Colombia's Gangs Deploy Drones

 

 

“BOGOTA, Colombia -- Shortly before Christmas, a swarm of drones killed seven soldiers as they rested inside a military compound in the country's northeast, unaware that a cocaine-trafficking guerrilla group was about to strike.

 

In the southwestern city of Cali, officials say they are scrambling to prevent gangs from dropping explosives from drones onto police stations. Earlier this year, insurgents deploying fighters alongside drones and other tools of war killed 80 people and uprooted tens of thousands in a remote stretch of eastern Colombia.

 

Colombia's resurgent militias -- groups with thousands of fighters that President Trump calls narco-terrorists for shipping drugs to the U.S. -- are battering this country's strained security services with explosive-laden drones in attacks that have picked up in frequency and ferocity. Since April 2024, when the strikes began, the military says there have been some 400 drone attacks, killing 58 soldiers and police officers and wounding nearly 300, according to Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

 

"When they began with the drone attacks, it was a fairly severe impact -- the sudden appearance of a capability that, quite frankly, wasn't on our radar," said Maj. Gen. Juan Carlos Correa, who is among the top army officers assigned to find ways to counter the drone attacks. "All the measures we have employed against drones aren't enough."

 

While the world has focused on rapid development of drone actions in  Ukraine, the heavily armed and richly funded drug-trafficking groups in Colombia have quietly added drones to their arsenal as they battle overstretched police and army units. The new capability makes groups that thrive on shipping cocaine to American consumers stronger -- and harder to stop.

 

Most of the drones used in attacks here, military officials say, are commercially available models -- often made in China -- purchased online for a few hundred dollars at most and modified to carry the homemade explosives long used by Colombia's armed groups.

 

And it's not just here. Criminal groups are rapidly weaponizing drones across Latin America.

 

In western Mexico, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel -- important smugglers of cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamines to U.S. consumers -- drops C-4 explosives to drive villagers from their homes and seize territory. In fighting in Rio de Janeiro in October, the powerful Red Command gang used drones to bomb heavily armed police. In Ecuador, a key depot for cocaine being smuggled to the U.S., the authorities say the kingpins who run their operations from prisons use drones to smuggle in phones and drugs.

 

"The drone challenge in Latin America is in some ways harder than what we're seeing in Ukraine and battlefields around the world," said Henry Ziemer, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Unlike high-intensity conflict, there's no real front line in the Americas. That means it's very difficult for countries to come up with countermeasures because you're not trying to defend a front line or even a border. You're defending against organizations that are embedded in society."

 

The attacks in Colombia come as Trump has blasted the president for letting the drug trade "become the biggest business in Colombia, by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large-scale payments and subsidies from the USA."

 

Petro says his government is vigorously fighting drug gangs, while acknowledging that the latest United Nations monitoring of the drug trade shows there is more coca -- the leaf used to make cocaine -- than ever before. Colombian military data also show that the country's most powerful armed groups have roughly doubled in size to 25,000 members in the past three years. The National Liberation Army, or ELN, now has 6,700 members.

 

All are increasingly adept at drone warfare, military officials say, a trend reflected in the tempo of strikes. In 2024, there were about a dozen a month, but that has nearly doubled this year, show military data.” [1]

 

1. World News: Colombia's Gangs Deploy Drones. Forero, Juan.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 Jan 2026: A8.