Colombia’s ‘El Tigre’ Steps Up Cartel Fight as Trump Alliance Takes Shape

President Abelardo de la Espriella is making his campaign against Colombia’s cartels a defining priority. The country’s new leader, widely known as “El Tigre,” won office on a law-and-order platform, and his early crackdown appears to be producing results both at home and in Washington.

In the early morning hours, de la Espriella arrived at the Barranquilla police command as 587 police officers and soldiers raided 50 sites across the Caribbean port city and surrounding areas in Operation Blindaje 360. Days earlier, Colombian media had publicized a police recording in which “Keko,” the alleged leader of the gang Los del Freseo, boasted that de la Espriella could not touch him.

“The Tiger’s got nothing. Let him come out, and we’ll put lead in him,” Keko allegedly said in the recording.

Before dawn, however, the president had tracked him down. The confrontation, in which the two men faced each other, was captured on video.

In footage released by the presidential office, El Tigre told Keko that the gang leader was “a tough guy on the phone… but the look of the fear on his face matched that of his many victims.” The operation resulted in 72 arrests.

The highly publicized encounter resonated with Colombians who had long argued that former leftist President Gustavo Petro’s policy of engaging drug traffickers had made the country more vulnerable to organized crime. Colombian and Venezuelan cartels were reportedly moving into territory left exposed by a power vacuum and weak law enforcement.

De la Espriella’s administration is also working to dismantle Petro’s “total peace” policy, which sought negotiations with several armed organizations. Before taking office, de la Espriella said he would reverse key parts of the initiative and reinstate arrest warrants for members of illegal armed groups.

Nearly three months into his presidency, the 48-year-old lawyer has ended his predecessor’s “total peace” negotiations, ordered that every armed group be treated as a terrorist organization and claimed more than 32,000 arrests. He is pursuing that offensive in close coordination with Washington.

A dual U.S.-Colombian citizen who lived in Miami before entering the presidential race, de la Espriella has aligned Colombia with President Donald Trump’s anti-cartel coalition. Last month, he personally handed over a guerrilla commander accused of supplying Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel to DEA agents, delivering the prisoner with his hands and feet shackled.

The prisoner, Geovany Andrés Rojas, known as “Araña,” is accused of leading the Comandos de la Frontera dissidents. He now faces narco-terrorism charges in Southern California.

“The option of dialogue is completely exhausted,” de la Espriella told troops after his Aug. 7 inauguration. In an Oct. 12 address, he reported 32,503 arrests, 33 ringleaders removed from action and 679 drug-production sites destroyed or disabled. He has also signed more than 100 extradition orders, including five involving former armed-group peace negotiators wanted in the United States whose transfers had been frozen by the previous government.

The offensive has extended into rural areas, where conflict monitor ACLED recorded August as the deadliest month for clashes between security forces and armed groups since it began monitoring Colombia in 2018.

In late August, de la Espriella warned FARC dissident leader Iván Mordisco: “When you least expect it, a bomb is going to fall on you.” Two days later, he walked past the bagged bodies of 23 suspected dissidents at an army base in Guaviare. Troops also killed the top commander of a trafficking organization with paramilitary roots in La Guajira.

Colombia joined Trump’s Shield of the Americas coalition as its 19th member in August. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said Bogotá had authorized “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terror networks domestically.” The administration has pledged $1 billion in security assistance, subject to congressional approval, while Marine Gen. Francis Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, has visited Colombian bases.

However, Colombian Vice President José Manuel Restrepo told News Media on camera that although Colombia supports Trump’s push for a new Western Hemisphere security alliance, it has set clear limits on the role of U.S. forces inside the country. Colombian troops, he said, rather than American forces, will conduct operations against Colombia’s armed groups.

Benjamin Gedan, a senior fellow and director of the Latin America Program at the Stimson Center in Washington who previously served as a South America director at the White House, said the developments of the past several years represented an exception:

“For decades, the United States and Colombia closely cooperated to fight guerrillas and organized crime. Plan Colombia was celebrated by both Republicans and Democrats. The Colombian military is well-trained and battle-tested. Renewed close cooperation between Bogotá and Washington is a cornerstone of the renewed U.S. focus on security in Latin America,” he said.

“Still, flashy military strikes on criminal targets will not answer the mail. These groups are well-armed, well-funded and thrive in regions with little state presence. Images of criminals in body bags may give the impression of forward progress after the failed strategy of Colombia’s last leader, much as videos of exploding speedboats have become the calling card of the Shield of the Americas. In both cases, a more sophisticated strategy is needed to deal lasting blows to criminal groups,” Gedan argued.

Oscar Palma, a professor of security studies at the University of Rosario in Bogotá, said it is still a little too early to assess the change in policies and affirm they will be fruitful within the Colombian context. “Beyond the policing acts themselves, there is the subjective feeling of security with debates within Colombian society on whether this open war strategy brings more or less security to the population. Many argue that the gangs are acting now more forcefully to defend their territories and business deals, while others believe that a strong police presence will eventually lead to less organized crime.”

Palma said there is a false dichotomy between having to choose all-out war or dialogue in order to achieve peace with groups such as the FARC and other gang leaders: “It is a fiction that you will come to zero combatants simply pursuing one strategy or the other—all-out war will never zero down those combating in the FARC and organized crime just as peace talks, especially if carried out in a misguided policy such as the one led by [Gustavo] Petros, will achieve real results.”

He said, “A better example is the strategy carried out by President [Juán Manuel] Santos during the dealings with the FARC, which led to a much safer Colombia: there were talks, but those were part of a bigger strategy of also fighting these groups with arms and bringing them to justice,” he added.

“There is a wave of freedom, a wave of democracy, a wave of free market… There is a new momentum for the region and we have to take advantage of that momentum. That’s what I said to President Trump,” Restrepo told News Media. “If we want to keep and preserve democracy in the region, the Shield of the Americas is going to be the best opportunity to do it.”