Bogota is burning. Again. The FARC dissidents, the ELN, the paramilitaries, they all smell blood ahead of the presidential vote. And in Whitehall, they are watching the price of crude. Not the human one.
This is not a new conflict. It is the same one that has chewed up the country for sixty years, a war fought with machetes and assault rifles, bankrolled by cocaine. But the stakes are higher now. The peace deal that Gustavo Petro championed is unravelling. Violence is spiking in the countryside where the state never really had a presence. And the oil money is flowing.
UK interest here is not humanitarian. Let us be clear. BP has been in Colombia since the 1980s. They operate the massive Cusiana and Cupiagua fields. That is 12 percent of Colombia’s crude. And with the war in Ukraine squeezing supplies, every barrel matters. The Foreign Office is not sending peacekeepers. They are sending trade envoys.
I spoke to a senior diplomat off the record. He said: “We are not taking sides. We are securing energy.” That is the line. But the Colombian left is nervous. They remember the 1990s, when British intelligence was accused of sharing data with the security forces who targeted union leaders. They remember the smear campaigns against Petro.
Petro is ahead in the polls. But not by much. His rivals paint him as a Castro sympathiser. The violence helps them. Every bomb, every kidnapping, every massacre chips away at his narrative of peace. The ELN knows this. They are playing the long game. They want to show that the state cannot protect its citizens.
The FARC dissidents are different. They are fragmented, drug-fuelled. They attack pipelines. They know that hitting infrastructure hurts the government’s pocket. And it makes foreign investors skittish. But not that skittish. Oil companies have seen worse. They have private security. They have insurance.
What worries the British government most is not the violence itself. It is the instability. A Petro victory could mean a reset of relations. He has already threatened to halt new oil exploration. That is a direct hit on BP’s future. So Whitehall is hedging. Quietly funding community projects in oil regions. Cultivating contacts across the political spectrum. Standard operating procedure.
The election is in May. The next two months will be bloody. There will be attacks. There will be accusations of fraud. There might be a coup attempt. The military in Colombia has never fully accepted civilian control. The British Embassy has already drawn up evacuation plans for staff. Not for the locals.
This is the game. Realpolitik dressed in diplomatic language. The oil must flow. The votes must be counted. And the bodies will keep piling up in rural Colombia. They always do.
Eleanor Rigby, Political Bureau Chief.