Clashes between two FARC dissident factions in Colombia’s Putumayo department have left 12 people dead, according to local officials and reporting from Deutsche Welle based on official and security sources. The violence, which officials said began on November 30, took place in and around Puerto Guzmán, a municipality in the coca-growing southwest of the country.
Yovani Cortes, the government secretary for Puerto Guzmán, said there were "doce cuerpos" recovered from the fighting, which had been recorded since the previous Saturday. DW reported that the confrontations involved the Raúl Reyes front, also known as the Calarcá faction, and the Comandos de Frontera. A source in the armed forces told AFP that the fighting involved men under the command of alias Calarcá, a figure who has been engaged in peace talks with the government.
The report also said the opposing side included members of the Segunda Marquetalia, a dissident formation that emerged after the 2016 peace accord with the FARC and later returned to arms. In Putumayo, the groups are battling over territory tied to coca cultivation, a crop that remains central to Colombia’s cocaine economy and to the armed groups that profit from it.
The death toll may not be final. DW noted that local media said the number of dead could be higher, and the official count was still being assessed as access to the area remained difficult. That uncertainty is common in rural conflict zones, where information often arrives in fragments and local authorities depend on witness reports, field checks and security force updates before a clear picture emerges.
Even so, the basic shape of the incident is already clear. The 2016 peace agreement largely demobilized the FARC, but it did not end the armed contest for land, routes and illicit revenue in Colombia’s border regions. Dissident blocs, criminal networks and rival insurgent structures continue to fight each other in areas where the state has only partial control.
Putumayo is one of those places. It sits in a part of the country where coca, logistics and geography still matter as much as politics, and where armed groups can sustain themselves by moving people, drugs and weapons across difficult terrain. The clashes in Puerto Guzmán show that the fragmentation of the old insurgency has not reduced the violence around it. Instead, it has created a shifting battlefield in which former allies now confront one another over the same resources.
For the government, the episode is another reminder that negotiations with one faction do not stabilize the broader conflict if other armed groups remain active. Calarcá’s side has been in talks with delegates of President Gustavo Petro since October 2023, but the wider map of armed actors in southern Colombia remains unstable and fragmented.
The fighting in Puerto Guzmán fits a familiar pattern in Colombia’s conflict regions: a local confrontation that begins with competing armed labels but is ultimately rooted in the same dispute over territory and illicit economies. The latest toll, official or not, indicates that those rivalries remain lethal.
