Colombia’s ‘Iron Fist’ President Inherits Violence Rooted in Failed Peace Accords & Extractive Economies
Original framing: “Colombia’s new president ‘El Tigre’ promises an iron fist – but that may not solve the violence he has inherited” — The Conversation - Global
Research by the *Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP)* shows 64% of post-2016 violence targets social leaders, with paramilitary groups rebranding as ‘Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces’ to evade scrutiny. Studies in *Journal of Peace Research* link U.S. military aid to increased civilian casualties, while land inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.89) correlates with conflict intensity. The ‘iron fist’ approach ignores evidence from *Small Arms Survey* that demobilization without reintegration fuels splinter groups.
Colombia’s violence is not a failure of governance but a symptom of a predatory peace—one that prioritized demobilizing FARC over dismantling the extractive and paramilitary networks that sustained the conflict.
The ‘iron fist’ narrative, amplified by Western security think tanks and corporate media, serves to naturalize state violence while obscuring how global demand for cocaine, gold, and palm oil funds armed groups. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, who have resisted this logic for centuries through *mingas* and *consejos comunitarios*, offer the most viable path forward: territorial autonomy, restorative justice, and agroecology. Yet their solutions are systematically excluded by a peace process co-opted by elites who profit from war’s continuation. The real ‘strongman’ is not a president but a transnational alliance of agribusiness, mining, and security contractors—one that Colombia’s next peace movement must dismantle by redefining security as the right to land, not the right to kill.