Geopolitical Mining · Colombia

Colombia’s Mining Election 2026: Viability, Legitimacy and Anomic Mining

Colombia’s election places a practical question before the mining sector: can the next government make formal mining more viable than illegality, more legitimate than disorderly extraction and more predictable than political improvisation?

By Marta Rivera Muñoz & Eduardo Zamanillo

Geopolitical Mining. May 29, 2026

Colombia enters its presidential election with a mining debate that extends beyond the traditional divide between left and right. The deeper question is what kind of state can govern the subsurface, attract formal capital, protect communities, control illegality and convert mineral resources into economic and strategic capacity.

That is precisely the kind of question that defines the era of Geopolitical Mining. Mining can no longer be understood only as an industrial activity, a geological opportunity or a permitting problem. It must be read as a system where geology, capital, institutions, territorial legitimacy, public authority, security, traceability and national strategy intersect. Geopolitical Mining frames this shift by asking not only where minerals are located, but whether the institutional, technical, financial and political systems around them can turn mineral potential into reliable supply.

Colombia is a relevant case for this analysis. It has coal, gold, nickel, emeralds, construction materials, platinum and copper potential. It also faces questions around permitting, territorial conflict, gold traceability, illegal mining and regions where formal legality does not always organize the reality of extraction.

The electoral challenge, therefore, is not only whether the next government will be more restrictive or more expansive toward mining. The central question is whether it can strengthen Colombia’s systemic mining viability: the capacity to transform mineral potential into formal, financeable, legitimate, traceable and territorially governable production.

For the full Geopolitical Mining framework behind this article, see our book Mining Is Dead. Long Live Geopolitical Mining.

Colombia’s Mining Profile

Colombia is often read through the broader extractive lens of oil, gas and coal. For this article, the focus is narrower: the mining export basket. That distinction matters because the figures below refer to mining exports, not to hydrocarbons.

In 2025, Colombia’s mining exports totaled USD 11.36 billion FOB, equivalent to 22.6% of national exports. Coal represented 43.2% of mining exports and gold 40.6%. The remaining 16.2% was composed of other minerals, including platinum, ferronickel and emeralds.

Methodological note: This table refers to Colombia’s 2025 mining export basket. It does not measure mining investment, reserves, production volumes or project level capital expenditure.

Source: UPME / Agencia Nacional de Minería, Boletín Minería en Cifras, February 2026 , based on DANE export data to December 2025. Preliminary figures.

Colombia’s Prospective Mineral Base

The 2025 export basket shows the structure of Colombia’s mining sector today. It does not fully capture the country’s prospective mineral base.

A 2024 study using open data from the Colombian Geological Survey, the National Mining Agency and SIMCO identified prospective areas for energy transition minerals including cobalt, copper, nickel, rare earths, lithium and silver. The study estimated that the overlap of these prospective areas totals 311,535.2 km², equivalent to 27.3% of Colombia’s continental territory.

Methodological note: Prospective area does not mean reserves, resources, production or economic viability. It refers to areas identified as geologically prospective based on available geoscientific information. These figures should be read as indicators of exploration relevance, not as a production forecast.

Colombia’s mining authority has also moved part of this prospectivity into formal exploration processes. In December 2025, the National Mining Agency announced a mining round with 14 Strategic Mining Areas focused on copper, gold and polymetallic minerals. According to the ANM, the areas were offered with technical studies, environmental certifications and prior engagement with communities and local authorities.

These two data points frame the mining debate in two different time horizons. The first shows the mining economy Colombia has today: an export basket led by coal and gold, with other minerals representing a defined share of the sector. The second shows the mineral agenda that could shape future development: copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, rare earths, silver and polymetallic systems.

The electoral issue is the distance between those two realities. Colombia’s next government will inherit a mining sector where coal, gold and other minerals require different policy responses: transition management for coal, traceability and territorial control for gold, and permitting, exploration capital and legitimacy for future mineral development.

From Mining Title to Mining Viability

A useful way to understand Colombia’s mining debate is the shift from mining title to mining viability. A mining title can create a legal right. It does not, by itself, create a mine. A prospective area can indicate geological potential. It does not, by itself, create a project. A feasibility study can show that a deposit may be technically and economically developed. It does not, by itself, guarantee sustained production.

By the second half of the 2010s, Colombia’s mining sector was increasingly shaped by questions that went beyond geology, commodity prices and formal titles. Earlier disputes over páramo protection, municipal consultation and project opposition had already shown that legal rights and project design were not enough to secure development. Projects increasingly had to navigate environmental litigation, territorial resistance, consultation disputes, municipal opposition, permitting delays, security risks and reputational pressure.

This is where the concept of mining viability becomes essential. In the Geopolitical Mining framework, mining viability is not the same as technical feasibility. A feasibility study may show that a deposit can be engineered and economically modeled. Viability asks a harder question: can the project become sustained production inside a real system of law, territory, capital, legitimacy, infrastructure, institutions and time? Colombia demonstrates this distinction clearly. The country has mineral resources. It has mining titles. It has export capacity. It has mining tradition. Those assets, however, do not automatically become executable, financeable and socially durable projects. The issue, therefore, is not only whether Colombia can attract investment. The deeper question is whether it can convert mineral endowment, capital and formal rights into sustained formal supply. In Geopolitical Mining terms, Colombia faces a systemic mining viability challenge.

The Petro Period: Environmental Ordering and the Formal / Illegal Divide

The Petro administration arrived with a critical view of extractivism. Its mining agenda was not to eliminate all mining, but to transform the model: energy transition, stronger environmental ordering, protection of water, formalization of small scale miners, more community participation and a greater role for the state in defining where and how mining should occur. This agenda responds to identifiable environmental and social concerns. It also shaped the concerns of formal mining.

The business concern should not be reduced to the claim that Colombia’s environmental authority simply missed deadlines. ANLA reported that in 2024 it achieved 99% timeliness in resolving new environmental license applications and modifications within legal deadlines. But that does not fully answer the mining sector’s concern, because mining viability depends on a broader pipeline: title, environmental certification, mining environmental zoning, prior consultation, regional permits, land access, security, litigation, financing and capital confidence.

During the Petro administration, business concerns increasingly focused on the broader uncertainty of that mining pipeline. Part of this process predates Petro. In 2022, Colombia’s Council of State ordered the national government and the National Mining Agency to correct an environmental protection deficit in mining environmental planning for the granting of mining titles. The Petro government then continued the move toward mining environmental ordering. Decree 044 of 2024 established criteria for declaring temporary natural resource reserves, and during the validity of such reserves environmental authorities may not grant permits or licenses for mineral exploration or exploitation. From an environmental perspective, this reflects a state trying to protect ecosystems and order territory. From an investor perspective, it can add another layer of uncertainty.

Available alluvial gold data point to a different trend in illegal extraction. In 2022, UNODC reported 94,733 hectares with evidence of alluvial gold exploitation on land in Colombia; 73% of that area was classified as illicit exploitation. Chocó alone concentrated 40% of the national total. For 2023, the UNODC and Ministry of Mines report, summarized by the Colombian Mining Association, identified 105,060 hectares of alluvial gold exploitation, an increase of 11% from 2022, with 76% categorized as illicit or unauthorized. This frames one of the central tensions of the Petro period: policy placed greater normative weight on formal mining, while territorial control over illegal mining remained limited.

That distinction matters. More regulation over formal mining does not automatically produce more mining order. If the legal route becomes harder, slower or less predictable while illegal extraction remains adaptive, violent and poorly traceable, the gap between formal and illegal extraction can widen.

Anomic Mining: Colombia’s Problem Is Deeper Than Illegality

Illegal mining is one of Colombia’s most consequential mining problems. But calling it only “illegal” may be analytically insufficient. In the Geopolitical Mining framework, anomic mining does not simply rename illegal mining. It identifies a deeper institutional condition: extraction continues, but the formal legal order no longer effectively channels, protects, controls or makes that extraction legible. The law may exist. Agencies may exist. Permits may exist. Formalization programs may exist. But legality does not consistently govern the mining reality on the ground.

Colombia illustrates this concept clearly. Formal mining is increasingly visible, regulated and exposed. Illegal mining can be more mobile, adaptive, less traceable and, in some territories, protected by armed or criminal structures. The result is not simply illegality. It is an anomic condition: the formal system does not disappear, but it loses part of its ability to organize extraction.

The four warning signs of anomic mining are visible in Colombia.

The central Colombian problem is not only that illegal mining exists. It is that in too many territories, legal mining does not consistently organize mining reality. This is one of the most consequential forms of extractive weakness. It affects formal operators, communities, ecosystems, public revenue and state authority.

The Legitimacy Gap

The third axis is legitimacy. In Geopolitical Mining, legitimacy is not communications, reputation management or public relations. It is strategic infrastructure. The article The Mining Paradox argues that modern life depends on formal mining — energy, food systems, infrastructure, health, defense, artificial intelligence and technology — but society has not built a stable language to legitimize the formal mining required to sustain that life. A mine can have resources, permits, financing and technical feasibility; if society does not recognize formal mining as part of a legitimate future, the project remains structurally fragile.

Colombia reflects this paradox. The country needs minerals, exports, royalties, regional employment, coal during the transition, formal gold, construction materials, infrastructure inputs and potential strategic minerals. At the same time, mining remains socially contested, territorially disputed and often described through the language of damage, corruption, extractivism or imposition.

Two types of legitimacy must be distinguished.

Territorial legitimacy is built where a project operates: water, land, employment, ethnic rights, community trust, environmental impact, benefit sharing and local history.

Social legitimacy is broader: whether society understands formal mining as part of development, energy transition, infrastructure, security, technology and modern life.

Colombia needs both. Without territorial legitimacy, projects are more vulnerable to conflict and delay. Without social legitimacy, formal mining struggles to be recognized as part of the national future.

Three Policy Approaches to the Subsurface

This is where the election becomes relevant for mining. Iván Cepeda, Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella represent different political tendencies. They also represent three different policy approaches to the state’s relationship with the subsurface.

The question is not simply who is pro mining or anti mining. The more useful question is: what mining priorities each agenda emphasizes, and what implications follow from those priorities. These risks are not identical, and they would not affect the sector in the same way. Cepeda’s agenda emphasizes legitimacy, environmental ordering and state led transition. Valencia’s agenda emphasizes investment conditions, legal certainty and institutional coordination. De la Espriella’s agenda emphasizes security, expansion and the separation of legal mining from criminal mining.

Iván Cepeda: Legitimacy, State and Transition

Iván Cepeda represents the clearest continuity with Petro’s socio environmental turn. His mining proposal criticizes Colombia’s current model as extractivist and reprimarizing, arguing that the country exports raw materials without enough value added and has not organized mining around sufficient environmental, social and territorial parameters.

His program proposes deepening the transformation initiated under Petro, strengthening socio environmental and cultural ordering, providing differentiated treatment for artisanal and traditional mining, advancing formalization, protecting prior consultation, strengthening citizen participation and expanding the role of the state in the mining cycle. It also refers to mechanisms such as reversal, caducity or termination of contracts when appropriate.

From a Geopolitical Mining perspective, Cepeda’s agenda places the strongest emphasis on territorial legitimacy, environmental ordering and state led transition. In Colombia, water, communities, ethnic rights, prior consultation, informal miners and territorial inequality have historically been central to mining conflict, litigation and mistrust. A Cepeda style agenda could therefore reinforce the legitimacy dimension of mining policy: more territorial planning, more consultation, more rights, more small scale formalization and more scrutiny of high dconflict projects.

The policy risk to manage is that if a legitimacy agenda becomes a formal route that is slower, less predictable, more reversible and less financeable, it could weaken the formal mining system it seeks to improve. In a country with anomic mining, if formal pathways become impractical, extraction does not necessarily disappear. It can move toward informal, illegal or opaque circuits. The question for Cepeda is this: how can Colombia build more legitimate mining without making formality unworkable?

Paloma Valencia: Investment, Permits and Formality

Paloma Valencia represents a vision of institutional reactivation. Her program proposes restoring private sector confidence, using all available energy resources, reactivating fossil fuels, advancing fracking, strengthening production of oil, gas and coal, and creating differentiated regulation for ancestral, artisanal, small, medium, large scale and informal mining that seeks legalization.

In mining, she proposes formalizing small scale miners, creating legal channels for gold, fighting illegal mining, exploring mechanisms for the central bank to buy Colombian gold through legal channels, and creating a fast decision making instance to coordinate environmental licensing, land management, prior consultation and financing for strategic projects. Her program also says prior consultation should not function as a veto, but as a mechanism for community partnership and regional investment.

Reuters has described Valencia as the candidate of the right wing Democratic Center and reported that she proposes tougher security policies, an end to Petro’s “total peace” policy, and increased output of oil, gas, coal, minerals and rare earths, including fracking with environmental safeguards while excluding the Amazon and páramos.

From the perspective of mining viability, Valencia’s agenda places the strongest emphasis on calculability: functioning permits, stable rules, clear consultation, gold traceability, protection for formal operators and institutions capable of making decisions. Capital does not finance geological enthusiasm. It finances executable routes. For Colombia to attract investment into formal mining, investors need to understand not only the resource, but the sequence through which a project can move from title to consultation, permitting, financing, construction and operation.

The policy risk to manage is that legitimacy could be treated primarily as an administrative variable. Colombia has already shown that a title is not enough. If reactivation is understood only as faster permitting, it could reactivate the same conflicts that weakened the system after 2015. Prior consultation, water, local benefits and community trust are not soft variables. They are part of the conditions of viability. The question for Valencia is this: how can Colombia accelerate investment without reducing legitimacy to a box checking exercise?

Abelardo de la Espriella: Security, Expansion and the Fight Against Criminal Mining

Abelardo de la Espriella offers the most expansion oriented mining energy agenda. His plan proposes recovering oil and gas exploration, opening space for fracking, signing new exploration contracts and treating subsurface resources as central to energy security, fiscal stability and competitiveness.

In mining, his proposal draws a clear distinction between legal mining and criminal mining. It supports formal investment in gold, copper, silver and rare earths, while promising to pursue illegal structures in regions such as Chocó, Cauca and Bajo Cauca Antioqueño. From the perspective of anomic mining, De la Espriella’s agenda focuses on an observable problem: illegal mining cannot be addressed only through environmental discourse or formalization programs. There is a territorial authority problem. If the state does not control rivers, dredges, excavators, mercury, gold laundering, armed finance and criminal corridors, legality will remain weak.

The policy risk to manage is an over reliance on security and expansion as the central mining solution. Force can interrupt illegality, but it does not automatically rebuild legitimacy, traceability, community trust or institutional quality. A highly securitized strategy may separate formal mining from criminal mining in the short term, but it will not necessarily solve the social and territorial dimensions of viability. The question for De la Espriella is this: how can Colombia restore authority without confusing territorial order with extractive acceleration alone?

The Mining Vote

Each agenda emphasizes a real dimension of Colombia’s mining problem. Cepeda’s agenda emphasizes the legitimacy and environmental ordering dimension. Valencia’s agenda emphasizes the investment, permitting and legal certainty dimension. De la Espriella’s agenda emphasizes the security and criminal mining dimension. None of those dimensions, by itself, solves Colombia’s mining dilemma. Colombia needs a complete architecture of mining viability. That architecture has five minimum capacities:

Without those five capacities, Colombia risks maintaining a difficult contradiction: formal mining becomes harder to advance while illegal mining remains profitable and adaptive.

Conclusion: Governing the Minerals

Colombia needs a state capable of strengthening the viability of formal mining. That means permits that function, institutions that coordinate, communities that can trust, capital that can calculate, minerals that can be traced and territories where legality is stronger than parallel extraction.

In the era of Geopolitical Mining, mineral power does not automatically belong to the country with the most resources underground. It belongs to the country that can convert those resources into legitimate, governable, financeable and strategically useful production.

That is Colombia’s real mining challenge. And that is the question the mining debate should put to Cepeda, Valencia and De la Espriella: not whether they want more or less mining, but whether they can build a formal mining system that is more viable than illegality, more legitimate than disorderly extraction and more predictable than political improvisation.

Resources / Sources Used

• Geopolitical Mining — Core Framework
• Geopolitical Mining — Anomic Mining
• Geopolitical Mining — Mining Viability
• Geopolitical Mining — The Mining Paradox / Legitimacy Gap
• UPME / Agencia Nacional de Minería — Boletín Minería en Cifras, February 2026
• MDPI / Sustainability — Prospective Areas for Energy-Transition Minerals in Colombia
• Agencia Nacional de Minería — 14 Strategic Mining Areas Round
• ANLA — Informe de Gestión 2024
• Consejo de Estado — Mining-Environmental Ordering Ruling, 2022
• ANLA — Decreto 044 de 2024
• ELAW — Colombia Constitutional Court, Sentencia C-035/16
• Función Pública — Corte Constitucional, Sentencia T-445/16
• Consejo de Estado — Reference to SU-095 of 2018
• Reuters — AngloGold Suspends La Colosa After Anti-Mining Vote
• UNODC Colombia — Alluvial Gold Exploitation 2022
• ACM — UNODC / Ministry of Mines 2023 Alluvial Gold Report Summary
• Ministerio de Minas y Energía — Formalization Progress Under Petro
• Iván Cepeda — Minería para la Vida
• Iván Cepeda — Programa de Gobierno
• Paloma Valencia — Programa Integrado de Gobierno
• Reuters — Paloma Valencia Interview / Mining-Energy Position
• Abelardo de la Espriella — Mining-Energy Sector Proposal
• Abelardo de la Espriella — Government Proposal PDF