BOGOTA, Colombia—Almost a decade ago, the most powerful rebel group Latin America had ever seen agreed to lay down its weapons and end its fight to overthrow the Colombian state. The accord with Colombia’s government earned a Nobel Peace Prize for then-President Juan Manuel Santos .
Today, the once-fearsome Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has turned to politics and farming. But it left a vacuum increasingly filled by armed gangs that have shaken Colombia with a violent, cocaine-fueled conflict raging across several provinces of the country where the government has little or no control.
At least one armed group has a presence in nearly 400 of the country’s 1,100 municipalities, said the state’s human-rights ombudsman’s office. That group and other militias fight each other and, on occasion, Colombia’s army, particularly in regions close to Colombia’s borders and other drug-producing regions.
The 2016 peace pact was supposed to open the way for the government to build roads and schools in long-neglected areas, while offering social services and deploying police and soldiers.
Instead, the demobilization of 13,609 members of FARC opened the way for other armed groups to eventually move in, animated by the billions of dollars made available by the prevalence of coca leaf, cocaine’s base plant.
President Gustavo Petro took office in 2022 pledging to expand peace to other armed groups through a policy called “total peace,” which has failed to disarm any of the militias.
“We were so happy that we were finally going to have peace, but it only lasted a couple years,” said Nelson Leal , a former mayor who two years ago fled his home in Tibú, a coca-growing region close to the Venezuelan border. He said that now “whoever has the biggest guns and most men tends to rule.”
The rights ombudsman’s office says that since 2022 the country’s most powerful armed group, the Gulf Clan , has expanded its presence from 255 municipalities to 392. The National Liberation Army, or ELN, a Cuba-inspired rebel group that has many of its fighters on the border with Venezuela or in that neighboring country, is now in 232 municipalities compared with 189 in 2022. Other groups made up of former FARC fighters who didn’t participate in the peace pacts have also spread their reach.
The Ideas for Peace Foundation, a policy group here, identified 14 enclaves around the country where armed groups are duking it out for territorial control, up from eight in 2022. The enclaves are remote, though they span the width of the country, including the Pacific Coast where drugs are smuggled to the U.S. and other countries.
Armed groups have spread as the Petro government has engaged with them in off-and-on peace talks in which his administration has declared cease-fires. That has often left Colombian security forces confused over which syndicates to pursue, said Maria Victoria Llorente , director of Ideas for Peace.
“For me that is the biggest challenge,” she said. “How do you intervene in a context where one group has a cease-fire agreement and another doesn’t?”
Colombia’s peace czar, Otty Patiño , didn’t respond to requests for comment. But in interviews with Colombian press, he agreed that the armed groups “want to dominate territory and live off illegal activities.” He acknowledged that the ELN has resorted to “deepen the war” but said that “total peace is still alive.”
The militias have grown as the amount of coca leaf and cocaine produced in Colombia have reached historic highs. The country produced 625,000 acres of coca in 2023 and nearly 3,000 tons of the finished drug, the U.N. said last year. The proceeds have been a windfall for armed groups, U.S. and Colombian military officials say.
The rights ombudsman’s office says that Colombia’s four main armed groups now have more than 20,000 members—fighters and non-armed workers who toil in logistics and supplying provisions. In 2022, those four groups had about 13,000 members.
While some armed groups in the past championed Marxism and worked to topple the state, today they are largely focused on holding territory where they thrive on extorting businesses, kidnapping and moving contraband. “The longer illicit economies serve as a means to an end, the more the illegal economy becomes an end in itself,” said Cynthia Arnson , a scholar on Colombia’s pursuit of peace accords at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
The battle over cocaine led the ELN in recent days to strike at its rivals—along with civilians—in the remote Catatumbo region abutting Venezuela in Colombia’s east. The group went door-to-door in farming communities, looking for people it considered foes and killing them. Some 80 people died, and tens of thousands fled their homes.
The government responded by declaring a state of emergency and deploying thousands of soldiers to confront the ELN and evacuate villagers.
“We are going to fight for national sovereignty,” said Petro, who in recent days visited Haiti and noted it is a major hub for U.S.-bound cocaine from Catatumbo.
In Catatumbo, made up of various small farming towns, residents talk of living in communities with little state presence.
Leal, the former mayor, spoke of how the community is still waiting for the state to build a promised 43-mile road connecting his hometown of Tibú to the regional capital of Cúcuta. To do any business in his town, everyone from shop keepers to cabbies has to ask permission from the ELN and the remnants of FARC, both of whom are fighting for control of the region, he said.
Leal, who was threatened and fled his town in 2023, now resides in Cúcuta, where thousands of those displaced by the recent violence seek shelter. “This is going to keep happening if the state doesn’t do what it needs to do,” he said.
Petro, himself a former guerrilla from the now-defunct M-19 movement, centered his “total peace” initiative on simultaneously engaging armed groups in talks and offering incentives leading to their disarmament and reintegration into society.
The policy came under sharp criticism from those who have closely tracked peace talks in Latin America and worked on the negotiations with FARC, which worked because of the leverage the state had against the guerrillas.
With U.S. assistance, Colombia had in the late 2000s and early 2010s badly weakened FARC, killing many of its commanders and leading thousands of fighters to defect. That forced the group to make concessions leading to a peace accord.
Petro’s policy, in contrast, has given groups that are more similar to Mexican narco cartels than FARC the chance to grow stronger while feigning interest in peace talks, say analysts who have closely tracked the government’s policies.
“You can’t treat organizations whose motivation and behavior is essentially criminal as old-fashioned insurgents with whom you can negotiate a political agenda,” said Sergio Jaramillo , who as peace commissioner in the Santos government negotiated with FARC. “They have no incentive for that. They have no incentives in transforming themselves into anything else and giving up their weapons.”
Analysts of the peace pact say that the Petro government and its predecessor, the administration of Iván Duque , also failed to execute a provision in the 2016 accord that would have weakened armed groups: a modernization of far-flung regions that had never seen a state presence. In some of those regions, armed groups are now the de facto state.
A recent report from Ideas for Peace, which tracked the peace process progress the past eight years, found that the Colombian government had been spending only 17.9% of the estimated $1 billion annually set aside for the accord’s rural-development programs. Just 1.5% of families had fully transitioned to growing legal crops from coca. Homicides in rural areas remained high, the report showed, and armed groups were increasingly recruiting children.
“You can’t just take a state and move it to a remote area,” said Llorente of Ideas for Peace. She said it takes time, patience and funding. “It’s something you have to build from the ground up,” Llorente said.
Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com