Total peace is responsible for what we're living through today
In the shadow of Colombia's enduring armed conflict, presidential candidate Paloma Valencia has staked her campaign on a fundamental rejection of negotiation, arguing that the state's duty is not to speak with those who terrorize civilians but to pursue them. Standing in Pereira weeks before the May 31 election, she offered a vision of governance rooted in enforcement rather than dialogue, placing the suffering of the Cauca region at the center of her indictment of President Petro's 'total peace' policy. Her candidacy crystallizes a tension as old as political violence itself: whether peace is better won at the table or through the force of law.
- The Cauca region is living through record cocaine production, historic homicide rates, and multiplying massacres — a human toll Valencia wields as evidence that negotiation has made Colombia more dangerous, not less.
- Valencia's rhetoric is deliberately unsparing: she promises to hunt armed groups 'like rats,' reactivate arrest warrants against the ELN, FARC dissidents, and paramilitaries, and dismantle every negotiating table the Petro government has built.
- The clash is not merely tactical but philosophical — Petro's 'total peace' bets that dialogue can exhaust violence, while Valencia insists that rewarding armed actors with a seat at the table only emboldens them.
- With less than a month until election day, Colombian voters in conflict-affected regions must weigh whether the suffering they have endured is the price of failed negotiation or the unfinished cost of a peace still in progress.
- Valencia is also courting economic frustration, promising toll reductions across the country and exemptions for communities in the Eje Cafetero — broadening her appeal beyond security into the daily burdens of rural and working-class life.
Paloma Valencia, the Centro Democrático party's presidential candidate, arrived in Pereira with a message that left little room for ambiguity: if she wins on May 31, Colombia's armed groups will face arrest warrants and prison cells, not negotiating tables. Her campaign is built on a direct repudiation of President Gustavo Petro's 'total peace' strategy, which she holds responsible for what she describes as a catastrophic deterioration in public security.
Her evidence is rooted in the Cauca region, her home department, where she says cocaine production has reached record levels, homicides have climbed to historic highs, and massacres have multiplied over fifteen years of compounding violence. For Valencia, this is not structural misfortune — it is the predictable consequence of a government that chose dialogue with the ELN, FARC dissidents, and paramilitary factions over the enforcement of the law. She vowed to pursue all three 'like rats' and lock them away, with no exceptions and no negotiations.
She also challenged the Petro administration's broader political project, arguing that the government is pursuing constitutional reform while dismantling health and security systems. Her counter-vision is deliberately unglamorous: competent governance, she insists, solves problems that ideology cannot.
Valencia extended her appeal beyond security by promising to negotiate reductions in highway tolls nationwide, with particular relief for the Eje Cafetero region, which she identified as carrying the heaviest toll burden in the country. The gesture signals an effort to connect with rural and working-class voters whose frustrations run deeper than the conflict alone.
The election now poses a stark question to Colombian society: whether the violence scarring regions like Cauca is the wound left by insufficient dialogue, or the wound left by too much of it. Valencia and Petro represent opposite answers, and the voters who have lived closest to that violence may well decide which answer carries the day.
Paloma Valencia, the right-wing Centro Democrático party's presidential candidate, stood in Pereira on the campaign trail and made a stark promise: if elected, she would abandon dialogue with Colombia's armed groups and instead hunt them down with the full force of the state.
Valencia's hardline position cuts directly against the current government's approach. President Gustavo Petro has pursued what he calls "total peace"—a strategy of negotiation with armed factions, many of them splinter groups born from the original FARC guerrilla movement. Valencia sees this policy as a catastrophic failure. She pointed to the Cauca region, her home, as evidence: record cocaine production, homicides at historic highs, terrorist attacks, and massacres multiplying across the past fifteen years. The department, she said, faces unprecedented confinement and suffering.
She rejected the framing that this violence is merely structural or inevitable. Instead, she laid direct blame at Petro's feet. "Total peace is responsible for what we're living through today," she told Caracol Radio during her campaign event. The math, in her view, is simple: negotiation has failed, violence has surged, and a different approach is necessary.
Her alternative is unambiguous. She vowed to reactivate arrest warrants against the ELN (National Liberation Army), FARC dissidents, and the paramilitaries she referred to as the "self-proclaimed Gaitanista Army." She would pursue them, she said, "like rats" and lock them in prison. There would be no talks, no negotiating tables, no peace process. Just enforcement.
Valencia also criticized the Petro administration's broader agenda. The government, she argued, wants to rewrite the constitution while simultaneously destroying health and security. She countered that good governance, not constitutional reform, solves problems. This framing positions her as the pragmatist against what she sees as ideological overreach.
Beyond security, Valencia addressed economic grievances. She promised to negotiate reductions in highway tolls across the country, with particular attention to the Eje Cafetero region, where she said tolls are the highest in Colombia. She proposed exempting certain communities from toll payments altogether—a direct appeal to rural and working-class voters frustrated by infrastructure costs.
The May 31 election, now less than a month away, presents Colombian voters with a fundamental choice about how to respond to armed conflict. Valencia's campaign represents one pole: military pressure, arrest, incarceration, and the rejection of negotiated settlement. Petro's government represents another: dialogue, conditional amnesty, and the bet that talking can reduce violence where fighting has not. The Cauca region's suffering—real, documented, and ongoing—will likely shape how voters weigh these competing visions.
Citas Notables
Total peace is responsible for what we're living through today— Paloma Valencia, presidential candidate
We will reactivate arrest warrants to pursue them like rats and put them in jail— Paloma Valencia, on her approach to armed groups
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does Valencia frame this as total rejection of dialogue? Isn't there a middle ground between negotiation and pure enforcement?
In Colombian politics right now, there isn't much middle ground. Petro's peace talks have coincided with visible increases in violence and drug production. For voters in places like Cauca, that correlation feels like causation. Valencia is betting that people are exhausted with negotiation and want to see arrests, convictions, results.
But hasn't military-only approaches been tried before in Colombia? What makes her think this will work differently?
That's the unspoken tension in her campaign. She's not really answering that. She's saying the current approach has failed, therefore we need the opposite. Whether enforcement alone can succeed where it failed in the past—that's a question she doesn't engage with.
The toll road promise seems disconnected from the security message. Why include it?
It's not disconnected at all. She's signaling that she'll govern for ordinary people, not just pursue a security agenda. Rural communities pay those tolls. If you can show you'll reduce their daily costs while also promising to restore order, you're speaking to material concerns and safety at once.
What does "total peace" actually mean in Petro's framework?
It means negotiating with armed groups—offering them incentives to lay down weapons, sometimes including reduced sentences or amnesty. The theory is that you can't kill your way out of a conflict this deep. But the practice has meant armed groups stay active while talks drag on, and violence hasn't dropped. That's Valencia's opening.
If she wins, what's the first thing she'd actually do?
Reactivate those arrest warrants. That's concrete, it's symbolic, and it signals an immediate break from Petro's approach. Whether it translates into actual security improvements is a longer question.