The adults in María Zenaida Puliche’s house try not to cry in front of Sofía, who is turning nine years old. They take turns approaching her and taking a photo with the strawberry cake. The girl smiles and hugs her dad, her aunts, her cousins. But not her mom. Daniela Valencia was one of the 22 fatalities in an attack carried out by the dissidents of the former FARC on Saturday, April 25, in Cauca, a region in southwestern Colombia where armed groups have cornered the State and violence lurks every hour of the day. It was the terrorist attack with the most civilian victims in Colombia since 2003, just a month before the presidential elections.
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Daniela was returning home in the rural area of Cajibío when a bomb exploded on the Pan-American highway, the main road in the area. She was traveling with her neighbors on Ciro Puliche’s bus, which every Saturday took them to the neighboring town of Piendamó to sell their coffee, plantain, and panela products. She had attended a dental appointment and taken the opportunity to buy a chalkboard and some markers to give her daughter for her birthday. The Central General Staff, a dissident group of the former FARC that never accepted the 2016 peace agreement, stopped them on the road. It would have been just another of the controls that illegal groups carry out daily in much of the country, but it ended up being one of the biggest attacks in decades: the armed group detonated a cylinder bomb that, according to the dissidents, was aimed at a military contingent. Daniela’s body and those of her neighbors were disfigured and had to be buried in closed coffins.
Aunt María Zenaida, who was like a second mother to Daniela, says she is overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. “I don’t feel resentment because I don’t want my heart to harden: hatred does not sow peace. But I want to scream. One is killed alive when someone is taken away like this,” she says. Her greatest frustration is with the State, unable to respond to these crimes. “Who do you complain to? There is no one to hold accountable for our dead. Only God, who is not responsible for what humans do,” she states. She does not mention them, but the armed groups are the ones who, in much of Cauca, control access to rural areas, collect extortion, and carry out “social cleansings”: murders of alleged criminals. The State is as powerless as she is.
The return of terror
Violence in Cauca has intensified in the last two years. The peace negotiations between Gustavo Petro’s government and the Central General Staff collapsed in early 2024, after the murder of an indigenous leader who was trying to prevent the forced recruitment of some teenagers. “If it’s war, it’s war,” the president declared then. News of military bombings, cocaine seizures, dissident attacks on police stations, and cylinders deactivated or detonated on the roads became daily occurrences. The civilian population was caught in the middle.
Along the Pan-American highway, the presence of the Army and Police is barely noticeable. A lone uniformed officer explains that this is part of the public force’s strategy given their limitations in combating the armed group. “The dissidents carry out acts to lure us and set traps. So, if we move, there is an attack right away,” he comments. The order, then, is to stay as still as possible. He advises civilians not to go out at night because the armed groups are more active at those hours. “If your truck is stolen, you will never see it again, no matter if you have a GPS. No one will go looking for it,” he says. “There is no accompaniment or reaction. Simply defense if we are attacked.”
The attack in Cajibío has exacerbated the anguish of various sectors of the Cauca population. Andrés, a 22-year-old Misak indigenous man, says he passed by the attack site minutes before the explosion. “It could have been me,” he says on a bridge over the Pan-American highway, congested due to intermittent closures caused by new explosives and threats to concession workers. About 50 kilometers away, in Caldas Park in the department’s capital, Popayán, a 72-year-old lawyer expresses the same concern. “I am not calm here, nor anywhere else,” she says before clarifying that she is only there for a procedure. For her, the tranquility of a historic center with luxury hotels, gourmet restaurants, and tourists is an illusion: “If they want, they can destroy it in a second.”
Elsy Sánchez, a teacher who arrived in Popayán after being displaced by violence in southern Cauca, wonders if the dissident guerrilla attacks are related to the presidential elections on May 31. “I don’t remember living through this before. Could it be because the elections are approaching? Everyone is tense, not even people want to come downtown,” she comments. The increase in violent actions in the weeks before electoral events is common in Colombia, but no one expected an attack of the magnitude that occurred in Cajibío.
Electoral speculations
The security crisis in Cauca, a stronghold of petrismo, has entered the national debate fully. The left-wing candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda, suggested that the attack could be an attempt by the armed group to favor “far-right sectors determined to destabilize the country.” Terror, from the candidate’s perspective, could lead some voters to support the opposition’s tough-on-crime proposals. The right-wing Paloma Valencia, for her part, criticized the insinuation of an alliance between her sector and the FARC dissidents. “Now it turns out that the guerrillas have become Uribistas (…). It is they, Cepeda and this government, who have to face the disaster of their total peace.” The left-wing senator was the architect of the failed peace negotiations.
The right-wing candidate descends from a Creole elite of Cauca that consolidated immense power in the colonial era, with large estates and mining operations. Her grandfather, Guillermo León Valencia, was president between 1962 and 1966. Although she has approached her region after the Cajibío attack, a few weeks ago she acknowledged that it is a hostile territory for her and that she can only campaign in the cities of Popayán and Santander de Quilichao. “It is a very petrista land because class hatred was sown a long time ago,” she said. In contrast, Cepeda’s running mate, Aída Quilcué, belongs to the Nasa people of Cauca and has denounced the dispossession suffered by indigenous people. She is a key figure in the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC), an organization that has developed great social mobilization capacity.
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A supporter of Valencia is Isabella Victoria Rojas, director of the Cauca Society of Farmers and Ranchers. “I want someone who does what needs to be done, who doesn’t hesitate and who asks for support from Colombia’s historical allies to equip the Armed Forces,” she says during an interview in her office, decorated with paintings of colonial estates and illustrious men from the founding of Popayán. She states that an attack in the Cauca capital is “imminent” and that she almost daily receives reports of attacks on medium and large landowners throughout the department: a security guard murdered, machinery set on fire, hundreds of hectares taken. She does not understand how petrismo swept the March legislative elections. She considers that what happened in Cajibío was an attempt by the FARC dissidents to “terrorize people” so they vote for Cepeda. “It is a show of power of what they are capable of doing if the right wins.”
On the opposite side is Orlando Baicué, spiritual guide of the Nasa people. “The armed groups are doing a favor to the far right. The attack was a provocation to generate chaos and for society to choose the ‘saviors’ who will militarize everything,” he says during a break in a CRIC meeting at the Cofradía reservation, near Popayán. He acknowledges that the armed groups “took advantage of the peace negotiations to arm themselves secretly” in recent years and that many indigenous youths join them due to lack of opportunities. The frustration reaches the point that several of his companions want to cast blank votes. “I am convincing them not to do it. I call not to lose hope, to understand that more could not be done because [the opponents] have tied the hands of our representative [Petro],” he says before emphasizing that the only thing he fears is not playing the transverse flute he carries everywhere.
What unites Rojas and Baicué is that neither is enthusiastic about the Cauca candidacies. “Cepeda’s advisors in Bogotá do not read the contexts. They did not need to place an indigenous woman to convince us, but to find someone who attracted the center. And, besides, they imposed her on us without an internal consultation, which is what we criticized about traditional parties,” says the indigenous leader. The agricultural and livestock guild leader is skeptical that the arrival of a Cauca native to the Presidency will improve the region’s situation: “We have placed 15 presidents [of the now dissolved Gran Cauca] and she would be number 16. If that were important, one would expect us to be much better. But it may be an opportunity. Cauca deserves that one of its daughters returns what it owes.”
Electoral apathy, faced with right- and left-wing recipes that have not worked, is evident. “The elections? The important thing now is the violence. How many innocent souls have already been lost?” replies a man buying potatoes in downtown Cajibío. However, Diego Jaramillo, a retired professor from the University of Cauca and close to the indigenous movement, is optimistic about petrismo’s possibilities. He recalls that Cauca was one of the departments with the highest vote in the primaries in which Cepeda was chosen as candidate, in October. “Petro has managed to make some sectors of the department feel represented. And his message has resonated: ‘Maybe today it couldn’t be done, but later it will,’” he says. According to him, it is unlikely that the attacks will cause a shift to the right: “People’s sensitivity is not built only with this.”
The change that did not come
The children, nephews, and brothers of driver José Ciro Puliche gather in the room where they organized the wake the day before. There are still funeral flowers and a photo in which he smiles next to his “chiva,” the colorful bus he was traveling on with his neighbors at the time of the attack. Robinson Puliche, his 21-year-old son, says he will miss the jokes they shared about football: he supports Deportivo Cali and his dad was a fan of América de Cali, two rival teams. He will also miss other neighbors who died: Doña Libia, who gave love advice; Doña Teodomira, who cooked beef for him when he was a child and did not want to eat fish; and Daniela, whom he knew from parties at night in the town and community work to repair the rural road.
Elmer Puliche, Ciro’s nephew, says he voted for Petro four years ago and hoped he would change the historical abandonment faced by indigenous people, Afro-descendants, and peasants of Cauca. “I expected him to fulfill at least 50% of what he promised, but he didn’t even reach 10%, especially on peace issues,” he states. Romulo, Ciro’s brother, rejects the president’s explanations about Congress blockages or the inefficiency of his ministers to make social changes. “A good leader does not look for culprits but acts and seeks solutions,” he adds.
No one understands the logic of the FARC dissidents, who in recent years have lost any trace of political vindication and have become criminal groups. “They don’t care about taking peasants, who are the ones who suffer the most,” says Angela, Ciro’s eldest daughter. Robinson rejects a statement in which the Central General Staff defined the attack in Cajibío as “a mistake,” “a regrettable incident,” a “collateral effect.” “How can it be a simple miscalculation that they killed 22 innocent people?” he says.
The family has no illusions that things will improve but rules out any possibility of leaving Cauca. Robinson says that once his dad told him he had refused to sell his farm. “He told me: ‘This land saw me grow up and I want to stay until the last day,’” he emphasizes. He died on his land, in a war that neither the State nor politicians yet know how to stop.
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