Mateo Pérez Rueda, a 24-year-old journalist working for the independent digital magazine El Confidente, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the FARC dissident group known as the 36th Front in Briceño, Antioquia, on or after May 5. His death is among the latest incidents in a surge of political violence that has reached its highest levels in a decade and is shaping Colombia’s presidential election.

The election comes as guerrilla attacks, homicides, kidnappings, forced displacement, and massacres have intensified during the campaign period. More than 50 people, including many forcibly recruited children and teenagers, were killed in clashes between two FARC dissident groups in Guaviare department. Rightwing senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event and later died.

Iván Cepeda, a 63-year-old leftwing senator leading in the polls, is regarded as the architect of the government’s “total peace” policy. Security experts consider the plan to have failed, arguing that armed factions used temporary ceasefires to expand operations. Until recently, Cepeda held a polling lead over rightwing senator Paloma Valencia, but in the past two weeks he has been overtaken by far-right lawyer and businessman Abelardo de la Espriella.

Both Espriella and Valencia propose abandoning “total peace” in favor of renewed military offensives against armed groups. Espriella has argued it is necessary to “save Colombia” from crime and promises a mano dura approach, including building 10 maximum-security “mega-prisons.” Valencia says Colombia needs “total security” instead of “total peace.” If no candidate wins more than half the vote in the first round, a runoff will be held on June 21.

Alejandro Chala, a researcher at Fundación Paz y Reconciliación, noted that Colombia’s current homicide rate is about 26 per 100,000 inhabitants, down from a peak of about 80 per 100,000 before the 2016 peace agreement. “The violence now is much more territorially concentrated, largely entrenched in the main areas where illegal economic routes operate. It clearly generates a lot of media noise, but it does not have the national reach it had in the past,” Chala said.