Colombia’s former president Álvaro Uribe, the country’s turnaround expert, is a bundle of energy and ideas at 73.

His drive to address the country’s decline stemmed from his family; he was born in the midst of political violence and grew inspired by his mother’s political activism and patriotic commitment as well as his father’s work discipline which made him realise that among the bipartisan and “Marxist-Leninist violence, drug trafficking, guerrilla groups, and paramilitaries, Colombia was a country with every possibility, but held back by violence”. That warranted every effort, from his perspective, “to change its historical course”.

His subsequent success seeded the term Uribismo –a combination of tough security policies, economic revitalisation, and a style of governance which connects with ordinary people. His leadership tipped the country away from failure towards function in less than a decade.

Now he appears doubly determined with the prospect of political change once more on the horizon with the upcoming presidential election on 31 May. This will have impacts likely beyond its own borders, given both Colombia’s record of state recovery this century and its rank as the fifth largest territory and third most populous country in Latin America.

Colombia, for instance, shadows South Africa in size, geography, and social complexity.

Its population of 52 million is around one-fifth smaller than that of South Africa. But its 2024 per capita income of $6 864 (versus SA’s $5 716) is higher, with the two countries on very different recent growth trajectories.

They both, however, share a history of violent crime, in South Africa’s case, fuelled by racial and economic exclusion, along with ineffective security forces; in Colombia’s, based on a volatile cocktail of drugs, inequality, and ungoverned spaces. There are other physical similarities: South Africa ranks as the 25th largest territory worldwide, with 1.22 million square kilometres; Colombia is 26th with 1.14 million sq./km.

And there are differences aside from the obvious: Colombia’s period of Spanish colonialism ended in 1819. More relevant, this century has been overwhelmingly good to Colombia. Its per capita income has increased from $4 020 in 2000, when South Africa’s was at $4 700.

Turn around

Under Uribe’s leadership from 2002 until 2010, Colombia managed to turn around both its security and growth circumstances. While the last 17 years of this century, the second half of the African National Congress’s 32 years in power have been dismal for South Africa in terms of economic growth, with a 5% decline in real per capita incomes since 2008, Colombia’s performance has, by comparison, risen by 36% over the same period enabling the greatest reduction in poverty in the country’s history.

This process of security stabilisation and economic growth was enabled through an international assistance scheme known as PLAN Colombia, aimed at tackling a vicious cycle of violence, low investment, and poverty.

But underlying all of this, said Uribe in an interview with the authors last month, was a need to address a crisis of confidence.

“Many Colombian governments exhausted all their political capital attempting to reach peace through political dialogue,” he says. The result was the increased military strength of illegal armed groups and a rapid expansion in criminal activities during the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, “68% thought the country was going in a negative track,” he reminds. One-third of the country was under the control of guerrillas, another one-third under paramilitaries, and the rest remained “at risk”. As a result, he remarks, “fear impacted in the Colombian people’s mindset,” an uncertainty compounded by the lack of investment, the drain on human capital and a tangible sense of insecurity on Colombia’s roads.

As president, he aimed to improve social cohesion not by words alone but through clear deeds: improving education standards, providing universal healthcare, ensuring access to finance, creating jobs, and ensuring connectivity. Achieving investment targets was dependent in turn on security, sound macro-economics, tax, and other incentives, access to markets (not least through the signing of ten free trade agreements) and improving competitiveness through better infrastructure, regulations, and logistical chains. Security would be achieved as a “democratic value for all” by confronting criminality while avoiding the temptation of applying martial law, and ensuring human rights protections. These objectives were resumed by Uribe as the ‘three eggs’ of his government: social policy, investment attraction and defence and security policy.

It worked. Getting stuff done with an energetic person at the helm trumped interminable processology and reinstated confidence in the state.

Startling

The results were startling. During Uribe’s two terms in office, homicides halved to 15 000 annually, kidnappings to less than 10% of their 2002 figure, and the number of municipalities without mayors (of a total of 1122) fell from 450 to zero, and without police from 158 to zero. This was achieved partly thanks to a steep increase in the security budget during his presidency.

Paramilitary groups were dismantled along with the guerrilla forces, which had waged war since the early 1960s, which at one point had threatened the capital, Bogota. Some 53 000 guerrillas and paramilitaries were demobilised leading to the reintegration of some militias into society. The area under coca cultivation decreased to 48 000 hectares, the largest-ever reduction in the country’s history.

Colombia was able to achieve its highest economic growth in more than 20 years through a foreign direct investment boom, lifting investment as a percentage of GDP from 16.5% to 24.6% during Uribe’s eight years. Investors were attracted by fiscal incentives but also stability agreements. Inflation fell from 7% to 2.5% during this time. Tourism boomed with improved security, while annual exports more than tripled from $11 billion to US$39 billion.

This was not only due to large firms. The government’s microlending portfolio increased tenfold to a total of over $4 billion between 2002 and 2010.

Behind this were administrative reforms intent on reducing the number of state entities and downsizing the public sector to create “a less bureaucratic state, a more social state”. This included the “democratic capitalisation of Ecopetrol”, the state oil company, in which half a million people became shareholders. Extreme poverty fell countrywide from 18% to 8.5% during this time, and poverty overall from 54% to 37%.

Overall, Uribe observes, “We built governance upon popular support, not upon pork barrel politics to the people of Congress.”

Red lines

In August 2010, Uribe was followed as president by his minister of defence, Juan Manuel Santos, who, after being elected on his predecessor’s raft of accomplishments, unexpectedly launched into negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). With Venezuela and Cuba as mediators, Uribe says that this “trespassed’ all the ‘red lines” on human rights violations, equating “our armed forces with terrorists’” Although a referendum was held and “Santos had said that with a ‘No’ vote, his government was going to drop the agreement”, he pushed it through Congress regardless after losing the vote.

While the 2016 peace deal might have officially ended hostilities, bringing the FARC into government had, however, the corrosive effect of legitimising its criminal activities. The presidency of Iván Duque, which followed Santos, did little to shift the country off its downward path, which was expedited especially once Gustavo Petro took office as the country’s first left-wing leader in August 2022.

Petro brought a different dimension to government. His “total peace” campaign looked, in the words of The Economist, “more like a slogan rather than an achievable goal”. With the armed forces weakened and drug production and trafficking on the rise, bureaucratic growth overshadowed economic growth. This new take on the country’s security problems tried to bring to the negotiation table not only the guerrillas, but also drug trafficking cartels and some of the FARC groups that had returned to arms after signing the Santos peace.

Total peace was attempted by taking a bigger piece of the pie for government.

Government service provision contracts have grown by more than 150% during the Petro years, and 11 embassies and 24 consulates have been created, along with an additional 200 000 government posts. The government became, in the process, the third-largest employer. When Uribe left office, the unemployment rate had fallen to under 12%.

Between 2006 and 2015, economic growth in Colombia averaged 5%, almost twice the Latin American number. Since 2016, annual economic growth has averaged around 2.5%.

Now the number of Colombians outside the formal labour market has reached nearly 15 million people, a figure only surpassed by the Covid years, with more than half the population in informal sector employment, including nearly 10 million self-employed workers, or rebusque. While unemployment today registers just under 10%, this number masks both growing informality and the increase in the percentage of workers earning less than the minimum wage, now just under half of those employed.

As a consequence, from 2022 to 2024, Colombia recorded the largest exodus of talent in recent history: over 1.3 million people permanently left the country, including 90 000 young people with professional or technical qualifications. In 2024, Venezuela and Colombia ranked among the five countries with the highest number of asylum applications registered in the United States (US) and Europe, alongside Syria, Afghanistan, and India.

As a result of the increase in state employment and the economic downturn, there is today a growing fiscal crisis to manage, external debt having risen from $185 billion in 2022 to $246 billion in March 2024, now touching 60% of GDP. To an extent, this fiscal free-for-all has been buffered by a high gold price (Colombia produces around 60 tonnes a year, South Africa 100 tonnes), record remittances, and a bumper coffee harvest, but the problems are now deep-rooted and potentially deadly.

The investment to GDP ratio fell to 16% in 2025, the lowest level in six decades. Rather than investment, the main drivers of growth were private consumption and public spending. Inflation was at 19.2% in 2024 and 14.1% in 2025.

Coca

By 2023, according to United Nations data, the area under coca cultivation was 253 000 hectares, with cocaine production touching 2 700 tonnes. This was the tenth consecutive year of increasing production as a result of a combination of an increase in the area under cultivation, the end of government aerial spraying, and better agronomy.

Petro has, in the view of his opponents, presided over a failure to rein in armed insurgent groups, of which drug trafficking numbers are but one metric. Petro’s own guerrilla past (operating under the alias “Aureliano”, he was a member of the 19th of April Movement, commonly known as M-19, an urban guerrilla group formed in the 1970s) is seen to have directly assisted his former comrades.

Another metric is in the rise of crime more generally, especially kidnappings and extortion. Organised criminal groups are now present in 518 municipalities, including the notorious “Gulf Clan”, with around 10 000 members, of which over one-third are considered to be heavily armed fighters.

Total peace has not, in fact, produced peace.

Now Uribe is backing Senator Paloma Valencia to win in the May presidential election. Having already won the March primary for the centre-right coalition, she will most likely face the candidate of Petro’s party, the Historical Pact, Iván Cepeda, in a second-round run-off.

“Petro has been a Marxist-oriented politician,” says Uribe, “pro-Maduro and pro-Cuba, and against the US. He was permissive of an illegal economy and narco-trafficking. With his election, many Colombians made a mistake.” He warns that Petro’s candidate this time, Cepeda, will be “worse, a rigid Marxist.”

There is little reason for Uribe to be sympathetic to a government which has set out to destroy his political legacy through persecution. In August 2025 he was sentenced in the first instance to 12 years of house detention following allegations that his lawyer tried to induce jailed paramilitaries to lie. This stems from Uribe's supposed connections to paramilitary groups during his time as mayor in his native Medellin and governor of Antioquia in the 1980s and 1990s. The ruling reached the Superior Court of Bogotá, which acquitted him on appeal. The case is currently before the Supreme Court of Justice.

Unseating Petro’s populism won’t be an easy struggle. “The left has a lot of power,” warns Juan-Carlos Pinzon, a former defence minister who, like Paloma, stood on a centre-right ticket in the primaries, finishing fourth out of nine candidates. “They have a budget for corruption, criminal cells for influence, and territorial cells for control.”

Two economies

Colombia has two economies, says Uribe, one real and the other informal. To recover, the former requires creating the conditions for investment to create jobs, reducing the deficit and lowering public indebtedness to no more than 50% of GDP. The latter, the informal, illegal economy, requires dealing with drug production and trafficking and the criminal ecosystem around it, both outside and inside the state.

To win, observes Uribe, Paloma will have “to get out there on the streets” and sell her plan for reactivating growth: reactivating the private sector, reducing government numbers by 30%, taking the fight to criminal gangs and “move forward with social programmes, especially for women.”

“Colombia is not a fight between right and left,” he says, “but between a country with freedoms and social welfare on the one hand and ‘statification’ on the other.”

Turning this around will require many of the reformist traits discernible during his presidency: a macro-vision with micro-management, the achievement of early victories to create a sense of confidence and momentum, the establishment of dialogue with communities, just as Uribe did with his weekly Community Councils, or Consejos Comunitarios where he met directly in local municipalities allowing citizens to air their grievances and discuss security issues, thus changing the way in which the government connected with citizens. Always there is an imperative, Uribe says, “to promise dedication, demonstrate hard work and say the truth”. And finally, similarly, always “assume responsibility in difficulties and delegate success.”

This is not a bad guide for South Africa.

Mills and Hartley are with the Platform for African Democrats; Molina is an Associate professor at Universidad de las Hespérides in Spain.