De la Espriella Dismantles What Is Left of Paz Total
COLOMBIA · SECURITY
Key Facts
- —The instruments Three Resoluciónes Ejecutivas signed 9 September: 391, 390 and 389 of 2026.
- —Resolution 391 Revokes the entire government delegation to the ELN talks, headed by Vera Grabe and including María José Pizarro, Olga Lilia Silva and Iván Cepeda.
- —Resolution 390 Revokes the government representatives to the Espacio Sociojuridico with the Clan del Golfo, derogating Resolution 257 of 2024.
- —Resolution 389 Orders the closure of the temporary location zone in Valle del Guamúez, Putumayo, effective 30 September.
- —Who is there Around 99 members of the CNEB, a FARC dissident structure. A transition plan is due within five working days.
- —The stated reason An absence of conditions of trust and of verifiable genuine willingness for peace, citing ELN offensives in Catatumbo.
Petro spent four years building an architecture for talking to everyone at once. His successor has taken it apart in five weeks.
President Abelardo De la Espriella signed three executive resolutions on Wednesday revoking Colombia’s negotiating delegations to the ELN and the Clan del Golfo and ordering the closure of a designated location zone in Putumayo.
What Was Revoked
Resolución Ejecutiva 391 of 2026 removes the government’s entire delegation to the ELN dialogue table. It was headed by Vera Grabe and included María José Pizarro, Olga Lilia Silva and Iván Cepeda, among others.
Resolución Ejecutiva 390 revokes the government’s representatives to the Espacio Sociojurídico with the Clan del Golfo, also known as the Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia. Álvaro Jiménez Millán and four others lose their mandates, and Resolution 257 of 2024 is derogated.
Resolución Ejecutiva 389 orders the closure of the Zona para la Capacitación Integral y Ubicación Temporal in Valle del Guamúez, Putumayo, effective 30 September. Roughly 99 members of the Coordinadora Nacional Ejército Bolivariano, a FARC dissident structure, are located there. A transition plan is due within five working days.
These are executive resolutions rather than decrees. Several outlets have described them as decretos. The instruments themselves say resolución.
The Stated Grounds
The government’s justification is an absence of conditions of trust and of any verifiable genuine willingness for peace, citing ELN offensives in Catatumbo.
That formulation does two things at once. It closes the tables and it assigns the reason for closing them to the armed groups rather than to a change of policy in Bogotá.
Not the First Step
This is a continuation rather than an opening move. De la Espriella took office on 7 August and began unwinding the Paz Total framework in late August, when he announced the extradition of negotiators linked to FARC dissidents and Los Pachenca.
Paz Total was the organising idea of Gustavo Petro’s security policy: simultaneous negotiation with multiple armed and criminal structures, each at its own table, with legal architecture built around each one.
What replaces it has not been set out in comparable detail. The resolutions say what ends. They do not say what the state now does with the roughly 99 people in Putumayo after 30 September, beyond requiring a plan within a week.
The Political Setting
A new AtlasIntel poll for Bloomberg, published on 9 September, gives De la Espriella a 54 percent positive image one month into office. Fieldwork ran from 30 August to 3 September with 1,904 respondents and a margin of error of about 2 percent.
A president with a majority approval and a mandate built on security has considerable room to close negotiating tables. The constraint is not political. It is what happens on the ground in Catatumbo, Putumayo and the Bajo Cauca once the tables are gone.
What Paz Total Was Meant to Do
Gustavo Petro’s security policy rested on a single proposition: that Colombia’s armed and criminal structures could not be defeated militarily one at a time, and that simultaneous negotiation with all of them was the only route to reducing violence.
The legal architecture followed from that. Law 2272 of 2022 extended the framework for peace talks beyond politically motivated groups to include criminal organisations, creating separate categories and separate legal routes for each.
The ELN table, the Clan del Golfo sociojuridical space and the various location zones for FARC dissidents were all products of that framework. Each had its own delegation, its own legal status and its own rules.
It was ambitious and it was contested from the beginning, including by people who supported the 2016 accord with the FARC. The objection was that negotiating with groups whose motivation is money rather than politics gives them standing without giving them a reason to stop.
What the Zones Were
A zona de ubicación temporal is a designated area where members of an armed group concentrate under agreed conditions while talks proceed. Movement is restricted, a verification mechanism operates, and the state suspends certain enforcement actions inside the perimeter.
The one in Valle del Guamúez held around 99 members of the Coordinadora Nacional Ejército Bolivariano. Putumayo is coca-growing territory on the Ecuadorian border, and control of it is contested by several structures.
Closing the zone on 30 September raises a practical question the resolution does not answer. The people inside it do not disappear. They either demobilise, which requires a legal route that the closure of the talks framework has just removed, or they return to the field.
The five-day deadline for a transition plan is the government’s acknowledgment that this needs an answer.
The Bet Being Made
The implicit argument for closing the tables is that they were not producing results and that their existence gave armed groups territory, legitimacy and time to consolidate.
There is evidence for that reading. The ELN’s Catatumbo offensive in early 2025 displaced tens of thousands of people and happened while its delegation was formally at a negotiating table.
The argument against is that the alternative is military, that Colombia has tried the military alternative for sixty years, and that the groups now in question are financed by a cocaine economy which has grown rather than shrunk.
De la Espriella has a 54 percent positive rating and a mandate built on security. The political room to make this bet exists. Whether it works will be measured in homicide and displacement statistics in Catatumbo, Putumayo and the Bajo Cauca over the coming year, not in resolutions signed in Bogotá.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What did De la Espriella sign?
Three executive resolutions on 9 September 2026: 391 revoking the ELN delegation, 390 revoking the Clan del Golfo representatives, and 389 closing the Putumayo location zone.
When does the Putumayo zone close?
30 September 2026. A transition plan is due within five working days.
How many people are in the zone?
Around 99 members of the Coordinadora Nacional Ejército Bolivariano, a FARC dissident structure.
What reason did the government give?
An absence of conditions of trust and of verifiable genuine willingness for peace, citing ELN offensives in Catatumbo.
How popular is the president?
An AtlasIntel poll for Bloomberg published 9 September gives him a 54 percent positive image, on fieldwork from 30 August to 3 September.
Sources: Infobae, El País Cali, LaFM, El Espectador, Semana.
This article was drafted with automated assistance and reviewed before publication. How we use AI · Report an error · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief