As U.S. Support Vanishes, a Nation’s Postwar Peace Teeters

When Colombia signed a landmark peace agreement with rebels in 2016, it was celebrated internationally for ending a war that had ravaged much of the country for decades. The United States bolstered the peace efforts, helping displaced farmers return to their land and helping prosecute war crimes.

Now, support from the U.S. government — the agreement’s biggest foreign economic backer — has vanished.

As the Trump administration has withdrawn most foreign assistance globally, including dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, it has undercut a deal designed, in part, to curtail the flow of drugs to the United States.

“This puts wind in the wings of armed groups,” said León Valencia, director of the Bogotá-based Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, an organization that works on post-conflict issues and had received U.S. funds. “They can tell demobilized guerrillas or victims that the government signed a peace agreement and didn’t keep its promise.”

Since 2001, U.S.A.I.D. has spent more in Colombia than any other South American country, about $3.9 billion.

While the U.S. Defense and State Departments funneled military spending in the 2000s toward a much-debated plan to eradicate coca farming, U.S.A.I.D. poured money into related economic development projects.

Then, after Colombia signed the peace deal with the country’s biggest and oldest guerrilla group, the United States also directed spending to projects that helped Colombian officials fulfill the agreement — while also giving farmers alternatives to cultivating coca leaves, the base for cocaine. The rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had been fighting the government for six decades.

Compounding Colombia’s challenges during the second Trump administration has been the withdrawal of support from the State Department, which helped pay for efforts like major counternarcotics operations and the tedious process of removing land mines.

The results have been on-the-ground setbacks for the military and police that could benefit criminal groups.

“It’s hard to overstate what a big paradigm shift this is for the Colombians because they’re so interconnected with the Americans,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, which monitors and tries to prevent armed conflicts. “It’s a tectonic shift that the U.S. might not always be there.”

In small towns and rural areas of Colombia where armed groups are still active, U.S.A.I.D. projects had been vital to helping maintain stability, according to interviews with 14 current or former agency employees or contractors based in Colombia. Most declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak, and out of concern that it would jeopardize the possibility of future work.

“There are parts of the country where there’s the bad guys and then there’s U.S.A.I.D.,” said one former contractor, who was working with a nonprofit that suspended its work trying to prevent young people from joining armed groups, after its U.S. financing was stopped.

U.S.A.I.D. had also helped Colombia provide services for the more than 2.8 million migrants from Venezuela who have arrived in the last decade, making Colombia the world’s largest recipient of people fleeing Venezuela’s political and economic crisis.

Still, American support isn’t entirely welcomed in Colombia. Many conservative politicians agree with the Trump administration’s claims that it’s an inefficient use of funds, while some leftist politicians say U.S. money is an instrument to control Colombian society.

Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, questioned why U.S. aid was going toward beefing up the country’s immigration and customs agencies, saying that type of spending infringed on the country’s sovereignty.

“Trump is right,” Mr. Petro said in a televised address. “Take your money.”

Colombia’s armed conflict goes back generations. Rooted in frustration over inequality and land distribution, it morphed into a complex battle among leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels and the government, fueled by drug money and other illicit business.

While FARC laid down its arms, offshoots remain, and existing and new armed groups have gained strength, according to analysts.

Today, the country faces eight separate armed conflicts, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which described the country’s humanitarian situation as reaching its most critical point since the signing of the peace accord.

Ariel Ávila, a senator for the Green Party who worked in peace-related projects before holding office, said U.S.A.I.D.’s withdrawal eliminated resources for a web of nonprofits that relied on U.S. support for democracy-building efforts, some of which have shut down.

“For me, U.S.A.I.D. hasn’t been just about peace building,” Mr. Ávila said. “It’s been an agent for democracy.”

Central to helping the country cement a lasting peace has been the creation of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a court dedicated to trying crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the internal conflict, which left at least 450,000 people dead.

American assistance — through U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department — represents about 10 percent of the court’s foreign support, court officials said.

The U.S. government provided technical and logistical support in three of the court’s large-scale cases — each representing thousands of victims — on sex crimes, crimes targeting Black and Indigenous people, and the systematic murder of leftist politicians. The agency also provided investigative tools, such as DNA test kits, to identify bodies found in mass graves.

The loss of U.S. help will slow down the court’s work, court officials said, which is worrisome because it has a 15-year deadline to reach verdicts and sentences in cases involving tens of thousands of victims and defendants living in rural and difficult to reach areas, said Judge Alejandro Ramelli, president of the court.

“We’re committed to finding the answers to thousands of questions that the victims have had for many years and have never had answered,” Mr. Ramelli said. “International aid is essential to being able to find that truth.”

U.S.A.I.D. funding also helped the Colombian government map millions of acres in conflict-afflicted territories, which was key to the peace deal. Land inequality had been a core grievance since fighting erupted, so the government promised to give formal ownership to poor farmers working in rural lands.

Government officials are in the process of mapping broad chunks of territory for which little or no formal government record exists. Colombia’s National Land Agency, which oversees the process, said the U.S. government helped carry out land surveys, develop safety protocols for work in conflict areas and identify land used for illegal crops.

Officials have mapped more than 3.2 million acres through a program funded by U.S.A.I.D. Just in the town of Cáceres, in the mountainous Antioquia region, they were able to issue titles to 230 families who agreed to stop farming coca leaves in exchange for formal land ownership.

Without the support, much of that mapping is on hold because the National Land Agency does not have the budget to complete the work on its own, the agency said. “The importance of U.S.A.I.D. is evident,” the agency said in a statement.

U.S.A.I.D. support has also been key in regions experiencing new conflict.

In the northeastern Catatumbo region, near the Venezuela border, the country is seeing its worst period of violence in a generation. Since January, 106 people have been killed and more than 64,000 displaced from their homes, according to a local government count.

Theylor Villegas, 27, is among the displaced. In 2019, he helped found Corporación Pride, an L.G.B.T. advocacy group in the Catatumbo region, and last year his organization won a U.S.A.I.D.-financed contract to track violence affecting women, young people and minority groups.

In January, two major events flipped Mr. Villegas’s life upside down: Widespread gunfire erupted between offshoots of the disbanded FARC guerrillas, and the Trump administration ordered a global freeze on foreign aid. Mr. Villegas was forced to flee the region and lost both his contract and U.S.-sponsored psychological and legal support he was receiving for his work.

Now, Mr. Villegas’s future is uncertain, and his organization’s work tracking and supporting victims in one of Colombia’s most violent regions is on hold.

“I feel impotent,” he said. “An organization like ours in this part of the world rarely gets noticed.”