In the minds of many outsiders, Colombia remains trapped in a predicament straight from Netflix’s Narcos: suspended between cartels and guerrilla warfare, with the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and CIA operatives hovering as weary custodians of order, saving Colombians from themselves — or so the script goes. This framing reduces political violence to criminal pathology, and imperial intervention to benevolent security management. Like most enduring stereotypes, however, it contains a kernel of truth: Colombia has indeed long been both a theater of internal conflict and a strategic outpost to further Washington’s hemispheric reach.

In recent years, however, Colombia has begun to project a very different presence on the global stage. Consider the scene: a sitting president, Gustavo Petro, standing in front of the United Nations headquarters alongside Roger Waters, calling for disobedience to US military directives; hosting the Progressive International and the Hague Group in Bogotá; severing diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel; and positioning his government among the most outspoken state critics of the genocide against the Palestinian people.

The tension between these two representations, each distilling a distinct meaning from Colombia’s political conflicts and aspirations, has long existed, but rarely so starkly. While the Trump administration recasts its militarized expansion across the Americas as an anti-narcotics crusade, one that has seen missiles indiscriminately lobbed at modest vessels along South America’s coastlines, Petro’s government offers a contrasting narrative. As the Colombian president remarked before the UN in September 2025, “Drug lords live in New York, Paris, Madrid, Dubai. . . .  They don’t live in the boats where the missiles fall. . . .  They live next to Donald Trump’s house.”