Colombia’s government says 27 members of the security forces were killed over two weeks in targeted attacks blamed on armed groups, intensifying concern that President Gustavo Petro’s promise of “total peace” is slipping further out of reach.
The figures are stark: 15 police officers and 12 soldiers, all killed since 15 April according to a list Petro published on X. The government says the attacks were systematic and retaliatory, carried out by the Gulf Clan criminal gang and other armed groups angered by recent operations against their leaders.
One of the deadliest incidents was the ambush on Sunday in Guaviare province, where seven soldiers were killed. The army has blamed that attack on a dissident FARC group. The packet says the wider string of killings also includes police officers murdered both on duty and off duty, showing that the violence is not confined to formal battlefield encounters.
Petro’s response has been to offer rewards for information leading to arrests, but the political damage goes deeper. His interior minister has acknowledged that the “total peace” strategy is not going well. That is a major admission from a government that came to office promising to negotiate with armed groups and reduce violence by political means.
The background helps explain the setback. Talks with the ELN were suspended in January. A ceasefire with a dissident FARC faction was not renewed in April. Negotiations with the Gulf Clan stalled after police operations against its leadership in February and the killing of a senior figure nicknamed “Terror” days later. In other words, each attempted pressure point produced a counterreaction.
The packet also places the killings in a broader historical context. The FARC’s 2016 peace deal ended the country’s largest insurgency, but dissident factions that rejected the agreement continued to operate. Those groups, alongside criminal gangs like the Gulf Clan, remain a major source of violence in rural and urban areas alike.
The death toll is therefore not just a statistic. It reflects the continuing fragmentation of Colombia’s armed landscape, where state forces, insurgent remnants and organised crime all overlap. Petro has tried to negotiate with several of these actors, but the recent killings show how fragile that approach has become when armed groups believe violence will give them leverage or revenge.
The event date is 2025-04-30. The confirmed facts are the two-week death toll, the breakdown between police and soldiers, and the government’s attribution of the attacks to armed groups including the Gulf Clan and dissident FARC elements. The packet does not prove a single chain of command behind every killing, so that distinction should be preserved.
