Why All Officials in De la Espriella's Government Must Step Up Against Narcoterrorism

    Radiography of a Historical Challenge

     The Colombian State, currently governed by President Abelardo De La Espriella and those he chose as his working team, faces a decisive juncture in which mere military containment or the presidential replacement of Petro-era complicity proves insufficient to overcome decades of systematic violence promoted by communist narcoterrorism against Colombia.

    The rise to power of a media-savvy leadership focused on security and order marks a necessary starting point, but the success of this administration does not rest exclusively on the presidential figure nor on the immense effort of the military and police force. It demands the total, coordinated, and patriotic commitment of all officials in De la Espriella's government, who must understand that narcoterrorism and its associated structures operate as a multidimensional network penetrating politics, economy, justice, and culture, aiming for a cultural shift to impose communism—an objective for which they resort to all possible criminal activities, termed by regressive Marxists as the combination of all forms of struggle.

     Challenges and Solutions against Narcoterrorism and the Communist Threat

    The challenge is monumental, and the solution is likewise monumental because it demands the integration of efforts across all fields of public administration and governance. To understand the magnitude of the task incumbent upon each ministry and state entity, it is essential to break down the structural reasons sustaining the current threat and the solutions that must be implemented from public administration:

     1. The Farce of the Havana Pact and the Survival of Bolivarian Militias: The spurious pact signed between Juan Manuel Santos and the Farc constituted the legitimation of narcoterrorism. Far from demobilizing terrorist structures, it allowed the Bolivarian militias, the Clandestine Communist Party, and the Clandestine Bolivarian Movement to maintain a clandestine presence, apart from the erratic pacts agreed upon by the inept negotiators Santos sent to Cuba in order to legitimize his unnecessary and undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.

      2. Territorial Control and Illicit Economies: These three clandestine networks, left intact by the Farc-Santos pact, continue to control the strategic areas where illicit crops and criminal mining are concentrated. Officials in the economic and environmental portfolios must understand that the fight against drug trafficking requires institutional presence and productive development in the regions, not just eradication statistics or sending soldiers and police officers to risk their lives without the rest of the State arriving with a proactive and productive presence.

      3. The Combination of All Forms of Struggle and Institutional Infiltration: There is a direct link between armed groups and traditional communism, the architect of strategies of social agitation, civil disobedience, and lawfare. This network operates through propaganda, infiltrated or venal judges, complacent magistrates, and international denunciations instrumented via sympathetic NGOs. Likewise, narcoterrorist structures such as the Eln or the Clan del Golfo remain intact at their core, which in the case of the Eln members is backed by ideologized sectors within the Catholic clergy who, guided by liberation theology, promote discourses functional to subversion.

     4. The Deception of False Dialogues: Armed and unarmed communism cyclically resorts to fictitious peace processes to buy time, regroup, and deceive public opinion without yielding on its strategic objectives, taking advantage of the weakness of past rulers. But worst of all, it relies on corrupt politicians like Belisario Betancur, Juan Manuel Santos, César Gaviria, Ernesto Samper, Gustavo Petro, or Andrés Pastrana who play into their hands.

     5. The Global Machinery of Drug Trafficking and Systemic Corruption: The financial engine of this phenomenon is transnational drug trafficking with sophisticated logistics chains involving lawyers, accountants, economists, systems engineers, merchants, transporters, bankers, and corrupt authorities in multiple countries. Additionally, domestic consumption has surged in producing nations, aggravating the public security crisis. This criminal ecosystem is complemented by arms trafficking, money laundering, smuggling, human trafficking, and document falsification. It is all one single package.

      6. The Simplistic and Chronic Measure of Isolated Military Action: History shows that guerrillas are not defeated exclusively through necessary and unavoidable military operations. Even if the State's military force neutralizes ringleaders and dismantles squads, the absence of a long-term State political project immediately complementary to military action allows bandits to return to the territories due to their structural roots.

    No security policy is sustainable if limited to the four years of a presidential term, and/or if war is considered solely a problem between the Army and terrorists, or peace an exclusive matter between the ruler and narcoterrorist kingpins, while often corrupt political leaders keep the population in limbo, without political identity or national objectives, and consequently without State policies to structurally solve severe problems of access to health, education, housing, the labor market, roads, connectivity, or integration into Colombia's geopolitical hearthland in the Andean summits.

     Given this diagnosis, solutions demand a deep transformation of public administration. Ministries cannot limit themselves to red tape or reporting figures from the comfort of their offices in the pleasant meteorological environment of the Andean region, while the rest of the regions suffer the ravages of socio-economic backwardness derived from their centralist corruption and ineptitude—in other words, their geopolitical myopia.

     For example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must transcend the bilingualism of its officials or the mere formality of diplomatic meetings presented as great achievements superior to its ordinary responsibility. The Chancellery must energize trade, security cooperation, and the rigorous defense of land and maritime borders, integrating the national periphery (hinterland) with the center of power (hearthland). Similarly, governors and mayors cannot act as loose cannons nor pretend to have resources appropriated without accountability, evading their responsibility under narratives of false pseudo-federal autonomies and artificial criticisms of Bogota's centralism, while ascending to the circle of the corrupt and partaking in the same spoils.

     Historical Lessons Learned from the State's Insufficient Comprehensive Response to Communist Narcoterrorist Aggression

     1. Security is the Foundation, Not the End of the Process: Without public order there is no development, but military security must be inextricably tied to civic-social action and permanent institutional strengthening in all regions, not just where voter majorities reside.

     2. Corruption of Official Functionaries as a Catalyst for Crime: Recent experience with Gustavo Petro's misrule demonstrated that anti-corruption rhetoric can be used by criminal gangs to rise to power, perpetuating the perverse belief that public administration is a spoils system for the feasts of the corrupt. Administrative probity is a matter of national security and permanent action by all public officials with authority, the Congress of the Republic, judges or magistrates, and oversight bodies, in addition to the necessary political acculturation of political party militancy for permanent control, auditing, and oversight.

    3. Political Fragmentation Weakens the State: The absence of political parties with true militancy and the lack of simultaneous, shared ideological training by leaders and passionate voters generate a class of vote-hunting politicians that impedes the consolidation of 50-year State policies. These individuals, in each electoral period, lie as easily as they breathe, deceiving voters while polarizing them around their rapacious greed to appropriate the official payroll and budget.

    4. Importance of the Cultural and Communication Battle: The State, as a juridical, political, administrative, organizational, and governing entity representing the common interests of Colombians, cannot cede the spaces of information and education to the arbitrariness of communists and their accomplices under the flimsy excuse of freedom of expression without judicial responsibility. A misinformed ciudadanía is vulnerable to the deceptive narratives of the radical left and international distortion driven by propaganda networks manipulated by international communism and its accomplices, but also to the mendacious discourses of the so-called right, which thinks only of votes and electoral deceptions.

     Conclusions of a Political Order

     1. Governmental Co-responsibility: No official in De la Espriella's government can assume a passive role in the current politico-strategic juncture experienced by Colombia. The fight against communist narcoterrorism demands absolute alignment of all ministerial portfolios with national security and development. If a synergistic bloc is not consolidated to face the problem, we will spend four years of temporary military successes, but sustained political failures over time.

    2. Insufficient Solution to the Problem with Solely Military Response: The necessary action of the Military Forces and Police is indispensable and urgent to neutralize immediate threats and aggressions, but it must be inextricably complemented by the social, economic, and judicial presence of the State, so that the actions of narcoterrorism, its accomplices, and the villainy of the corrupt do not turn into prolonged aggressions over time against institutional order and the lives of Colombians.

     3. Comprehensive International Strategy: Colombian diplomacy must play a proactive, perceptive, and cooperative role globally to dismantle the finances and logistics networks of transnational drug trafficking and its accomplices. It cannot remain stuck in self-praise for bilingualism or photos in media and social networks from meetings with high-ranking U.S. officials. That is barely part of the solution, besides being one of its routine duties. What matters is not the officials, but national interests. Colombia does not need bureaucrats who have friends among U.S. diplomats, but diplomatic strategists in the Chancellery capable of empowering national objectives and the country's land and maritime border policies.

    4. Long-Term State Vision: It is imperative to overcome quadrennial improvisation and consolidate sustainable public policies that guarantee territorial sovereignty and the integration of peripheral regions. In this regard, the State's strategic intelligence and university research work must be tied to development plans, which must always be qualified and grounded in real needs and objective responses. Since this demands time and strategic organization, the only solution is to create a serious political party that, by its nature and structure, for the first time embodies the construction of a transformative political project in the short, medium, and long term. Anything else will be more of the same chronic demagogy.

     5. Relentless Combat against Endemic Corruption: The purging of institutions and rigorous control of public resources are conditions sine qua non to prevent enemies of democracy from using the state apparatus itself for their own benefit.

    About the author: Lieutenant Colonel Luis Alberto Villamarín Pulido is a veteran officer of the Colombian Army, a renowned international analyst of strategic affairs, geopolitics, and national security, author of more than 40 books on these topics, and an international lecturer and expert consultant in defense and military leadership in the most relevant Spanish-language media in the world.

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