For years, the Colombian state maintained its position about how guerrillas’ involvement with drug trafficking made them lose their political and/or ideological nature. Political and military sectors supported this approach and used the term narco-guerrilla or narco-terrorists. The peace process initiated in 2012 seemed to alter this narrative.
This article analyses how Colombia’s peace process had a contradictory effect on the ‘narco-terrorist’ characterization of the FARC-EP: it opened windows of opportunity both for more peace-prone discourses, and for an even more virulent version of the criminalisation of the guerrillas.