Christina Marie Noriega

In the slopes overlooking downtown Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, gun-toting gangs reign over vast stretches of neighbourhoods, overseeing the drug trade, demanding extortion fees and deciding who comes and goes on their turf.

Now, such gangs have declared that they are ready to give it all up.

In the city of Buenaventura, a ceasefire between two rival gangs is being held up as a model for government peace plans.

The Petro administration plans to pour money into rural communities to stop the drug trade at its source.

This story was produced with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Before Jhon Hernández became a voter for the first time last month, he was a front-line protester clamoring for change. He joined tens of thousands of Colombians last year in demanding stronger social programs and an end to a proposed tax reform, as COVID-19 restrictions wreaked havoc on the nation’s poor people.

This year, Mr. Hernández ditched the ski mask that had identified him as a protester and instead organized a voter registration drive, convinced that the way forward is not through b...

For the first time, Colombia will have a leftist president.

Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime senator who has pledged to transform the country’s economic system, has won Sunday’s election, according to preliminary results, setting the third largest nation in Latin America on a radically new path.

Mr. Petro, 62, received more than 50 percent of the vote, with more than 99 percent counted Sunday evening. His opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, a construction magnate who had energized the co...

A new law in Colombia aims to address widespread impunity in cases of environmental crime and curb escalating rates of deforestation.
The legislation, which took effect last August, comes at a time when deforestation continues to climb in Colombia, where more than 171,000 hectares (423,000 acres) were cleared in 2020.
Human rights groups and environmentalists have expressed concern that law enforcement may use the new legislation to target vulnerable communities instead of the financiers of d...

BOGOTA, Colombia—In the next five weeks, Dairo Antonio Usuga, Colombia’s most-wanted drug lord who was captured on Oct. 23, is expected to be extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges filed in New York and Florida, according to Colombian authorities.
As head of the notorious drug cartel Clan del Golfo, Usuga—more commonly known by the alias “Otoniel”—is accused of steering an international criminal enterprise, processing and shipping more than 160 tons of cocaine each year t...

Bogota, Colombia – Under the sweltering Andean sun, Walter Queragama walked several kilometres late last month from Ciudad Bolivar, a poor neighbourhood in the south of the Colombian capital, to Bogota’s National Park.

Bogota, Colombia – Alejandro Gaitan awoke to the sounds of strange voices and heavy boots outside his home in the Colombian city of Armenia, about 280km (173 miles) west of the capital Bogota. Moments later, five police officers burst through the front door.
After conducting a search, they proceeded to read out a warrant for the arrest of the 22-year-old philosophy student, who was wanted for “terrorism” and attempted homicide, along with six other criminal charges. He faced more than 40 year...

Bogotá—On May 9, after multiple days of widespread unrest and police violence, demonstrators in Colombia’s capital city gathered, with candles cradled in their hands, for an evening of mourning. On the cracked cement floor of a public park lay sheet after sheet of paper with the typewritten names of demonstrators killed during recent protests. One read: “Jeisson García, 13 years old, Suspect: ESMAD” — one of the youngest alleged victims of the country’s notorious riot control police.

On a Tuesday morning in March 2008, Eduardo Garzon failed to show up for his job at a working-class restaurant that he co-managed in Bogota, Colombia. His whereabouts remained unknown for the next five months until his mother discovered Garzon had died 300 kilometres (186 miles) away from their home in an alleged confrontation with the military.

Luis Troches was walking home from the shop in late July when armed men stopped him along a dirt road in south-west Colombia. They gave the 14-year-old an ultimatum: he could join their group – dissidents from the demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) – or they could take him and his 11-year-old sister by force.

“He came home scared and distant,” said his mother, Luzmery. Both knew that the men, who control their hamlet in the north of Cauca province, would be back for an ...

With Afro-Colombians facing multiple threats of violence, the need for a national Black rights movement is more urgent than ever.