Colombia

Colombia’s State Council provisionally suspended a 23.7% minimum wage hike that was decreed by President Gustavo Petro to secure a living wage for minimum wage workers in December. The country’s top administrative court additionally gave the Petro administration a week to issue a new “transitional” decree that will be valid until the Council of […]

Colombia’s defense minister ordered the security forces and intelligence agencies to step up measures to protect President Gustavo Petro in response to an alleged plot to plant drugs in his car. In a post on social media platform X, Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez said that he had ordered the commanders of the military and the The post Colombia steps up […]

International airlines are rapidly re-establishing services to Venezuela, signalling a cautious but commercially significant reopening of the country’s aviation market. On Thursday, February 12, Colombia’s Avianca resumed a daily direct flights between Bogotá and Caracas. The move restores one of the most important air corridors in northern South […]

President Gustavo Petro declared an emergency in large parts of Colombia in response to rains that flooded vast areas and threaten to overflood dams. The emergency was declared in all provinces on the Caribbean coast and the Choco province, which has both a Pacific and a Caribbean coast. According to disaster management agency UNGRD, heavy The post […]

Colombia’s goldenberry symbolized the country’s push into high-value fruit exports. Now, it faces a turf war at home from a fruit with far greater global recognition: the blueberry. While blueberry cultivation has expanded rapidly across Colombia over the past decade, producers say the industry remains far from becoming a fully fledged export […]

Indigenous security forces were able to thwart the kidnapping of a coalition senator in southwest Colombia on Tuesday. Aida Quilcue, a senator and indigenous leader, and her security detail disappeared from the radar around noon while traveling through the east of the Cauca province. Following her release three hours later, Quilcue told press that she The […]

Unseasonal heavy rains and severe flooding across northern Colombia have created a full-blown humanitarian crisis, displacing hundreds of thousands, destroying homes and farmland, and pushing local infrastructure and health systems to breaking point. The disaster has hit hardest in the department of Córdoba, where officials say 156,000 people have been […]

A recent order to carry out airstrikes on guerrilla group ELN “fatally injured” efforts to resume peace talks between Colombia’s longest-living guerrilla group and the administration of President Gustavo Petro, the rebels said Tuesday. Petro said last week that he ordered an airstrike on a suspected guerrilla position in the northeastern Catatumbo […]

Colombia’s prosecution said it will indict Ecopetrol CEO Ricardo Roa on election fraud and influence peddling charges. The accusations filed by the prosecution’s anti-corruption unit are the result of two separate investigations into corruption allegations leveled against the director of the country’s state oil company. The campaign finance charge The […]

Nearly a week after Donald Trump hosted Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, at the White House, calm has returned to a bilateral relationship that only recently appeared headed for rupture. The insults have stopped. The social media theatrics have faded. Diplomacy, not spectacle, is back in charge. This alone tells us that both governments have agreed

Santiago Gallon, one of the most infamous business associates of Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe, has been assassinated in Mexico, local media reported. Gallon, a financier of paramilitary organization AUC and alleged drug trafficker, was reportedly shot and killed in a restaurant in Toluca, a city in the south of Mexico. According to journalist […]

Colombian President Gustavo Petro appeared on Tuesday to melt into the gilded woodwork of the Oval Office, wearing a gold tie and an uncharacteristically sober dark suit. Seated beside U.S. President Donald Trump, the two-hour meeting appeared—at least on the surface—to be a cordial encounter between political adversaries entrenched on opposite sides of […]

The National Electoral Council (CNE) barred Colombia’s leading presidential candidate, Senator Ivan Cepeda, from participating in a multipartite primary that sought to unite the left ahead of the elections. The decision forced Cepeda’s party, the Historic Pact, to withdraw from the primary and unleashed a new wave of criticism about the politicized […]

Powerful storm surges and weeks of unusually intense rainfall have triggered widespread flooding across Colombia’s Caribbean coast, affecting more than 50,000 families, damaging homes and infrastructure, and placing hundreds of thousands of livestock at risk, authorities said. The floods have hit the Magdalena River basin and large swathes of northern […]

Paramilitary successor organization EGC suspended peace talks with Colombia’s government after President Gustavo Petro allegedly promised his US counterpart Donald Trump to arrest their commander. In a post on social media platform X, the organization said that its delegation “will provisionally suspend talks with the government in order to conduct […]