The contrast is the story.

“Gustavo Petro no quiso hacer ninguna de esas operaciones; quiere decir que Gustavo Petro se apadrinó con ellos.”

— Sen. Germán Rodríguez, Salvación Nacional party

A narco-influencer who taunted a sitting president

Pérez Toncel ran Los Pachenca, formally the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), out of Colombia’s La Guajira department. He didn’t operate quietly. He posted video of himself on social media boasting “Controlando todos los rincones, papi. Conquistador hasta la muerte” — controlling every corner, a conqueror until death — and, on the day De la Espriella was inaugurated, a photo of a gun captioned “limpieza por todos los territorios,” a promise of cleanup in every territory, according to El Heraldo’s review of his posts. He called De la Espriella “un gatito” — a kitten.

De la Espriella named him a high-value military target on July 9th. According to El Colombiano’s reporting on the operation, investigators already had a human source placing him in Riohacha’s urban zone, and Gerson Arias, an investigator with the Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP), says his downfall may also have come from inside his own organization — associates tired of a commander who kept drawing heat. The FBI then ran a counterintelligence operation, planting a false rumor in the Guajira underworld that Pérez Toncel’s own people had killed him. The rumor spread widely enough that Los Pachenca had to publicly deny it — and the panicked calls Pérez Toncel and his fiancée made to reassure relatives, plus a GPS tracker already on his vehicle, let investigators triangulate his location, with an MQ-9A Reaper drone from US Southern Command standing by overhead. Police ultimately raided the house on foot, about thirty officers from an elite unit called Los Lobos plus Dijín and Dipol, after ruling out a strike because of the residential setting and nearby airport fuel tanks.

Pérez Toncel died in the raid along with his fiancée, Rosa Angélica Tarazona, alias “La Bebecita,” who was already facing a criminal conspiracy charge tied to the ACSN and was out on house arrest at the time, and two men identified as bodyguards.

Petro’s reaction — and the four years before it

Petro didn’t celebrate the operation. He went to X to ask why all four people in the house had to die, and asked rhetorically whether Colombia’s constitution has the death penalty — it doesn’t, and never has; Article 11 bans it outright. Medellín Mayor Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez answered him directly, writing that the Fuerza Pública had finally “descongeló” — thawed out.

That word choice wasn’t incidental. Two days before Pérez Toncel’s death, Loren Moss’s Finance Colombia podcast covered a set of recordings published by Noticias Caracol from a 2022 meeting between Petro’s peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, and an envoy for the Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s largest criminal army. On the recording, Rueda proposes the two sides “jugar a los congelados” — play frozen, essentially a mutual stand-down. Colombia’s Ministry of Defense data, per Noticias Caracol’s reporting, shows no aerial bombardment against the Clan del Golfo for roughly two years after that meeting, while the group’s own ranks more than doubled, from roughly 4,500 fighters to nearly 10,000, spreading from about 165 municipalities to 338. FIP’s Gerson Arias and Human Rights Watch Americas director Juanita Goebertus have each separately attributed that growth to the ceasefire and the resulting collapse of state intelligence penetration of the group. Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación and Procuraduría are now formally investigating the episode, after Representative Christian Garcés filed a criminal complaint naming Rueda and two other officials and asking Congress to examine what Petro himself knew.

As for the ACSN specifically: Arias told El Colombiano the Petro government opened exploratory contact with the group in August 2022, but the formal resolution authorizing talks didn’t arrive until 2024, the entire negotiation sat with one lone negotiator, and no legal framework was ever built to answer what the group would actually receive in exchange for disarming. Colombian Sen. Germán Rodríguez, of the Salvación Nacional party, has a blunter read: he told Semana that “desde Gustavo Petro se tenían estas informaciones de inteligencia. Quiere decir que Gustavo Petro no quiso hacer ninguna de esas operaciones; quiere decir que Gustavo Petro se apadrinó con ellos” — Petro had this intelligence, chose not to run the operations, and got in bed with them.

Four weeks versus four years

De la Espriella’s government reports a cumulative security balance, as of September 5th, of 14,422 captures, 43,684 kilograms of drugs seized, 1,485 firearms recovered, and roughly 1,321 hectares of coca eradicated since taking office on August 7th. That includes Operación Azarías, which killed 23 members of an EMC front in Guaviare and captured six more, and 41 signed extraditions in nineteen days — among them Willington Henao Gutiérrez (“El Mocho”), Carmen Evelio Castillo Carrillo (“Muñeca”), Geovanni Andrés Rojas (“Araña”), Gabriel Yepes Mejía (“H.H.”), and Freddy Castillo Carrillo (“Pinocho”). All five had extraditions already approved under Petro’s government in 2025, then frozen while they sat at Total Peace negotiating tables, according to Finance Colombia’s own reporting on the decision. Two of them, Castillo Carrillo (“Muñeca”) and her brother Freddy (“Pinocho”), are themselves identified as top Los Pachenca leaders — Bendito Menor’s own organization — and remain at large.

The operations haven’t been without real cost. Colombia’s Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal confirmed two of the Azarías dead were minors, bringing to at least six the number of minors killed in Colombian airstrikes in under a month, according to El Diario de Pereira. Bogotá’s 34th Family Court, in a ruling by Judge Viviana Arciniegas Gómez, has ordered the government to halt airstrikes anywhere there is reasonably verifiable information that minors could be present — an order Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara is appealing, calling it “absurdo e inconstitucional.” Colombia’s Defensora del Pueblo, Iris Marín Ortiz, separately criticized the government for parading bodies from the Azarías operation for the cameras, arguing the state doesn’t need to resemble what it’s fighting.

A biographical irony

There is also a personal history worth naming directly: it’s biographical, not incidental. Petro was a member of the M-19 guerrilla; on October 25th, 1985, in Zipaquirá, he was arrested along with eight others in a raid that turned up firearms, homemade explosives, and propaganda. He was convicted of illegal possession of weapons and explosives under a state-of-siege decree, per case documents obtained by Semana, and released on February 5th, 1987, for pena cumplida — sentence served. Colombia’s 1991 Constitution later stripped state-of-siege convictions of much of their legal weight, according to Carlos Alonso Lucio, a former M-19 member quoted in that same Semana report, though Semana’s reporting also notes the question isn’t entirely settled under Article 197 of the Constitution.

What matters going forward

Two explanations for Colombia’s failure to stop groups like the ACSN and the Clan del Golfo under the Petro government aren’t mutually exclusive. One is institutional failure: a Total Peace framework that was underbuilt and understaffed, run against a two-year drift with no legal architecture behind it. The other is an active, documented choice by senior officials to trade state leverage for nothing, on tape, while the organizations they were negotiating with roughly doubled in size. The evidence for each sits in the public record — one in Gerson Arias’s institutional history, the other in a Fiscalía case file with Danilo Rueda’s name on it.

What matters going forward is which government’s incentives are actually governing security policy in Colombia: one whose peace architecture chose, on tape, not to fight the country’s largest criminal organization, or one moving quickly — even if unsustainably fast — in the opposite direction. Four weeks isn’t a track record. But four years was a policy.