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Guest Essay

By Elizabeth Dickinson

Ms. Dickinson is an expert on armed groups and organized crime in Colombia and Latin America. She wrote from Bogotá.

A few years ago, one of the greatest risks of driving through Colombia’s southern Guaviare region was getting a tire hopelessly stuck in the mud along its tortuous, unpaved roads. A former stronghold of leftist insurgency, Guaviare shook off decades of rebel control in 2016, when Bogotá signed a peace deal to demobilize the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Rural residents looked on in hope and disbelief as police, rather than guerrilla fighters, patrolled their towns. Peace, it seemed, had finally arrived.

Less than a decade later, that peace is gone. Land mines line........

© The New York Times