Colombia would be facing the possible use of public power for the benefit of a criminal organization,” Garcés said, according to Infobae. Garcés also asked the House Accusations Committee to examine whether Petro himself knew of or directed any of the concessions. The Fiscalía’s own preliminary inquiry, opened in early July, was assigned to the unit of prosecutors who work before the Supreme Court and folded into other ongoing cases examining government favoritism toward armed groups, according to Semana.

A parallel thread involves the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (National Intelligence Directorate, DNI). Video and audio also obtained by Noticias Caracol show Jorge Lemus, then the DNI’s director, and Rey Rosanía, his counterintelligence chief, meeting on August 19, 2025, in Bogotá with Eduard Ferney Rincón, a former trafficker known as “Boyaco Sinaloa” who has said he paid $18 million USD to US authorities to avoid extradition, and a former staffer for the legislative office of Senator María José Pizarro. On the recording, Lemus asked Rincón to lean on congressional contacts to help pass a government bill on armed-group submission to justice, central to the total-peace strategy, and to help establish a direct line to Ávila, whom Lemus said had been avoiding the agency. Lemus has defended the meeting as lawful intelligence work conducted under Colombia’s Intelligence Law and has said the leak of the material endangered intelligence sources and methods.

Rueda, in an interview with Caracol Radio after the recordings surfaced, said the September 2022 meeting was part of a preliminary “exploratory phase,” not a formal negotiation, that only three such meetings took place, all with international witnesses present, and that no ceasefire was ever signed. “In that exploratory phase, there was never any decision by the president of the republic that meant military operations against the group would not continue,” he said. On the officer purge, he said he was never given names: “I was never given the names of police officers who had to be removed from the security forces for abuses or overreach.” Asked about “let’s play frozen,” he called it a metaphor: “To be able to talk, you need a space… but the conversation ends and the game continues. It’s like the cat chasing the mouse.” Velásquez, in a written statement, said his evaluation of senior officers began two weeks before he took office as defense minister and was “a rigorous procedure” based on documented sources, that Rueda “had no participation in or knowledge of that process,” and that bombing suspensions applied only where minors were at risk. “The statements made by Danilo Rueda implicate only him, and he is the one who will have to provide the corresponding explanations,” Velásquez said.

Rueda left the peace commissioner’s post in November 2023; Otty Patiño succeeded him and, with negotiating-team lead Álvaro Jiménez, pursued two rounds of dialogue with the Clan del Golfo in Doha, Qatar — an initial confidence-building agreement in September 2025, followed by a peace agreement signed December 5, 2025, that established temporary concentration zones for the group’s fighters. The first such zone, in Tierralta, Córdoba, was scheduled to receive an initial contingent the day after the audio broke.

Abelardo de la Espriella, who defeated Pacto Histórico Senator Iván Cepeda in the 2026 presidential election, was inaugurated August 7, 2026, in Cali — the first Colombian presidential inauguration held outside Bogotá. “The option of dialogue is completely exhausted,” he declared in his inaugural address, according to Infobae. He announced a security offensive against armed groups, an incoming list of narco-terrorist organizations and Colombia’s entry into the US-backed Escudo de las Américas regional security initiative. Within his first weekend in office, according to Infobae, his government reported operations against Clan del Golfo and dissident FARC fighters in three departments. The Clan del Golfo remains listed by Washington as both a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

Federico Gutiérrez, the mayor of Medellín, used a July 27, 2026, press conference to lay out what he described as a coordinated criminal structure operating inside the administration of his predecessor, former mayor Daniel Quintero Calle, and Quintero’s brother, Miguel Quintero Calle. Gutiérrez told reporters the network reached into nearly every district agency and directed more than $1 trillion COP in public contracting, based on findings the Alcaldía de Medellín (Medellín Mayor’s Office) has compiled since he took office in January 2024.

Prosecutors classify the alleged network as a grupo de delincuencia organizada, or GDO (organized crime group) — a designation Colombian law uses for entrenched, racketeering-style criminal structures. Gutiérrez has given it a public nickname, “Hermanitos Q” (Little Q Brothers), and said the case file, which stood at 501 findings in an earlier accounting, now includes 666 findings after his administration added 165 new files. He said the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) has formally charged 55 people, a number he expects to reach 59, and that the combined prison exposure of the group’s members, based on current charges, exceeds 750 years, according to Infobae Colombia.

Gutiérrez said the network coordinated in part through a WhatsApp group its members called “Los Amiguitos” (The Little Friends), which he said the implicated parties created themselves in 2020 and which prosecutors are using as evidence. He also displayed images he said documented purchases tied to the alleged scheme: an armored Toyota pickup truck Miguel Quintero acquired about two months into the administration, valued at $260 million COP, a swimming pool built at Miguel Quintero’s farm in Copacabana, Antioquia, valued at $160 million COP, and firearms, according to Infobae Colombia. “This wasn’t a government with corruption cases,” Gutiérrez told reporters. “It was corruption governing from different desks. As they say, not even Ali Baba dared so much.”

Quintero governed Medellín from 2020 to 2023. He now serves as Colombia’s national Superintendent of Health, appointed by President Gustavo Petro by decree in April 2026 despite the pending charges, according to El Espectador. The appointment drew public opposition from health-sector groups, including Change.org petitions that together gathered more than 17,000 signatures asking Petro to reconsider, according to Infobae Colombia. Quintero rejected Gutiérrez’s allegations the same day, calling the mayor “ridiculous” in a post on X: “The only government plan Mayor Federico Gutiérrez had was trying to screw me over because I denounced what happened at Hidroituango, where $10 trillion COP is still missing that people are paying for through their utility bills,” he wrote, according to Infobae Colombia. Hidroituango, EPM’s long-delayed and cost-overrun hydroelectric project, predates Quintero’s administration.

The Área Metropolitana and Itagüí’s fire department

The most legally advanced case centers on six contracts signed between 2020 and 2023 between the Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá (Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley, AMVA) and the volunteer fire department of Itagüí, a Medellín-area municipality, worth $17,645 million COP, according to Infobae Colombia. Prosecutors allege the money, meant to fund emergency and pandemic response, was instead diverted through inflated invoices. Juan Alberto Cardona Henao, the fire department’s former accountant, has already been convicted and sentenced to 19 months in prison; he is cooperating with prosecutors under a plea agreement. Miguel Quintero, his business associate Sebastián Ortega, former AMVA official Álvaro Villada and Vanesa Álvarez Restrepo face a hearing where prosecutors intend to formally charge them with embezzlement and undue interest in contracting — exposure of up to 22 years and six months. That hearing has been postponed three times: originally set for August 3, pushed to August 25 and then to August 31 at the request of Villada’s defense, and voided a third time on August 31 itself, after the presiding judge agreed with Quintero Calle’s defense that the case had been improperly transferred to her courtroom following the original judge’s medical leave. It is now scheduled for September 10, according to Infobae Colombia.

Afinia and EPM’s Caribbean coast utility

Gutiérrez also renewed a long-running allegation, first raised by his administration in 2024, that the general manager’s post at Afinia — a Caribbean-coast electricity distributor in which EPM (Medellín’s public utility) holds a stake — was effectively sold during Quintero’s term for between $5 million and $8 million USD, in a deal allegedly brokered at a restaurant in Medellín and finalized in meetings in Cartagena and Barranquilla. Gutiérrez said the buyers installed Javier Lastra Fuscaldo as general manager in August 2021 with the help of Emilio Tapia, a contractor already convicted in Bogotá’s unrelated “carrusel de la contratación” (contracting carousel) case. Lastra has denied the allegations since they first surfaced. “Nobody made conditions on my appointment at Afinia, and my management was carried out based on good practices,” he told El Colombiano in 2024, adding that he had not been formally notified of any complaint against him. Gutiérrez said Afinia has lost $1.5 trillion COP a year since; separately, EPM’s own board told El Colombiano in 2024 that Afinia was losing $80 billion to $90 billion COP a month and needed at least $1.5 trillion COP in fresh investment that year.

Medellín Mayor Federico “FICO”Gutierrez speaking on “Los Hermanitos Q.” (courtesy Alcaldia de Medellín)

Metroparques, the Aguas water park, and Inder

Prosecutors have filed a formal accusation against four people over maintenance contracts for the Parque de las Aguas water park, administered through Metroparques, worth close to $22 billion COP: Álvaro Villada, Jorge Enrique Liévano (Metroparques’ former general manager), Viviana del Valle Velázquez (the entity’s former purchasing chief) and contractor Juan Alexander Pino Jaramillo, who together face up to 33 years in prison, while three additional contractors face up to 16 years. Prosecutors allege contracting companies tied to Pino — Comercializadora J. Pino SAS, Soluciones SAS and Estructuras Zafiro SAS — received more than $4.5 billion COP, and that cost overruns on chlorine, floodlights and biosafety supplies alone caused more than $2.79 billion COP in damage. Authorities have already applied asset forfeiture to a car and a motorcycle tied to the case.

A separate, related matter involves a 2020 contract awarded to Sian Eventos y Logística SAS, led by Mauricio Jaramillo Botero, to supply sports equipment for youth recreation programs run by Inder (Medellín’s sports and recreation institute) through Metroparques. Gutiérrez said the contract ran up $3,705 million COP in cost overruns on balls, medals, uniforms and trophies, stretched from a planned two-and-a-half months to 26 months, and that roughly $200 billion COP in Inder funding was separately redirected to Metroparques through similar inter-agency contracts. Jaramillo faces up to 16 years in prison; Diana Paola Toro (Inder’s director), Liévano and María Eugenia Domínguez (another former Metroparques general manager) face up to 33 years.

Buen Comienzo, the early-childhood program

Gutiérrez said prosecutors have charged three people over an early-childhood nutrition and education contract awarded in October 2020 to Corporación Colombia Avanza, after Quintero appointed Vivian Cecilia Puerta Guerra to run the Buen Comienzo program. According to the accusation Gutiérrez cited, the contract exceeded the corporation’s demonstrated operating capacity by 2,816%, producing patrimonial damage of roughly $1,423 million COP — money Gutiérrez said could have fed more than 3,300 additional children for a month. Colombia’s Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office) has already barred former education secretary Marta Alexandra Agudelo from holding public office for eight years; she and Henry Paulison Gómez Montoya, Colombia Avanza’s general manager, face up to 33 years and 16 years respectively in the criminal case. Gutiérrez said four children ages 0 to 5 died of acute malnutrition in Medellín in 2023, the last full year of Quintero’s term, and that no similar deaths have occurred since.

The Jardín Botánico and a witness’s murder

A 2020 contract to maintain the city’s parks and green spaces, previously handled by the nonprofit Jardín Botánico de Medellín, was instead awarded through a private process to Reforestadora El Líbano SAS for $5,250 million COP, according to Gutiérrez. The Procuraduría has already disqualified former infrastructure secretary Natalia Urrego Arias and Liévano from public office for nine years over the contract; Luz Eliana Henao Rodríguez, El Líbano’s legal representative, faces up to nine years in the separate criminal case. Gutiérrez also renewed a request to the Fiscalía and national police for protective measures for witnesses in the broader investigation, citing the March 14, 2024, killing of Asdrúbal Vélez Orozco, a businessman linked to El Líbano and the husband of Henao. Gutiérrez said other witnesses and their families are currently being threatened and pressured.

Aguas Vivas and the international money trail

The Aguas Vivas case, the one that directly names Quintero, is separate from the broader “Hermanitos Q” file but factors into Gutiérrez’s overall tally: 13 people, including Quintero, face embezzlement and abuse-of-authority allegations tied to $42 billion COP in alleged patrimonial damage and more than 4,000 pieces of evidence. Gutiérrez has also pointed to an alleged international money trail: a Medellín businessman’s Miami-based gold-trading company reported revenue of roughly $112 billion COP over the last three years of Quintero’s administration, then reported no income after Gutiérrez took office in 2024, according to Telemedellín.

US Ambassador to Colombia Hugo Guevara visited Gutiérrez’s office in Medellín on August 21 for talks focused on combating child sexual exploitation, during which Gutiérrez also raised the corruption findings, according to Telemedellín. Gutiérrez then traveled to the United States, meeting Homeland Security Investigations personnel in Phoenix on the same child-exploitation cooperation before flying to Miami, where he met for more than two hours on August 31 with the FBI‘s International Anti-Corruption Unit. He handed over a file the mayor’s office says contains roughly 13,000 pieces of documentary evidence, four plea-agreement cooperators and imputation proceedings against 55 former officials, according to El Espectador. Quintero dismissed the trip on X, telling Gutiérrez to “stop being a clown” and adding that if he had “a single ill-gotten peso” in the US, “the United States wouldn’t need your theatrics to find it,” according to Infobae Colombia.

Gutiérrez said several other officials facing charges in the broader case have gone on to hold national-government posts under Petro, including Fabio Andrés García (Medellín’s former secretary general, now in a leadership role at the Superintendencia Nacional de Salud), Sergio Andrés López (Medellín’s former planning director, now an advisor at the Ministerio de Salud (Health Ministry)), Natalia Andrea Jiménez (a former subsecretary of contracting execution, now a contractor at the Cancillería (Foreign Ministry)), César Augusto Chavarría (Metroparques’ former logistics chief, now at the DIAN tax authority) and Rubén Darío López (the infrastructure secretariat’s former technical director, now a contractor at Aerocivil, Colombia’s civil aviation authority).

Where the cases stand

Two threads of the investigation are moving on parallel, and separately contested, tracks. In the Aguas Vivas case, Judge 22 of the Medellín Criminal Circuit Court nullified the formal charges against Quintero and 12 co-defendants on July 14, 2026, ruling that prosecutors had not specified clearly enough how each defendant participated in the alleged scheme. The Fiscalía and the Alcaldía de Medellín, recognized in the case as a victim, are asking that same judge to reverse herself before the matter can move to the Tribunal Superior de Medellín (Medellín Superior Court) for a final ruling. Hearings on August 6 and August 20 each ran long before prosecutors and the city’s legal representative — who cited more than 4,000 pieces of evidence and 50 witness statements — could finish arguing that the nullity was wrongly decided; the defense is now set to respond at a hearing scheduled for September 14, 2026, after which the judge will rule, according to El Colombiano and Telemedellín. The nullity is a procedural setback for prosecutors, not an acquittal or a dismissal, and the case remains open.

In the AMVA-Itagüí firefighters case, Gutiérrez said the repeated delays have gone beyond ordinary scheduling friction. After the August 25 postponement, he called it “indignante” (outrageous) and asked prosecutors to seek the defendants’ arrest rather than wait out further delays, according to Infobae Colombia. After the August 31 hearing was voided over the reassignment dispute, Gutiérrez wrote on X: “There have been three postponements. They have dragged this process out so much that we have gone to the courts to investigate what is happening — this is no longer normal.” He added that his administration, recognized as a victim in the case, would join prosecutors in asking the court to order pretrial detention for the defendants when the hearing resumes on September 10, according to Infobae Colombia.

Colombia’s Information and Communications Technology Minister, Alexandra Falla Zerrate, and Justice and Law Minister Iván Cancino González met in Bogotá on Monday, August 24, 2026, with representatives from Claro, the Colombian unit of Mexico’s América Móvil (NYSE: AMX), Tigo, the local brand of Luxembourg-based Millicom International Cellular (NASDAQ: TIGO), WOM and other mobile carriers to define measures for blocking unauthorized cell phone communications from the country’s prisons. The meeting is the government’s latest attempt to stop inmates from using contraband phones to order extortion and coordinate other crimes from behind bars.

The talks were convened by the Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, or MinTIC) and the Ministerio de Justicia y del Derecho (Ministry of Justice and Law, or MinJusticia) to review measures already in place to restrict illegal signals inside penitentiary facilities and to identify the technical, legal and operational obstacles that remain unresolved.

“Our purpose is clear: authority to shut the door on crime, technology in the service of security, and results that protect the peace of mind of Colombians,” Cancino told La FM after the meeting. He said the working group reviewed what has already been done, the current state of measures restricting unauthorized communications in penitentiary facilities, and the technical and operational challenges still to be resolved.

Representatives of the mobile carriers raised concerns and proposals about the measures under study and said they were willing to work with authorities, according to MinTIC. The ministries have not detailed what a new blocking mechanism would look like; officials said specifics would be announced in the coming days once technical evaluations with the carriers are complete.

The problem long predates Monday’s meeting. In January 2026, Instituto Nacional Penitenciario y Carcelario (National Penitentiary and Prison Institute, or INPEC) director Col. Daniel Gutiérrez told Noticias RCN, in comments reported by Infobae, that none of the 16 nationally run prisons equipped with signal jammers were effectively blocking illegal signals: six were nominally active but not generating a working block because they ran on 12- to 15-year-old GSM-era technology unable to keep pace with 4G and 5G networks, and the other 10 were entirely out of service. Gutiérrez also said a signal-blocking trial at the maximum-security wing in Cómbita, Boyacá, left the state facing more than $50 billion COP in fines after the jamming disrupted legitimate cell service for nearby residents — a preview of the balance regulators must strike between blocking prison communications and protecting service for law-abiding Colombians nearby.

The stakes were underscored in July 2026, when Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office, or Fiscalía) charged 17 people, including five INPEC guards, with extortion tied to a scheme run from the El Barne maximum-security prison in Cómbita, according to Vanguardia, citing Agencia EFE. Prosecutors said the guards allowed cell phones and other contraband into the prison so inmates could call victims across several departments and demand payment on behalf of armed criminal structures. Finance Colombia has previously reported on the pattern: a scheme run by the Satanás gang, whose imprisoned leader and members kept extorting Bogotá residents with smuggled phones even after signal jammers were installed, since many of the devices had been pulled from service due to obsolescence or court orders won by nearby residents whose own legitimate calls the jammers had blocked.

The National Police and National Army are also taking part in the effort, MinTIC said, working alongside the ministries and carriers to prevent criminal structures from continuing to direct operations from inside penitentiary facilities. The working group left commitments to keep advancing solutions that strengthen communications control in and around Colombia’s prisons, though the government has yet to say when any new blocking mechanism will take effect.

Headline photo: Ministers Alexandra Falla Zerrate and Iván Cancino González meet with mobile carrier representatives at MinTIC headquarters in Bogotá. (Photo courtesy MinTIC)

A recording made inside the offices of Colombia’s national intelligence agency in July 2025 has become the center of a dispute over whether the government of then-President Gustavo Petro was negotiating with organized crime for its own protection, or whether two jailed drug traffickers manufactured a fake conspiracy to win their freedom. Semana published fragments of the recording on August 15, 2026, and Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) is now investigating whether the underlying plot was real or staged.

According to Semana, Jorge Lemus, then director of the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DNI, National Intelligence Directorate), met on July 18, 2025, with a retired police officer identified as Manuel Antonio Castañeda, who told him, “I’m the one they call the Narcochofer” — the narco-chauffeur. Semana describes Castañeda as having mafia connections and a history as a recurring source for Colombia’s intelligence units. Also in the room were Gustavo Arias, then the DNI’s counterintelligence director, and an analyst taking notes. It was, Semana reports, the first time Lemus had spoken with Castañeda directly.

Castañeda came to sell access to two men: alias Falcon and alias Fortuna, both Clan del Golfo bosses held in a US prison. Falcon is Juan José Valencia, arrested in May 2021 in a mansion in Llanogrande, in Rionegro, Antioquia. Investigators at the time linked him to trafficking routes running from Cartagena to Belgium, Holland, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, commanding more than 225 men inside the organization run by alias Otoniel. He was extradited, convicted in the United States, and released in late 2025, apparently for cooperating with American prosecutors, though Semana notes he still faces charges in Colombia. Fortuna is Andrés Mauricio Vélez, whom Colombian police classify as a narco invisible — an invisible trafficker who finances operations without direct involvement in trafficking itself. He served four years in the US and was recaptured on his return to Colombia in September 2025 on charges of money laundering, illicit enrichment and criminal conspiracy.

Both men were willing to hand over information, Castañeda told Lemus, in exchange for having some of the property held by the Sociedad de Activos Especiales (SAE, Special Assets Company) — the state body that administers assets confiscated from criminals — signed over to a tercero de buena fe, a third party acting in good faith, to manage on their behalf. Castañeda also said Falcon wanted an arrest warrant covering five members of his immediate family lifted.

The approach had already run through other channels. Castañeda told Lemus the first contact was made with Augusto Rodríguez, then director of the Unidad Nacional de Protección (UNP, National Protection Unit), the agency that assigns state protection details to people under threat. Castañeda calls Rodríguez “el Ingeniero” — the Engineer — on the recording, and said Rodríguez had asked for a first gesture of good faith that produced a weapons seizure in Puerto Boyacá, in the Magdalena Medio region, and that President Petro already knew about the arrangement.

Castañeda also told Lemus he had spoken that same morning with then-Army commander General Luis Emilio Cardozo, through the Presidency’s secretary of transparency, Andrés Idárraga. He said attacks were planned for July 20 — two days after the meeting — and that the traffickers would hand over two cylinder bombs, a mortar, an R-15 rifle with 100 rounds, a grenade-dropping drone and two grenades, all tied to a planned attack on Petro during a visit to the Sierra region, and separately, rifles intended for an attempt on then-Vice President Francia Márquez. The purpose, Castañeda said, was to generate a scandal resembling the assassination of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay and blame the president for it.

Lemus’s own voice is on the recording responding to Castañeda’s complaints that the government had not delivered after the Magdalena Medio operation: “No, no — but I’m committing that we’ll do it.” When Castañeda raised concerns about creating friction with the UNP director, Lemus told him, “No, no, no, because I can handle things with the SAE itself, relax.”

Semana obtained responses from four of the officials it names. Lemus confirmed that SAE properties were offered to the Narcochofer in exchange for information, telling Semana such meetings happen routinely and that an offer is not the same as a delivery — the government waits for information before acting. He acknowledged that offering state assets for information is not part of his official function, but defended it as necessary given what he characterized as a matter of national security. Rodríguez denied any agreement, saying he only received data, passed it to the president, and had no further contact once the information was verified and the weapons found. Retired General Cardozo said he referred Castañeda’s warning to a Special Forces colonel for corroboration, and that a weapons cache was found in Santa Marta. Idárraga said the matter was routed through Petro to Angie Rodríguez, then head of the presidential administrative department, and to retired General Humberto Guatibonza, the president’s chief of protection, with the SAE’s director, Amelia Pérez, tasked with evaluating the property request.

Once the meeting ended, Lemus warned his own analyst to be cautious about Castañeda’s credibility, according to Semana.

“I’ve been following this kid for a long time. He talks about a reach in the Police he never had. I have my reservations about this kid.”

— Jorge Lemus, then director of Colombia’s DNI, quoted by Semana

The reservation appears to have been warranted. El Tiempo‘s investigative unit first reported the underlying dealings on January 30, 2026, and reported in mid-August where the case has landed. Sources inside the Fiscalía told El Tiempo that the alleged plot against Petro and Márquez, along with the weapons handovers in Puerto Boyacá, Santa Marta and Medellín, are being investigated as possible falsos positivos — manufactured results. One source described the motive: in exchange for staging the plot, the two traffickers wanted their arrest warrants lifted so they could return to Colombia. The Fiscalía has refused both men a principio de oportunidad, the legal mechanism for suspending prosecution in exchange for cooperation, and the SAE denied Fortuna’s property request outright. Both men are now under investigation for possible procedural fraud and illegal possession of weapons restricted to Colombia’s armed forces, and El Tiempo reports the Fiscalía is weighing whether other people belong in the case.

Either reading of the recording reflects poorly on the state. If the plots were real, Colombia’s intelligence service was negotiating its president’s physical safety with two Clan del Golfo bosses, offering confiscated mafia real estate as currency. If the plots were staged — which the Fiscalía is treating as the working theory — two traffickers led the UNP, the Army command, the presidency’s anti-corruption office and the national intelligence service in circles.

The broader record adds context. El Colombiano, citing intelligence figures, reported that Clan del Golfo grew from roughly 4,500 members in 2022 to close to 10,000, and expanded its territorial presence from 165 to 338 municipalities — close to a third of Colombia’s total. El Colombiano put coca cultivation at around 230,000 hectares in 2022; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime measured 253,000 hectares in 2023, with potential cocaine production reaching 2,664 metric tons, a 53% increase in a single year. The Petro government ran 12 negotiating tables under its paz total — total peace — policy, and none ended in disarmament, in part because Colombia’s Congress never passed a ley de sometimiento, a submission law that would have given a purely criminal group a legal path to surrender. On October 24, 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control placed Petro himself on its sanctions list on counternarcotics grounds. In April, the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Office of the Inspector General) opened a disciplinary investigation into Lemus over separate recordings in which he allegedly offered judicial benefits to the lawyer of contraband boss Diego Marín Buitrago, alias Papá Pitufo, as a way of bringing Marín into the paz total framework.

Not every assessment of the policy is damning. In a November 2024 report, ACLED, the conflict-monitoring group, described the result as a paradox: Petro’s approach reduced violence even as armed groups grew stronger. The Clan del Golfo eventually came to a negotiating table in Qatar starting in September 2025, and Colombia’s decades of pure militarization never produced a durable peace either. But a drop in violence purchased by the state standing down, while the group across the table roughly doubles in size, amounts to a truce on the cartel’s terms with no legal permanence. The Narcochofer recording exposes the mechanism underneath the policy: not a negotiation with defined limits, but an official offering assets he has since admitted he had no authority to offer, to a source he privately told his own analyst he distrusted, for weapons the Fiscalía now suspects were planted.

The recording’s release comes as Colombia’s new government begins its own campaign against the same armed groups. Abelardo de la Espriella took office on August 7 and moved quickly: his first order transferred 117 high-profile prisoners from paz total negotiating tables into maximum-security prisons. That same day, a vehicle bomb attributed to Iván Mordisco’s FARC dissidents destroyed a newly built toll plaza in Mondomo, in northern Cauca. On the night of August 10, two Kfir fighter jets bombed ELN camps between Tibú and San Calixto, in Norte de Santander. In Algeciras, Huila, an ambush on a Ninth Brigade unit checking a cylinder bomb killed two soldiers and wounded 19. Colombia’s Gaula Militar captured alias Bonito, second-in-command of the Comandos de la Frontera, in Guamal, Meta, and de la Espriella announced Friday night that alias Momo of the Clan del Golfo had been killed in Antioquia.

The Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsman’s Office), Colombia’s national human-rights watchdog, reported that four farmers in rural El Tarra were wounded during the August 10 bombing. Semana reports that military counterintelligence is investigating a possible high-level leak that would have allowed the ELN to anticipate the strike, and is separately examining whether the ELN itself dropped explosives from drones onto the civilians to discredit the armed forces.

The same intelligence apparatus now expected to run a national offensive against these groups — and to prevent that offensive from being compromised from within — is the one whose director spent an afternoon in July 2025 offering seized property for tips from a source he privately did not trust. In June, as president-elect, de la Espriella instructed his running mate, now-Vice President José Manuel Restrepo, to file criminal and disciplinary complaints against former High Peace Commissioner Danilo Rueda over a separate set of Clan del Golfo recordings published by Noticias Caracol, and to forward that material to the United States Department of Justice. Those cases will take years to resolve. The offensive against the same armed groups is happening now.

Agents from Colombia’s Dirección de Antinarcóticos (Counternarcotics Directorate), the National Police unit known as DIRAN, working alongside Interpol and the Ontario Provincial Police, took Arif Jhuman, 40, into custody July 8 at a Smart Fit (B3: SMFT3) location inside the El Tesoro shopping mall, in the comuna 14 sector of El Poblado.

Jhuman, who used the alias Gillani, was the subject of an Interpol Red Notice tied to charges in both Canada and the United States. In Tampa, Florida, the US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida unsealed an indictment on December 10, 2025, charging Jhuman along with four other men — Tyler Corbin, Edward Noel, Alfredo Santana and Omar Singateth — with conspiracy to traffic firearms, trafficking in firearms and dealing firearms without a license. Prosecutors said the group trafficked and conspired to traffic more than 100 firearms from Florida into Canada during 2023 and 2024; of those, authorities recovered 29 at Canadian crime scenes, including homicides. US Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe’s office brought the case under Operation Take Back America, a Justice Department initiative targeting transnational criminal organizations.

🚨‼️Medellín no es refugio de criminales.

En una operación conjunta entre la Dirección de Antinarcóticos de la Policía Nacional, en coordinación con Interpol y agencias internacionales fue capturado en Medellín Arif Jhuman, alias “Gillani”, ciudadano canadiense requerido por… pic.twitter.com/ohjweapEch

— Fico Gutiérrez (@FicoGutierrez) July 9, 2026

Ontario Provincial Police first sought Jhuman in April 2023, when they said he had gone unlawfully at large after breaching parole granted during a nine-year, 11-month sentence for drug trafficking. Jhuman was known to frequent Toronto before he disappeared. Colombian authorities said he entered the country using false documents; he had been living in Medellín since 2025.

Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez announced the arrest, describing it as the product of coordinated intelligence work among Colombian, Canadian and international agencies. “We work hand in hand with national and international authorities to close off routes for transnational criminal structures. There is authority, intelligence and cooperation here to find them and bring them before the law,” Gutiérrez wrote.

Colombian investigators are also examining a possible link between Jhuman and a British organized-crime network dismantled in Medellín in late 2025, according to El Colombiano. Three UK nationals — Christopher Neil Costello, known as Dips; Robert Steven Taylor; and Liam George Anton O’Brien — were captured in the same comuna 14 sector in November and December 2025 on drug trafficking charges tied to a group Colombian authorities have connected to the Clan del Golfo, which allegedly moved narcotics into England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Preliminary intelligence suggests Jhuman may have provided logistical support for arms and drug shipments moving through the US and Canada toward that network, Colombian investigators said, though the connection remains under investigation.

Colombian authorities have not disclosed a timeline for Jhuman’s legal proceedings or a possible extradition to the United States, where he faces the firearms trafficking case. His arrest was the 27th capture of a foreign fugitive in Colombia so far in 2026 on narcotics- and weapons-related charges, according to El Colombiano.

Photo courtesy Ontario Provincial Police.

“I will not accept illegal migration here. Colombians first, Colombians second and Colombians third,” De la Espriella said during an extraordinary security council meeting Sunday, August 23, in Barranquilla.

During the meeting, the president said deportations were “a presidential order that must begin to be carried out this week,” adding that he would not accept any “illegal immigrant, wherever they come from, who is committing crimes. They are leaving, and we will deport them.”

“The order to Migración is clear, and we are calling them now to give it to them: They must begin operations coordinated with the Barranquilla police to locate illegal migrants,” De la Espriella said, referring to Migración Colombia, the government agency responsible for the country’s official immigration procedures.

So far, however, the government has not provided further details about how the operations will be carried out or whether the announcement will become a broader national policy or formal government position.

Providing additional details, De la Espriella said authorities should focus “first, on those who are committing crimes. Second, on those who have not regularized their immigration status,” adding that they “will have to be deported.”

He said the position was consistent with what he advocated during his presidential campaign and described it as both a political and administrative decision.

“I take responsibility for it. I will not accept illegal migration here,” he said.

The position follows statements De la Espriella made during the campaign. “Anyone who migrates to Colombia while respecting the law will be protected and will have every guarantee. Anyone who violates immigration law will be returned to their country without any consideration,” he said in June during an interview with journalist Luis Carlos Vélez.

His remarks are also consistent with his statements over the weekend in Barranquilla and with the positions of right-wing political leaders he has cited as models, including US President Donald Trump and his hardline immigration policies.

Venezuelans could be most affected

Although De la Espriella did not explicitly refer to Venezuelans, his announcement could have a particularly significant impact on the 2.8 million Venezuelans living in Colombia, who account for nearly 90% of the country’s immigrant population.

Of those, 848,000 were in an irregular immigration situation as of January 2026, according to official Migración Colombia figures. About 193,000 of them are children and adolescents.

At the same time, Migración Colombia data show that at least 82% of Venezuelan migrants in the country had regular immigration status as of January. The remaining population has yet to fully formalize its status and includes people in the country under temporary permits who have not been able to access the Estatuto Temporal de Protección para Migrantes Venezolanos (ETPMV), or Temporary Protection Statute for Venezuelan Migrants, created under the government of former President Iván Duque.

A sharp shift in Colombia’s migration policy

De la Espriella’s position represents a significant shift from the approach to migration taken by Colombia’s previous governments, including the right-wing Centro Democrático administration of Iván Duque from 2018 to 2022.

In 2021, Duque implemented the ETPMV to provide legal status for up to 10 years to nearly 2 million migrants and help guarantee access to social rights and services, including employment, education and health care.

His successor, leftist President Gustavo Petro, who governed from 2022 to 2026, expanded protections for migrants, both by facilitating the regularization of their status in Colombia and by broadening access to basic rights for adults and minors.

Petro’s government also restored diplomatic relations with Venezuela, the country of origin of the vast majority of migrants living in Colombia.

De la Espriella’s announcement therefore signals a potentially substantial change in Colombia’s approach: from policies centered largely on regularization and integration toward stronger immigration enforcement and deportation. The extent of that shift, however, will depend on how the presidential order is implemented and whether the government turns the measures announced in Barranquilla into a broader national immigration policy.