This article is a co-production with Amazon Underworld, a journalistic alliance covering crime trends throughout the Amazon Basin.
A small motorized boat streaks across the San Miguel River—the natural frontier between Colombia and Ecuador—carrying Jairo Marín, a man in his early fifties, light-skinned and battle-scarred, who is also known as Popéye. He is on his way to meet one of his mobile units of heavily armed combatants as his organization prepares for what could be either a path to peace or an escalation of conflict.
Earlier this year, Marín, a guerrilla commander born in the Colombian Amazon, became the chief negotiator of the Comandos de la Frontera, which he describes as a “21st century guerrilla organization.” The armed group controls tens of thousands of acres of coca plantations and has gained significant political leverage as President Gustavo Petro’s Administration scrambles to secure agreements with armed groups critical to advancing Colombia’s broader peace talks and anti-narcotics efforts.
Negotiations with the administration, however, are more urgent than ever. Petro has less than a year in office to secure a deal. Meanwhile, coca cultivation is soaring, reaching a record 625,000 acres in 2023 and the U.S. government is threatening to cut military aid and cooperation programs for not meeting anti-drug standards. Time is running out.
It seems a narrow path to peace runs through the Colombian Amazon and hinges on working with, not against, the very groups that control drug trafficking and profit from violence.
Sporting military fatigues, rubber boots, and a Galil rifle slung across his shoulders, Marín commands an army of at least 1,200 armed combatants scattered across the region—an amalgam of former Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC) members, soldiers, paramilitaries, and fresh recruits often from local Indigenous communities enticed with monthly pay.
“We control many things, yes, things that the State with its military and police forces cannot do. We can do it,” he says during an interview near the border. To his south lies the protected area of the Cofán Indigenous people in Ecuador; to his north, in Colombia, stretches a sea of coca—a plant with many cultural and medicinal uses but which is the base ingredient for cocaine.
Colombia’s protracted internal conflict has evolved from an ideological guerrilla warfare that began in the 1960s into violence increasingly driven by criminal enterprises fighting for control over illicit economies, a shift that has fundamentally complicated the U.S.-backed drug war. Sophisticated transnational networks now control coca-rich regions, prioritizing business goals rather than political influence. The government and the guerrilla groups operate as parallel states that regulate movement of people, punish rule-breakers, and defend against competing armed groups while controlling local populations through coercion and extreme violence.
The Comandos and the cocaine business
In Putumayo, arguably the Amazon Basin’s most conflict-ridden area, over 123,000 acres of coca flourish along borderlands where groups like the Comandos evade crackdowns by crossing into Ecuador and Peru, operating freely across borders without seeking sovereign power. Cocaine from the tri-frontier region reaches Pacific Coast ports in Colombia and Ecuador, but also travels along rivers toward Brazil, both a consumer and transit route to growing markets in Africa and Europe.
In 2016, a peace accord between the government and the FARC was adopted. The FARC demobilized the following year as part of the agreement. But after surrendering their weapons, over 500 former members were assassinated. Marín, a former Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces commander who joined the guerrilla group at age 13 in the 1980s, remembers this moment—and what it ushered in.
“We’re going to unite, we’re going to begin, we’re going to arm ourselves because we cannot let ourselves be killed. That’s how this organization began,” Marín says, explaining how a group of 16 people got together in 2017, ultimately forming the Comandos de la Frontera in 2020, filling the power vacuum left by FARC’s departure and the State’s failure to provide security.
Now, the Comandos’ regional expanse severely affects local populations, with community representatives sharing stories of recruitment of minors, targeted assassinations, and disappearances, and describing their control as suffocating. Violence is rarely reported to authorities, who are distrusted by local communities.
The Comandos embed themselves in villages by recruiting members and pressuring community authorities. “The enemy had gotten into our house and we didn’t realize it,” explains an Indigenous community leader, who requested anonymity for safety reasons.
Marín and the rest of the Comandos leadership, often locals themselves, call themselves “regionalists” and claim to represent rural and State-abandoned communities. They have formed an agenda of what they call “territorial transformations,” arguing they are willing to give up the coca economy and stop being an armed movement if the State can grant them security guarantees and provide locals with legal livelihoods and rural development investments.
A last opportunity for peace under pressure
The cocaine economy is the main fuel for Colombia’s war economy, which has recently also seen a surge in illegal gold mining. Never before has so much coca been grown in the country and even with increased drug seizures, Washington D.C. under President Trump threatens decertification from its annual anti-narcotics cooperation due to a lack of effort in fighting illicit drugs. This could mean Colombia would miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in military and police aid, thereby weakening its response capacity to drug trafficking and could ultimately result in the U.S. lobbying against Colombia receiving loans from international institutions such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
With limited time remaining in office, several peace dialogues have been aborted, rural violence exacerbated, and Petro’s administration faces dim prospects for achieving anything beyond minimal agreements that would barely impact the country’s spiraling drug production. But, on the frontlines of peacebuilding are those who know that small victories might turn the table.
“At least in the dialogues with [the Comandos], we have agreed on the need to overcome the predominance of illegal economies linked above all to coca and illegal mining in those territories,” says Armando Novoa, a spectacled, slick-haired Bogotá-based lawyer who represents the State at the negotiation table with the guerrilla structure that includes the Comandos.
“This is what we have called the economic transformation of the territory or the transition from illicit economies to licit economies,” he explains. “Of course, security and dialogue must go hand in hand. It’s not just dialogue; it’s also about having an intelligent public security presence in the territory. But that presence shouldn’t rely solely on armed repression against communities to counter coca cultivation.”
Coca crop substitution
If it were up to many of the coca crop farmers, a transition to legal food crops would grant them an exit from cycles of violence surrounding the drug trade.
“Coca brings violence, deaths, all kinds of problems, you know? So that’s also why we want to start transforming things,” says a coca crop owner in rural Putumayo, who requested anonymity for their security. In their drug lab, buyers purchase coca paste on site, while potential food crops lack market access due to poor roads that increase transport costs and damage produce during the journey. Many farmers hope to build legal livelihoods but need land titles, loans, and markets for their products.
Past attempts at crop substitution failed due to bureaucratic hurdles, missing funds, and flawed agricultural projects. However, according to Gloria Miranda, Colombia’s crop substitution director, this time will be different with aligned peacebuilding and drug policy.
“The coordination between drug policy and ‘total peace’ policy is fundamental,” she explains. “The state must recover control through more than just armed force. Military power is only one dimension of control. We’re building legitimate state presence through social policies and non-violent means.”
In contrast to previous coca crop eradication efforts that faced sniper attacks and landmines from other groups, the Comandos now claim to allow substitution programs to proceed. “We view the progress of the substitution program very favorably, precisely because the armed group is not opposing it. In fact, the armed group is willing to let the program proceed without confrontation, violence, or threats,” Miranda says.
The window for success is closing fast with presidential elections in 2026, and crop substitution projects and partial agreements yet to materialize. Petro needs immediate results before his presidency ends and a potentially less peace-friendly president takes power—a fact not lost on the Comandos.
“If we don’t reach at least some minimum agreements, some partial agreements, well we’ll go as far as we can [in the process],” Marín clarifies, indicating his willingness to continue peace negotiations even with a possible next right-wing government.
Fidgeting with the safety clip of his gun, Marín, just a few hundred meters from Ecuador’s border—a quick escape away—says: “Our policy since we were formed is that we are not going to attack the state,” he says. “But if they attack us, we’ll defend ourselves.”
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