The Clan del Golfo, which has origins in right-wing paramilitary organisations and calls itself the Gaitanista Army of Colombia, is responsible for shipping hundreds of tonnes of cocaine annually to the United States and Europe, according to Colombian military intelligence.
The group of 7,500 members poses one of the main security challenges faced by the country's leftist government and has been engaged in talks with the Bogota government aimed at demobilisation in exchange for judicial benefits and security guarantees.
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro has sought, since his election in 2022, to negotiate the disarmament and demobilisation of various groups in the Latin American nation, the world's largest producer of cocaine.
"Colombia chooses negotiated peace and thanks all the nations that accompany us on this path," government representative Agueda Gomez said ahead of the signing.
The agreement, the so-called "Commitment to Peace in Doha", was mediated by Qatar, Norway, Switzerland and Spain.
The mediators explained that the commitment signed by the two parties worked on two tracks.
The first would deal with drug production and the recruitment of adolescents and children from the Clan del Golfo across 15 designated territories.
The second track is to reintegrate child soldiers into society.
"This process demonstrates the commitment of the joint command... to peace with the territories, the persons deprived of liberty in national and international prisons belonging to the Gaitanista Army of Colombia," the group's representative Luis Armando Perez Castaneda said.
The Clan del Golfo considers itself a political group and demands to be recognised as such, in part, to receive judicial treatment similar to that of guerrillas and paramilitary squads.
It is the largest illegal armed group in Colombia, following the historic peace agreement with the now-defunct FARC guerrilla group in 2016.
"This declaration represents a step towards the disarmament... and then the building of peace," Qatar's chief negotiator Mohammed Al-Khulaifi said.
"There will remain many obstacles and challenges that must be overcome, and we will continue our role as mediators in order to help the two parties take additional steps," he added.
New US strike on alleged drug boat in Pacific kills four
Washington, United States (AFP) Dec 5, 2025 -
A strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean killed four people on Thursday, the US military said, amid a growing controversy over a campaign that has taken more than 87 lives.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump's administration have especially come under fire over an incident in early September in which US forces targeted the wreckage of a vessel that had already been hit, killing two survivors.
A senior Democratic lawmaker who saw footage of that incident on Thursday said it showed a US attack on "shipwrecked sailors," while others have described it as a possible war crime.
The latest strike targeted a "vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific," US Southern Command said in a post on X.
"Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed," said the post, which included a video showing a multi-engine boat speeding across the water before being hit by a blast that left the vessel engulfed in flames.
Earlier in the day, lawmakers attended a classified briefing on Capitol Hill in which they were shown extended video footage of the strike, only a brief part of which has been publicly released.
The footage showed "the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors -- bad guys, bad guys -- but attacking shipwrecked sailors," Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told journalists.
- No 'imminent threat' -
Himes described it as "one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service."
"You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States," he added.
Republican Representative Don Bacon meanwhile said on CNN that "these two people were trying to survive and our...rules of war would not allow us to kill survivors."
"The rules are they have to pose an imminent threat. And I think we could say they did not pose an imminent threat to our country," Bacon said.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton, another attendee of the briefing, defended the military action, saying "the first strike, the second strike, and the third and the fourth strike on September 2 were entirely lawful and needful, and they were exactly what we'd expect our military commanders to do."
"I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight," he said of the footage.
However, both the White House and Pentagon have sought to distance Hegseth from the decision to strike the survivors, instead pinning the blame on Admiral Frank Bradley, who directly oversaw the operation.
Himes said Bradley told lawmakers during the briefing that Hegseth did not order that all the boat's crew be killed, but Bacon said the Pentagon chief is ultimately responsible because "he's the secretary of defense."
Trump's administration insists it is effectively at war with alleged "narco-terrorists," and the president has deployed the world's biggest aircraft carrier and an array of other military assets to the Caribbean, insisting they are there for counter-narcotics operations.
Regional tensions have flared as a result of the strikes and the military buildup, with Venezuela's leftist leader Nicolas Maduro accusing Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for "imposing regime change" in Caracas.
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