The presidential motorcade cut through the deserted streets of Santa Marta before dawn, tyres crunching on glass and debris where tourists once sipped cocktails on the malecón. At the wheel: a new president, a pistol holstered openly at his hip, rolling into a city held hostage by the very gangs his predecessor tried to negotiate with.
Abelardo De La Espriella didn’t hide the weapon. Didn’t tuck it beneath a jacket or leave it in the armoured SUV. The message was deliberate, unmistakable, and entirely without precedent in modern Colombian politics: the state would not be cowed.
A City Under Siege
Santa Marta, the pearl of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, has been paralysed for seventy-two hours. Shuttered hotels. Empty beaches. The famous rodadero — normally thrumming with domestic tourists and foreign backpackers — reduced to a ghost town patrolled by masked men on motorcycles.
The shutdown began Friday evening, hours after elite police units killed alias “El Zarco,” the operational commander of Los Pachencos, the criminal franchise that has extorted, trafficked, and terrorised this region for over a decade. By midnight, the group had declared an “armed strike” — a paramilitary euphemism for total economic asphyxiation. Shopkeepers who opened their doors found threatening pamphlets nailed to their frames. Drivers who ignored the stop-work order had their vehicles torched.
Three dead. Twelve injured. A tourist from Medellín shot in the leg for photographing a barricade.
The President’s Gamble
De La Espriella, sworn in barely three weeks ago on a platform of “territorial recovery” and “zero impunity,” flew in from Bogotá against the counsel of his security detail. His defence minister urged a video address. His intelligence chief warned of snipers positioned in the hills above the historic centre.
The president listened. Then he strapped on his personal sidearm — a Glock 19, registered, licensed, the same weapon he carried as a congressman from Antioquia — and boarded the helicopter.
“Colombia does not negotiate with those who terrorise its citizens,” he told reporters on the tarmac at Simón Bolívar International Airport, the gun visible beneath his open guayabera. “We govern. They obey. That equation has been forgotten. Today we remind them.”
The imagery was electric. Within hours, the photograph — president armed, flanked by soldiers, walking the abandoned boardwalk where families pushed strollers last week — dominated every newspaper front page and social feed from Cartagena to Cúcuta.
Calculated Risk or Reckless Theatre?
Critics called it theatrics. Senator Clara Velasco of the Historic Pact coalition denounced “a dangerous performative masculinity that endangers the very communities it claims to protect.” The ombudsman’s office warned that presidential visibility could trigger retaliatory violence against civilians trapped in the city’s poorer barrios.
But in the neighbourhoods where Los Pachencos collect weekly “vacunas” — protection payments — from bakers, mechanics, and taxi drivers, the reaction was different.
“They killed El Zarco and the gang burned the city down,” said María Fernanda Gutiérrez, who runs a fried fish stand near the market plaza. “The president comes with his gun and walks where we walk. Maybe things change. Maybe they don’t. But today, for the first time in years, I feel like someone in Bogotá knows we exist.”
The Criminal Architecture
Los Pachencos — named for the Pachencas River where the group originated — evolved from the demobilisation of the AUC paramilitaries in the mid-2000s. They never truly disbanded. They mutated. Today they control micro-trafficking corridors, fuel theft from the Santa Marta–Barranquilla pipeline, and the extortion economy that bleeds the city’s informal sector dry.
El Zarco, whose real name was José Miguel Rodríguez Paredes, had led the organisation’s urban front since 2019. His death represented the most significant operational blow to the group in years. But the speed and coordination of the retaliatory shutdown suggested a command structure deeper and more resilient than authorities acknowledged.
Intelligence intercepts obtained by this publication indicate the order came from “El Viejo” — the group’s shadowy supreme leader, believed to be hiding in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The lockdown was not spontaneous. It was rehearsed.
Why it Matters
Santa Marta is more than a tourist postcard; it is a stress test for a presidency defined by its promise to reclaim territory from criminal governance. If De La Espriella’s armed walkabout translates into sustained military pressure, intelligence-led dismantling of Los Pachencos’ financial architecture, and — crucially — protection for the communities who have lived under their thumb, the symbolism becomes strategy. If it ends in a photo opportunity and a return to business-as-usual extortion, the president will have handed his opponents a metaphor they will wield for years: a leader playing cowboy while the city burns. The gun at his hip is not the story. What he does next is.
