A stillness hung over the muddy waters of the Caguán River, on the fringes of the Colombian Amazon.

In the town of Cartagena del Chairá, boats rested against the riverbank, and silence had swallowed the rumble of engines that would ordinarily sputter along the dirt roads.

But despite the apparent calm, there was no sense of peace.

“People are scared. We are in a very difficult situation. We can’t move for food, supplies or anything. Many children can’t even go to school,” said resident David Rincon, who asked to use a pseudonym.

Days earlier, on May 12, community members received an audio message banning any movement by road or river.

The message had come from the Carolina Ramirez Front of the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), one of the many groups fighting in a long-simmering conflict that has gripped Colombia since the 1960s.

The restrictions had effectively cut off parts of the department of Caqueta. Defying orders was not an option. “If you don’t comply, they threaten you — or worse,” Rincon told Al Jazeera.

But an end to the decades-old conflict has proven elusive for the government of Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro. And that could weaken his left-wing coalition ahead of the country’s presidential election on May 31.

“There is no peace or calm for anyone,” Rincon said. “You don’t know what will happen next. You just don’t know what to do.”

Petro’s flagship policy

Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing leader, was elected in 2022 on a promise of delivering “total peace” to the conflict-ravaged country.

That phrase became the name of his flagship policy, aimed at negotiating solutions with armed rebels and criminal groups to end the fighting.

But Petro has yet to achieve lasting peace. Since he took office, the number of active fighters in the conflict has more than doubled, rising from about 13,000 in 2022 to roughly 27,000 by the end of 2025, according to the Colombian think tank Fundación Ideas Para la Paz (FIP).

Violent incidents have escalated too, with the number of disputes last year between armed groups reaching their highest level in a decade, an increase of 34 percent over 2024.

Now, what was once one of Petro’s most ambitious policies has become one of his most contested.

In Sunday’s presidential race, only one leading presidential candidate has committed to continuing the “Total Peace” plan. The others have pledged to abandon it. Experts warn that the policy is widely seen as a political liability.

“Total Peace is in the red,” said Javier Florez, the director of conflict and security at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz, a think tank.

“It owes results to the country but leaves it with armed groups and networks of organised violence that are stronger, with greater territorial expansion and technological sophistication.”

A different kind of conflict

Petro’s government has pointed to several challenges that have stood in the way of the “Total Peace” plan.

Among them was the fracturing of Colombia’s armed rebel groups over the past decade.

In 2016, Colombia’s government struck a peace deal with the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

But not all the FARC fighters agreed to surrender their weapons. Some splintered off and formed their own groups.

“From one day to the next, there wasn’t one FARC any more, but three or four FARCs,” said Yezid Arteta, a former FARC member who is now part of the government’s negotiation teams.

In the years since the 2016 peace deal, Colombia’s armed conflict began to look different.

The fight was no longer centred on a small number of hierarchical organisations. Instead, it had become a patchwork of smaller groups competing over territory and illicit economies.

“When President Petro came to office, what remained were the (smaller) groups — fragments of war, scattered pieces of conflict across the country,” Arteta explained.

Experts say these fragmented groups are less driven by ideology and more motivated by building criminal economies.

The fragmentation also made negotiations more difficult. For a ceasefire to last, it had to involve not only the government but also rival armed groups.

Arteta called Petro’s initial approach “somewhat romantic”. It assumed a left-wing government could more easily bring armed groups to the table — which it did — and drive social transformation.

But the armed groups and criminal networks came to the negotiating table with their own demands.

At first, some baulked at the prospect of ending kidnappings for ransom, a major source of income. Others resisted efforts to disrupt coca production — the raw material in cocaine — during periods of negotiations and ceasefire.

One group, the Clan del Golfo, also pushed to be treated as a political actor rather than a criminal organisation in order to secure judicial leniency, including reduced sentences and protection against extradition.

“It’s harder because groups set the bar much higher. Their expectations were higher,” Arteta told Al Jazeera.

Shaky implementation

That said, the Petro government did manage to mint deals with several prominent armed groups.

In 2023, for instance, it struck ceasefires with the Clan del Golfo and the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), a FARC offshoot.

Within months, however, several agreements had already begun to break down amid attacks on security forces and renewed violence in key regions.

Florez, the think tank director, notes that Petro approached these negotiations differently than some of his predecessors.

His government engaged multiple groups in talks simultaneously — both rebels and criminal networks — and his negotiators were quick to seek ceasefires, rather than waiting to iron out more detailed peace frameworks.

“This caused a lot of disorder in state offensive operations,” Florez said. Military leaders, he explained, “did not know whether (they) could act or against whom”.

Florez added that the negotiators became overstretched, juggling too many parallel talks.

“You have to try new things — but ultimately, it didn’t work,” he said.

Some critics, particularly on the right, believe the strategy ultimately backfired. They argue that the negotiations — and the on-again, off-again ceasefires — gave criminal networks and rebel groups time to reorganise and consolidate territory. That, in turn, weakened the government’s hand.

Laura Bonilla, the deputy director of the Fundación Paz y Reconciliación (PARES), a research nonprofit, is among those with reservations about “Total Peace”. She believes the policy has not worked as intended.

However, she believes the plan has become a “political scapegoat”, particularly in Colombia’s heated election season.

“It was very poorly implemented,” Bonilla said, “but groups do not grow because of dialogue. They grow because of money, resources and people.”

The solution, she added, is not to abandon negotiations entirely, but to explore other avenues for pressuring armed groups, including by attacking their financial underpinnings.

She would also like to see clearer boundaries established between peace talks and state security initiatives.

“Many people blame Petro or Total Peace for insecurity, but that is not correct. Total Peace is not responsible for that,” she said. “The mistake was making expectations too high, which created huge disappointment.”

Continuation or abandonment

With the presidential election days away, the fate of the “Total Peace” project has become one of the central divides in the race, with only one candidate pledging to take the policy forward.

Senator Ivan Cepeda, a close ally of President Petro, says he will continue negotiations with armed groups if elected, arguing that Colombia’s conflict cannot be resolved through military force alone.

But right-wing candidates, such as Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella, have called for a decisive break with the “Total Peace” approach.

Valencia, a senator from Cauca, a region heavily affected by armed conflict, has argued against negotiations and called for a stronger military response.

Following recent attacks, including a bus bombing in Cauca that killed 20 people, she said the state must respond “with the iron fist of a Colombian woman”.

De la Espriella, a right-wing outsider nicknamed “The Tiger”, has presented himself as a fan of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who champions mass arrests as a solution to crime.

If elected, de la Espriella said one of his first acts in office would be to end Petro’s peace experiment.

“The blood being shed today is a direct consequence of Gustavo Petro’s so-called ‘Total Peace’ — a sham policy,” he said at a recent rally in Cali. “In our government, there will be no peace processes.”

He added that his approach would be defined by strong military action. “The peace we believe in is one imposed through weapons and the laws of the republic: submission or neutralisation.”

Analysts say this hardline rhetoric largely reflects the public mood, as frustration over the lack of security grows. Security consistently ranks among voters’ top concerns.

“Society in general has become very closed off to seeing dialogue and negotiation as legitimate tools for addressing Colombia’s problems of violence and insecurity, because many people associate that vision of peace with what is happening now,” Flórez said.

But he warned that blaming “Total Peace” alone for the rising insecurity is too simplistic — and abandoning it completely risks further entrenching the country’s conflict.

Varying results

Experts say Petro’s “Total Peace” project will ultimately be remembered as yielding mixed results.

Luis Gregorio Moreno, a former government adviser involved in talks in the city of Quibdo, noted that the Petro administration extended its negotiations to urban criminal groups, an unprecedented step.

But he voiced frustration with the government’s inability to follow through with solutions.

Local discussions had focused on creating jobs and opportunities for young people, to break the cycle of displacement and poverty in Colombia. But bureaucratic delays prevented deals from being implemented.

“We were very frustrated because we had managed to understand what armed leaders wanted,” Moreno said. “If agreements had been implemented, the violence peak in 2024 would not have happened.”

Talks in Quibdo remain open, though progress has slowed. “Our communities are tired of violence,” Moreno explained. “It’s always better to have an imperfect peace than a perfect war.”

Meanwhile, Edilson Sánchez, a former FARC fighter who signed Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement, has been discouraged by the continuing violence.

When Sánchez laid down his weapons in 2016, he believed the war had ended.

Nearly a decade later, in January 2025, he and his family were displaced when violence erupted across northern Colombia. They were evacuated from their village by military helicopter.

“Since then, the bloodshed has not stopped, day or night. Death has become like daily bread. It constantly knocks on people’s doors,” he said.

Sanchez and his family were relocated to the nearby city of Cucuta for a few months, but they feared the violence would eventually reach them, as warring groups expanded their influence in strategic border areas.

Now, he, his wife and his four children live in another region of Colombia. “I am living away from home in a small green tent,” Sanchez said. “It has not been easy.”

Still, Sánchez said he is not ready to abandon the idea behind the “Total Peace” policy.

“Peace, and the pursuit of it, is the only way forward we currently have.”