The recent bombing of a FARC dissident camp under the command of Ivan Mordisco, which killed seven minors in the Amazonian department of Guaviare, has put President Petro at the center of an intense political debate. He is noted above all for having gone from zero tolerance towards attacks in which minors die, when he was an opponent, to justifying the attacks, now that he is president. He is not, however, the only politician to be uncomfortable in the face of this humanitarian drama. On the other hand, the opposition and the more conservative sectors of the country, which today demand explanations, are unlikely to be able to exploit this moment because many have validated the attacks with the presence of minors which occurred during right-wing governments. Meanwhile, the left, which has waved the flag in defense of human rights and called for the resignation of these former officials, has opted for less forceful statements against the military. Childhood, once again, falls in the middle.
One of the officials closest to the president, who has toned down criticism of the attacks, is the Interior Minister, Armando Benedetti. The same one who in 2021, when he sat in the Senate of the Republic and was in opposition to former president Iván Duque, promoted a motion of censure against former minister Diego Molano for the attack against 11 minors in the same region of the country, 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 not so vehement.
“I accept what the President says,” the minister said in a speech Wednesday to the House of Representatives Committee on Human Rights. “If they (dissident guerrillas) knew that they would never bomb because there are minors, then their job would be much easier to tell the intelligence of the military forces that there are minors, to cover themselves. What I say may be perverse, but there is another much more perverse reality.” His words, less forceful than before, join the list of politicians who have tried to support the president by justifying the attack. According to Benedetti, Colombia does not have the technology for more precise attacks, he added, two defense arguments he did not have on the table when he faced the opposition’s Molano.
The then senator Roy Barreras found himself in a similar situation – now a candidate close to the governing party – who was also decisive in the motion of censure against Ivan Duque’s Prime Minister of Defense, Guillermo Botero, revealing before Congress that six minors had died in a military operation in 2019. “Colombia needs a Minister of Defense and not a Minister of War, 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 Barreras once again regretted the deaths of the minors. But, like other sectors of the left, it placed more emphasis on the drama of child recruitment by dissidents than on the military operation itself. “We must fight criminals,” he wrote on his networks. He also clarified that six years ago he had not said that the attacks had to be eliminated, but rather that “they must be done with surgical precision”, in response to an interview in which Guillermo Botero – defense minister in 2019 – had questioned him for not being so critical now. So far Barreras has not called for the departure of Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Ivan Cepeda, Petrismo’s official candidate in the 2026 elections, was one of the most critical voices of the 2021 Guaviare attack, in which several minors died during the operation ordered by the then Defense Minister, Diego 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 is confirmed that boys and girls are dead… and you knew about it, I will report you for serious violations of IHL.” The current candidate’s position is not as strong as it was when he was in opposition. Even though he rejected the bombings committed in this government, he did not ask, as years ago, for the resignation of Pedro Sánchez.
Katherine Miranda, an opposition MP, is now calling on the left, in particular Cepeda, to take a tougher stance against the complaints. “Dear Ivan Cepeda, I invite you to jointly denounce President Petro and Minister Pedro Sánchez for serious violations of international humanitarian law. Coherence and principles should not depend on the government in power,” he told him. The issue is delicate for the candidate, who has spent his entire life fighting for the defense of human rights.
There are some on the left who have made more drastic changes. The view of pro-government Senator Wilson Arias, for example, has taken a turn from what he held in 2021, when he harshly questioned Diego Molano and stressed that the state had an obligation to protect them even in the midst of military operations. Today, although the senator condemns the deaths of children in the bombing ordered by Petro, he qualifies his position by retweeting messages in which he insists that there is a substantial difference between the current operation and that of four years ago. In a publication on his position, previously focused on state responsibility without nuance, he now introduces distinctions.
But political dilemmas also exist on the right, especially among those who defended Duque’s ministers during the attacks in which minors died. While underlining the double race of Petrism, former ministers such as Botero defend the actions of the current Defense Minister. “The public forces in this case, in the previous one and in all other cases acted with all force and with all caution,” Botero told Noticias Caracol, a political turning point when an iconic representative of the Duque government defends the actions of the military minister of Petrismo.
One of those who find themselves in this situation is the presidential candidate and senator Maria Fernanda Cabal, of the Uribista Democratic Center party. “Wasn’t what you just did in Guaviare with the bombing a war crime? There’s always a trill,” he said, underlining a hypocrisy on Petro’s part, recalling a message from the then senator, in 2019, who defined the bombing in the Duque government in which minors died as a war crime. But beyond that, he didn’t go against the defense minister. She herself, then from the party in power, shared messages that seemed to exonerate the attacks in which minors died.
The Democratic Center, the party led by the government’s opponent, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, announced on Wednesday that it will not support the motion of censure against minister Pedro Sánchez. A representative of that community in the Chamber, José Jaime Uscátegui, assured that it is inconsistent that “after three years of total impunity, in which we asked the Public Force and the Ministry of Defense to act, and now that they do so, we will lash out against them as if they were the bad guys of the walk”.
In the current debate, the left and the right find themselves at the awkward moment where they share very close versions of the same argument: both argue that if you stop bombing out of fear of minors, this actually encourages the recruitment of children. In this context, political extremes end up justifying military actions similar to those previously criticized, with the premise that any operational containment could strengthen dissidents. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations insist that this logic normalizes child deaths and ignores state obligations to protect children, even in the midst of war.
