Trump poised to decertify Colombia

It appears increasingly likely that the Trump administration will move to "decertify" Colombia as a partner in its fight against global drug trafficking for the first time in 30 years.

The upcoming determination, due September 15, could trigger cuts to hundreds of millions of dollars in bilateral assistance, visa restrictions on Colombian officials, and sanctions on the country's financial system under current U.S. law. Decertification would strike a major blow to what has been Washington’s top security partner in the region as it struggles with surging coca production and expanding criminal and insurgent violence.

A recent U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation in Colombia had increased 53% in 2023, with the country now responsible for 67% of global production. An internal security report shared with Reuters revealed that the number of combatants in the country's armed groups — mostly financed through drug trafficking and illegal mining — increased by 7% in the past year and 45% since President Gustavo Petro took office in mid-2022.

Colombian security forces have been reeling after dissident members of the demobilized FARC guerilla group shot down a police helicopter during a coca eradication operation last month, killing 12 police officers. On the same day, a truck bomb on a major thoroughfare near a military aviation school in Cali exploded, killing six civilians.

While Petro's government has sought to break with the country's militarized counternarcotics strategy through peace talks with armed actors, crop substitution programs, interdictions at more profitable nodes of the supply chain, and global initiatives to decriminalize and reduce the demand for drugs, it has been forced to revive elements of the U.S.-backed war on drugs, including manual eradication, aerial bombardments, and bounties on the heads of crime bosses.

Under the framework of Plan Colombia, Colombia has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in the Western Hemisphere, averaging $700 million annually in security aid, development assistance, economic support, counternarcotics funding and foreign military financing through the Departments of Defense and State and the now-defunct USAID — for a total of nearly $15 billion since 2000.

The threat of decertification, which puts much of that aid at risk, comes amid a rapid deterioration in relations with the historic U.S. ally since President Trump took office. A Petro-Trump social media spat in January over conditions of deportation flights led to threats of 50% tariffs, visa revocations, and economic sanctions.

Insinuations by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Petro was responsible for the political violence that culminated in the assassination of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay in June, followed by a diplomatic crisis over unfounded allegations that Rubio was involved in a coup plot against Petro, have eroded once-solid ties. A proposed 50% reduction in non-military assistance to Colombia in the 2026 U.S. federal budget and the administration’s unhappiness with the conviction for witness tampering and bribery of the former rightwing president, Álvaro Uribe, have further strained bilateral ties.

Tariffs on Colombia's U.S.-bound exports and demands to extradite guerrilla leaders involved in peace negotiations have led Colombia to seek new trade and security agreements with China and the European Union, a trend that decertification could accelerate.

To mitigate some of these concerns, Colombia in August hosted a bipartisan delegation of two freshman Colombian-American senators, Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who told the AP before arriving that “the purpose of the trip is to understand all the dynamics before any decision is made.” After meetings with top Colombian officials, Gallego said in a statement: "Colombia will suffer more if we take away its certification because there will be more unemployed people, and then drug traffickers and criminals will have more people who want to work for them."

In July, the Colombian government tapped a former Trump aide to "[advocate] for Colombia’s position in anticipation of the forthcoming determination by the U.S. administration," documents filed with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit reveal.

The one-year, $720,000 contract with DGA Government Relations is being overseen by Nicole Frazier, who served as a special assistant to the president in the last two years of Trump’s first term. She has been tasked with giving "special emphasis" to ensuring Colombia is not decertified.

For the past six months, Colombia has waged a diplomatic offensive against the pending blacklisting, with numerous high-level visits by top police and counternarcotics officials, meetings with key GOP lawmakers and Trump administration officials, and repeated warnings from Colombia’s defense minister that decertification would run counter to making the U.S. “safer, stronger and more prosperous,” echoing Rubio’s words from January.

“It’s a political decision,” Colombia’s foreign minister Rosa Villavicencio said this week, but “if you look at certification objectively, in terms of the social costs we’ve paid, lives lost and servicemembers killed, the just thing to do would be to maintain our certification, and we hope that it’s looked at objectively.”

After the State Department sends its recommendation to the president based on Colombia’s interdiction results, hectare reduction figures, and anti-drug policies over the past year, Rubio will send his own recommendation to Trump, who makes the final decision, which is then submitted to Congress for feedback, though typically the presidential determination stands.

Security analysts and former U.S. officials have urged the U.S. to issue national security waivers allowing certain bilateral cooperation to continue even if Colombia is formally decertified. The last time Colombia was decertified, insurgent and paramilitary violence surged.

Without these waivers, transnational criminal groups could seize the opportunity to ramp up operations across the region and narcotics flows to the U.S. may increase, according to these experts. U.S.-bound migration from Colombia could also resume and foreign investment in the country continue to wane.

Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, a Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, says that waivers could include foreign military financing and international narcotics and law enforcement programs, as well as funds approved in the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act.

“Cooperation with the U.S. is so embedded that decertification would seriously affect all operations, including in air, maritime, intelligence and other capacities,” a Colombian defense official told the International Crisis Group. “The main beneficiaries of decertification would be criminal groups, [who] are regional, not just local, so [this] would endanger security across the hemisphere.”

Decertification could also inadvertently boost Petro’s party in the lead-up to next year's elections — contrary to the Trump administration's preference — and prove difficult to reverse if the Trump-aligned opposition wins the presidency in August.

This could be why business leaders, opposition mayors and former President Uribe’s party are, like the Petro government, warning U.S. lawmakers and the administration about the risks of decertifying the country. This week, the mayors of Colombia’s second and third largest cities visited Washington to advocate against decertification.

“It would be the U.S. shooting itself in the foot,” Sanchez-Garzoli said, because “by isolating Colombia, the U.S. would not get the intelligence it needs, which is vital for counternarcotics efforts and strategies in the region. This would have a boomerang effect and would be bad for drug policy in the region, which is why in the past Colombia has always ended up being certified.”