How Drug Wars Destroy Democracy

Colombia’s drug war has ravaged the country — leaving tens of thousands dead, disappeared, or displaced and entire communities broken. Democracy is among the casualties.

By Juan Masullo and Abbey Steele

July 2025

On June 7, at an impromptu campaign event in Bogotá, Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot multiple times, twice in the head, at close range in broad daylight. He remains in intensive care. The attempted assassination — caught on video by at least six different cameras — has rocked Colombia, a country where such political violence feels all too familiar.

The shooter, a 15-year-old boy, was quickly apprehended and claimed on the spot that a local gang had hired him. The ensuing investigation revealed details as chilling as they are telling — a U.S.-sourced 9mm Glock modified for burst fire, high-lethality rounds, and a list of accomplices that include a weapons supplier and a getaway driver. A month passed before authorities uncovered and arrested the person allegedly contracted to orchestrate the attack, but the motive remains unknown. Regardless of the investigation’s final outcome, however, the fact that a child equipped with military-grade firepower was hired to kill a sitting senator running for president is both a gruesome reminder of Colombia’s violent past and a dire warning for the future of the country’s democracy.

The high-profile attack may have come as a shock to casual observers of Colombian politics, given the celebrated 2016 peace agreement ending the decadeslong conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a rebel guerrilla movement deeply involved in the drug trade. But while the war with the FARC may have ended, the “war on drugs” did not. Demand for cocaine continues to soar, and with the demobilized FARC out of the market, old rivals spread to new regions, international drug-trafficking organizations formed new alliances, and FARC dissidents and new groups emerged to compete for part of the market. These shifts have devastated the Colombian countryside, leaving scores dead, thousands displaced, and communities under lockdown. The violence has taken hold in neighboring countries including Ecuador, where a presidential candidate was assassinated in 2023.

Powerful drug-trafficking organizations use violence to operate outside the rule of law, control who can and cannot run for local office, and eliminate community leaders who stand up to them. The attempt on Senator Uribe’s life underscores a grim fact: Democracy is among the drug war’s casualties.

The Backlash Against Democratic Competition

Colombia has experienced high-profile political assassinations before. Between 1987 and 1990, drug-trafficking organizations murdered four presidential candidates.

The 1986 presidential election was the first in nearly thirty years to include candidates from outside the traditionally dominant Liberal and Conservative parties, and the 1988 local elections were the first to allow citizens to choose mayors and governors directly. It was hoped that these changes would convince the FARC to lay down its arms and join the democratic process. Yet the group continued its insurgency, and drug-trafficking organizations — especially the Medellín Cartel — resisted the new political competition, assassinating candidates for local office whom these organizations opposed.

During the same period, the U.S. cocaine market was exploding, bringing massive profits to Colombian drug-trafficking organizations. The Medellín and Cali cartels accumulated enough resources to challenge state-security forces and bribe government officials as well as police officers and soldiers at every level. The cartels had the power to eliminate politicians who spoke out against them, threaten judges who might rule against them, kidnap journalists who covered them, and extract concessions from the government, especially to prohibit the extradition of key cartel members to the United States. Meanwhile, drug-trade profits funded the FARC’s expansion to nearly all regions of the country between 1985 and 2002.

The June 2025 attack on Senator Uribe recalls not only the killings of the late 1980s, but also his own loss: In August 1990, Uribe’s mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was kidnapped along with five others by the Medellín Cartel. She was killed five months later during a botched rescue attempt, recounted by Gabriel García Márquez in News of a Kidnapping (1996). Uribe is not the only member of this generation’s political class with direct ties to that period. Bogotá’s Mayor Carlos Galán is the son of 1990 presidential frontrunner Luis Carlos Galán, an outspoken critic of the cartels who was assassinated in 1989by the cartel.

Colombians went to the polls in May 1990 not only to choose their next president, but also to elect a Constituent Assembly. While the promise of a new constitution (and the end of the Cold War) led some insurgencies to negotiate demobilization with the government, the FARC unleashed a new wave of violence.

Four years earlier, the FARC founded a political party, the Patriotic Union (UP). The UP soon found itself in the crosshairs of the Medellín Cartel, state agents, and paramilitary groups. Two of the four presidential candidates killed between 1987 and 1990 were leaders of the UP. These were far from the only victims affiliated with the party: Nearly six thousand UP members were killed, and tens of thousands more were displaced. The FARC used this violence as a justification to continue the war, which it could finance with profits from the drug trade, rather than lay down its arms.

Drug profits were also enough to finance paramilitary groups, leading to new levels of violence between insurgents and counterinsurgents, and against civilians. Between 1985 and 2012, roughly one in five Colombians became a victim of displacement, killing, disappearance, or sexual violence. And even after the Medellín Cartel’s infamous leader, Pablo Escobar, was killed in 1993 and the main leaders of the Cali Cartel were arrested in 1995, peace in Colombia remained elusive. New players in the drug trade emerged, but kept a lower profile than the cartel leaders of the 1980s had.

Post-accord, Not Post-conflict

After two more decades of violence and several failed attempts to negotiate peace, the administration of Juan Manuel Santos (2010–18) signed a peace agreement with the FARC in 2016, earning the president the Nobel Peace Prize. Violence dropped substantially, igniting hopes for lasting peace, but the calm was brief. As the FARC disengaged, new actors — including rearmed guerrillas and dissident factions — flooded into the vacuum. Rather than winding down, violence has risen every year since 2016.

The year 2025 is already shaping up to be the most violent in a decade: Since January, in the coca-producing Catatumbo region alone, clashes between FARC dissidents and the National Liberation Army (ELN; the largest remaining armed rebel group) have claimed more than a hundred lives, displaced fifty-thousand people, and confined tens of thousands within their rural communities. Despite President Gustavo Petro’s platform of “Total Peace” and ongoing talks with ten armed groups, peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the ELN have faced major setbacks, including the deadly offensive in Catatumbo. Observers in Colombia now speak of a “post‑accord” phase rather than a postconflict one.

As with the political violence of the late 1980s, the assassination attempt on Senator Uribe followed peace negotiations and, crucially, democratic reforms meant to improve representation and stimulate broader participation.

Political participation was a key pillar of the 2016 peace agreement, which included special congressional seats to represent victims, changes in campaign financing and media access, and a path for the FARC’s transition to a political party. But the gains in democratic participation in rural regions stemmed mostly from the FARC’s demobilization and a brief respite from the strongarming of armed groups. During this opening, leaders and communities organized to demand land restitution and oversight on large-scale development projects. The blowback has been brutal. Since 2016, at least 1,372 social leaders have been murdered, with 173 killed in 2024 and 67 more in 2025 so far. These attacks frequently target advocates for land reform, environmental protection, and indigenous rights — people striving to build democracy from the ground up. Over the same period, 74 candidates for local and regional office were also killed.

Colombia’s peace accord also triggered an unexpected surge in illicit economies. Coca cultivation, which hovered around 96,000 hectares in 2015, skyrocketed to approximately 146,000 hectares by 2016 — an increase of more than 50 percent — and has continued to climb. By 2023, coca fields had expanded to 253,000 hectares, yielding over 2,664 metric tons of potential cocaine production. These explosive increases reflect not only the government’s reduced eradication efforts but also improved cultivation techniques and the entry of new actors into the trade. As coca crops expand, armed groups battle for territorial control, displacing communities and targeting those who resist.

Last month’s assassination attempt on Uribe therefore cannot be taken as an isolated incident. It is but the latest episode in a broad pattern of armed groups using drug-funded violence to reshape politics in their favor.

The War on Drugs . . . and Democracy

A sad irony connecting the late 1980s to today is that, in both periods, increasing and mutating violence followed peace talks that had generated widespread hope that the violence would end. Then and now, powerful groups enriched by the drug trade could not be contained by peace agreements, law, or state power — to democracy’s detriment.

The assassination of prominent politicians is unmistakably political and directly undermines democracy: Instead of being defeated through free and fair elections, candidates are forcibly removed from the race; potential political contenders are intimidated from running for office; and competing perspectives are eliminated from policy debates and the electoral arena.

But the damage goes beyond political leadership.

Drug-trade violence sends a chilling message that discourages democratic competition and civic engagement. By instilling fear, it drives many people — especially in rural areas — to withdraw from political participation and even to abandon their rights, including to property. This weakens the very foundations of democracy, eroding the inclusive debate and active citizenship essential for its survival.

Violence also heightens public demand for mano dura policies — that is, policies that bolster the military and security agencies at the cost of civilian oversight and empower the executive while weakening institutional checks and balances. In the name of fighting crime, security forces often bypass due process and the rule of law. Many citizens accept or even support these democratic shortcuts, believing they will bring stability and security. The result, however, is a dangerous power shift: The executive and security branches gain disproportionate power over the other branches of government as well as the civilian population.

Finally, when powerful drug-trafficking organizations intimidate or coopt elected officials, public accountability ceases. This shift in accountability — from voters to armed groups — undermines core democratic principles and leaves civilians without meaningful channels to prevent or resist domination. The threat is especially acute in peripheral regions where drug traffickers, including FARC dissidents, operate. Citizens are left trapped between multiple violent actors and a state that is both more powerful and less accountable.

These threats to democracy are not limited to Colombia. The entire region is vulnerable to collateral damage from the war on drugs. Colombian criminal organizations have expanded their operations to neighboring countries, bringing violence and challenging democratic governance in places that have long tried to avoid Colombia’s instability. Ecuador and Costa Rica, once “islands of peace,” have become central cocaine transshipment ports, and violence has followed. Trafficking and drug-related violence have also reached the relatively safer countries in the region’s south, such as Chile.

Not all political assassinations are related to the drug war, of course. But inherent in such acts is the view that violence can be used to bypass free and fair competition. In Latin America, the organizations that employ this approach have enriched themselves through illegal means. And with the drug money, they have built the capacity to challenge the state through violence or the threat thereof.

Confronting the threats to democracy posed by endemic violence and the drug war demands a shift in both thinking and strategy. We must listen to those activists, scholars, and political leaders who propose alternatives to current drug policy. Colombia led a group of 62 countries to call for reform of the international drug-control system during the 2024 UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. This year, Colombia secured support for an independent review of international drug-trade policies — a hopeful step toward ending the war on drugs. In general, we must stop treating drug policy as a purely national issue. As President Carlos Gaviria reminded us in 1990, even as Colombia bled from cartel violence, the root causes and flows of drug trafficking are transnational and thus require coordinated international solutions. Anything less will leave both public security and democracy dangerously exposed.

Juan Masullo is assistant professor of political science at the University of Milan and a member of the Amsterdam Conflict Research Network. Abbey Steele is associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and the convenor of the Amsterdam Conflict Research Network. She is the author of Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War (2017).

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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