International legal context

Adherence to all treaties

Disarmament Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)	State Party
1980 CCW Protocol I (Non-Detectable Fragments)	State Party
1996 CCW Amended Protocol II on mines	State Party
1980 CCW Protocol III on incendiary weapons	State Party
1995 CCW Protocol IV on blinding laser weapons	State Party
2003 CCW Protocol V on explosive remnants of war	Not Party
2001 Firearms Protocol	Not Party
Optional Protocol to the CAT	State Party

International Humanitarian Law Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1949 Geneva Conventions	State Party
Additional Protocol I of 1977	State Party
Additional Protocol II of 1977	State Party

International Criminal Law Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court	State Party
Amendments to the Statute on the crime of aggression	Not Party
Amendment to the Statute on blinding laser weapons	Not Party
Amendment to the Statute on the intentional starvation of civilians in NIAC	Not Party

International Human Rights Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights	State Party
Optional Protocol to the ICCPR	State Party
1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights	State Party
1969 American Convention on Human Rights	State Party
1948 Genocide Convention	State Party
1984 Convention against Torture	State Party
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)	State Party
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict	State Party

Membership to International Organisations

Organisation	Status	Comment
United Nations	Member State
International Court of Justice	Did not accept compulsory jurisdiction
Organization of American States	Member State
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)	Member State	Safeguards agreement in place

Domestic Legal Context

Imports, exports, and supplier base

Colombia is overwhelmingly an arms importer. The United States supplied 185 of the 327 recorded deliveries or orders (roughly 57 per cent), reflecting its position as Colombia’s principal security-assistance partner, particularly from 1999 under Plan Colombia and its 2016 successor framework, Peace Colombia (Paz Colombia); Israel is a distant second (29 deliveries, concentrated in fighter aircraft upgrades, precision-guided munitions, and missiles), followed by Canada (17), Germany (15), France (14) and Spain (14), with smaller volumes from Italy, Brazil, the Netherlands, South Korea, Sweden, Russia and a handful of other suppliers.

Colombia’s earliest recorded deliveries date to 1948–1969, an era dominated by war-surplus and early-Cold-War transfers from the United States and, for a handful of items, Canada and Sweden. The Navy received former US destroyers and frigates while the Air Force built up a mixed fleet of former US combat types (P-47D Thunderbolts, B-26 Invaders, F-80 and Canadian-supplied F-86 Sabre fighters). The Army’s one significant acquisition of the period was 148 US M-2 107mm mortars, ordered in 1960.

The period from roughly 1970 to 1984 marks Colombia’s most significant build-out of high-end combat capability recorded in the dataset. The Army received 52 US M-113 armoured personnel carriers (1970); the Air Force acquired 18 French Mirage-5 fighter/ground-attack aircraft (1971–73) together with R-530 short-range air-to-air missiles, its first genuine air-combat capability; and the Navy took delivery of two German Type-209-1200 submarines (delivered 1975). The Air Force added A-37B Dragonfly light attack aircraft from the United States in 1980–82.

Between 1985 and 1999, Colombia’s principal combat-aircraft modernization was the acquisition of 13 Israeli Kfir C-2 fighter/ground-attack aircraft (ordered 1988) with Shafrir-2 air-to-air missiles, alongside three Argentine IA-58A Pucará ground-attack aircraft (1989). This period also saw the first Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk helicopters enter Colombian service (from 1986), the beginning of a helicopter-mobility programme that expanded very substantially over the following two decades.

The 2000s, coinciding with the peak years of Plan Colombia-era US security assistance, saw the largest and most diverse tranche of acquisitions in the dataset – 84 recorded deliveries or orders spanning all nine of SIPRI’s weapon categories, more than any other decade. Rotary-wing mobility was expanded on a large scale, with dozens of US-supplied UH-1H Huey and S-70L/S-70A Black Hawk transport helicopters delivered across nearly every year of the decade (in blocks of up to twenty-five at a time), together with Russian Mi-17 helicopters (2001, 2006, 2008). The introduction of 25 Brazilian EMB-314 Super Tucano light attack/trainer aircraft (ordered 2005) was accompanied by a substantial build-up of precision-guided munitions and air-to-air missiles – Israeli Griffin and US Paveway guided bombs (100–200 units per order, 2006–07). In 2010–19, the Navy acquired two German Type-206A submarines (delivered 2015) equipped with Seehecht-3 torpedoes, and its first South Korean-built surface combat vessels – a Donghae-class corvette (2011) and a Po Hang-class corvette (2019) – armed with C-STAR anti-ship missiles.

From 2020, SIPRI records a further set of orders across the Air Force, Navy and Army, several of which are still shown with a delivery year of zero – that is, not yet delivered as of the most recent update to the database. For the Air Force, this includes an order for 17 Gripen-E fighter aircraft from Sweden (ordered 2025, not yet delivered), and 25 French MICA long-range air-to-air missiles (ordered 2023, not yet delivered). As of August 2026, the contract for the Gripen fighters was being reassessed by the incoming government.

Colombia’s own role as a supplier is minor by comparison, though not negligible in absolute terms. SIPRI records five transfers by Colombia, but none involving newly manufactured major-combat systems – a used Mi-17 transport helicopter to Mexico (2002) and a Hunter TR-12 APC, manufactured by Colombian company Armor International, to Suriname (2012).

Colombia also maintains a State-owned defence-industrial base, Industria Militar (Indumil), which manufactures small arms, ammunition, and explosives domestically for the armed forces, police, and authorized civilian sector. Its production and overall export book fall outside the SIPRI major-conventional-weapons dataset discussed above, but Indumil’s own 2024 report records export sales of COP 8.227 billion in 2024 (down 49 per cent from 2023) across product lines including weapons, ammunition, explosives and Galil-rifle components. Its principal export market has been the Middle East, including Galil-rifle parts sold back to Israel – the licensor of the original design, produced under licence since the 1980s – until Israel suspended defence sales to Colombia in October 2023 amid a diplomatic dispute. Colombia’s own submissions to the UN Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA) record some of this activity at item level: the 2007 national report lists .38-calibre revolvers exported to Guatemala (270) and Panama (75); the 2009 national report records a ‘Yavuz Regard’ 9mm pistol exported to Türkiye (122 units) and Negev-pattern light machine guns exported to Israel (33, alongside the Galil relationship above); and the 2025 national report records grenade launchers (25) and mortar grenades (750) exported to the Dominican Republic (manufacturer not specified).

Domestic legislation relevant to the Arms Trade Treaty

National framework

The principal legislation governing weapons, ammunition, and explosives in Colombia is Decreto 2535 de 1993 (‘por el cual se expiden normas sobre Armas, Municiones y Explosivos’). Its original implementing regulation, Decreto 1809 de 1994, was consolidated into Decreto 1070 de 2015, the Defence Sector’s single consolidated regulatory decree(decreto único reglamentario).

Decreto 2535 establishes rules on the classification, possession (tenencia), carriage (porte), import, and export of arms, ammunition and explosives, as well as their seizure and confiscation. It distinguishes between weapons of war or weapons for the exclusive use of the Public Force, restricted-use weapons and civilian-use weapons. Article 1 excludes from its scope weapons, ammunition, explosives, and accessories destined for State forces in the performance of their constitutional and legal functions.

Article 57 of Decreto 2535 provides that only the national government may import and export arms, ammunition, explosives, and accessories, in accordance with regulations issued by the Ministry of Defence. Article 2.2.4.1.19 of Decreto 1070 provides that the government, through Industria Militar (INDUMIL), may import and export arms, ammunition, and explosives for legal and natural persons subject to specified requirements. For Colombian or foreign legal persons, an application must identify the class and quantity of material, port of embarkation, port of arrival, final destination or storage location, consignee, exporting company and intended use, and must include a certificate of legal incorporation and favourable opinions from the competent military authority and INDUMIL. Applications by natural persons are subject to separate documentary requirements and a favourable opinion from the competent military authority.

The import regime is supplemented by Decreto 925 de 2013, which establishes provisions governing applications for import registrations and licences through the Ventanilla Única de Comercio Exterior (VUCE). Under Article 14, imports subject to the prior-licensing regime include products controlled by INDUMIL and certain goods destined for the Armed Forces and National Police. Decreto 1165 de 2019, which establishes Colombia’s Customs Regime, provides the broader customs framework applicable to imports, exports and transit. Article 191 contains specific provisions for the importation of material de guerra o reservado by the Armed Forces, National Police, Ministry of Defence and its decentralised institutes, including simplified declaration requirements and automatic customs release, subject to Colombia National Tax and Customs Directorate (Dirección de Impuestos y Aduanas Nacionales – DIAN) inspection powers. These customs requirements operate alongside the weapons-specific authorization regime established under Decreto 2535 and Decreto 1070.

The framework is supplemented by Decreto 4508 de 2006, which established the National Coordination Committee for the Prevention, Combat and Eradication of Illicit Trafficking in Small Arms and Light Weapons in all its aspects. Colombia is also a party to the Inter-American Convention against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials (CIFTA), approved by Ley 737 de 2002 and promulgated by Decreto 2122 de 2003.

Weapons falling within the scope of Decreto 2535 are subject to the domestic possession and carriage permit system. The legislation provides for issuance, renewal, suspension, and cancellation of permits, and for seizure and confiscation of weapons held in breach of the requirements. The DCCAE (Departamento Control Comercio de Armas, Municiones y Explosivos), within the Comando General de las Fuerzas Militares, administers the relevant weapons-control procedures, including possession, carriage, transfer, and registration.

Colombia has also established a Registro Nacional de Identificación Balística (RNIB). Article 5 of Ley 1941 de 2018 provides for the registration of firearms with tenencia, porte and special permits through their ballistic fingerprint. Decreto 771 de 2022, incorporated into Decreto 1070, regulates the RNIB and provides that it contains ballistic-fingerprint information for all firearms with tenencia or porte permits, as well as firearms linked to criminal investigations.

The legislation also provides for the control and disposal of weapons and ammunition placed under State custody. Decreto 2535 and its implementing regulations provide for the seizure and confiscation of weapons. Decreto 275 de 2026 establishes the National Voluntary Weapons Surrender Programme and provides for surrendered weapons to be received by DCCAE and designated military units for inventory and subsequent neutralisation and destruction.

Oversight of this framework is divided among three bodies. INDUMIL is the State industrial and commercial entity involved in the production, import and commercialisation of weapons, ammunition, and explosives and, under Article 2.2.4.1.19 of Decreto 1070, imports and exports on behalf of the government. The DCCAE administers the weapons-control system domestically. It also serves as the secretariat of the Comité de Armas del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional. The Comité considers applications for tenencia and porte of restricted-use weapons, recommending provisional suspension of sales where necessary for public order and security, and setting general policies concerning the acquisition, sale, import and export of arms, ammunition, and explosives.

Transparency and reporting

Colombia ratified the Arms Trade Treaty on 15 October 2024, becoming a State Party on 13 January 2025. Colombia’s ATT Initial Report was due on 12 January 2026. The ATT Secretariat records the Initial Report as submitted, with Colombia having requested that it be posted only in the restricted area of the ATT website. The Initial Report is therefore not publicly available for consultation. Colombia’s first Annual Report is due on 31 May 2027.

Colombia has submitted information to the UN Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA), though on an irregular basis. Its recent submission was in 2025, following earlier reports in 1992, 2007, and 2009 (see above). Multi-year gaps separate these four submissions, so UNROCA does not itself provide a continuous annual record of Colombia’ arms transfers.

Colombia has also submitted reports under the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons and International Tracing Instrument (PoA/ITI). The 2026 report identifies the legislation and administrative instruments Colombia applies to international transfers of small arms and light weapons, including Decreto 2535 de 1993, Decreto 925 de 2013, Decreto 1070 de 2015, Decreto 1165 de 2019 above mentioned. It states that exports of small arms and light weapons require an end-user certificate identifying the goods, destination, intended end use, exporter and end user. The certificate includes a non-re-export clause requiring prior authorization and an undertaking that the goods will be used exclusively by the declared end user. The report also refers to an export licence issued by the Ministry of Defence and an import certificate from the destination country.

Colombia reports that INDUMIL conducts an export risk assessment, with input from the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The assessment includes review of the purchaser and end user, the end-user certificate and compliance documentation, and consideration of risks including terrorism, violations of human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL), diversion to transnational organized criminal groups, and violence against women and children. Colombia also reports procedures for verifying delivery certificates and obtaining confirmation from the importing State concerning the status of the shipment.

For imports, the same report identifies Decreto 925 of 2013 on import registration and licensing and Decreto 1165 of 2019 establishing the customs regime as the applicable framework. These instruments should therefore be considered alongside Decreto 2535 and Decreto 1070 in examining controls applicable to weapons entering Colombia.

The PoA report also provides information on collection and destruction. Colombia reported collecting 21,234 weapons in 2024 and 21,833 in 2025, of which it reported destruction of 11,546 and 9,107, respectively. It also reported tracing requests concerning 10,308 weapons in 2024 and 12,832 in 2025.

Key weaponry in the armed forces

Strategic position and defence posture

Colombia’s defence posture is dominated, as it has been for six decades, by internal armed conflict rather than external deterrence. As per War WATCH, the Colombian Armed Forces (Fuerzas Militares) were a party to four ongoing non-international armed conflicts (NIACs), all tracing their origins to the Marxist guerrilla movements – principally the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) – that emerged in the 1960s in response to unequal land distribution, and to the right-wing paramilitary groups, above all the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), that arose in the 1980s to combat them. Although the AUC demobilized collectively between 2004 and 2006, and the FARC-EP signed a peace agreement with the government on 24 November 2016 (leading more than 13,000 of its fighters to lay down arms), dissident and successor structures have since proliferated. Following the November 2022 launch of President Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ (Paz Total) strategy of simultaneous negotiation with all major armed groups, have grown substantially: from around 15,120 fighters in December 2022 to approximately 28,802 by July 2026, per data compiled by Fundación Ideas para la Paz, with territorial disputes doubling from seven zones of active contestation in 2022 to fourteen by mid-2026.

The total peace strategy collapsed in 2024–26: the government suspended its ceasefire with the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) in March 2024; talks with the ELN broke down in August 2024; and negotiations with the Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia (EGC) opened in Qatar in September 2025 but had collapsed by March 2026. President Abelardo de la Espriella, inaugurated on 7 August 2026, immediately ended negotiated peace in favour of ‘a strategy of direct military confrontation’, declaring dialogue ‘completely exhausted’. The ICRC has characterized 2025 as having produced ‘the worst humanitarian consequences of armed conflict [in Colombia] over the past decade’ (see Recent and Current Operations and Compliance with IHL by the Armed Forces, below, for the detailed evidentiary record.)

Janes assesses the risk of military interference in Colombian government as low, notwithstanding periodic civil-military strain following the 2016 peace agreement and subsequent security-sector reforms under President Petro. Colombia’s political context has also been volatile : President de la Espriella narrowly defeated Iván Cepeda in the 21 June 2026 presidential runoff, in a highly polarized election shaped by social discontent, persistent insecurity and declining approval for outgoing President Petro. Institutional tensions surrounding the National Electoral Council’s handling of the count have, per Janes, further undermined confidence in electoral impartiality and increased the risk of election protests.

Corruption remains a persistent constraint on Colombian institutional capacity: Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index scores Colombia 37 of 100 (ranking it 99th of 182 countries). This is down from 39 in 2024 and below the Americas regional average of 42, the decline attributed to the absence of a sustained anti-corruption policy and continuing high-level corruption (see further below).

Beyond the multiple internal armed conflicts, Colombia’s threat environment has a growing external dimension: per Janes, political tensions with Venezuela and Ecuador, together with a maritime boundary dispute with Nicaragua, have increased the perceived requirement for a credible conventional deterrent, prompting sustained procurement, personnel growth and specialized training aimed at rebalancing the Armed Forces away from their historical counter-insurgency orientation. That rebalancing remains incomplete. Janes assesses the Fuerzas Militares de Colombia (FMC) as one of the most mobile and professional counterinsurgency forces globally, but one whose doctrine, force structure, and equipment continue to reflect decades of internal-security priorities: the Army lacks sufficient armour, tanks and field artillery for conventional operations, the naval infantry has no amphibious or international landing capability, the Navy has capability gaps in anti-submarine warfare, and – notwithstanding operating the largest helicopter fleet in Latin America – the Air Force’s combat fleet numbers fewer than 20 Kfir combat aircraft, with the rest optimized for light attack and counterinsurgency missions rather than air combat.

At policy level, President Petro’s 2023 Política de seguridad, defensa y convivencia ciudadana set out four pillars – protecting the population, combating deforestation and environmental damage, strengthening national defence, and improving the welfare of the Armed Forces – alongside a proposal to end mandatory military service in favour of a more professionalized force and increased equipment procurement through approved budget allocations. President de la Espriella has since replaced that framework with his own 90-day ‘plan de choque’ (shock plan), announced through Defence Minister: nine ‘Bloques de Defensa y Seguridad Urbana’ (Bodsu) deployed across Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Bucaramanga, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Ibagué and Soacha, with an initial 2,000 police officers (400 to Bogotá in the first phase); a new programme of joint military-police operations in prioritized zones; one-month surrender ultimatums issued to named leaders of Los Pachenca, the ELN’s Nororiental front, and FARC dissident structures; and closer security cooperation with the United States, including membership of the Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels (A3C). One concrete element of this reinforced aerial and intelligence capability is the incoming MQ-9A Reaper fleet in cooperation with the US (see below under Air Force). Whether and how far this new plan will be reflected in a revised military-expenditure allocation was not established.

According to SIPRI, Colombia’s 2025 military expenditure was US$14.5 billion, or 3.2 per cent of GDP – a 1.0 per cent real-terms decrease from 2024, and the 29th-highest defence budget among the roughly 40 countries SIPRI tracks at that level of detail. This sustained spending sits alongside a wider organized-crime environment that both drains and is fuelled by Colombia’s security apparatus: the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s 2025 Organized Crime Index scores Colombia 7.82 for overall criminality (2nd of 193 countries assessed) against a resilience score of only 5.46, with an arms-trafficking score of 8.00 specifically.

Composition of the Armed Forces

Army

The National Army of Colombia (Ejército Nacional) is the largest of the three Armed Forces branches and, per Janes, the service most shaped by the post-2016 shift away from the peace-agreement-era force posture and toward the ‘Damasco’ doctrine, which reorients conventional force planning around Venezuela as Colombia’s principal external conventional threat while the Army retains its long-standing internal counterinsurgency and counternarcotics mandate against the ELN, dissident FARC structures (the EMC, the EGC, and related fronts) and the Gaitanista Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AGC). The Army is built around eight conventional land divisions plus a ninth, dedicated airmobile division, each subdivided into brigades that in turn contain the Army’s manœuvre and combat-support battalions.

Recent reporting also indicates corruption-related institutional concerns within the Colombian Army. In March 2026, three generals left the service following internal reviews into alleged corruption. In August 2026, eight active-duty soldiers and one retired sergeant, including three majors, were arrested on alleged embezzlement (peculado por apropiación) and falsification of public documents following an 18-month investigation into irregular administrative management in several regions. The sources do not, on the available evidence, establish a broader pattern of corruption or involve weapons or ammunition; they are therefore noted here as institutional concerns.

Air force

The Colombian Air Force (Fuerza Aeroespacial Colombiana, FAC) generates effects primarily for counterinsurgency operations with modernization (new radars, the Barak MX air-defence system and the planned Gripen fleet) intended to build a more credible conventional capability. Its multirole fighter fleet is limited, and its ability to detect and intercept hostile aircraft is constrained by a lack of early-warning coverage. The legal framework has separately been extended to authorize airstrikes against organized crime groups that generate armed violence even without an insurgency link.

A January 2018 reform created a single chief of staff over three commands – Air Operations, Forces Support and Personnel – intended to make the service more multi-functional and interoperable. Six Air Combat Commands (CACOM) cover defined geographic areas. Fighters are based at Palanquero, near the centre of the country, while most fixed-wing logistics aircraft operate from El Dorado in Bogotá. Four new bases (Tumaco, Urabá, Mitú and La Guajira) are planned by 2030 to extend airspace surveillance and defence, integrated into the planned National Air Defence System (SISDAN).

Air-defence systems

Ground-based air defence is organized around two separate lines. The FAC’s own inventory of Bofors L/70 40mm towed anti-aircraft guns – 15 in service since 2021, UK-origin – is distinct from, and additional to, the L/70 guns already noted under the Army, above. Early-warning radar is provided by 5 AN/TPS-70 and 4 AN/TPS-78 long-range 3D radars (both US-origin, Northrop Grumman). The FAC’s principal air-defence procurement is the Israeli Barak MX system: the equipment table records 16 Barak MX transporter-erector-launchers ordered (8 delivered and in service since 2025), together with 2 Barak MX BMC units, 2 Barak MX “Land on the Move” system-of-systems units and 2 ELM-2084 multi-mission fire-control radars (1 each delivered and in service) – all Israel Aerospace Industries/Elta products – while the associated Barak MR and Barak LR interceptor missiles are listed as zero ordered, delivered, or in-service.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Janes records 4 MQ-9A Reaper armed drones on order (General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, US; none delivered), carrying both an attack and surveillance/reconnaissance role. Following the Defence Minister’s August 2026 visit to Washington, Colombia announced that the United States would loan it three MQ-9A Reapers, with Colombia purchasing a fourth outright for intelligence, surveillance, and counternarcotics use, in a configuration with armament capability for precision strikes against high-value targets, subject to rules of engagement and required authorizations.

Navy

The Colombian National Navy (Armada Nacional de la República de Colombia, ARC) is primarily configured for internal security and counterinsurgency operations, while also building conventional deterrence against regional rivals – specifically border disputes with Venezuela and Nicaragua – by enlarging its Pacific and Caribbean surface fleets and expanding riverine capabilities. A relationship with NATO since 2018 is increasing the ARC’s familiarity with NATO manuals and doctrine.

The ARC’s 2021 Fleet Construction and Optimisation Plan (Procyon) sets out procurement objectives to 2042, including a Strategic Surface Platform (PES) programme for five new COTECMAR-built multirole frigates and a further COTECMAR-built offshore patrol vessel; budgetary constraints since the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the ARC’s original 2030 modernization target out to 2042, and the near-term priority is fleet maintenance, including a May 2021 COTECMAR contract covering 211 vessels.

Functionally the fleet is organized into frigate, submarine, patrol-craft, and logistic-support flotillas, distributed across five naval zones and rarely operating as single entities. Two dedicated counter-trafficking task forces – N°72 Poseidon (Tumaco, Pacific coast) and N°73 Neptuno (Turbo, Caribbean coast) – target routes used by FARC-EP dissident groups, the ELN, and the Clan del Golfo (AGC), supported by amphibious marine battalions, the coastguard, and regional naval forces. The hospital ship Benkos Biohó, attacked by the ELN’s Ernesto Che Guevara Front on 5 June 2026 while under naval escort on the Pacific-coast Río San Juan (see Compliance with IHL by the Armed Forces, below), illustrates this riverine and coastal role in practice.

Recent and current operations

Domestic armed conflicts

As of War WATCH, the Colombian Armed Forces were a party to four of eleven ongoing NIACs – against the ELN, the EGC, the EMC (a FARC-EP dissident group) and the Comandos de la Frontera (CDF, also FARC-EP dissident) – with a further seven pitting non-State armed groups against each other (ELN v EGC; ELN v EMC; ELN v Frente 33 of the Estado Mayor de los Bloques y el Frente, EMBF; EMC v Frente 57 Yair Bermúdez; EMC v EGC; EMC v Segunda Marquetalia; EMC v EMBF). The classification and applicable-law is given under Conflict environment and applicable IHL, below.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that seventy-eight per cent of the rural population was living under the influence of at least one non-State armed group. War WATCH, citing the UN Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, records approximately 7.2 million people displaced inside or outside Colombia at the end of 2025, the second-highest figure in the world; OCHA projected that 10.4 million people would need humanitarian assistance in 2026, while the World Food Programme found that, notwithstanding Colombia’s upper-middle-income status, more than a third of households in the fifteen most-affected departments around 7 million people were experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity.

The defining episode of the reporting period began on 16 January 2025, when the ELN launched a major offensive in the Catatumbo region of Norte de Santander against the 33rd Front of the EMBF, displacing more than 64,783 people, forcibly confining over 12,913, and killing 117 between January and April 2025 – a toll the Defensoría des Pueblo characterized as ‘the most serious humanitarian emergency the country has recorded since official record-keeping began,’ noting that this single-region, 3.5-month displacement total exceeded all of Colombia’s internally displaced persons recorded nationwide for the whole of 2024 (25,611 people). The ICRC’s own review of 2025 reached a similar conclusion nationwide, finding that Colombia ‘experienced the worst humanitarian consequences of armed conflict [in the country] over the past decade’ and recording, for 2025 alone, 235,619 individually displaced people (+100% on 2024), 87,069 people displaced in mass-displacement events (+111%), 176,730 people confined (+99%), 965 people killed or injured by explosive hazards, 308 new disappearances and 282 attacks on health workers.

The attack led President Petro to suspend ELN talks indefinitely; President de la Espriella’s 7 August 2026 inauguration marked a decisive break with the negotiated-peace framework of the preceding four years, issuing armed groups a one-month surrender ultimatum replacing negotiation with ‘direct military confrontation’, and, on 31 August 2026, terminating the government’s remaining negotiating processes with the EMBF, the Coordinadora Nacional Ejército Bolivariano, and the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada.

Under this posture the Armed Forces have mounted a visibly intensified campaign. Washington pledged a US$1 billion security-assistance package to the incoming government on the day of President de la Espriella’s inauguration, and on 28 August 2026 the government repealed the 2015 resolution banning aerial glyphosate spraying for coca-crop eradication. ACLED recorded at least 84 deaths in clashes between the security forces and armed groups since President de la Espriella took office, making August 2026 ‘the deadliest month for these clashes since ACLED started coverage of the country in 2018,’ and cautioned that ‘by using casualties as a metric of achievements, the government may create a permissive environment for state forces to carry out abuses.’ The International Crisis Group separately cautioned that ‘a heavy-handed approach could cause violence to spike, rather than reducing it.’

Both War WATCH and ACLED document a rapidly escalating armed-drone dimension to the conflict used overwhelmingly by non-State groups against the security forces. ACLED’s regional analysis records approximately 670 weaponized-drone events across Latin America since 2018, more than 72% of them between January 2025 and 21 August 2026 alone; 97 of the 182 Latin American municipalities where ACLED has recorded such events are in Colombia, concentrated in Cauca with expansion into Norte de Santander, Antioquia, Chocó, Nariño and Bolívar, and the number of armed groups in the region using weaponised drones rose from five in 2024 to nineteen by August 2026, with the ELN and FARC-dissident structures increasingly using fibre-optic-guided drones resistant to radio-frequency jamming – a technology ACLED notes was first seen at scale in Ukraine. The Armed Forces’ response is the National Anti-Drone Shield (Escudo Nacional Antidrones), announced by Defence Minister Pedro Sánchez Suárez on 10 January 2026: a roughly US$1.615 billion, multi-layered counter-UAS system combining early-warning sensors, electronic-warfare jamming, physical interceptors and a centralized command-and-control platform, intended to protect strategic and critical infrastructure, military and police operations, border regions, airports, and major cities against both military-grade and improvised drones fielded by State and non-State actors alike, to be rolled out in phases following supplier selection.

Counternarcotics and counter-trafficking operations

The Aerospace Force’s counter-narcotics role extends beyond the domestic conflict to interdiction of narco-trafficking flights, which Janes records as a growing operational focus conducted in cooperation with Panama and Mexico.

The ARC has also undertaken discrete humanitarian and expeditionary deployments: Janes records a 2015 deployment of an ARC offshore patrol vessel, 7 de Agosto, in support of the EU’s counterpiracy operation Atalanta and NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield off the Horn of Africa, alongside a broader ARC humanitarian-assistance and disaster-response role.

International deployments and peacekeeping

Colombia’s most consistent international military deployment is not a UN peacekeeping mission but its contribution, since 1982 and continuing through at least 2026, of a roughly 275-strong contingent (COLCON) to the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) monitoring the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in the Sinai. Janes also records a wider pattern of bilateral military training and cooperation deployments by Army and Air Force personnel, including to El Salvador, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau and Guatemala. By contrast, Colombia’s contribution to UN peacekeeping is minimal. As of 31 January 2026, it fielded just four uniformed personnel across all operations worldwide.

Compliance with IHL and Human Rights by the Armed Forces

Conflict environment and applicable IHL

As of 1 September 2026, the Colombian Armed Forces were a party to four of eleven NIACs: against the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), the Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia (EGC), the Estado Mayor Central (EMC, a FARC-EP dissident structure) and the Comandos de la Frontera (CDF, also a FARC-EP dissident). Additional Protocol II of 1977 applies as treaty law to each of these four along with Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and customary IHL; War WATCH’s own classification analysis finds that the opposing non-State group in each case exercises sufficient territorial control. A further seven NIACs pitted non-State armed groups against each other governed only by Common Article 3 and customary IHL. The operational environment is characterized not only by confrontation between the State and organized armed groups, but by intense competition among those groups themselves for territory, drug-trafficking routes and other illicit economies, producing large-scale displacement and confinement on a recurring basis and shifting alliances between fronts.

The humanitarian consequences of these conflicts, taken as a whole, have been severe. The ICRC documented 845 alleged IHL violations in Colombia in 2025 – a figure that comprises only cases known directly to the organization and does not by itself attribute responsibility to any particular party. Most of these violations occurred outside the conduct of hostilities, affecting civilians or persons deprived of liberty; the remaining cases arose during hostilities, when parties failed to take the necessary precautions to protect civilians.

What is directly relevant to the conduct assessed below is the environment these conflicts create for the Armed Forces’ operations. War WATCH, citing Fundación Ideas para la Paz, observes that the character of armed-group control over civilian populations has shifted: groups have moved progressively away from massacres and the killing of social leaders as their principal instrument of territorial control – responding to State operations that prioritize action against the most lethal and visible forms of violence – and towards threats, extortion, confinement, and forced displacement, exercising control not only through visible armed presence but through personnel sent into communities to enforce the rules they seek to impose. The armed groups the Armed Forces are fighting also routinely recruit and use children, as detailed under Protection of children in military operations, below. These circumstances create substantial operational difficulties for the Armed Forces but do not modify their obligations under IHL: the presence of armed-group members among civilian populations, including child recruits, does not remove the requirements of distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack, which are the central frame for the assessment that follows.

Conduct of hostilities and protection of civilians

Non-State armed groups conduct – extensive use of improvised explosive devices, anti-personnel mines, and armed drones against civilians and the security forces alike, together with killings, forced displacement and confinement, the recruitment of children, and conflict-related sexual violence – creates the overall operating environment in which the Armed Forces conduct their operations.

The available evidence does not establish, for the Colombian Armed Forces, the same scale of current attacks on civilians or civilian objects documented above for several non-State armed groups. One well-documented, though contested, instance was located of Colombian forces attacking civilians: on 8 September 2025, a Colombian Navy patrol on the Guandipa River, Mosquera municipality, Nariño, opened fire on a boat carrying the mayor of Mosquera and her team, killing an adviser, and wounding a bodyguard. The Navy stated its unit fired to protect itself against an unidentified vessel travelling at high speed, without navigation lights and against river traffic; the mayor’s office and a social leader who was aboard rejected this account, saying the shots were fired directly at them without warning, and demanded an investigation.

The most significant concerns arise from military operations against armed-group positions in areas where civilians may be present – particularly the use of air power, addressed in detail below. Under customary IHL, attacks may only be directed against military objectives, and a party must at all times distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects; even where a lawful military objective is targeted, the attacker must take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental civilian harm, and must not launch an attack expected to cause civilian loss excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

The ICRC’s 2025 findings, above, indicate why these rules carry particular weight in the Colombian context: fighting repeatedly occurred in populated areas, and failures to take precautionary measures were the principal category of alleged violation occurring during hostilities specifically. Colombian air operations accordingly need to be assessed case by case – the information available to commanders on the target and surrounding population, the means and methods chosen, the anticipated military advantage weighed against anticipated civilian harm, and the precautions taken before and during the attack – since civilian casualties following a strike do not, by themselves, establish an IHL violation; the legal assessment turns on what was known or reasonably knowable to the attacker at the time.

A further, distinct conduct-relevant phenomenon, is the asonada: episodes in which groups of civilians either form a human cordon to prevent the military from entering an area, or surround soldiers already conducting an operation there. The International Crisis Group traces the practice to 2020, during Duque-era forced coca eradication, when coca farmers blockaded counter-narcotics police and army units; it has since become widespread, with at least 92 recorded incidents between 2022 and July 2026. Community representatives uniformly deny acting under armed-group pressure, but ICG reports that, in private, both residents and military officers describe whole rural neighbourhoods as often compelled to participate under threat of fines or expulsion – which, if accurate, would place the civilians involved within the scope of the ICRC’s guidance on voluntary versus involuntary human shields, a distinction with direct bearing on the lawfulness of any use of force against or near them.

ICG records that Colombian troops are instructed not to fire on civilians in these situations, and cautions that dispersing an asonada by force would both exceed the Armed Forces’ legal authority and further erode the population’s trust in the State. Colombian media have documented at least two recent cases in which the Armed Forces did use force in response to an asonada. On 10 September 2025, soldiers of the Army’s Sixth Division fired shots – by their own account, into the ground – during an attempted asonada in Puerto Guzmán, Putumayo, aimed at halting a counter-mining operation, after approximately 80 civilians attacked them with rocks and other objects, injuring three soldiers; one civilian was wounded in the foot when he ‘placed his foot in the trajectory’ of a warning shot. Two days later, the commander of the Army’s Jungle Brigade No. 27 publicly characterized the soldiers’ response as ‘legitimate defence’ and attributed the confrontation to incitement by the Comandos de la Frontera (E-48), which he said sought to protect illegal mining and other criminal economies in the area. On 16 July 2026, in the El Filo sector between El Tambo and Argelia, Cauca, the Army acknowledged expressly resorting to what it called ‘legitimate use of force’ after members of a crowd of roughly 500 people – which it said the Carlos Patiño dissident structure had coerced into the confrontation – attempted to seize soldiers’ weapons and deploy explosive devices; four civilians were injured and evacuated by helicopter to Popayán. The Defensoría del Pueblo’s own assessment of this confrontation, published three days later, gives a materially more serious casualty picture: it records that community members, allegedly coerced by the EMC’s Iván Mordisco line into moving toward El Filo, attempted to disarm Army personnel, who then opened fire, killing one person and wounding three others, including a minor. Colombian press coverage published the same day as the incident independently corroborates the more serious account over the Army’s own framing: community witnesses and video evidence cited by El País showed a civilian shot from behind, and the outlet reported a civilian death that the Army disputed at the time.

Air operations and precautions in attack

The most substantial current compliance concerns involving the Armed Forces relate to air operations against FARC-dissident structures, particularly where recruited children may have been present. Colombian military air operations against FARC-dissident camps have repeatedly resulted in the deaths of minors, including a 10 November 2025 operation in Calamar, Guaviare, which killed 20 people including 7 minors, and a 13 November 2025 strike in Puerto Rondón, Arauca, which killed 8 people including 1 minor – part of a wider pattern documenting at least 25 children killed since 2019 across seven separate bombing operations under both the Duque and Petro administrations. By 1 July 2026, Colombia’s Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses reported that at least 65 children aged fourteen to seventeen had died in military operations during the Petro administration, principally in Guaviare, Arauca and Putumayo. Defence Minister Pedro Sánchez disputed the figure precision and attributed responsibility to the armed groups that recruit children: ‘Minors killed in bombings are clear evidence of a crime committed by those who recruit our children’; the Defensoría del Pueblo publicly disputed that framing in turn, saying the true figure could be higher still.

The issue became the subject of formal institutional investigation following the November 2025 operations. On 18 November 2025, the Procuraduría General de la Nación opened five preliminary disciplinary inquiries stating that the military operations under scrutiny had killed at least fifteen children and said that the investigations would examine whether the Armed Forces had observed the principles of precaution, humanity, and proportionality governing the conduct of hostilities; a Procuraduría commission was dispatched to the operational sites to gather testimony and technical evidence. President Petro, defending the operations publicly the day before the Procuraduría’s announcement, accounted for twelve of the fifteen deaths across three named bombing operations.

The issue remained active into August and September 2026. On 27–28 August, a Colombian military operation at El Retorno, Guaviare – Operation Amón, conducted by five Kfir jets and six A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircraft launched from Apiay air base against the Jorge Suárez Briceño Bloc of the Calarcá-aligned dissident structure – killed ten people, including three children aged between fifteen and sixteen. The Ministry of Defence stated that the operation had complied with applicable legal standards and characterized all ten dead, including the three minors, as illegal combatants in continuous combat function (‘combatientes ilegales en función continua de combate’) who had been ‘instrumentalized’ by the group that recruited them – invoking, without referring directly to, the controversial ‘continuous combat function’ concept developed in the ICRC’s 2009 Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities. The Ministry of Defence said it would refer the recruitment of the minors killed to the Fiscalía for investigation as a crime committed by the group that recruited them.

The operation generated immediate judicial scrutiny. On 3 September 2026, the Juzgado 34 de Familia de Bogotá ordered a temporary suspension of offensive air operations wherever there is accurate, objective or reasonably verifiable information of minors’ presence at a target, until protective measures are adopted and verified and no less harmful alternative is shown to exist. A further, separate order – issued around 5 September 2026 by Judge Jhoan Aguilera Martínez of the Juzgado Tercero Penal del Circuito de San José del Guaviare – imposed its own temporary restriction on offensive air operations specifically in Guaviare wherever intelligence or objective evidence indicates the possible presence of children. Both were precautionary judicial orders rather than final findings that the underlying military operations had violated IHL.

The Bogotá court affirmed its own suspension on appeal on 7 September 2026, rejecting challenges from the Presidency and military leadership; a separate administrative court in Cúcuta then issued its own, parallel ruling on 16 September 2026, similarly withholding offensive air operations wherever there is ‘objective information or reasonable doubt’ as to the presence of minors or civilians. The Bogotá court went on to lift its own suspension around 17 September 2026, replacing it with a reinforced precaution standard (‘estándar reforzado de precaución’) requiring intensified verification of information on minors’ possible presence, integration of that information into the operational authorization process, an individualized assessment of the foreseeable risk to minors’ lives recognizing their status as protected victims rather than responsible combatants, consideration of less harmful operational alternatives, and rigorous application of distinction, precaution, and proportionality. As of the date of this profile, that reinforced-precaution standard rather than a blanket suspension governs; whether it has been applied to a subsequent strike should be later checked.

These developments should not be presented as establishing that the individual strikes discussed above were unlawful: the judicial orders are precautionary rather than adjudications on the merits, and the Ministry’s own categorical framing of the dead as combatants in ‘continuous combat function’ is, in turn, legally contestable – the ICRC’s own Interpretive Guidance, and case law built on it (see, e.g., the ICC’s discussion in its Ntaganda judgment of the direct-participation threshold), generally requires an individualized assessment of each person’s conduct and role rather than a categorical inference from presence in an armed group’s camp, and forced recruitment of children is itself a war crime committed by the recruiting group rather than by the State. What the record does demonstrate is that the adequacy of intelligence, target verification, precautions, and proportionality assessment in Colombian air operations has become the subject of active, current administrative and judicial scrutiny – since Colombia’s increasing use of air-delivered weapons and armed drones against dispersed armed groups is precisely the kind of use whose lawfulness depends on the safeguards and procedures surrounding it, not simply on whether civilian casualties occurred.

Protection of children in military operations

The recruitment and use of children by non-State armed groups is a defining feature of Colombia’s current conflicts. Human Rights Watch’s August 2026 research put the number of children recruited since 2021 at approximately 1,500, with recruitment increasing substantially since 2023. Dissident FARC structures accounted for the large majority of recorded cases; more than half of documented cases are concentrated in Cauca department, Indigenous children represent nearly half of all cases despite comprising only around four per cent of Colombia’s population, and more than thirty per cent of recruited children are aged between ten and fourteen. Children have reportedly been transferred between regions and used for intelligence gathering, logistics, surveillance and operating drones, and in some cases for direct participation in fighting. The Colombian Armed Forces have themselves publicly warned of the increasing use of children by armed groups, including in connection with armed drones.

The legal consequence of this recruitment crisis is not, however, that the children involved cease to receive IHL protection. Their recruitment and use by armed groups are violations attributable to those groups, while the Armed Forces remain separately bound by the rules governing attacks as discussed above. The presence of children who may be participating in hostilities creates a heightened requirement for careful target assessment and feasible precautions; it does not, as the Ministry of Defence’s ‘continuous combat function’ framing of the El Retorno dead risks suggesting, provide a blanket basis for treating everyone present at an armed-group position as a lawful target.

The Security Council’s Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict has also engaged with this issue directly, in conclusions adopted 6 September 2024. The Working Group welcomed, among other steps, President Petro’s decision to suspend air strikes against armed group camps where children may be present. However, that sits uneasily with the record set out above under the same administration.

Colombian law expressly prohibits State forces from recruiting or using children for intelligence purposes. Article 6 of Law 1621 of 2013 prohibits intelligence and counterintelligence bodies from involving children in intelligence or counter-intelligence activities, a prohibition the Constitutional Court upheld in Sentencia C-540 de 2012. Article 162 of the Criminal Code (Law 599 of 2000). Most recently, Sentencia T-005 de 2024 ordered the Ministry of Defence, the Army and the National Police to stop conducting civic-military activities involving children in conflict-affected areas.

There is nonetheless documented evidence of State security forces themselves using children, principally for intelligence purposes. Colombia’s Truth Commission recorded 106 cases of children recruited by the fuerza pública (Military Forces and Police jointly) between 1994 and 2019, attributing most to irregular conscription practices, while separately finding that the fuerza pública did intentionally and recurrently used children for intelligence and surveillance. The Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP) separately identified, as of its Auto No. SRVR-LRG-T-046-2023 (23 February 2023), 98 cases of children recruited or used by fuerza pública personnel, of which 94 fell within the JEP’s temporal jurisdiction (before 1 December 2016) and were the figure carried into press coverage.

Protection of civilians under the control of State forces: historical record and current accountability

The falsos positivos findings establish a serious historical compliance problem involving extrajudicial killing of civilians by military personnel, falsification of operational records and command involvement, principally during the early 2000s. They are relevant as evidence of the scale of past violations and the State’s subsequent accountability response, but should not by themselves be treated as evidence of a continuing current practice.

Accountability has also proceeded against personnel who did not acknowledge responsibility. On 17 December 2025, the JEP sentenced the former commander of the Batallón de Artillería La Popa, retired Colonel Publio Hernán Mejía Gutiérrez, to 20 years’ imprisonment on the adversarial track for 35 incidents involving 72 deaths. The JEP found that Mejía had headed an illegal organized power structure within the battalion and that civilians had been systematically presented as combat casualties through falsified operational reporting.

On 28 March 2022, an Army operation in Alto Remanso, Putumayo, targeting a non-State armed group commander during a community gathering, resulted in eleven deaths. Colombia’s Fiscalía concluded that the victims’ bodies ‘had not retained the natural post-mortem position, which indicates that eventually they had been manipulated,’ and that a rifle found beside one of the victim’s body ‘had never been used or handled by him, but rather, it had been planted’ – findings the prosecutor characterised as a violation of the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. Only five weapons were recovered for eleven dead, and ballistic evidence showed the shots had come from two different firing positions rather than the single position the official account described.

Reportedly, twenty-five military personnel were charged with homicide of a protected person and attempted homicide; all pleaded not guilty and were ordered into pretrial detention. Following a jurisdictional dispute over whether the case should proceed in military or ordinary courts, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled unanimously on 16 April 2024 that it must remain in the ordinary criminal justice system, holding that the ‘functional element’ required for military jurisdiction is negated whenever grave human rights violations are at issue. As of the date of this assessment, the case remained at the pretrial stage.

The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ 2024 country visit findings bear directly on this specific question. Its report recounts the historical use of enforced disappearance within the falsos positivos strategy during the Democratic Security Policy period (2002–2010), in which victims were captured, killed and exhibited under a false identity as combat casualties, but states plainly that it ‘did not receive reports of enforced disappearances that occurred after 1 December 2016 as part of the ‘false positive’ phénomènes.

This subsection concerns the Armed Forces rather than the National Police. No evidence identified in the material reviewed links the falsos positivos pattern or the JEP proceedings described above to the Police.

Torture and ill-treatment in military custody

The UN Committee against Torture’s 2023 review of Colombia identified this as a distinct, unresolved structural concern specific to the Armed Forces. Reiterating a prior recommendation, the Committee called on Colombia to ‘ensure that grave human rights violations and other abuses committed against civilians by military personnel, including acts of torture and ill-treatment, do not fall within the jurisdiction of military courts and to ensure that the ordinary courts have sole jurisdiction over such acts,’ and separately noted continuing reports that ‘international standards regarding jurisdiction over alleged human rights violations committed by members of the security forces are not systematically applied by all judicial bodies.’

On 7 October 2025, at a military base in Frontino, Antioquia, soldiers detained a 27-year-old peasant with a cognitive disability on suspicion of belonging to an illegal armed group. Over approximately five hours he was stripped, beaten, hung from a tree and asphyxiated, and died in custody; soldiers then wrapped his body in a hammock and disposed of it in a river, where it was recovered three weeks later. Nine soldiers were charged with torture, homicide and aggravated forced disappearance in the ordinary criminal justice system, consistent with the Committee’s recommendation. By July 2026, six had been convicted – a lieutenant to 20 years and three months, and five others to 20 years and two months – with three more still in pretrial detention.

Enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings: further current-period findings

OHCHR’s annual reporting on Colombia documents a continuing flow of specific allegations of unlawful killing by State security forces. In 2023, OHCHR received 37 allegations of arbitrary deprivation of life by members of the Police and Military Forces combined, verified 30 of them, and attributed 21 to the Police and 9 to the Military specifically. Allegations against the Police are addressed below; this section concerns the nine allegations attributed to the Military. In 2024, OHCHR received 33 such allegations and verified 18 (with 6 still being verified and 9 deemed inconclusive), including two child victims among those verified – though this year’s report does not disaggregate the Police/Military split.

The Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ country visit found that enforced disappearance ‘did not end with the 2016 peace accords’ and continues ‘daily across the country’, with estimates for 1958–2016 ranging from 121,768 to 210,000; Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office separately registered 10,206 cases, involving 12,620 victims, for 2016–2024. On attribution, the Committee describes most current disappearances as falling ‘within a strategy of territorial control deployed by non-State and criminal armed groups,’ with ‘serious allegations’ in some areas of State ‘support or acquiescence’; disappearances specifically linked to military counter-insurgency operations are, in the current period, attributed to the Estado Mayor Central (an EMC dissident faction of the former FARC-EP), again with alleged State acquiescence rather than direct Armed Forces perpetration.

The UN Human Rights Committee’s 2023 review of Colombia raised similar general concerns. The Committee noted ‘the rising number of incidents such as massacres and murders of human rights defenders committed by criminal organizations and non-State armed groups, as well as extrajudicial executions and other alleged arbitrary deprivations of life allegedly committed by army officers, police officers and other public officials authorized to use weapons belonging to the State’, while also noting progress in the JEP’s Macro Case 03 (falsos positivos) and the separate Macro Case 08, concerning security-force collusion with paramilitary groups and civilian third parties. It recommended that such violations be investigated ‘promptly, thoroughly and impartially,’ with commensurate sanctions for those convicted.

Accountability Mechanisms

Colombia is a State Party to the Rome Statute and has accepted ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory since 1 November 2002. The ICC Prosecutor opened a preliminary examination of the situation in 2004. The Office’s November 2012 Interim Report found a reasonable basis to believe that crimes against humanity – including murder, forcible transfer, severe deprivation of liberty, torture, and sexual violence – had been committed since 1 November 2002, and war crimes – including attacks against civilians, torture, hostage-taking, sexual violence, and the recruitment and use of children – since 1 November 2009, by different actors. The examination was closed on 28 October 2021, when the Prosecutor determined that Colombian authorities could not be characterized as inactive, unwilling, or unable genuinely to investigate and prosecute Rome Statute crimes; the Office’s full closure rationale was subsequently set out in its Report on the Situation in Colombia, issued 30 November 2023. The Prosecutor indicated that the assessment could be reconsidered if there were a significant change of circumstances.

Colombia maintains a formal transitional-justice architecture created by the 2016 FARC-EP peace accord, comprising three linked bodies: the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP), a judicial mechanism that offers reduced, restorative sentences to combatants who fully acknowledge responsibility and contribute to truth and reparation, as against ordinary criminal punishment for those who do not; the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (Truth Commission), a non-judicial body that published its final report in 2022; and the Search Unit for Persons Deemed as Missing. The JEP’s most significant output is the September 2025/July 2026 falsos positivos judgment discussed above.

Domestic accountability remains active through several mechanisms. The JEP continues to adjudicate historical violations, including those examined in Case 03, above. For current-period conduct, the Procuraduría opened five ex officio disciplinary investigations in November 2025 into bombing operations that killed at least fifteen minors, while the Fiscalía opened an investigation into the August 2026 El Retorno strike (see Air operations and precautions in attack, above). As of 25 September 2026, none of these current-period proceedings had resulted in a finding, disciplinary sanction or criminal conviction. Their outcomes should therefore be monitored before drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of accountability for recent conduct.

The UN Committee against Torture’s 2023 concluding observations welcomed the progress made in the area of transitional justice, including the first resolutions of conclusions issued by the JEP, the Truth Commission’s 2022 final report, and Colombia’s stated commitment to implement both the Truth Commission’s recommendations and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ judgment in Bedoya Lima v. Colombia. It nonetheless expressed concern that acts of torture and ill-treatment ‘are not investigated because they are considered to be subsumed under offences that carry a heavier penalty, such as kidnappings, massacres and homicides attributed to non-State armed actors or documented acts of torture in cases of extrajudicial executions attributed to members of the security forces’ – a finding that bears directly on the Armed Forces accountability record discussed above.

President de la Espriella has publicly criticized the JEP since taking office on 7 August 2026 and has indicated an intention to reform or dismantle it, although constitutional constraints are understood to limit his ability to do so unilaterally. This creates real uncertainty about the JEP’s institutional future precisely as it begins to produce its first substantive sentences against military personnel – a tension Arms TRACK will follow closely.

Separately from the JEP’s judicial track, the collapse of ‘Total Peace’ has left a residual disengagement problem: ninety-nine members of a structure linked to the Coordinadora Nacional Ejército Bolivariano laid down their arms three days before the August 2026 presidential run-off and entered a government-controlled temporary transition zone, where – as at time of writing – they remained without a decision on their legal status or on the reintegration process they had been promised.

Key Weaponry in Law Enforcement Agencies

Legal Framework

The National Police (Policía Nacional) is established under Article 218 of the Constitution as a permanent armed body of a civilian nature, whose principal function is to maintain the conditions necessary for the exercise of public rights and freedoms and to ensure peaceful coexistence. Although institutionally distinct from the Military Forces, the Police forms part of the Public Force and is administratively attached to the Ministry of National Defence.

The Police’s ordinary intervention powers, including during public demonstrations, are principally governed by Law 1801 of 2016, the National Code of Security and Citizen Coexistence (Código Nacional de Seguridad y Convivencia Ciudadana). Article 8 establishes, among other principles, proportionality, reasonableness, and necessity in the exercise of police powers. Article 166 defines the use of force as a necessary, proportional, and rational means and as a last physical resort to protect life and physical integrity. It also requires officers to use only means authorized by law or regulation and, among lawful means, to select those that are effective while causing the least harm.

The legal framework governing the weapons available to the Police should be distinguished from the rules governing the circumstances in which those weapons may lawfully be used. Article 2.2.4.1.1 of Decreto 1070 of 2015 , as amended by Decreto 273 of 2026, regulates the categories of firearms that members of the Public Force and other authorized State bodies may carry. By contrast, Decreto 1231 of 2024 established a specific framework governing police use of force, including the circumstances in which firearms may be used.

Decreto 1231 of 2024 amended Decreto 1070 of 2015 by providing that firearms constitute an extreme measure and may not be used against persons except where there is an imminent danger of death or serious injury, to prevent a particularly serious offence involving a serious threat to life, or to arrest a person presenting such a danger. Where circumstances permit, officers must identify themselves and give a clear warning before using firearms, unless doing so would create a danger or would be manifestly inappropriate. The provision, which complies with international human rights law, also establishes reporting requirements following the use of potentially lethal force. 

Decreto 1231 also required the Police to adopt a specific manual governing the employment and technical classification of firearms. This was subsequently done through Resolución 01319 of 15 May 2026, which applies to uniformed National Police personnel and establishes institutional rules on the employment of firearms and their technical classification (Arts. 2–4). The resolution reiterates the principles of necessity, legality, proportionality, and differentiation and provides that firearms are an extreme measure (Art. 5). It expressly prohibits the use of firearms with lethal ammunition to control peaceful demonstrations and public gatherings, except in legitimate defence against an actual and imminent threat of death or serious injury (Art. 9(12)). It also provides that officers may not invoke obedience to a superior’s order where the use of the firearm is manifestly unlawful or where they had a reasonable opportunity to refuse to comply, and provides that superiors who issue unlawful orders are likewise responsible (Art. 9(9)). The resolution further requires reporting following the use of firearms, including a detailed account of the circumstances (Art. 10). 

The framework for policing demonstrations was substantially revised following the 2019–21 protests. In November 2022, the National Police created the Unidad de Diálogo y Mantenimiento del Orden (UNDMO)through Resolución 03684 of 11 November 2022, as part of the transformation of the former Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (ESMAD). In March 2023, Resolución 1091 of 31 March 2023 adopted a new Manual para la Atención a la Reunión y Manifestación Pública y Pacífica y Control de Disturbios, replacing the 2017 manual (Resolución 03002 of 29 June 2017) that had barred crowd-control officers from carrying firearms. The 2023 framework places greater emphasis on dialogue, the protection of the right of peaceful assembly, and the differentiated and proportional use of force. The IACHR identifies the transformation from ESMAD to UNDMO, the creation of dialogue teams and specialized intervention units, and the 2023 Manual as measures intended to reduce disproportionate use of force in protests. It notes that the new framework prioritizes dialogue and a gradual approach to the use of force. Civil society groups, including the Mesa por la Reforma Policial (CAJAR, MOVICE), however, called the change ‘cosmetic’ rather than structural.

In July 2026, the incoming administration announced that UNDMO would be replaced by a restored ESMAD structure as part of a broader change in public-order policy. Whether the doctrine, training arrangements and less-lethal weapons framework introduced during the UNDMO transformation will be maintained, modified or replaced following the announced institutional change remains to be established.

The Police is ordinarily responsible for domestic public-order functions. The constitutional distinction between the Police and the Military Forces means that military involvement in domestic public-order policing is exceptional rather than the ordinary framework. This distinction has also been emphasized by the Constitutional Court and is relevant to the concerns regarding military involvement in public-order operations discussed below.

Weapons and equipment

The categories of weapons that members of the police may carry are regulated separately under Article 2.2.4.1.1 of Decreto 1070 de 2015. The provision authorizes police and other law enforcement officials to carry pistols and revolvers above .38 calibre (9.652 mm), as well as semi-automatic or automatic pistols and sub-machine guns. Exceptionally, the Fiscalía General de la Nación, Procuraduría General de la Nación, INPEC and, following an amendment in March 2026, the Unidad Nacional de Protección (UNP), may possess long firearms, including rifles and carbines, with prior authorization from the Comité de Armas of the Ministry of Defence. In the case of the UNP, such firearms may be possessed exclusively for the President’s security scheme. Decreto 273 of 2026, which entered into force on 17 March 2026, introduced the amendment. 

A separate regulatory framework governs less-lethal weapons, ammunition, elements and devices. Decreto 1417 of 2021 introduced a classification and regulatory regime for armas traumáticas, while Decreto 1563 of 2022 established a broader framework governing the classification, marking, registration, permits, and restrictions applicable to less-lethal weapons, ammunition, elements and devices. Both instruments expressly exclude the Fuerza Pública when acting in fulfilment of its constitutional, legal, and regulatory mission. They therefore do not constitute the principal regulatory framework governing the Police’s own use of less-lethal equipment.

The Police’s own less-lethal weapons are instead governed by specific institutional regulations. In particular, Resolución 01840 of 20 June 2025, Manual para el Empleo de Armas, Municiones, Elementos y Dispositivos Menos Letales (AML) y su clasificación técnica para la Policía Nacional, establishes institutional parameters governing the employment and technical classification of less-lethal weapons, ammunition, elements, and devices by the National Police. The Manual establishes principles of necessity, legality, proportionality, and differentiation; identifies the AML that may be employed by the Police; sets parameters governing their use; requires Police training; provides that AML must be institutionally supplied and not altered; and requires a prior warning where force is to be used. 

The National Police is equipped with both conventional firearms and less-lethal weapons and devices. Its 2025 financial disclosures identify ammunition, explosives, and less-lethal devices held in police armouries for policing operations, training and firing practice, public-order operations, and other operational purposes. The disclosed stocks include 9 mm, 5.56 mm, 7.62 × 51 mm and 12.7 × 99 mm ammunition, as well as CS/OC chemical agents, smoke and stun grenades, and other devices. In November 2025, the Police also reported the acquisition and distribution of SIG Sauer 5.56 mm rifles and 9 mm pistols to police units. 

For public order operations, the former ESMAD was historically equipped with a range of less-lethal weapons and devices. A 2021 Ministry of Defence report identified gas-launching rifles and multiple launchers, spherical-ammunition launchers, rubber ammunition, directed-impact cartridges and other kinetic ammunition, as well as CS/OC chemical grenades and cartridges, smoke grenades and cartridges, stun and light-and-sound grenades, multiple-impact grenades, electrical launchers, police batons, anti-riot vehicles, and water-cannon devices. The report stated that, when ESMAD carried out exceptional riot-control interventions, its personnel did not carry or use firearms and instead used less-lethal weapons, ammunition, and devices. 

The use of 12-gauge shotguns nevertheless became a significant issue following the 2019 protests. In its judgment STC7641-2020 of 22 September 2020, the Supreme Court ordered the suspension of the use of 12-gauge shotguns by ESMAD and other institutions carrying out police activities pending verification that adequate safeguards existed for their responsible and measured use. The Court also ordered the matter to be referred to the Procuraduría General and Fiscalía General for investigation.

The transformation from ESMAD to UNDMO has involved a stated review of less-lethal weapons, operational doctrine, and intervention practices. The Ministry of Defence describes the transformation as involving a new doctrine prioritising dialogue and de-escalation, updated manuals and protocols, the definition and appropriate use of less-lethal weapons, and differentiated training. The Ministry of Defence also states that Resolution 1091 of 2023 suspended the use of multiple-impact grenades (granadas de impacto múltiple) in UNDMO intervention operations. 

UNDMO is responsible for attending public meetings, demonstrations, protests and strikes where specialised intervention is required, as well as riots and other violent disturbances arising from gatherings. Its institutional model places dialogue at the centre of the intervention approach, while retaining specialised intervention where circumstances require it. The extent to which these changes will be sustained following the July 2026 announcement concerning the restoration of ESMAD remains to be established.

Oversight

Oversight of police conduct operates through several mechanisms rather than through a single independent civilian police-oversight institution.

The Procuraduría General de la Nación exercises disciplinary oversight over public officials and has preferential disciplinary powers. Under Law 2196 of 2022, which established the current Police Disciplinary Statute, disciplinary authority is generally exercised by designated officials within the National Police, while the Procuraduría retains preferential authority. The law specifically provides that the Procuraduría is competent in cases involving disciplinary offences constituting violations of international human rights law. It also provides for the possibility of provisional suspension where there are serious indications of possible violations of international human rights law or serious effects on the community. 

The Fiscalía General de la Nación is responsible for investigating criminal conduct falling within the ordinary criminal jurisdiction. The Justicia Penal Militar may exercise jurisdiction over offences committed by active members of the Public Force where there is a direct relationship with service. Article 221 of the Constitution, as amended by Acto Legislativo No. 01 of 2015, establishes this service-related military jurisdiction and requires the Military or Police Criminal Justice system to be independent of the command of the Public Force. 

This jurisdiction is nevertheless limited. Article 3 of Law No. 1407 of 2010 (Military Penal Code) expressly excludes torture, genocide, enforced disappearance, crimes against humanity, and conduct contrary to the constitutional function of the Public Force from being treated as service-related offences. The Constitutional Court has further stressed that the military jurisdiction is exceptional and requires a direct, close, and immediate connection between the alleged offence and the performance of official duties. Where that functional connection is absent, the ordinary criminal jurisdiction applies. 

The Defensoría del Pueblo also has an important monitoring role, particularly concerning demonstrations and human rights. In STC7641-2020, the Supreme Court ordered the Defender to provide monthly reports on compliance with the measures concerning the use of 12-gauge shotguns. 

Police Compliance with the Law of Law Enforcement and Human Rights

The 2021 national strike crackdown

The most extensively documented instance of unlawful use of force by Colombian law enforcement in recent years is the security-force response to the Paro Nacional (national strike) that began on 28 April 2021, initially in protest at a proposed tax reform. Human Rights Watch documented 34 deaths between 28 April and 31 May 2021 – 2 police officers, 1 criminal investigator, and 31 demonstrators or bystanders, of whom at least 20 appear to have been killed by the police – with at least 16 protesters or bystanders killed by live ammunition (most fatally struck in the thorax, head or abdomen).

More than 1,100 protesters and bystanders were injured, a figure Human Rights Watch regarded as an undercount given under-reporting; nine cases of severe eye damage were documented, including seven with likely permanent loss of vision in one eye, apparently from teargas cartridges, stun grenades or kinetic-impact projectiles – consistent with the pattern Amnesty International and the Omega Research Foundation later documented globally in their 2023 report ‘My Eye Exploded’: The Global Abuse of Kinetic Impact Projectiles which counted more than 100 protesters injured by such projectiles in Colombia’s 2021 protests specifically. A young Bogotá protester, Leidy Cadena Torres, was shot directly in the eye by a rubber bullet fired by police on 28 April 2021 during the same wave of tax-reform protests, permanently blinding her; her case was later individually profiled by Amnesty International’s 2024 ‘Protect the Protest’ campaign. Authorities also recorded, as of 14 May 2021, 2 cases of rape, 14 cases of sexual assault and 71 other cases of gender-based violence attributed to police officers, and Human Rights Watch documented 17 beatings, including one, of 24-year-old Elvis Vivas López, that resulted in his death on 1 May 2021. Over 1,200 people were detained, with a further 5,500 or more taken into custody under a ‘protection transfer’ provision.

Human Rights Watch’s recommendations – set out in the 2021 report – included transferring the police from the Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of Interior or a new security ministry to separate it from military authority, reforming its disciplinary system to ensure independence, and prioritizing criminal investigations of individual officers rather than routing cases through the military justice system. A separate later OHCHR report, reaching a similar conclusion independently, likewise called for ‘a broad national debate on police reform, including the possibility of transferring the police from the Ministry of Defence to civilian control, and improving internal oversight and accountability mechanisms’.

Amnesty International separately conducted investigation documented 28 cases of sexual and other gender-based violence against women, children and LGBTIQ+ people during the same period – including sexual assault, forced nudity and conduct amounting to torture – a smaller but independently corroborating count alongside the official figures above rather than a duplicate of them.

The UN Committee against Torture’s 2023 concluding observations addressed this pattern of policing directly, under an ‘Excessive use of force’ heading. The Committee expressed concern about ESMAD’s conduct during the 2019–2021 protests specifically, including allegations of torture and ill-treatment of peaceful demonstrators, and about limited progress in investigating and prosecuting alleged unnecessary or disproportionate use of force, including lethal force, more generally. It recommended that the maintenance of public order be carried out, insofar as possible, by civilian police forces, that military involvement in the maintenance of public order remain exceptional, temporary, and duly justified, and that this be coupled with strict adherence to international use-of-force standards.

During its July 2023 review of Colombia, the UN Human Rights Committee’s dialogue with the State likewise centred on the 2021 strike: the Committee’s chairperson noted that ‘89 homicides had been documented, of which 36 had been ascribed to the law enforcement forces,’ and that 52 cases of extrajudicial executions had been recorded in 2021 alone. The Committee’s concluding observations, issued shortly afterward, addressed the 2021 strike under the right of peaceful assembly: it expressed concern at acts and omissions by State agents incompatible with that right, ‘such as arbitrary deprivations of life and violations of personal integrity and security through the unnecessary or disproportionate use of force, arbitrary detentions, sexual and gender-based violence and acts of discrimination and racism,’ regretted the reported slow progress in investigating these violations, and noted with concern that individuals accused of violence during the protests had been prosecuted for terrorism and criminal conspiracy. It recommended that Colombia strengthen measures against excessive use of force, speed up investigation and prosecution of the 2021 killings, eye injuries and sexual violence specifically, continue reforming the riot squad and the use of force in protests, and review the terrorism/conspiracy prosecutions of protesters against Article 21 of the Covenant.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) conducted an on-site working visit to Colombia from 8 to 10 June 2021 specifically to examine the protest-policing crisis, and issued 41 recommendations covering use-of-force protocols, ESMAD’s institutional design, and criminal and disciplinary accountability. Colombia and the IACHR subsequently formalized a Joint Follow-up Mechanism, and the Commission’s January 2023 follow-up report found that, of the 28 recommendations it was able to assess, 3 had been substantially complied with, 14 partially complied with, and 11 not yet addressed at all – none of the original 41 had achieved full compliance as of that report.

On individual criminal and disciplinary accountability specifically, the Procuraduría General de la Nación issued first-instance disciplinary sanctions on 11 May 2026 – nearly five years after the events – against two former ESMAD members over a protester’s death during the 2021 protests in Bogotá: patrolman Abberson de Jesús Salas Acosta was dismissed and barred from public office for 18 years, his conduct classified as most serious (gravísima) and committed with intent, for firing a gas-launching rifle into the crowd; sub-lieutenant Jorge Enrique Bombita Uriana, commander of ESMAD’s Section 1, received a suspension and eight months’ special ineligibility for grave intentional misconduct. The Procuraduría found both had violated the principles of personal integrity, legality, and proportionality.

A second, independently verified Procuraduría sanction concerns a different officer and a different victim: patrolman Álvaro José Guerra Ríos, of the Bogotá Metropolitan Police’s ESMAD, was dismissed and disqualified from public office for 16 years over injuries caused to two women during protests in the Suba locality of Bogotá on 5 May 2021, one of whom lost an eye; the Procuraduría found he had exceeded the legal limits on police force and violated the principles of legality, necessity, and proportionality.

Individual disciplinary accountability has demonstrably occurred but the overall criminal and disciplinary response to the wider 2021 pattern of killings, injuries, and sexual-violence allegations remains harder to assess. The Fiscalía’s report to the IACHR recorded 21 confirmed homicides linked to the strike (with 11 further cases under verification and 19 others occurring during, but unrelated to, the strike), 14 cases of violence against women (13 against civilians, one against a police officer), and – on the disappearances side – 328 people located against 91 still missing, but only three formal enforced-disappearance complaints filed; on the criminal side, it reported four uniformed personnel detained over three civilian deaths and three civilians arrested over one officer’s death, without giving comprehensive prosecution or conviction figures across the full pattern.

The government’s institutional response to the 2021 crackdown is covered in detail under Key Weaponry in Law Enforcement Agencies, above: it replaced ESMAD with the ostensibly less-lethal UNDMO in 2022, then seemingly restored ESMAD in July 2026. Whether the restored ESMAD now operates under the same use-of-force constraints UNDMO was meant to introduce remains an open question.

In practice, UNDMO’s own equipment use continued to draw documented criticism in 2022–26: on 6 May 2025 it deployed stun grenades and tear gas against parents protesting the alleged sexual abuse of children at a Bogotá daycare, affecting children present at the protest; and on 1 December 2025, it deployed stun grenades and tear gas without warning against a peaceful sit-in opposing an arms fair.

Arbitrary detention and safeguards in custody

Beyond the use of force itself, the UN Committee against Torture’s 2023 review of Colombia identified a distinct pattern of concern in police detention practice. The Committee expressed concern about ‘mass and arbitrary arrests carried out by police officers who show no identification’, and ‘incommunicado detention of persons deprived of their liberty for periods of up to 24 hours, especially in the context of demonstrations and protests’. The Committee recommended that Colombia investigate and punish officers who fail to apply fundamental safeguards, with investigations to follow the Minnesota and Istanbul Protocols.

Torture and ill-treatment by the Police

The 2025 Global Torture Index’s Colombia factsheet – produced by five Colombian civil-society organisations, coordinated by the World Organisation Against Torture – records 26 torture cases officially reported nationwide in 2022 (38 victims, including children) and 15 verified in 2024, without disaggregating Police from military conduct or protest from non-protest contexts, and without public information on convictions.

On 3 March 2024, at the municipal police station in Bolívar, Valle del Cauca, a 27-year-old man was allegedly tied to a chair and beaten for nearly twelve hours, sustaining chest and head injuries that required emergency surgical removal of his spleen; the Fiscalía initially charged five National Police officers with aggravated torture, aggravated kidnapping, and falsifying a public document, for recording that he had left the station unharmed. By May 2025, a judge had ordered the pretrial detention of three of them, arrested in Palmira and Pasto. Separately, on 2 December 2025, two police officers were arrested over an incident reported by the victim’s wife at a Unidad de Protección de Personas Privadas de la Libertad in Manizales, in which a person already deprived of his liberty was allegedly handcuffed, taken to a bathroom out of camera view, kicked and punched, subjected to nine discharges of a taser, and left restrained for hours without medical attention; both officers were charged with torture, abuse of authority, and failure to render assistance.

Lethal force in ordinary law enforcement

The Constitutional Court’s Sentencia SU-190 of 17 June 2021 concerns Dilan Mauricio Cruz Medina, a nineteen-year-old fatally struck by an ESMAD bean-bag round fired by an ESMAD captain during the 23 November 2019 Bogotá protests; the Court held that assigning the case to military rather than ordinary criminal jurisdiction had violated the victim’s family’s rights to due process and access to justice, and articulated the standard – since applied in cases discussed below – that ordinary jurisdiction governs whenever doubt exists as to the direct connection between the alleged conduct and police service. This is a distinct authority from the Supreme Court of Justice’s STC7641-2020 shotgun-suspension order discussed earlier; both concern the same underlying protester’s death but from different courts on different legal questions.

In Auto 647 of 10 April 2024, the Constitutional Court examined the death of José David Carrillo Chamorro, who died on 25 January 2023 during a police search operation at a sports facility in El Retén, Magdalena; a witness stated that an officer applied sustained pressure to his neck, and the autopsy attributed death to asphyxia by external compression of the airway. Finding serious doubt as to whether the police conduct was ‘directly, closely, evidently related to the service,’ the Court assigned the case to the ordinary Fiscalía rather than military and police criminal jurisdiction. The same standard, however, can equally point the other way: in Auto 127 of 31 January 2024, concerning the fatal police shooting of Bryam Alejandro Erazo Pérez in Popayán on 11 June 2020 – where officers pursuing a homicide suspect who had fled into a house were, on the evidence before the Court, confronted with a knife – the Court found both the subjective element (the officer was on duty) and the functional element (a direct link to police service) satisfied, and assigned the case to military jurisdiction instead. Read together, these cases show that the ordinary/military jurisdictional line in Colombian police-lethal-force cases turns on the specific evidentiary picture in each case rather than operating as a rule that automatically favours either forum.

The same standard was applied a third time to the Leidy Natalia Cadena Torres case, discussed above: in Auto 1411 of 28 August 2024, the Constitutional Court likewise found doubt as to the proportionality of the force used against her and as to whether she was actively confronting police at the time, and assigned her case to the ordinary criminal courts rather than military jurisdiction.

A further, more recent case remains procedurally unresolved as of the date of this profile writing. On 4 April 2025, police responding to a disturbance in Cachipay, Cundinamarca, allegedly discharged their firearms; an eight-year-old girl, Alison Hernández, who was inside a vehicle, was killed, and her father and sister were wounded. Colombia’s military criminal justice authority opened its own investigation within days, and a first-instance judge (Juzgado 1702 de Control de Garantías) proposed that the case be referred to ordinary rather than military jurisdiction.

OHCHR’s annual reporting provides the aggregate current-period picture that the case law above does not. In 2023, OHCHR received 37 allegations of arbitrary deprivation of life by members of the Police and Military Forces combined, verified 30 of them, and attributed 21 specifically to the Police. In 2024, OHCHR received 33 such allegations and verified 18, including two child victims, but that year’s report does not disaggregate the police/military split.

Children and police operations

Colombian law expressly prohibits State forces – the National Police specifically included, not only the Army – from recruiting or using children for intelligence purposes. Article 6 of Law 1621 of 2013 bars intelligence and counter-intelligence bodies from involving children in intelligence or counterintelligence activities in any circumstances, and Article 3 of the same law defines the intelligence and counterintelligence function as carried out by, among others, ‘las dependencias de las Fuerzas Militares y la Policía Nacional organizadas por éstas para tal fin’ – expressly bringing Police intelligence units within the prohibition’s scope. The Constitutional Court upheld this framework in Sentencia C-540 de 2012, holding it constitutionally justified by children’s special protection and Colombia’s international obligations. The Constitutional Court’s Sentencia T-005 of 2024, however, discussed above, found that the police, alongside the army, have engaged children in civic-military activities in conflict-affected areas and ordered all three to stop and redesign the relevant programmes around civilian institutions instead.

Police use of force against children specifically, as distinct from their use of force against protesters generally, is also documented. In Auto A-1787/24, the Constitutional Court examined the killing of a three-year-old in Cali on 28 September 2023, struck by a bullet fired by a police officer during a foot pursuit (the same shot wounded an adult woman); the officer was charged with aggravated homicide. Unlike the ordinary-versus-military jurisdiction standard applied elsewhere, the Court sent the case back to the military prosecutor ‘for appropriate action,’ leaving it with the military justice system by default rather than assigning it to the ordinary courts. In Sentencia T-009 of 2026, the Constitutional Court addressed the 21 January 2015 shooting of Luisa María Gallego Uribe, then twelve, struck in the thigh during an exchange of fire between National Police officers and vehicle thieves in Medellín’s Campo Valdés neighbourhood. Ballistic evidence showed the bullet was a .38-calibre revolver round, distinct from the Police’s 9mm sidearms, and a lower court had found on that basis that the shot came from the criminals’ weapons, breaking the chain of State liability. The Constitutional Court held this reasoning incomplete: liability must also account for the risk to civilians created by the police operation itself, regardless of whose weapon fired the round – and it ordered reparations accordingly.

Accountability and Oversight

The jurisdictional pattern illustrated by the individual cases discussed above reflects a broader structural problem repeatedly flagged by international and civil-society monitors. Amnesty International’s November 2025 review of 398 conflicts of jurisdiction referred to the Constitutional Court between February 2021 and October 2024, involving members of the National Police and Armed Forces, concluded that continuing military-justice involvement in cases with alleged human-rights violations ‘is not a technical error: it is a structural obstacle that contributes to impunity,’ and highlighted that ‘the National Police in Colombia is defined as a civilian body, yet its members are investigated and subjected to trial by the [military justice system]’.

The transitional-justice architecture discussed in detail under Compliance with IHL by the Armed Forces also touches the Police, though only as one of several implicated State institutions rather than as a Police-specific accountability measure. The JEP’s Macro-Case 08 examines crimes committed by members of the Public Force, other State agents, paramilitary groups, and civilian third parties acting in association, including homicide, torture, enforced disappearance, forced displacement, and illegal detention; its preliminary victim count attributes 15,710 victims specifically to Public Force members, as against 56,502 to paramilitary groups and 280 to other State agents in the same case.This figure covers the Armed Forces and Police together and should not be read as isolating Police-specific conduct; it is noted here as part of the broader accountability picture.

Risk of Diversion and Re-Export of Imported Weapons

Domestic Diversion and Re-Export Risk

Colombia faces a significant and well-documented risk of diversion of firearms and ammunition from legal into illicit circulation. The available evidence is considerably stronger for domestic diversion–weapons legally held or legally authorized in Colombia reaching unauthorized users – than for the narrower question of weapons imported into Colombia subsequently being re-exported illicitly to third countries. The two pathways are therefore considered separately below.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) gives Colombia an arms-trafficking score of 8.00/10 in its 2025 Organized Crime Index. It describes a well-developed illicit firearms market involving weapons originating from the United States, Central America, Venezuela and Brazil, identifies Buenaventura as an important transit point, and reports the involvement of mafia-style groups, local gangs and state-embedded actors, including through corruption. The Index also notes the increasing availability of military-grade equipment among non-State armed groups and the use of small-arms rentals in criminal activities. 

The Constitutional Court’s 2024 review of Colombia’s adherence to the ATT similarly summarized evidence before it identifying several sources of weapons reaching illegal armed groups. These included theft from Colombian military arsenals; weapons stolen abroad or surplus weapons from Central American States and subsequently smuggled into Colombia; weapons legally imported into other countries and subsequently smuggled to unauthorized users in Colombia; diversion of legally held weapons already within Colombia by members of the armed forces, security companies and civilians; and diversion of weapons legally imported into Colombia, including through falsified licences. The Court presented these pathways as evidence that illicit arms flows into Colombia have both internal and transnational components. The Court did not, however, quantify the relative prevalence of these different pathways or establish that weapons lawfully imported into Colombia were subsequently re-exported to third countries.

Diversion from State and Military Stockpiles

Diversion from State-controlled stockpiles is directly documented. In June 2025, the Fiscalía General de la Nación charged ten alleged members of a network accused of trafficking weapons, ammunition, and explosives originating from the Colombian security forces. According to the investigation, the network included an active-duty Army soldier and a retired police intendant who allegedly removed ammunition, grenades, and weapons or weapon parts from military facilities in Bogotá, the Tolemaida military base and an INDUMIL facility in Soacha. The material was allegedly supplied to FARC dissident structures and urban criminal groups in Cauca, Tolima, Meta, Arauca and Bogotá. Investigators seized, among other items, 13 pistols, 16 rifles, seven revolvers, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, five shotguns, four carbines, 3,184 rounds of ammunition and 67 magazines. The case illustrates a diversion mechanism involving insiders with authorized access to State-controlled stocks.

A further case, reported on 22 September 2026, involved the Gaula Militar, National Police and Fiscalía General de la Nación apprehending four retired military personnel and two civilians accused of extracting weapon parts, ammunition, and accessories from military units, including the Cantón Militar Coronel Jaime Rooke in Ibagué and the Batallón de Infantería Mecanizada No. 5 ‘General José María Córdova’ in Santa Marta, by paying warehouse personnel 4,000–6,000 pesos per cartridge to falsify records and facilitate the extraction. Investigators seized more than 22,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition, valued at over 61 million pesos, together with cash, phones and vehicles, and reported that the material was being moved toward Meta and Guaviare for sale to illegal armed groups. The alleged network leader, a former sergeant, is reported to have coordinated the operation from La Picota prison in Bogotá while already incarcerated. The case adds a further, more recent illustration of the pattern already documented above of insiders with authorized access facilitating diversion from State-controlled stocks.

The Constitutional Court identified theft from Colombian military arsenals and diversion by members of the armed forces among the documented sources of weapons reaching illegal armed groups. There are recent indications of weaknesses in the custody and traceability of State-owned military material. In November 2025, the Secretaría de Transparencia reported that it had referred to the Fiscalía findings concerning alleged irregularities at INDUMIL, including at least 320 grenades, more than 7,200 grenade bodies, rifle and pistol parts, and aviation bombs that were allegedly inadequately recorded or lacked adequate custody and traceability documentation. The authority also reported allegations that some material had been certified as destroyed while remaining in storage. These findings concern alleged deficiencies and do not, by themselves, establish that the material was diverted into criminal circulation, but they demonstrate vulnerabilities at a point in the State-controlled supply chain.

Historical evidence should nevertheless be treated with some qualification. A Small Arms Survey, found that, at least during the period it examined, relatively few weapons recovered from the FARC and ELN appeared to originate directly from Colombian military stockpiles, with international illicit markets and foreign procurement networks constituting important alternative sources. State-stockpile diversion should therefore be understood as one documented pathway within a broader and predominantly transnational illicit supply environment, rather than as the sole or necessarily principal source of weapons for armed groups.

A separate episode illustrates the difficulty of establishing the scale of losses from State inventories. In April 2024, President Petro stated that more than one million rounds of ammunition, grenades, and missiles were missing from military installations at Tolemaida and La Guajira. The figure was subsequently disputed in reporting based on military sources, which attributed the discrepancy to an apparent misreading of a SAP inventory column and reported substantially smaller shortages at La Guajira, including approximately 102,234 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition, 10,547 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition, around 1,000 grenades and one Spike missile. The episode should thereforenot be treated as evidence of a confirmed loss of more than one million items. It nevertheless illustrates the importance of reliable inventory, reconciliation, and traceability systems for State-held weapons and ammunition.

Colombia also reported to have strengthened its capacity to trace firearms recovered in criminal investigations. At the Ninth Biennial Meeting of States on the UN Programme of Action, held in June 2026, Colombia reported that its modular traceability instrument had, from 2025–26, centralized information concerning more than 30,000 captured firearms, of which approximately 16,000 had been subject to tracing.

Diversion from Legal Holders and Legal Supply Chains

The risk also extends to weapons held lawfully by private actors. The clearest documented case is the March 2025 operation against a network of three private-security companies. The Policía Nacional and Fiscalía reported that the companies rented firearms to members of criminal organizations, registering them fictitiously as escorts or escort coordinators and providing the weapons together with legally valid transport documentation. The investigation identified the Clan del Golfo as one of the network’s regular clients and found that 60 of the fictitious escorts had criminal records. One of the persons allegedly certified through the arrangement was Oliverio Isaza Ramírez, alias ‘Terror’. The operation resulted in the seizure of more than 100 firearms, including 22 revolvers, 50 pistols, five shotguns and 31 traumatic weapons, together with 3,735 rounds of ammunition. The case demonstrates a concrete pathway from legal authorization to illicit possession: weapons held by licensed companies were allegedly placed in the hands of criminal actors through manipulation of the private-security system while retaining apparently valid documentation. It therefore provides direct evidence of domestic diversion from a legally controlled supply chain.

The regulatory authorities have also identified significant compliance problems within the private-security sector. Supervigilancia reported that its 2025 inspections resulted in the seizure of 166 firearms from private-security companies and unauthorized providers. The figure demonstrates enforcement action concerning irregular possession or custody of firearms, although it does not establish that all of the weapons had been diverted to criminal groups.

A further accountability gap was highlighted in 2025, when the government reported that 62,664 firearms associated with 197 private-security companies whose licences remained formally valid but which appeared inactive in the Supervigilancia information system could not be located. This figure should not be treated as evidence that 62,664 firearms had entered criminal circulation: the underlying finding was that their current location or custodian could not be established. It nevertheless indicates a substantial weakness in the ability to account for weapons held within a legally regulated sector.

In July 2025, Supervigilancia, the Ministry of Defence and the DCCAE activated an inter-institutional protocol providing for the operational blocking, preventive custody and administrative monitoring of firearms belonging to private-security companies subject to sanctions proceedings. The measure was presented as a means of preventing the diversion and misuse of firearms assigned to private-security companies and addressing risks associated with criminal infiltration of the sector. It provides evidence that the authorities have identified diversion from the private-security stock as a concrete regulatory risk, although the announcement does not quantify how many firearms had actually been diverted.

A further 2025 case provides evidence of vulnerability within the legal manufacturing and distribution chain itself. In February 2025, the Policía Nacional dismantled the criminal structure known as ‘Los Cosos’, whose members allegedly obtained original industrial firearms and ammunition irregularly through INDUMIL and subsequently sold them to residual armed groups and criminal networks in Bogotá and Soacha. Police investigators estimated that the group was trafficking approximately 30 firearms per month. The case illustrates a potential diversion point within the legal supply chain before weapons reach ordinary authorized holders.

The regulatory authorities also identified custody and traceability deficiencies at an individual private-security company. On 20 May 2025, Supervigilancia ordered the cancellation of the operating licence of VIPERS Ltda., a company authorized to possess 610 firearms, after identifying, among other issues, firearms at unauthorized premises and serious deficiencies in the custody, traceability and storage infrastructure for firearms. The decision was subject to the applicable administrative appeal process. The case demonstrates regulatory vulnerabilities but does not establish that the company’s firearms had been diverted into criminal circulation.

The Constitutional Court’s 2024 review provides further evidence that the vulnerability extends to weapons that entered Colombia lawfully. In summarising studies before it, the Court identified the diversion of weapons legally imported into Colombiaas one source of weapons reaching unauthorized users. It separately identified weapons legally imported into other countries and subsequently smuggled into Colombia, as well as weapons stolen from Colombian military arsenals. The evidence therefore supports a legal-import-to-domestic-illicit-market pathway, but does not quantify its prevalence or establish that the weapons concerned were subsequently re-exported.

Colombia has also reported formal controls intended to reduce diversion in international transfers. Its national reporting under the UN Programme of Action and International Tracing Instrument identifies marking and record-keeping requirements for imported small arms and light weapons and reports the use of end-user documentation and procedures for international transfers. The available reporting also identifies needs relating to the updating of the regulatory framework and strengthening risk-assessment capacity for export, import, transit, and re-export controls. These mechanisms demonstrate a formal framework for controlling international transfers, but the public evidence reviewed for this profile does not establish how consistently such controls are applied in practice to weapons previously imported into Colombia or whether they have prevented subsequent illicit re-export.

Cross-Border Trafficking and Re-Export Risk

The evidence for significant inward trafficking of weapons into Colombia is extensive. Reporting on information contained in Policía reports, stated that 21,237 weapons were seized in Colombia during 2024, including 15,454 original weapons and 5,783 improvised weapons. Of the total, at least 3,954 were manufactured in the United States, 1,616 in Colombia, 805 in Italy, and 414 in Germany. The same reporting identified trafficking routes through which weapons acquired in the United States were moved through Mexico and subsequently through Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, or Panama before entering Colombia. The evidence therefore demonstrates the importance of international trafficking chains in supplying the Colombian illicit market, but describes weapons entering Colombia rather than weapons previously imported into Colombia and subsequently re-exported.

The GI-TOC’s 2025 assessment similarly identifies Colombia as a significant destination and transit point within regional illicit firearms flows, with weapons entering the country from the United States, Central America, Venezuela and Brazil. The Constitutional Court identified comparable pathways, including the smuggling into Colombia of surplus weapons from Central American States, weapons stolen in Venezuela and Ecuador, and weapons legally imported into other countries but subsequently diverted to unauthorized users in Colombia. These pathways should not be conflated with re-export from Colombia: in each case, the evidence concerns weapons whose illicit diversion occurred outside Colombia before their arrival in the country.

A UNIDIR/UNODC study provides more specific evidence of international trafficking networks supplying Colombian armed groups. It describes a March 2019 case involving a suspected trafficker who allegedly procured weapons in the United States, moved them from Central America into Colombia using courier companies, and distributed them to the ELN, FARC dissident factions and other criminal groups. The study also identifies weapons diverted from the Venezuelan military as another source entering Colombia. It cautions, however, that the available law-enforcement sources did not establish how the weapons were acquired in the United States or transported to Central America.

The underlying trafficking network was also documented by INTERPOL through Operation Trigger V. INTERPOL reported the seizure of 857 firearms and more than 38,000 rounds of ammunition across a coordinated operation involving several Latin American countries and identified the individual known as ‘Zeus o Mono’ as a suspected leader of a transnational trafficking network supplying weapons to the ELN in Colombia. INTERPOL’s account illustrates the cross-border nature of the supply chains feeding Colombian armed groups, but likewise provides no evidence that weapons previously imported lawfully into Colombia were subsequently re-exported from Colombia.

These sources establish multiple routes by which weapons reach Colombian armed and criminal groups, including diversion from Colombian State and private stocks and transnational trafficking from abroad. They do not, however, establish a corresponding pattern of weapons first imported lawfully into Colombia and subsequently diverted for re-export to a third country.

Overall risk assessment

The evidence reviewed for this profile therefore supports a documented risk of diversion from State and private legal stocks, including weapons acquired through lawful import procedures, as well as significant transnational trafficking of weapons into Colombia. It does not, however, establish a recurrent pattern of lawful Colombian imports subsequently being diverted and re-exported illicitly to third countries. A more definitive assessment of that specific risk would require evidence linking weapons seized outside Colombia to weapons previously imported into Colombia, together with information on the authorization and subsequent custody or transfer of those weapons.