“Load your magazines, boys!” Hernán Darío López shouts. Five of the seven students immediately raise theirs to the sky, seven bullets inserted at lightning speed. The other two jam. “Every second is precious. When you’re part of a security detail, you won’t have time to think,” the instructor insists. Their hands tremble. They wipe the sweat from their palms on their military-patterned cargo pants and nervously readjust their earmuffs. “Oh, man. instructor López is giving you a hard time here, but out on the street, you’ll face a real threat,” he presses. “Okay!” the last one in line shouts with relief.

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Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, is striving to show that its fight against drugs is succeeding. It is a decisive factor in its global image, but also in its economic and political relationship with the United States, its main trading partner. Rather than focusing on crop eradication and aerial fumigation, the government of Gustavo Petro has placed its biggest bet on cocaine seizures — and it has reached record levels.

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At an elite club in northern Bogotá, some fifty Colombian investors listened last Tuesday to a statement that sums up Venezuela’s current economic situation better than any report. It was uttered by Ángel Cárdenas, infrastructure manager at CAF, the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean: “Among investors in the region, the debate is no longer whether the country represents an opportunity or a risk. The question is whether or not you’ve already been to Caracas.” After years of freefall, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves has returned to the global radar.

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An explosion rocked a road in the department of Cauca, in southwestern Colombia, last weekend, leaving at least 20 dead in one of the deadliest attacks against civilians in Colombia’s violent history. The attack, attributed to the front commanded by alias Iván Mordisco — leader of the main dissident group of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) — is not an isolated incident: it is the latest chapter in an ongoing power struggle between armed groups and the Colombian state, and a direct blow to the “total peace” platform on which President Gustavo Petro came to power.

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“Moshing and headbanging” at a death metal concert. That’s paradise for prison guard Lelio Camacho, a member of the psychosocial support team at La Modelo medium-security prison in Bogotá. A metalhead to the core, he says he’s unique among the 17,000 employees of Colombia’s National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (INPEC). “With great humility, I consider myself unique for doing what I love at my job,” he says, sitting in the prison’s courtyard number one. In 2022, he fulfilled his dream of forming a band in prison. But not just any band: half the members of Simbiontes, as they named the group, are INPEC staff; the other half are inmates. “It’s a symbiosis, a fusion,” he says, gritting his teeth and clasping his hands, excited, before taking the stage in the prison auditorium to play for the visitors. The audience cheers.

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Gustavo Petro is running out of time. On August 7 he will cease to be Colombia’s president. Over four years, many of his promises have fallen by the wayside — sometimes because of his own missteps, other times because of the resistance and fears of a country where the left had not governed in decades. Now the toll of holding power has come crashing down on him. At times, he appears irritable and in a bad mood, but on Saturday morning, a smiling Petro, dressed in an impeccable blue suit, walked into Pavilion 8 of the Fira de Barcelona accompanied by his presidential entourage. Petro was taking part in the Fourth Meeting in Defense of Democracy alongside the presidents of Spain, Brazil, and Mexico — a progressive lineup in which he feels at ease.

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