The ink on a tattoo does not change, even when the skin beneath it goes cold. For Luz Marina Monroy, a sixty-seven-year-old mother from the edges of Bogotá, a specific marking on her arm is a permanent anchor to a devastating moment in 2008. Her son, Julián Oviedo Monroy, left home with dreams of wearing a military uniform to rescue his family from poverty. Instead, he became a number.
Specifically, he became one of the 6,402 civilians murdered by Colombian military officers in the infamous "false positives" scandal. Poor young men were lured away, executed, and dressed up in rebel fatigues to boost enemy body counts during the height of the nation's internal war. His mother eventually identified his body in a shallow, hidden grave in northeastern Colombia. She knew him by his tattoo.
Hundreds of miles away in Cali, Sigifredo López carries a completely different set of scars. In 2002, left-wing guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) stormed a local government building and snatched López along with eleven other lawmakers. For seven long years, the jungle was his cage. He survived solitary confinement, starvation, and the profound psychological torture of the canopy.
Then came the morning in 2007 when gunfire tore through the quiet air of his camp. Rebel guards had panicked and executed all eleven of his companions. López alone breathed the humid jungle air as a survivor, a living ghost of a conflict that has claimed or uprooted one in five people across this nation.
These two individuals stand on completely opposite sides of a vast political chasm. Yet, as Colombia heads into a high-stakes presidential vote, they are driven by the exact same primitive instinct. Fear. Not a fear of what might happen tomorrow, but a bone-deep terror of returning to yesterday.
The Mirage of Total Peace
Colombia is fracturing under the weight of an escalating security crisis. Under incumbent left-wing President Gustavo Petro, a grand strategy known as "total peace" sought to dismantle the violence by negotiating directly with drug cartels, criminal syndicates, and leftover rebel factions. The idea was simple: exchange ceasefires for political transitions and community investments.
The reality has been chaotic. Armed groups utilized the diplomatic breathing room to fortify their positions, expand territory, and step up recruitment. The International Committee of the Red Cross recently noted that the humanitarian toll on civilians has reached its worst point in a decade.
Consider what happens next when a state pulls back its teeth. In June 2025, an active presidential candidate was assassinated. Gangs have integrated explosive drones into their arsenals, raining terror onto rural villages. Even though the National Liberation Army (ELN)—the country’s largest remaining guerrilla faction—announced a brief pause in operations to avoid disrupting the ballot box, other syndicates offered no such civility.
This deterioration has twisted the traditional political map. López, a man who explicitly considers himself a leftist, cannot bear the sight of the current disorder. He looks at the current political map and sees an administration handing the steering wheel of the country over to organized crime. The escalating chaos feels too familiar. It mimics the early days of his own captivity.
Because of this, his allegiance has swung dramatically to the right. He supports Abelardo de la Espriella, a brash, hardline attorney backed by foreign conservatives who has built his entire platform on a single, uncompromising promise: an absolute scorched-earth campaign against crime.
The Rhetoric of Extermination
De la Espriella pulls no punches. He has publicly channeled the style of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, promising to hunt down criminal elements and wipe out those he deems national security targets. Critics hear the echoes of an authoritarian past in his speeches.
To a survivor like López, that severe language sounds like salvation for a new generation. He insists that when violence reaches this level, the victims are being systematically revictimized by state inaction.
But to Monroy, those exact same words sound like a death warrant for thousands more innocent sons.
She watches de la Espriella’s rise with absolute horror. When the candidate speaks of purging targets, she does not see a safer Colombia. She sees the return of the unaccountable military machine that took her son. If the government sanctions a total war without guardrails, the bureaucratic pressures that incentivized the "false positives" atrocities could easily re-emerge.
Monroy does not love the current administration. She acknowledges that the security situation under Petro has withered, and she believes his chosen successor, peace activist Iván Cepeda, must adopt a far firmer stance against criminal elements. But when forced to weigh the failure of a messy peace initiative against the deliberate deployment of an aggressive military campaign, her choice is instant. She chooses Cepeda.
A Nation Trapped in Reflection
The upcoming election is not a debate over economic theories, structural tax codes, or infrastructure projects. It is an existential referendum on how to stop a hemorrhage. The polarization gripping the country has been intensifying for decades, creating a rigid division between two incompatible factions.
This deep ideological rift turns neighbors into adversaries. When an entire society views the opposing political camp not as a rival with differing ideas, but as a direct threat to survival, the democratic fabric begins to tear. The danger is that the slightest provocation could ignite a renewed cycle of political violence.
The tragedy of the Colombian ballot box is that both paths forward are shrouded in dark history. Choosing one side means risking a slide back into the lawless jungle warfare where insurgencies rule by kidnapping and extortion. Choosing the other side means risking a return to state-sponsored operations where the military views its own citizenry as acceptable collateral damage.
Luz Marina Monroy and Sigifredo López will walk into their respective voting booths on Sunday carrying the heavy baggage of their individual trauma. They will cast opposing ballots, convinced they are shielding their children from a monster. They are both right to be afraid. The tragedy is that the country can only run in one direction, and both paths lead directly through a graveyard.
