Abstract
Amid the deteriorating security environment in Colombia, the country’s new president has agreed to renew cooperation with the United States. But today’s illicit criminal networks are larger, more technologically capable, and transnational. Recreating Plan Colombia, a bilateral model that was effective against terrorist organizations, will not work against today’s illicit threats. Instead, both countries must first align around simple, measurable objectives before adopting a phased strategy that restores Colombia’s operational capabilities, regionalizes efforts and develops Colombia into a regional security hub, and institutionalizes multilateral cooperation to ensure the long-term durability of such initiatives.
Introduction
Cocaine production has more than tripled since Colombia signed its historic peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016. Reported kidnappings have also more than tripled. Colombia faces a deteriorating security environment, far different from what many had hoped would follow that historic peace accord. On August 7, 2026, President Abelardo de la Espriella took office pledging to end negotiations with armed groups and instead launch a military campaign to defeat them. His new offensive is named “Plan Patriota 2.0”—a reference to the original Plan Patriota, the Colombian military campaign that supported the broader and better-known Plan Colombia. But can simply reviving Plan Colombia with U.S. support work today?
The threat environment has changed significantly from the one Colombia faced in the early 2000s. Armed criminal organizations are larger, more capable, and more interconnected internationally. Simply reviving Plan Colombia would almost certainly fail. Therefore, a new plan must be radically different, with U.S. assistance reflecting such a shift. Most importantly, any new initiative must have clear and aligned objectives. It must also follow a phased approach. First, it must restore Colombia’s operational capabilities, then develop it into a regional security hub, and finally build the institutional durability for regional operations throughout Latin America. In essence: restore, regionalize, and institutionalize. Only by structuring a new strategy in this manner can Plan Patriota 2.0 have any meaningful and enduring effect on the illicit networks that have expanded across the region.
The Original Plan Colombia
Plan Colombia was initially conceived by President Andrés Pastrana, with the support of U.S. President Bill Clinton, to address the near-failed-state conditions Colombia faced at the time. Homicide rates were among the highest in the world, reaching approximately 63 per 100,000 people. Colombia accounted for nearly half of the world’s kidnappings and was grappling with an active insurgency that threatened the country’s stability. By 1999, the FARC had more than 18,000 members. Cocaine production, the primary concern for President Clinton, was rising, with the majority of the product being shipped to the United States.
Over the next decade and a half—and approximately $10 billion in aid—sustained U.S. support spanning three presidential administrations helped Colombia develop its operational intelligence, special operations forces, and air-mobility capabilities. These capabilities allowed Colombia, through its military campaign known as Plan Patriota, to confront armed groups.
The results were mixed. On the one hand, Colombia’s homicide rate fell to approximately 33 per 100,000 people by 2010, while the FARC’s ranks declined to roughly 7,000 members. It also led the Colombian government and the FARC to a peace accord. But on the other, Plan Colombia never halted the flow of drugs as the U.S. government had originally hoped. In fact, a year after the peace accord, Colombian drug farmers cultivated 171,000 hectares of coca, the largest crop ever recorded at the time. Given some of the security successes, policymakers may be tempted to follow a similar blueprint today. This would be a mistake. Contemporary threats are vastly different from those in the Colombia of yesteryear.
How the Threat Environment Has Changed
The threat environment has evolved dramatically since Plan Colombia began. Today’s criminal organizations are larger, wealthier, more interconnected, and more technologically sophisticated than at any point in history.
Consider a few indicators. According to the United Nations, Colombia has now surpassed its 2017 levels of coca cultivation, reaching approximately 261,000 hectares in 2024. Illicit drug consumption is also no longer simply a North American problem. In recent decades, U.S. cocaine consumption has declined from its peak. But global consumption overall increased by nearly 50 percent between 2013 and 2023. Of those 25 million cocaine users worldwide, approximately five million—one-fifth—reside in the United States, suggesting that most cocaine is destined for markets around the world. This has transformed what was once primarily a bilateral challenge into a much broader regional and global problem. Case in point: neighboring Ecuador. There, homicides have quintupled in the past five years, fueled by the drug trade. Illicit networks have threatened state institutions dramatically.
Criminal organizations have also diversified their portfolios. They no longer depend primarily on cocaine, but operate across the entire illicit economy, including illegal mining, human trafficking, arms trafficking, and other criminal activities. They are also more robustly manned, with approximately 26,000 members in total, compared with roughly 21,000 last year and around 11,000 in 2018.
The organizations Plan Colombia focused on—the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC)—have also evolved. Today, the FARC has broken up into different dissident groups, each with its own interests. The ELN now operates in both Colombia and Venezuela and is stronger than ever. The Clan del Golfo, which has its origins in the AUC, has grown to become the largest illicit armed group in Colombia. Each of these groups functions more as a transnational criminal organization than as the more traditional terrorist organizations that Plan Colombia was effective at confronting. While these groups are designated by the United States as foreign terrorist organizations, they are less centralized and less ideologically driven than those targeted during the original campaign. Rather than using illicit activities primarily to finance political goals, their very existence today is centered on generating profits from illicit markets.
Technology has also become a force multiplier. For example, increasingly accessible commercial drones are being used to transport illicit goods, conduct surveillance, and attack security forces. Social media is also now used as a recruiting tool, a propaganda tool, and a mechanism for intimidation—another means through which these organizations project power and legitimacy. A new plan will need to systematically thwart these new capabilities.
A Reimagined Plan
Following President Abelardo de la Espriella’s inauguration, the U.S. committed to support Plan Patriota 2.0 with $1 billion in security assistance. What that bilateral cooperation will ultimately comprise remains to be seen. Simply reviving the old plan will fall short of what is needed in today’s environment. Moreover, the United States is unlikely to provide the same level of enduring support—totaling over $10 billion—that it once did. A new strategy must establish clear objectives and measures of success while adopting a phased approach of restore, regionalize and institutionalize.
Objectives and Metrics
One element key to the success of the original Plan Colombia was the alignment of objectives on counterterrorism post-9/11. However, this alignment is not quite present today. Colombia’s primary focus is now on reestablishing territorial control and regaining the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over large swaths of territory that it lost to armed groups. Meanwhile, U.S. objectives include dismantling cartels and denying drug trafficking into the United States, according to the Shield of the Americas. While these objectives appear similar at first glance, they will require greater alignment. Success will ultimately be defined by the metrics used to measure progress.
After all, simply reducing drug flows into the United States would not eliminate these criminal organizations. The broader drug market is global, and these organizations have diversified into other illicit activities. Fully dismantling these criminal organizations is unrealistic. A more practical approach would be to agree on a narrow set of objectives across the region, rather than rely on overlapping national objectives.
An important lesson from Plan Colombia was to more carefully align metrics with objectives. Success cannot be defined primarily through metrics like body counts. That perverse incentive structure contributed to the “falsos-positivos” scandal in which military units killed innocent civilians, dressing them up as enemy combatants to increase body counts. Instead, Colombia must assess its internal progress through measurement of its clearly stated objectives: state presence; reduced territorial control by illegal armed groups; lower violence rates against civilians; and reduced recruitment and intimidation by illegal armed groups.
The United States will likely measure success as it traditionally has—drug-related indicators such as hectares of coca cultivation and interdiction rates. But while reducing the flow of drugs into the U.S. is an enduring objective, success requires domestic policies such as drug-demand reduction programs, outside the scope of regional collaboration. U.S. policymakers should focus on Latin American stability, measuring success by each country’s ability to confront illicit groups that undermine state control. Indicators should include sustained government presence in contested areas, the disruption of criminal organizations, and reductions in overall violence rates against civilians. This would reduce the region’s vulnerability to state capture by both criminal organizations and extra-regional actors. It would also better align with the threats each state is facing.
For Colombia to ultimately play a major regional role, it must dramatically reinvest into the key domestic capabilities employed during the original Plan Colombia. Simultaneously, it will need investments in strategic intelligence and institutional capacity building to enable it to operate regionally.
Restore Colombia’s Capability
At present, roughly three-quarters of the Colombian National Army’s helicopter fleet is reportedly in disrepair and grounded. Yet simply returning those aircraft to operational status will not be sufficient to confront illicit groups more technologically capable than those of the past. Colombia’s armed groups have already introduced the use of drones to attack security forces and even helicopters. As the relatively low-cost—but highly sophisticated—use of drones in Ukraine and Iran has demonstrated, traditional military capabilities are increasingly vulnerable to Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) strikes.
Any new maintenance support will therefore have to be accompanied by survivability training and capabilities designed to address these threats, including counter-drone detection and electronic warfare. Many of these countermeasures are still being developed, given the rapid evolution of such attacks. The U.S. would benefit from using Colombia as a partner in co-developing and testing new systems to counter the low-cost emerging technologies employed by both illicit groups and strategic rivals, such as through Colombia’s new anti-drone shield initiative. Further development of these capabilities should involve defense-industrial partnerships with Colombia’s own defense companies such as weapons manufacturer INDUMIL. Systems developed through this partnership could then be shared throughout Latin America, increasing the regional role Colombia plays.
New capabilities are also needed for Colombia’s future regional security leadership. Under the original Plan Colombia, the U.S. invested heavily in its tactical- and operational-level intelligence, granting its security forces the capability to search and destroy targets. However, Colombia currently lacks the strategic intelligence capability to analyze those threats throughout the hemisphere. Developing not only its collection capabilities but its analytic capacity, its intelligence information systems, and its international information-sharing agreements would help address this gap. To do so, greater investments in institutional capacity building programs at the ministry and agency levels are necessary. These investments would greatly develop the Colombian security apparatus’ human capital, resource management, logistics, and command-and-control capabilities. Such development would eventually allow Colombia to develop into a regional hub through which countries fuse intelligence, produce a common operational picture, coordinate activities, and support training.
Regionalize Efforts
Initially, the United States must take the lead in developing the regional approach. America must aid Colombia in confronting its internal threats and build its capabilities to operate regionally. A defense-centric approach, while controversial, provides an effective starting point for regional cooperation. Assisting countries in reestablishing territorial control would provide much of the institutional continuity necessary for the sustainment of that cooperation. This model has proved successful in the case of Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S). What initially began as a military initiative to detect and monitor drug shipments in the air and maritime domains has grown into an interagency task force formed of several U.S. agencies and 20 countries. Ultimately, the long-term solution requires the involvement of other government agencies: from the intelligence community to law enforcement, from prosecutors to the judiciary.
United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has taken a step forward with the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C) by standing up its own Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere (JTF-WHEM), designed to coordinate and synchronize U.S. efforts with the 18 partner nations. As it matures, it must integrate the objectives and capabilities of each partner nation, while sustaining existing efforts across U.S. and partner-nation government agencies. Remaining overly defense-oriented risks limiting success in operations to disrupt illicit economies.
Each country will prioritize its own use of government capabilities and agencies to meet its own objectives, which will not necessarily align uniformly across the region. However, if this task force is only intended to coordinate U.S. efforts in the region rather than be a truly multinational operation, then a separate regional hub for fusing intelligence, creating a common operational picture, coordinating efforts, and conducting training is still needed. Colombia could eventually fill that need with U.S. support.
The long-term goal of developing Colombia into a central partner for regional cooperation has precedent. The Colombian navy launched the multinational Operation Orion in 2018. Orion was designed to limit the trafficking of drugs through the maritime domain. The operation has since grown to include 62 countries that participated in the 2025 Operation Orion XV. Additionally, through the U.S.-Colombia Action Plan—funded by the United States—Colombia has continued to provide police and military training to other countries in the region. These initiatives demonstrate Colombia’s reliability to serve as a hub for intelligence sharing, operational coordination, and training for countering illicit groups. And while Colombia has agreed under the Shield of the Americas to host a regional anti-trafficking hub in Medellín, details remain unclear.
Regional efforts should complement and leverage existing systems rather than duplicate them. Several existing bodies already address aspects of the trafficking problem or have the potential to do so, though many lack effective operational capabilities. The Organization of American States (OAS) Committee on Hemispheric Security, for example, serves as the political forum through which member states discuss and coordinate on security threats such as transnational criminal organizations. There is also the OAS Department against Transnational Organized Crime (DTOC), which provides member states with technical assistance and capacity building to address illicit threats. However, these bodies are better suited to provide political coordination and technical assistance than to address challenges operationally.
The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), signed in 1947, provides a longstanding regional security framework and was effectively employed in 1965 during the Dominican Republic crisis. Through the treaty, an Inter-American Peace Force with a unified command was created, with seven countries contributing forces. Indeed, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe argued in 2002 for the treaty to be updated to address internal threats so that countries could better share intelligence and coordinate activities. While the TIAR has not been effectively invoked of late, it provides an example of how the Americas have collaborated under an enduring institutional framework to operationally address a regional challenge.
Both the OAS and TIAR provide an institutional regional framework that could complement JTF-WHEM and help provide greater longevity to a broader regional approach, with Colombia serving as the nucleus of operations.
Institutionalize Operations
For any plan to work, it will require institutional continuity across administrations, as Plan Colombia achieved in both the United States and Colombia. However, political polarization now risks derailing any long-term strategy between governments. The original Plan Colombia continued under both Republican and Democratic administrations in the United States. While addressing Colombia’s security challenges has traditionally maintained bipartisan support, a post-de la Espriella government that favors negotiations with the armed groups could leave any new strategy a limited window in which to succeed. Any lasting plan must therefore be anchored in multi-year institutional agreements and measurable objectives capable of surviving election cycles.
SOUTHCOM is central to achieving the necessary continuity and longevity. Through a defense-based framework, A3C could provide the needed institutional continuity, while JTF-WHEM could provide the operational longevity. For SOUTHCOM to sustain these efforts, it would need to incorporate lessons from JIATF-S. Two key attributes that led to the task force’s success were the clarity and simplicity of a shared objective—to detect and monitor drug shipments—and the congressional authorization that helped sustain the task force for more than three decades. These attributes also helped support broader interagency and multinational participation over time.
As JTF-WHEM matures, SOUTHCOM and the Department of War should seek a formal congressional foundation to instill the same institutional longevity as JIATF-S. Multinational and interagency staffing within the task force could partially mitigate its vulnerability to the political cycles of each participating country. However, a defense-centric approach would remain inherently vulnerable to changes in national priorities. A more durable and regionally focused approach therefore requires more enduring frameworks.
A broader framework through the OAS—or through a revision to the TIAR—for addressing internal threats would provide a more permanent institutional foundation. Such a model would not depend on universal hemispheric participation, only that of willing countries. In this scenario, the U.S. could support the creation of a regional hub where intelligence is fused, operations are coordinated, and where units can train. Over time, Colombia should take on that role.
In the early 2000s the Argentine ambassador to the U.S. advocated for a regional security force. Whether such a force is ultimately necessary, coordinated regional efforts are. A regional framework supported by institutional agreements and multinational staffing would have a greater chance of enduring even as governments change their political priorities or even withdraw from specific cooperation activities.
Conclusion
Efforts to revive Plan Colombia must reflect changed realities. A new plan will fail unless Washington and Bogotá recognize and adapt to how the threat environment has evolved. Any such plan will need to incorporate effective objectives and metrics to measure progress. It will also need to adopt a phased approach to restore Colombia’s capabilities, regionalize operations, and institutionalize into a durable regional model.
