Drone Warfare Comes to Latin America
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- Dilan Camilo Erazo Yela, a 10-year-old Colombian boy, became his country's first known drone-strike fatality in July 2024 when the EMC dissident FARC faction dropped explosives on a soccer field in El Plateado, injuring 12 others.
- ACLED documented an explosive rise in Colombian drone attacks — 1 in 2023, 38 in 2024, and 149 in 2025 — with 137 more recorded through July 17, 2026, including strikes that killed 13 police officers in Antioquia in August 2025.
- More than 7,000 Colombian mercenaries have fought alongside Ukrainian forces since Russia's 2022 invasion, and some are now being recruited by Mexican cartels to pass on drone expertise learned on the Eastern European battlefield.
- Mexico's cartels pioneered commercial-drone weaponization as early as 2015, using U.S.-manufactured technology to smuggle narcotics and strike rivals; ACLED logged 40 drone-linked fatalities in Mexico in 2025, with cartels dropping bombs daily to displace families.
- During a police raid last October, Rio de Janeiro's Comando Vermelho deployed drones against officers in favela operations, contributing to 121 deaths in a single drone-related incident — the deadliest episode logged by ACLED in the region.
- Colombia announced a $1.68 billion anti-drone program in January with radar and signal-jamming systems, though analyst Tiziano Breda warned that fiber-optic drones already used by the ELN render some of those countermeasures obsolete.
- New Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella, who took office Aug. 7, has pledged to strengthen the armed forces through expanded drone and artificial intelligence capabilities.
Why it matters: Drone proliferation is dismantling Latin American governments' traditional air-combat advantage, with Colombia's attacks rising from 1 to 149 between 2023 and 2025 and forcing $1.68 billion in new countermeasures. The Ukraine-Colombia-Mexico knowledge pipeline brings battlefield innovations to criminal groups within months, leaving civilians like 10-year-old Dilan Yela caught in strikes governments cannot yet reliably jam.
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