Colombian authorities have reported 109 arrests in an overnight military and police operation in Cúcuta, a city on the border with Venezuela. The presidential office said the preliminary count also included 49 searches and 32 expulsions.
Operation Némesis began on the evening of 3 November and continued into the following morning, covering eight of the city’s districts. President Abelardo de la Espriella, who was in Cúcuta for security meetings, said he had supervised the operation through the night.
The figures cover activity up to 4.45am local time on 4 November. They are an initial government tally, not a final account of the investigation or its legal outcomes.
More than 300 uniformed personnel took part in the deployment. Police and military units were involved, alongside judicial investigators and personnel from the prosecutor’s office.
Searches, seizures and expulsions
The presidency said officers seized 12 firearms and more than 10 kilograms of drugs. It also reported recovering contraband merchandise valued at 500 million Colombian pesos. It did not give a breakdown of the substances or of the goods in its initial account.
The government said the operation was directed at criminal structures linked to offences including homicide, terrorism, extortion, drug trafficking, smuggling and illegal mining. Those descriptions concern the stated targets of the operation; they do not establish what, if anything, has been proved against each person arrested.
Officials also reported the expulsion of 32 foreign nationals. The initial presidential statement did not explain the grounds for the individual decisions or identify the people affected. The available tally does not establish whether any of those expelled were also among the 109 people arrested, so the figures should not be added together as a total number of people.
An arrest is not a conviction. The initial announcement did not set out the individual charges or subsequent court decisions for those detained.
A wider border security campaign
The operation accompanied the activation of an urban security group in Cúcuta known as Bosur. De la Espriella has attended similar raids in other Colombian cities, including Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Barranquilla.
The Cúcuta deployment also followed the launch on 3 November of Esparta, a broader military and police campaign focused on armed groups in Norte de Santander, the department of which Cúcuta is the capital. The government says the campaign is intended to target groups operating in the Catatumbo region, including the National Liberation Army and the FARC dissident group known as Front 33.
Defence minister Jorge Mora said the wider campaign would involve approximately 1,200 army and police personnel, with a marine component to arrive later to strengthen control of rivers. That figure refers to the broader campaign, not an independently verified count of those taking part in the Cúcuta searches.
The city has experienced recent violence. On 26 October, former local government official Miguel Castellanos was killed. The following day, an explosion outside a tax agency office near the Francisco de Paula de Santander international bridge injured at least four police officers. Authorities were investigating responsibility for the blast; the preliminary Némesis announcement did not establish a connection between it and the people arrested.
Conflict in Catatumbo has also displaced civilians. In January 2026, the United Nations estimated that about 100,000 people had been displaced across the region since violence escalated a year earlier. Cúcuta’s municipal authorities had recorded the arrival of people fleeing the area. That historical estimate is not a current count or a measure of displacement caused by Némesis.
Questions over detainees’ treatment
The president has appeared in government videos with people detained during security raids. Before the Cúcuta operation, criminal lawyers publicly disagreed about the practice. Johan Andrés Montenegro argued that exposing detainees before conviction infringed the presumption of innocence. Francisco Bernate took a different view, saying the president could speak in his capacity as head of the security forces and was not acting as a judge or prosecutor.
Those opinions concerned earlier operations, not a court ruling on the Cúcuta arrests. For the people detained and expelled in the latest operation, the initial figures leave the individual legal and migration decisions to be established.
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
