Colombian officials announced Tuesday that an airstrike carried out by the army a day earlier had killed 19 members of a guerrilla group in the country’s southeastern Amazon region. The bombing, which targeted the dissident former FARC group, came as leftist President Gustavo Petro faced US sanctions over his reluctance to target armed groups involved in drug trafficking.
The attack occurred on Monday “at dawn” and led to the deaths of “19 terrorists”, arrests and the seizure of military equipment, Admiral Francisco Cubides said at a press conference. The military operation was a response to “imminent” threats of attacks by insurgents against military targets, he said.
President Petro on Monday ordered the “military bombardment and disbandment” of the group led by the country’s most wanted guerrilla, known by the pseudonym Ivan Mordisco, following the failure of peace talks with the Central Staff (EMC).
Ivan Mordisco leads the EMC, a rebel group that rejects the 2016 peace agreement between Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas and the government. The EMC has grown in power since the FARC’s disarmament, and finances itself through drug trafficking, extortion and illegal mining in remote areas of the country, according to experts. Its fighters compete for territory in the Colombian Amazon with another FARC splinter group, led by a man named Calarca.
The United States under Donald Trump recently imposed sanctions targeting Petro and his relatives and removed Colombia’s status as an ally in the fight against drug trafficking, believing that the leftist government was not doing enough to curb cocaine production.
Ahead of the 2026 presidential election, Gustavo Petro is also facing criticism from the opposition who consider him too soft on criminal groups and accuse him of failing in his strategy to lead peace talks with armed groups remaining in Colombia.
