Colombia's incoming president, Abelardo De La Espriella, is moving to join President Trump's anti-cartel coalition before he even takes office, a sharp reversal from his leftist predecessor's years of resistance to Washington.
Officials from De La Espriella's incoming administration traveled to Washington last month for talks with U.S. defense officials, Newsmax reported. The discussions covered American intelligence support for Colombian counternarcotics missions, extradition of captured traffickers, and the possible restart of aerial eradication of coca crops, the raw material for cocaine. A senior U.S. official announced a new military partnership designed to take the longtime alliance "to new levels."
De La Espriella, who takes office Friday, ran on a promise to crush Colombia's armed trafficking groups and rebuild the country's frayed security relationship with Washington. He narrowly defeated Sen. Iván Cepeda in June. On the campaign trail, he vowed to confront traffickers "with the wrath of God." Now the machinery behind that pledge is taking shape fast.
De La Espriella designated Medellín, Colombia's second-largest city, as the hub of Trump's Shield of the Americas, the regional alliance targeting drug trafficking organizations that the Trump administration launched alongside an 18-country anti-cartel coalition and military task force. Washington has designated roughly two dozen Latin American criminal groups as terrorist organizations and authorized lethal force against them.
Incoming Colombian Defense Minister Gen. Jorge Eduardo Mora, who met with U.S. War Department officials, called the emerging strategy "a new stage of cooperation, integration and joint action." The U.S. State Department said it stands "ready to support Colombia's efforts to strengthen its security forces, defeat narcoterrorists and criminal organizations and end illegal immigration flows."
De La Espriella's government is reportedly preparing what officials have dubbed Plan Patriot 2.0, a callback to the original Plan Patriot, the U.S.-backed offensive launched in the 2000s that targeted FARC, Colombia's powerful leftist guerrilla army, as part of Plan Colombia, Washington's multibillion-dollar counternarcotics effort.
The speed of the realignment reflects how badly the U.S.-Colombia relationship deteriorated under outgoing leftist President Gustavo Petro. His government pursued peace negotiations with armed groups while military operations slowed. Scores of generals were removed during his presidency. Washington sanctioned Petro, decertified Colombia as a counternarcotics partner, and threatened cuts to U.S. assistance.
Petro also publicly denounced U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-running boats off South America, calling them murder. That posture put him at odds not only with Washington but with the growing scale of the threat inside his own country.
Conflict researchers at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz, a Colombian research group, estimated that the number of combatants in armed organizations involved in drug trafficking nearly doubled, from about 13,000 in 2022 to nearly 27,000 last year. Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine-producing country. Under Petro, the problem grew while the tools to fight it shrank.
Kevin Whitaker, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 2014 to 2019, told the New York Times that the moment calls for a harder line.
"Is this the right moment for a more kinetic approach? My answer is 'yes, and.'"
But Whitaker also cautioned that rebuilding Colombia's military capabilities after years of funding cuts and leadership purges will not happen overnight.
"You can't just snap your fingers."
That warning points to the central challenge facing De La Espriella. The political will is there. The partnership framework is forming. But the institutional damage from Petro's years in power, a weakened officer corps, a military that lost operational tempo, and an enemy that doubled in size, cannot be reversed by a handshake in Washington.
Not everyone in Colombia welcomes the shift. Sen. Iván Cepeda, the candidate De La Espriella defeated, framed the emerging alliance as an affront to national independence.
"What's being discussed is a strategy to subject Colombia to another sovereignty and convert it into a kind of protectorate."
Cepeda's objection echoes a familiar line from Latin American leftists who treat any security cooperation with Washington as imperialism. It is the same instinct that led Petro to call U.S. strikes on drug boats murder while armed trafficking groups doubled their ranks inside his own borders. The argument has a constituency. It does not have results.
American officials who spoke with the Times on condition of anonymity described the scope of the discussions: U.S. intelligence and operational support for Colombian counternarcotics missions, extradition pipelines for captured traffickers, and the potential return of aerial coca eradication, a tactic that was a pillar of the original Plan Colombia but has been politically contentious for years.
Whether aerial eradication has been formally agreed upon or remains under discussion is unclear. The full structure of Plan Patriot 2.0 has not been made public. And the identities of the roughly two dozen groups designated as terrorist organizations, along with the full list of 18 countries in the anti-cartel coalition, have not been detailed in the reporting so far.
The Trump administration has made cartels a major national security priority, blaming them for fueling America's overdose crisis and violent crime. Colombia, as the world's top cocaine producer, sits at the center of that supply chain. For years under Petro, Washington had no willing partner in Bogotá. That changes Friday.
De La Espriella's alignment with Trump is not charity. Colombia's new president inherits a country where armed groups have grown bolder, territorial, and more numerous. He needs American intelligence, equipment, and logistical support. Trump needs a partner willing to act on the ground in the hemisphere's most important narcotics battlespace. The incentives run in both directions.
Four years of Petro's approach, peace talks, military drawdowns, public clashes with Washington, produced a Colombia with twice as many armed traffickers and a severed relationship with its most important security ally. De La Espriella is betting that the opposite approach will produce the opposite result. The men with guns in the Colombian countryside will be the first to test whether he is right.
When a country's leftist experiment doubles the ranks of its enemies and alienates its strongest ally, the voters' correction is not imperialism. It is common sense.
