The recent air attack against a FARC dissident camp led by Ivan Mordisco, in which seven minors were killed in the Guaviare department in the Amazon, has placed Colombian President Petro at the center of an intense political debate. He has been particularly criticized for going from zero tolerance for airstrikes that killed minors when he was in opposition to justifying them now that he is in office.
However, he is not the only politician to find himself in a difficult position due to this humanitarian tragedy. On the other hand, the opposition and more conservative sectors of the country – now demanding explanations – have little political gain to gain from this moment, as many had approved airstrikes involving minors during right-wing governments.
Meanwhile, the left, which has defended human rights and called for the resignation of officials involved in past strikes, has issued less forceful statements against the military. Once again the children find themselves in the middle.
One of the officials closest to the president, who has toned down criticism of the air strikes, is Interior Minister Armando Benedetti. He is the same politician who, in 2021, while he was a senator in opposition to former president Ivan Duque, promoted a vote of no confidence against Diego Molano, defense minister, for an air attack that killed 11 minors in the same region, the department of Guaviare. “It seems we are losing the war because we do worse things than criminals,” he wrote on his X account at the time. Four years later, as Home Secretary, he was much less vehement.
“I stand by what the president says,” Molano said during a Wednesday session of the Committee on Human Rights in the House of Representatives. “If they (the dissident guerrillas) knew that there would never be any attacks because minors were present, it would be much easier for them to tell military intelligence that the minors were there to protect themselves. What I say may seem perverse, but the reality is even more perverse.”
With this quiet statement, Molano joined a list of politicians attempting to support the president by justifying the attack. According to Benedetti, Colombia does not have the technology for more precise attacks, he added, two defensive arguments it did not have when he faced the opposition’s Molano.
A similar situation involved then-senator Roy Barreras – now a presidential candidate close to the ruling party – who was also instrumental in the no-confidence vote against Ivan Duque’s prime minister of defense, Guillermo Botero. It was Barreras who revealed to Congress that six minors had died in a military operation in 2019. “Colombia needs a defense minister, not a war minister, a political agent of the enemy’s ideology, as Botero was,” he said at the time. Barreras claimed, before the government admitted it, that children were among the victims, based on a forensic study.
This time too, Barreras expressed regret for the deaths of minors. But, like other sectors of the left, it placed more emphasis on the issue of child recruitment by dissidents than on the military operation itself. “Criminals must be fought,” he wrote on social media.
Barreras also clarified that six years ago he had not called for an end to airstrikes, but rather that “they must be carried out with surgical precision”, responding to an interview in which Guillermo Botero – who was defense minister in 2019 – wondered why he wasn’t equally critical now. So far Barreras has not called for the removal of current Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Ivan Cepeda, the ruling party’s official candidate for the 2026 elections, was one of the most critical voices regarding the 2021 air attack in Guaviare, in which several minors were killed during the operation ordered by Molano. From Congress, the senator warned that children recruited by armed groups are victims of the conflict and that the State, by carrying out operations without verifying their presence, re-victimizes them.
“If it were confirmed that boys and girls died… and you knew about it, I will report you for serious violations of IHL (International Humanitarian Law),” he said.
Cepeda’s position now is not as firm as it was when he was in opposition. While he has rejected the airstrike under the current government, he has not called, as he did years ago, for the removal of the incumbent defense minister.
Katherine Miranda, an opposition MP, is now urging the left, particularly Cepeda, to take a tougher stance on these violations. “Dear Ivan Cepeda, I invite you to join me in denouncing President Petro and Minister Pedro Sánchez for serious violations of international humanitarian law. Consistency and principles should not depend on the current government,” he said. This is a sensitive issue for Cepeda, who has dedicated his entire life to the fight for human rights.
Some on the left have made more drastic changes. The position of pro-government senator Wilson Arias, for example, has changed since 2021, when he harshly criticized Molano and argued that the state had an obligation to protect children even during military operations. Today, although the senator condemns the deaths of children in the airstrike ordered by Petro, he nuances his position by retweeting messages in which he claims that there is a substantial difference between the current operation and that of four years ago. In a post about his position, previously focused exclusively on state responsibility, he now makes distinctions.
Political dilemmas exist on the right too, especially among those who defended Duque’s ministers when airstrikes killed minors. While highlighting Petro’s double standards, former ministers such as Botero have defended the current Defense Minister’s actions. “The security forces in this case, as in the previous one and in all other cases, acted with all force and utmost caution,” Botero told the television program Caracol News. This is a notable political shift: a prominent figure from the Duque era now supports the actions of Petro’s defense minister.
One politician in this situation is presidential aspirant Senator Maria Fernanda Cabal of the Centro Democrático (Democratic Center), the party founded by right-wing leader Álvaro Uribe. “What you just did in Guaviare with the airstrike – wasn’t that a war crime? There’s always a tweet about it,” he said, recalling that Patro sent a message describing the Duque-era airstrike that killed minors as a war crime. Besides that, she did not go against the current Ministry of Defense. At the time of the 2019 strike, he shared messages that seemed to justify the action.
The Democratic Center announced on Wednesday that it will not support a vote of no confidence against Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez. A representative of the party in the Chamber, José Jaime Uscátegui, said that it would be inconsistent that “after three years of total impunity, during which we urged the Public Force and the Ministry of Defense to act, now that they do so, we attack them as if they were the bad guys.”
In the current debate, both the left and the right find themselves in the awkward position of presenting very similar versions of the same argument: both argue that if airstrikes are stopped out of fear that minors might be present, they are actually encouraging the recruitment of children. In this context, political extremes end up justifying military actions similar to those they had previously condemned, on the premise that any operational restrictions could strengthen dissidents. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations insist that this logic normalizes the deaths of minorities and ignores the state’s obligation to protect children, even in the midst of war.
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