{"id":1302,"date":"2026-04-29T18:23:04","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T16:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/colombia-2026-presidential-election-amid-a-national-security-crisis\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T11:08:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T09:08:51","slug":"colombia-2026-presidential-election-amid-a-national-security-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/colombia-2026-presidential-election-amid-a-national-security-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Colombia: 2026 presidential election amid a national security crisis."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A string of attacks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Colombia, April 2026. A wave of attacks is rocking the southwestern part of the country as it counts down to the elections that will determine the new president for the 2026\u20132030 term (which began on March 8 with legislative elections and will conclude on May 31 with the presidential election\u2014Ed.). In less than a week, over twenty bomb attacks have left fourteen dead and more than forty wounded. The most serious attack along the Pan-American Highway\u2014a vital artery for domestic transportation\u2014has paralyzed the logistics corridor, resulting in a tragic loss of life.   <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this context, we spoke with Lucas Andr\u00e9s Restrepo, a lawyer affiliated with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), Mildred Ram\u00edrez, a journalist with the Alianza de Mujeres Tejedoras de Vida, and Claudia Mej\u00eda Duque, a lawyer and human rights defender. Their voices tell us how civil society is preparing for the elections, as well as their hopes, expectations, and the paths forward. For peace.  <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The risk to the continuity of the JEP<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lucas Andr\u00e9s Restrepo, a lawyer affiliated with the JEP\u2014the body tasked with investigating and punishing crimes committed during the conflict in Colombia\u2014and a professor in Cauca, was recently stranded in the tunnel along the Popay\u00e1n-Cali highway (Pan-American Highway), just a few meters from the site of that attack. For him, this is yet another real and tangible example of the many obstacles institutions face in their attempt to implement the peace agreements (signed in 2016 between the state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-EP, ed.) amid a persistent and localized armed conflict. For Restrepo, the JEP faces a major risk with the rise of right-wing figures such as Paloma Valencia or Abelardo de la Espriella, especially since its investigations expose the leadership of the military and the state to the law. Since it lacks a majority in Congress to abolish the Jurisdiction, the real danger lies in administrative sabotage aimed at underfunding it, blocking access to classified archives, and undermining the reintegration conditions for signatories (former guerrillas). And if reintegration fails, he says, the process is distorted, and the JEP would end up devoting itself exclusively to defending itself on an institutional level, rather than delivering restorative justice. On the contrary, he says, in the face of a possible government led by Iv\u00e1n Cepeda (a senator from the Pacto Hist\u00f3rico, the governing coalition led by current President Gustavo Petro and a presidential candidate\u2014ed.), the JEP\u2019s challenge would be to redesign \u201cPaz Total\u201d within the framework of a \u201chuman\u201d security policy that restores state control in territories where the state left a vacuum after the FARC\u2019s withdrawal, allowing justice to operate in areas currently controlled by dissident and paramilitary groups. Furthermore, Restrepo emphasizes the need for the Constitutional Court to limit the JEP\u2019s \u201cjurisprudential creativity,\u201d preventing interpretive rulings from altering the original spirit of the Agreement. Finally, the JEP\u2019s lawyer stresses that this potential government should strengthen bilateral international alliances,       <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">particularly with the European Union, Spain, and Italy, to ensure funding for reparatory measures and accelerate the implementation of comprehensive agrarian reform.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Journalism in Putumayo<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the southern part of the country, in the department of Putumayo, information management poses an operational risk that affects journalistic practice. Mildred Ram\u00edrez, a communicator with the Alianza de Mujeres Tejedoras de Vida, an organization allied with COSPE, warns that the centralist \u201cinfodemic\u201d reduces the complexity of the region to metrics of illicit crops, rendering invisible the dynamics of conflict and state neglect that persist in the area. Faced with this information vacuum, Ram\u00edrez promotes situated journalism that prioritizes the self-protection of sources and makes visible the processes of resistance and peacebuilding led by women\u2019s organizations. In this part of the country, the Alianza de Mujeres Tejedoras de Vida challenges the official narrative. Mildred recounts how women resist amidst illegal economies and state neglect that seems the result of a deliberate plan rather than an accident. Here, the stakes are so high that mentioning that a victim was the sister of a leader can condemn an entire family to death. From this ethic emerges a form of journalism rooted in collective self-protection that seeks to reframe the narrative and demonstrate that legal economic alternatives and women-led peacebuilding exist\u2014realities the country\u2019s center refuses to acknowledge. This fragmentation highlights that while centers of power disseminate information focused on a few regions, the realities of the rest of the country remain marginalized in the national discourse. Faced with this void and the historical failures of governments\u2014both left and right\u2014women have chosen autonomy, choosing themselves and their grassroots work as the only solid response to a political system that, regardless of ideology, has let them down.        <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Feminist Agenda in Colombia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This election campaign has revealed a deep divide in the way women are viewed within the national project. Claudia Mej\u00eda Duque, a lawyer and human rights defender, warns that Colombia faces the risk of a historic setback fueled by the \u201cTrump doctrine.\u201d This global resurgence of the far right not only threatens reproductive autonomy but also legitimizes a patriarchal logic of violence aimed at \u201ccrushing\u201d the opponent.  <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The feminist movement has launched the 2026\u20132030 Agenda: Horizon of Equality. The proposal is radical and calls for a shift from a state that views women as \u201cbeneficiaries\u201d of domestic subsidies to one in which they are full-fledged political actors. This implies a new paradigm of feminist security. According to Claudia, it is a matter of understanding that there will be no public security as long as gender-based violence continues to be the norm in the private sphere. Feminist security places the sustainability of life and environmental care above traditional militaristic sovereignty.    <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Areas under threat<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Colombia is heading toward the presidential elections on May 31, 2026, amid a critical security situation. According to the Indepaz Observatory, the country recorded 35 massacres and 94 fatalities in the first quarter of the year, representing a 32% increase in lethal violence compared to the previous period. These figures align with warnings from the Defensor\u00eda del Pueblo, which identifies a concentration of violence in 34 municipalities in the southwest, where a sustained offensive against law enforcement has been reported.  <\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the past week alone, between April 20 and 27, the escalation of terrorist activity has reinforced the picture of extreme risk to the democratic process.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Overcoming this crisis requires a paradigm shift that addresses the region\u2019s urgent challenges: moving from a centralist information bias to a locally grounded journalism that safeguards local truths, and from militaristic security to feminist security that guarantees safety in the private sphere. The challenge for 2026 is to recognize that there will be no democratic stability as long as information remains a risk factor and the protection of women continues to be a marginal issue on the national agenda. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A string of attacks Colombia, April 2026. A wave of attacks is rocking the southwestern part of the country as it counts down to the elections that will determine the new president for the 2026\u20132030 term (which began on March 8 with legislative elections and will conclude on May 31 with the presidential election\u2014Ed.). In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1304,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions\/1304"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festival.cospe.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}