This is the script for my video posted on July 27, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Colombia may be a single country on paper, but in reality its geography makes it extremely difficult to govern as one. Notoriously, the country is full of militant groups, gangs, drugs, and a polarized political environment, and geography can explain why this is the case more than almost anything else. So how exactly does Colombia’s geography dictate its fate?
The Andes Mountains split into three separate ranges as they enter Colombia, fragmenting the populated western region into isolated valleys and highland pockets, which historically produced strong regional identities and very weak integration as a nation.
The Magdalena river runs the length of populated Colombia, from the Andes down to the Caribbean near Barranquilla. The Cauca runs parallel to it through the western valleys and feeds into the Magdalena, with the combined river carrying on to the coast.
Together these rivers were the main artery for goods and people, but river transport never really scaled into national integration, because any movement east or west still meant crossing mountains.
Then there are the oceans. Colombia is the only South American state with coastlines on both the Pacific and the Caribbean.
The Caribbean side, including the cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla, has been Colombia’s main commercial window on the world and commercial output for most of its history.
But the Pacific side is among the poorest and least-governed regions and is now a primary export corridor for drugs. Buenaventura is Colombia’s largest Pacific port and its main gateway for trade with Asia. And yet the city around that port has extreme poverty and heavy control from armed groups, because the Colombian government struggles to exert control of its own.
The eastern lowlands like the Llanos Orientales and the Amazon basin are sparsely populated and peripheral to government control, which has similarly allowed armed groups to control a large share of territory.
So those are the constraints. And they’ve bound Colombia for centuries. In the 18th century, the Viceroyalty of New Granada ran its administration from the colonial capital of Bogota, high on an Andean plateau far from the coast. Being up in the mountains made it hard to reach, and that isolation shaped how power worked in the region.
Early on, Spain handed out encomienda grants to settlers, who obtained the right to demand tribute and labor from specific indigenous groups. In theory this was in exchange for protecting them and converting them to Christianity, though in practice it was a system of forced labor. Separately, private entities began to build large haciendas to profit from agriculture, ranching, or mining. This concentration of control over land, in addition to the geographical separation, is the source of many of the country’s problems.
In the early 1800s in Gran Colombia, the revolutionary Simon Bolivar pushed for a strong central state to hold the new republic together, while his rival Francisco de Paula Santander pushed for constitutional civilian rule and more autonomy for the individual regions.
This hardened into the Conservative and Liberal parties that structured Colombian politics for over a century. In 1899, the Thousand Days' War broke out between the Liberals and the Conservative-led government, driven by deep polarization, a disputed election, and an economic crisis as international coffee prices crashed.
The war was fought across Colombia, which included modern Panama at the time, and resulted in between 60k and 130k deaths, widespread property destruction, and economic ruin. Much of the death was from disease, but regardless the war left Colombia too weak to resist the 1903 separation of Panama.
The Conservatives were dominant for decades. But in 1928, Colombian Army troops fired on workers striking against the United Fruit Company, killing anywhere from a few dozen to well over a thousand. The toll is still disputed. But the scandal helped erode Conservative rule, which collapsed in 1930 amid a global depression and a split among the Conservatives.
But in 1948, Liberal populist Jorge Gaitan was assassinated in downtown Bogota, provoking riots that killed about 3000 people over only about 10 hours. This ignited another civil war called La Violencia, or The Violence, which killed at least 200k people in the span of ten years. The violence was overwhelmingly rural and driven mainly by the Liberal versus Conservative feud, though fights over land and class were tangled up in it too.
An army general named Gustavo Rojas Pinilla served under Conservative presidents during La Violencia, and in 1953 he seized power in a coup, pushing out the hardline Conservative Laureano Gomez. He ruled as a military dictator until a junta forced him out in 1957.
The Liberals and Conservatives then cut a deal. They would alternate the presidency and split offices between them. This system, called the National Front, ran from 1958 to 1974, and it stabilized elite competition while closing the system to outsiders like communists, populists, and independents.
Rojas himself came back, founded a populist party of his own, and narrowly lost a disputed election in 1970. That loss helped give birth to a guerrilla group called M-19, and Rojas died in 1975.
The closure of the political system helped produce armed alternatives like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a far-left Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that grew out of Communist-linked peasant self-defense communities and supported agrarian reform and anti-imperialism. Colombia's rugged, hard to govern terrain gave it the room to survive.
Through the 20th century, those same constraints gave guerrillas and traffickers room to operate in places the state barely reached. The cartels were the exception. Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel was a huge transnational operation, not a small local outfit, and it ran on American demand for drugs and deep official corruption as much as it ran on terrain.
In 2016, the FARC signed a peace accord with the government to end the insurgency, with rural reform, transitional justice, and a path into legal politics. After a failed referendum and renegotiation, the FARC became a legal party, now called Comunes.
Don’t get me wrong, corruption, greed, and ideological disputes obviously play major roles in Colombia’s dynamics, but geography has allowed those pieces to exist, and it drives many of the country’s geopolitical dynamics as well.
Colombia’s border with Venezuela, for example, is extremely porous, with people from both countries moving freely between them thanks to the grasslands, jungles, and even deserts that make the region difficult to fully control. This has allowed armed groups like the National Liberation Army, or ELN, to thrive. Trafficking of illegal goods has spilled into Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Panama for similar reasons.
All of this causes problems for Colombia diplomatically and economically, because countries like the US expect hard enforcement, and enforcement is extremely difficult for geographical and logistical reasons. That tension broke open in 2025 when the US decertified Colombia as a counter-drug partner for the first time since 1997, then sanctioned the president, his family, and some associates.
Since 2022, Colombia has been led by Gustavo Petro, its first left-wing president and a former member of M-19 who later served as mayor of Bogota. He’s pushed big reforms on health, pensions, and labor, wanting to centralize power rather than hand it to the disparate regions. Most of this has proven extremely difficult to implement, and his presidency has been highly volatile. In 2026, Colombian voters swung right again, narrowly electing Abelardo de la Espriella, who takes office in August.
Colombian politics are deeply fragmented. And though the electoral system and historical factors are major contributors to this, geography is in many ways the underlying source.
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I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.