Colombia – Bombings Against the Insurgency: The Continuation of the Counterinsurgency War and the Doctrine of the Internal Enemy Under the Petro Government
We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article published by Nueva Democracia from Colombia.
The government of Petro has carried out 16 bombings against armed groups to date, resulting in at least 64 killed and dozens of captures. In November 2025, the State bombed 15 children in Guaviare. So far in 2026, and especially after promising the United States results in the fight against “narco-terrorism,” the current government has bombed the ELN in Catatumbo and the FARC in Guaviare. Most recently, during the week of the 8th of March, they bombed FARC in Ituango, Antioquia, leaving 7 guerrillas killed.
Concurrently and in parallel, the US government has carried out 45 aerial attacks on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean regions of Colombia and Venezuela since September 2025, resulting in the illegal killing of 157 people under the pretext of combating drug trafficking.
In addition to the bombing of a camp of the armed group Comandos de la Frontera on the border between Colombia and Ecuador, which was carried out openly with the cooperation of the United States, and it is alleged that it may have extended into Colombian territory, leaving a toll of at least 27 murdered, including peasants among the victims.
Beyond the debate between the government of Noboa in Ecuador and Petro in Colombia, blaming each other for the killed and who gave the order, both governments are implementing the US military policy of bombings, “kinetic operations,” and the fight on “narco-terrorism” against the “internal enemy” and in the service of US interests to stabilize the region and expand U.S. territorial and especially military control in Latin America.
In line with this strategy, the United States delivered 145 armored tanks to Colombia in the last month, and in November of last year, it purchased 17 combat fighter jets from the Swedish company Saab for 16.5 trillion pesos, which will be used to precisely improve bombings against the “internal enemy.”
In 1964, the United States promoted in Colombia and in the oppressed countries under its influence the Military Doctrine of the “internal enemy.” This doctrine identified communism and leftist, social, and dissident movements as threats to security. Even the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held this doctrine and the military manuals oriented from Washington responsible for serious cases of violence and repression. The insurgency and the revolutionary, democratic, and popular rights struggle are stripped of their political character, distorted, and assigned the role of a terrifying internal enemy, representing terrorism, drug trafficking, crime, etc. The doctrine stigmatizes social and popular movements, labeling them as “useful idiots” to this supposed internal enemy.
This same military doctrine continues to be used by the United States today to deepen military, economic, political, and ideological interference over the American continent. It is also the policy continued and deepened by the current government of Colombia. Amidst an official discourse of “total peace,” the facts show that there is a deepening of the counterinsurgency war in Colombia, under the guidance and tutelage of North American imperialist interests.
The current government of Colombia, like previous ones, deepens the discourse of the internal enemy and the militaristic logic, aligning with the policy of militarization and interference that US imperialism promotes in the region. Behind the official figures, a narrative is hidden that strips the conflict of its political content. By indiscriminately labeling groups as “criminals” or “terrorists,” the insurgency is stripped of its political character, and the structural causes of the conflict – exploitation, injustice, and oppression – are made invisible.
Colombia continues to be, today as yesterday, one of the main military pawns of Yankee imperialism for the control of its “backyard.” The Plan Colombia and its successors institutionalized US interference in military affairs, consolidating a model of internal war financed, trained, and directed from abroad.
This war logic remains current and is expressed in the convergent bombings by the Colombian State, the Ecuadorian State, with the direct participation of US imperialism against the peoples of the Caribbean, the Andes, and the Amazonias. Under the script of the “war on terrorism and drug trafficking,” these operations conceal illegal summary executions, distort the political character of the armed conflict and the guerrilla struggle that persists in Colombia. They also repeatedly blur the lines with mass movements, political organizations, rural communities, and fishermen, populations over which a policy of terror is maintained and the bombings on their territories are legitimized.
The growing military interference of the United States in Colombia and Latin America – materialized in the purchase of armaments, joint operations, and direct aggression in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic – consolidates the country as a faithful subject of the Pentagon in the region. Sovereignty is thus handed over by the tacit acceptance of doctrines and war actions that respond to the imperialist interests of territorial control, exploitation, and oppression, all of this disguised under the failed discourse of the anti-drug fight.
On March 10, Petro complained to Trump about not being invited to the “Shield of the Americas” meeting held with the most cooperative – read: most servile – governments of the region for the “security” of the American continent. With this, Petro would be denouncing that Colombia did have the necessary level of cooperation to comply with the Yankee dictates in the region, and he demanded his place so that Colombia can continue to be the laboratory of Yankee counterinsurgency in Latin America. And as long as this persists, peace will continue to be a chimera, and bombings will be the only State response to the structural problems of the land and inequality. In the face of this, there is only the need for popular mobilization and a consistent anti-imperialist movement that rejects US interference, denounces the counterinsurgency policy and bombings against the internal enemy as a continuation of said interference, and confronts this war that disguises itself as a fight against drug trafficking but that in reality perpetuates domination and terror over the peoples.
