In the earlier Megamachine papers we described the mechanics mainly through German or European cases — Volkswagen, Schaeffler, BASF, DMG Mori, KUKA. We showed how industrial substance dissolves into shells, how strategic sovereignty shifts in a single legal act, how the layers erode at different speeds. What happens in these cases is shocking in the abstract but invisible in everyday life — the plants keep running, the products are sold, the workers walk past the gatehouse every morning. The Megamachine works quietly.
There are countries in which it does not work quietly. There are countries in which it lives. In which it sets up the health system, occupies the judiciary, divides up the territories, diverts the drinking water, feeds the children or lets them starve — all at the same time, all interwoven, without any single person ever being able to survey the whole process. Colombia is one of these countries. With fifty-one million inhabitants, a progressive constitution adopted in 1991, a democratically elected left-wing government since August 2022 — and an everyday experience in which the system works and does not work at the same time, in which every act of bureaucracy presupposes another that has not yet taken place, and in which nobody can name who answers for the consequences.
This is what we call Kafkaesque. The term comes from Franz Kafka, the Prague writer whose novels "The Trial" and "The Castle" describe the experience of living in a world whose rules are never fully disclosed to you, in which the authorities never make available precisely the official responsible for your own case, and in which the matter at stake becomes, over time, a matter in itself, whose very existence you end up doubting. Kafkaesque does not mean excessively bureaucratic. Kafkaesque is the structure in which a person finds himself facing a system that relates to him without his being able to relate to the system.
This structure is not specific to Colombia. It is found all over the world, in varying intensities. But in Colombia it is not a property of bureaucracy — it is the lived reality of fifty-one million people. And it is multi-layered: it nests on the level of the health system, the judiciary, the territory, the commodity economy, the international entanglements. It is not a failure — it is a system.
This paper traces it. We begin with a typical encounter with the health system, because that is where the experience of the Kafkaesque is most everyday and most immediately tangible. From there we move on to the other stages on which the Megamachine lives — the judiciary, the territory, the mine. At the end we come to the question of what the Megamachine produces in Colombia — and for whom.
I. A Day with the Health System
A Colombian citizen has a doctor's appointment. She is a member of an Entidad Promotora de Salud — one of the insurance-and-administration companies that organise the country's health system between the state and the hospitals. Her contributions are paid, even a month in advance. She arrives at the clinic an hour before the appointment and registers at an entrance terminal with her ID number. The terminal recognises her without any problem, registers her presence, sends her to the waiting room. An hour passes. Two hours. She is not called.
At a counter in the waiting room she learns that her appointment has been cancelled. Reason: missing payment. She knows she has paid. She goes back to the entrance and tries to get a receipt from the terminal that might be followed by a payment demand — the terminal does not know this procedure. She turns to an employee, explains her situation, asks for help. The employee gives her a small slip with a number and sends her back to the same waiting room, where she is to be called under this new number to receive a new appointment.
Three hours later she is called. At the counter she learns that her membership has been suspended. Why, nobody can tell her. She is to go to the central office, which is in another part of the city. She phones in the evening. The next day she has to go there. What she would have learned at the hospital that day, what the diagnosis would have been, what treatment would have been recommended — she does not know.
This encounter is not unusual. Statistically it is the normal case. More than ninety-eight per cent of Colombians are insured; on paper, insurance coverage is almost universal. But for millions of people the experience of the system is identical to the one described above — the appointment cancelled, the reason inexplicable, the central office elsewhere, the day lost, the money paid, the treatment not received. In December 2025, when Petro's second reform was shelved in the Senate, the opposition itself spoke of 2,033 deaths said to have been caused by the failure of the system during Petro's term in office — people who did not get their medicines, whose treatments were suspended, whose EPS was placed under state administration and under whose new management the next step in their individual course of treatment no longer took place.
This is the point at which the definition of the Kafkaesque becomes concrete. The citizen did everything right. She is a member. She has paid. She has registered. The system has identified her. But somewhere between the entrance terminal and the counter room her right to treatment has seeped away into an administrative situation whose topography none of those involved knows. The staff at the counter do not know why the membership has been suspended. The central office may know — but it is not here. And while the citizen wanders from one office to the next, her day is lost, her treatment is lost, and — for the chronically ill — her health is lost. Nobody wanted this. Nobody can change it. It is the normal course of things.
II. The EPS System — Ley 100 of 1993
The system has a history. In 1993, under the government of César Gaviria, Ley 100 was passed. It created the current health system, whose architecture would dominate the following thirty-two years. Ley 100 was part of a broader wave of reform in the early 1990s in which the Colombian Constitution of 1991 was to translate its programmatic promise of a welfare state into operational structures. The inspirations were Pinochet's privatisations in Chile and the World Bank's structural adjustment programmes.
The architecture of Ley 100 is apparently elegant. The state is the main financier; it collects contributions from citizens, adds tax revenue, and passes the funds on to private or public insurance-and-administration companies — the Entidades Promotoras de Salud, EPS. These EPS manage the money, mediate between the state and the treatment providers, and organise the individual care offered to their members. They receive an annual flat rate per member, the Unidad de Pago por Capitación, UPC for short. Out of this flat rate they must pay for all their members' treatments. If they manage to organise treatments below the flat rate, they make a profit. If they do not, they make a loss.
The system is a classic case of regulated competition. It was supposed to be more efficient than direct state administration, because the EPS have an economic incentive to be thrifty. It was supposed to be fairer than the earlier fragmented system, because all citizens receive membership — either in the contributory Régimen Contributivo (for employees with a formal contract) or in the subsidised Régimen Subsidiado (for the economically weak). It was supposed to be universal, because the state provides the funds for both regimes.
In practice the system has developed three problems. First: the EPS are economic actors who use their room for manoeuvre. They delay treatments, refuse medicines, demand countless prior authorisations, obstruct access — all legal, all within the rules of the game, all with the effect that individual costs stay below the flat rate. Second: several EPS have become insolvent over the years, often after embezzlement scandals; their owners have diverted funds into other structures, often into international holdings. Third: the operational complexity — different EPS, different treatment pathways, different IT systems, different contractual relationships with hospitals — creates the administrative landscape in which the experience described in the first chapter is an everyday one. What on the large scale is called the profit motive is, on the small scale, the cancelled appointment and the suspended membership.
Over the years various Constitutional Court rulings have carried out repairs to the system — the most important in 2008 (equal treatment of both regimes) and 2015 (Ley 1751, which recognises health as a fundamental right). But the basic structure — the state finances, the EPS administers, the hospital treats, the citizen waits — remained intact. This was also true under the conservative government of Iván Duque (2018–2022), who in 2020 attempted a further privatisation that was prevented by the National Strike.
III. The Failed Reform — Petro's Defeats in 2024 and 2025
Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president in Colombia's history, took office in August 2022. One of his central election promises was the reform of the health system. Ley 100 was to be replaced by a national health system based on a social-insurance model in which the EPS would lose their central role as financial intermediaries and the funds would be channelled directly to the treatment providers via the state agency ADRES (Administradora de los Recursos del Sistema General de Seguridad Social en Salud). The emphasis was to be on primary prevention — health centres in the communities, early diagnosis, less acute medicine and more continuous care.
In February 2023 the Petro cabinet presented the draft reform. In April 2024 — after a negotiating process in Congress lasting more than a year, which led to a cabinet reshuffle — the draft was rejected in the Senate's Comisión Séptima. The opposition's reasoning: the reform was technically insufficiently grounded, its adoption would aggravate the system's problems, and it was not covered by the budget. The government's reasoning: the opposition had received lobbying money from the EPS owners, who had an interest in preserving the system.
Petro tried a second route. In July 2025 Health Minister Guillermo Jaramillo issued Decree 0858, a new model intended to introduce administratively the essential contents of the failed reform — primary care centres as the mandatory first point of contact, one hundred and nineteen functional subregions, a reduced role for the EPS. In October 2025 the Consejo de Estado suspended the decree on the grounds that a reform of this scope had to be adopted by Parliament, not by decree.
In December 2025 — on 16 December, one day after an eighteen-month delay of the procedure — the Senate's Comisión Séptima definitively shelved the second draft reform. With that, the reform had failed politically. The opposition spoke of responsibility towards the public finances. The government spoke of 2,033 deaths that the unreformed system had already cost.
What remains is the everyday experience. The EPS Sanitas, Sura and Compensar — the largest private providers — denounce structural underfunding. The government has placed several EPS under state administration (Supersalud intervention); their staff were replaced for a year, on the grounds of remedying financial and administrative deficiencies. The shareholders of these EPS are suing the government for defamation. According to his own figures, between August 2022 and June 2025 Petro transferred 110 trillion pesos (about US$27.5 billion) to the EPS — the highest amount in the system's history. The patients go on waiting.
This point is analytically important. Petro is democratically elected. He has a mandate. His reform programme is consistent with what the 1991 Constitution defines as fundamental social rights. But he cannot push it through. He lacks a majority in Parliament. The courts limit executive powers. The EPS owners mobilise lobbying money, the media, international legal structures. What appears in the bureaucracy's waiting room as a stranded appointment is, on the macro-political level, a stranded reform project — and both have the same structure. A rule exists. It cannot be enforced. Nobody is responsible for making it enforceable.
IV. The Second Stage — the JEP and Truth without Punishment
The Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP for short, is one of the creations of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC-EP, the country's largest guerrilla group. It is a special tribunal for the crimes of the armed conflict — massacres, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, attacks, displacements. Its logic is that of transitional justice: whoever gives truthful testimony and acknowledges responsibility receives reduced sentences — not prison, but "Sanciones Propias" with a form of their own, from five to eight years of restricted movement, with mandatory reparation projects in the affected territories.
This architecture was meant to fulfil two goals at once — truth and reconciliation. It was meant to give the victims a voice and the perpetrators a way out of illegality. It was meant to enable the country to write its own history.
The JEP's most important Macrocaso is Caso 03 — "Asesinatos y desapariciones forzadas presentados como bajas en combate por agentes del Estado". In English: killings and enforced disappearances presented as combat casualties — by agents of the state. In popular parlance: the "falsos positivos". During the years of the Política de Seguridad Democrática under President Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010), members of the Colombian armed forces lured poor or mentally impaired civilians to remote regions with the promise of work, murdered them, dressed them in guerrilla uniforms and presented them to the authorities as fallen FARC or ELN fighters. Rewards, promotions and special leave were the incentives. The scale: initially estimated at 6,402 victims for the period 2002–2008.
On 28 April 2026 — two days ago, on the eve of this paper — the JEP confirmed that the number was not 6,402 but 7,837. An increase of 22 per cent, resulting from the extension of the period under investigation from 2002–2008 to 1990–2016. Most of the victims were young men from poor urban districts or from the countryside, often with cognitive impairments, lured to remote regions with false promises of work, executed there, dressed in uniforms, photographed. The soldiers who killed them received rewards.
In September 2025 the JEP handed down its first judgment in Caso 03 — against twelve soldiers of the La Popa Battalion on the Caribbean coast. They had acknowledged their responsibility. The sentence: eight years of restricted movement, that is, no prison sentence but restricted mobility with mandatory participation in reparation projects. The JEP's maximum penalty. For at least 130 murders in the Medellín district, in which General Mario Montoya and his staff were involved, charges were brought — Montoya has not acknowledged his responsibility; his case was handed over to the investigation unit, with the prospect of regular — and thus considerably harsher — sentences. The remaining 4,500 military personnel allegedly involved have so far hardly been named in public. In December 2024, on the eighth anniversary of the peace agreement, JEP President Alejandro Ramelli asked rhetorically: "Why do we not demand as a society that the names of the more than 4,500 military personnel under investigation be published?"
This is the second point at which the Kafkaesque becomes concrete. 7,837 victims of murders committed by the state's army. A truth commission that has done its work — testimony, documentation, legal acknowledgement. Sanciones Propias which in theory are meant to make reconciliation possible — but which in practice are felt by society to be inadequate, because they include no prison sentence. Families who after twenty years are still searching for their sons' bones. Generals who do not acknowledge their responsibility — and are thereby excluded from the JEP process, with the prospect of regular sentences which in Colombia, however, rarely lead to conviction, because the investigating and judicial authorities are overloaded. The result is a strange half-truth: the facts are established, responsibility assigned, the crime acknowledged — but the legal and moral consequence bears no relation to the scale. The families now know more about what happened than they knew ten years ago. But they have no certainty that any of it will have consequences commensurate with the gravity of the crime.
V. The Third Stage — the Territory and Its Actors
Whoever lives in Colombia lives under several sovereignties at once. There is the Colombian state — the police, the armed forces, the judiciary, the municipal administration. Since 2016 there has been the former FARC, the majority of which was demobilised and integrated into the political system. There are the FARC dissidents who rejected the peace agreement — the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) and the Segunda Marquetalia, both still active in drug trafficking and territorial control. There is the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN, founded in 1964, a different guerrilla group that did not sign in 2016 and has since been in a negotiating process with the government that is permanently open and permanently frozen. There are the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, AGC — also known as the Clan del Golfo —, the largest paramilitary-narco-criminal organisation, successor to the former AUC. There are numerous regional groups — Spartanos and Shottas in Buenaventura, Zetas in Quibdó, Comuneros del Sur in Nariño. There are drug cartels whose links to Mexican structures such as the Sinaloa Cartel are documented. There are mining corporations with their own security, their own legal departments, their own political connections.
Whoever lives in a village in Catatumbo, in the Sierra Nevada, in Cauca, in Chocó, in Putumayo does not experience these sovereignties as an abstraction. He experiences them as concrete actors who drive through the village, knock at the door, levy taxes ("vacunas" — literally vaccinations, in economic vocabulary protection money), carry out recruitment, fight out conflicts, leave the dead lying. A family can be subject to demands at the same time from the Colombian state — taxes, compulsory voting, compulsory schooling — and from the ELN — compulsory assembly, compulsory payment — and from a FARC dissident faction — a different compulsory assembly, a different compulsory payment — and from the Clan del Golfo — yet other obligations. Who complies with which obligation, who has which connection, who cultivates which solidarity, is in everyday life a question of survival. Whoever stands on the wrong side is murdered.
In 2024, 173 social leaders were murdered in Colombia — peasant leaders, indigenous leaders, environmentalists, trade unionists. In 2025 there were already forty by March. Since the peace agreement of 2016 the number has fallen compared with the years of armed conflict — but it has remained high, and it has shifted to a different structure of actors. Those who used to be murdered by the army or the paramilitaries are today often murdered by one of the dissident groups or by the Clan del Golfo. The act is the same, the actor is a different one. The legal consequence is similar: none.
In July 2025 a mass grave was discovered in the Guaviare region containing the bodies of eight religious and social leaders who had disappeared three months earlier. The evidence pointed to a FARC dissident group. In the same region, pamphlets intimidating the rural community councils circulate via WhatsApp. On TikTok and Telegram the ELN and FARC dissidents run their own propaganda — with guerrilla-song content, tributes to revolutionary figures, videos of captured rivals, their own recruitment channels. Territorial control is today also fought out digitally. The Colombian police are not absent there — they are merely one voice among several, and not always the loudest.
VI. Catatumbo, January 2025 — the State as Spectator
On 16 January 2025 a new wave of armed clashes began in the Catatumbo region, on the border with Venezuela. The ELN attacked members of the demobilised FARC and dissidents of the 33rd Front, whom it accused of collaborating with the front hostile to the ELN. The first reports spoke of knocks on doors, of families dragged out of their houses and shot on the spot, of collaboration with army operations. Within a week the number of dead exceeded 100 and that of displaced people 32,000. By the end of March there were more than 80 civilian victims and 80,800 people affected, of whom 52,000 were displaced and more than 20,000 had restricted freedom of movement.
The Petro government's reaction was hesitant at first. Peace Commissioner Otty Patiño admitted that the government had not sufficiently analysed early warnings. On 17 January Petro suspended the peace talks with the ELN. On 20 January he declared an "estado de conmoción interior" — a kind of limited state of emergency — for Catatumbo, initially for 90 days. The justification: resources to alleviate the economic and social consequences, supplies, security. On 25 January the government offered a reward of US$700,000 for information leading to the arrest of four ELN leaders.
The Catatumbo crisis of January 2025 was a turning point — not because it changed the scale of the violence, but because it exposed the logic of Petro's "Total Peace". "Paz Total" was Petro's central security-policy concept: simultaneous negotiations with all armed actors, from the FARC dissidents through the ELN to the AGC and the urban gangs. The hope was that under the pressure of the talks the actors would be forced into a peace process. The reality was different. The negotiations led to a fragmentation of the groups — the Comuneros del Sur split off from the ELN, the 33rd Front split off from the EMC, each splinter group negotiated for itself. Whoever refused to negotiate gained territorial power; whoever negotiated lost it. The logic of the negotiating process produced more actors, not fewer.
In May 2024 the negotiations with the ELN broke down for the first time, after the government had negotiated separately with a single ELN front. In August 2024 the bilateral ceasefire with the ELN expired without being renewed. In September 2024 the ELN attacked a military base in Arauca and killed three soldiers. In November 2024 negotiations resumed. In January 2025 the Catatumbo war began. In May 2026, a few weeks before the presidential elections, Total Peace is politically exhausted. The violence has not declined — it has merely been redistributed in space and among the actors.
VII. The Fourth Stage — La Guajira and the Wayuu Children
La Guajira, the peninsula in north-eastern Colombia, is no ordinary department. It is home to the Wayuu, Colombia's largest indigenous people — over 300,000 people, who also live on Venezuelan territory. It is the poorest region of the country, with chronic water shortages. It is the key economic region of Colombian mining.
In 1976 the contract was concluded between the Colombian state — through the state-owned Carbocol — and the International Colombia Resources Corporation (Intercor), a subsidiary of the American Exxon. From 1983 coal mining began in the Cerrejón open-pit mine. Over four decades Cerrejón became the largest coal mine in Latin America — 69,000 hectares, six times the size of the city of Manchester, with a 150-kilometre railway line to the port of Puerto Bolívar. Various multinational corporations have held stakes — Exxon, BHP Billiton, Anglo American. In January 2022 the Swiss group Glencore acquired the stakes of BHP and Anglo American and has been sole owner ever since.
The history of Cerrejón is a chronicle of documented human rights violations. 25 Wayuu communities were directly displaced — 7,000 people resettled, often with considerable violence, often with promises of compensation that were not kept. 18 rivers and streams have disappeared or been diverted — the most important case is the Bruno stream, a tributary of the Río Ranchería, which has not only drinking-water but also spiritual significance for the Wayuu. In 2014 the government approved the diversion of the stream; in 2017 the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled in favour of the Wayuu communities and ordered it to be reversed. The stream remained diverted. Glencore reportedly tied up 15 responsible government agencies at once through lobbying, so that the ruling was not implemented. Today, nine years later, the Bruno stream still does not flow in its original bed.
Cerrejón uses over twelve million gallons of water a day — about 45 million litres — in a desert region with chronic water shortages. Wayuu children suffer from chronic diarrhoea, respiratory problems, skin diseases, loss of sight. Between 2014 and 2016 Wayuu children accounted for more than 90 per cent of child mortality in La Guajira, although the Wayuu make up only 38 per cent of the department's population. Thousands of children have died — of malnutrition, of dehydration, of diseases that would be trivially treatable elsewhere. In November 2020 the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, called for the mine to be closed.
In 2022 the situation paradoxically changed for the worse. After Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and the reduction of Russian gas deliveries to Germany, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz telephoned the then Colombian President Iván Duque with the request to increase coal deliveries to Germany. In the first three months of 2022 German coal imports from Colombia rose by 62 per cent. The German importers — EnBW, Uniper, STEAG — continued to source coal from Cerrejón. In 2023 Cerrejón's output rose by 12 per cent. Glencore announced that it would operate the mine until 2034 — although before the Ukraine war the licence had been set on an earlier closure path.
In January 2023 the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz, LKSG) came into force in Germany. It obliges large German companies to keep their global supply chains free of serious human rights violations and environmental damage. The German importers of Cerrejón coal were thus formally obliged to examine the Wayuu complaints. In practice the importers confirmed that Cerrejón held Bettercoal certification and therefore complied with the UN Guiding Principles. In November 2025 the Irish OECD National Contact Point found that Bettercoal was relying on human rights impact assessments six years out of date — a gap that violated Bettercoal's own rules and the OECD Guidelines. At the same time, Glencore has sued the Colombian government before an international arbitration tribunal — for lost profits, because the Constitutional Court ruling of 2017 had restricted the further expansion of the mine. The case is ongoing.
VIII. The Logic of the Kafkaesque — an Analysis
We have now described four stages — the health system, the JEP, the territory, La Guajira. At first glance they seem independent of one another. They are not. They have the same structure. We can summarise it in five points.
First, each stage has a formal architecture that is coherent and just on paper. Ley 100 promises universal health care. The JEP promises truth and reconciliation. Colombian criminal law promises protection against politically motivated violence. The Constitutional Court ruling of 2017 promises the Wayuu their stream back. The texts are in place, the architectures work.
Second, each stage has an operational reality that directly contradicts the formal architecture. The EPS delay treatments. The JEP sanctions do not match the gravity of the crimes. The police are absent from the contested regions or stand too close to the wrong actors. Glencore does not implement the Constitutional Court ruling, and no authority compels it to.
Third, in each case the gap between formal architecture and operational reality is not a defect of the architecture — but a consequence of the structure of actors in which the architecture is embedded. Ley 100 is not wrong in itself; it is exploited by EPS actors whose interest does not coincide with the interest of the patients. The JEP sanctions are not wrong in themselves; they are felt to be inadequate by a society that lived in conflict for twenty years and in which the generals stand closer to the civilians than the victims' families do. The police are not absent in themselves; they are assigned too many tasks at once and anchored in too few actors. The Constitutional Court ruling is not unenforceable in itself; it is unenforceable because 15 government agencies are addressed at once and none takes responsibility for implementation.
Fourth, in each case responsibility for the gap cannot be assigned. Who is to blame for the membership being suspended? The EPS, which the state commissioned to administer it, or the state, which does not provide sufficient funds for administration? Who is to blame for the JEP sentences being so mild? The JEP, which invented transitional justice after the peace agreement, or the peace agreement itself, which prescribes this logic? Who is to blame for 80 people being murdered in Catatumbo? The ELN, the FARC dissidents, the government that did not warn, the Venezuelan state that harbours the actors, or the international demand for drugs that finances the whole thing? In each case no clear answer can be given. In each case all the actors have a share, none has the whole.
Fifth, in each case the individual citizen is the loser. The patient loses her day and her treatment. The mother of a falsos-positivos victim has been waiting for twenty years for an adequate legal consequence. The farmer in Catatumbo loses his house, his harvest, sometimes his life. The Wayuu child loses its sight, sometimes its life. The actors who produce these outcomes do not lose. They change their role, their alliance, their location. But they do not lose.
This is the structure we call Kafkaesque. It is not bureaucracy as such. It is the constellation of a formal order that is not enforced operationally because no central authority is responsible for enforcing it — and in which responsibility is spread across so many actors that no single one can or will bear it. The citizen faces this constellation as Josef K. faces the court in Kafka's novel: he knows that it concerns him. He does not know who decides. He does not know where he could lodge a complaint. He knows only that the day is lost.
IX. The Megamachine in Colombia
What does this have to do with the Megamachine we described in the previous papers? At first glance, little. The Megamachine in the DMG Mori papers is an economic phenomenon — consolidation, takeover, displacement of substance. The Megamachine in Colombia is a political, social, territorial constellation — violence, bureaucracy, mining, displacement. At first glance, two different animals.
At second glance it is the same animal. Mumford's concept of the Megamachine denotes a socio-technical system that coordinates people without any single authority surveying the system — a machine made of people, in which every contribution is rational and yet nobody has explicitly decided the overall result. The DMG Mori consolidation is one example of it — nobody planned the Japanese end point, everyone involved acted rationally, the result is there. The Colombian constellation is another example of it — nobody planned the deaths of the Wayuu children, everyone involved (the mining corporation, the Colombian government, the German importers, the international energy market, the former owners Exxon and BHP) acted according to their own logic, the result is there. The Kafkaesque experience of the individual Wayuu mother, the individual Catatumbo farmer, the individual patient in the waiting room is the human tip of a megamachinic chain that reaches much further.
What is specific to Colombia is not the megamachinic — but the density. In Germany the Megamachine is a layer above lived reality; it becomes visible when you look, it disappears when you look away. In Colombia the Megamachine is lived reality; it is not a layer but the place where life takes place. The Megamachine lives in Colombia.
Several factors explain this density. First, historical accumulation: Colombia has six decades of armed conflict behind it, which hollowed out state structures and normalised non-state actors. Second, geographical topography: a country with three Andean cordilleras, two oceans, impenetrable jungle and a 2,219-kilometre border with Venezuela offers spaces in which a central state structurally finds it hard to be present. Third, economic entanglement: Colombia is at once Latin America's largest coal exporter, the third-largest coffee exporter and the world's largest cocaine exporter — three value chains with global demand that operate in the country with differing degrees of state recognition. Fourth, international entanglement: Plan Colombia (1999, US$9 billion in US aid), the formerly eight US military bases, the economic ties to the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Israel — Colombia is not an isolated actor but a hub at which many lines converge.
This density produces what defines the Megamachine as a form of life. In a country in which so many actors with their own logics intervene, the consequence of no single action can any longer be clearly attributed to the one who acts. The German electricity customer who pays EnBW or Uniper indirectly finances the deaths of the Wayuu children. She did not want this. She may not know it. She could know it if she wanted to. But even if she knew, what would she do? Change her electricity contract? To which supplier that does not buy from Cerrejón? Responsibility diffuses until it is nothing.
X. What Petro's Defeat Means
Gustavo Petro took office in August 2022 with a mandate that was meant explicitly to attack Colombia's Kafkaesque structures. The EPS system was to be replaced. Total Peace was to force the armed actors into a peace process. The mining economy was to be subjected to an ecological transformation. The relationship with the Wayuu communities was to be restructured. Petro achieved something in each of these areas — the state administration of several EPS, the negotiations with various armed groups, the recognition of Pinghu and La Guajira as emergency zones, the investment in primary care centres. But in each of these areas he also failed — the reforms were blocked by Congress or by the Consejo de Estado; Total Peace crumbled in the Catatumbo war; the mining transformation is proceeding more slowly than global energy demand; the Wayuu communities go on waiting.
2026 is an election year. Petro is not standing — the Colombian Constitution prohibits immediate re-election. His term ends in August 2026. The question being decided in these weeks is whether his reforms will end with him or whether his successors will continue them. The constellation points rather to the former. A conservative government would relieve the EPS sector, bury Total Peace, approve the mining expansions, run the mine until 2034. A social democratic government — if one emerges — would continue Petro's line in a softer form, with less confrontation, a slower pace of reform, more compromise. A second left-wing government seems unlikely after the Catatumbo crisis and the failure of the reforms.
The analytical point is not whether Petro governed wisely or unwisely. The point is that even a left-wing, democratically elected government with a clear reformist agenda could not break through the country's Kafkaesque geometry — precisely because this geometry does not consist of a single policy but of the entanglement of many. Whoever wants to reform the EPS system comes up against the owners of the EPS, who have lobbying connections to the Comisión Séptima, which in turn are linked through campaign donations to conservative senators, who in turn ally with mining interests, which in turn sue the government in international arbitration proceedings, which in turn are co-financed by German electricity customers, who in turn know nothing about it. Whoever attacks one of these lines illuminates the others — but the lines support one another.
That is why the concept of the Megamachine achieves more here than the concept of corruption or clientelism. Corruption describes individual acts. Clientelism describes individual relationships. The Megamachine describes the web in which the individual acts and the individual relationships first unfold their effect — and in which nobody can hold the web itself to account.
XI. What the Megamachine Produces in Colombia — and for Whom
One last question is the question of production. What does the Megamachine produce in Colombia? For whom?
It produces coal. 24 million tonnes a year from Cerrejón alone, in 2024. 559.8 million tonnes of coal were extracted from Cerrejón between 2002 and 2021 and largely exported — to Europe, to Asia, to Turkey, to the Middle East. It produces cocaine. About 1,700 tonnes a year in 2023 according to UN estimates — via the Pacific and Atlantic routes to North America and Europe. It produces oil, bananas, coffee, cut flowers, avocados, emeralds. It produces profits from drinking water for Glencore's shareholders.
It also produces — and this is the other side of the balance sheet — displaced people. 176,500 internally displaced people in 2024 alone, more than three times as many as in 2022. The disappeared. The dead. Thousands of Wayuu children. Social leaders. Falsos-positivos victims. Women who, as MAFAPO mothers, walk the streets in boots searching for the bones of their sons. Patients in waiting rooms who lose their day.
Who profits? Glencore. The EPS owners Sanitas, Sura, Compensar (at least on the shareholder side). The drug consumers in North America and Europe. The coal importers EnBW, Uniper, STEAG. The international arbitration lawyers. The campaign financiers. The global pharmaceutical corporations that sell their products to the EPS without having to go through doctors' prescribing channels. The Mexican cartels that redistribute Colombian cocaine. The law firms employed in the proceedings of the JEP, of the Restitución de Tierras, of the Court of Cassation, of the international arbitration tribunals. The German end consumers who obtain cheaper electricity without having to know where it comes from.
Who loses? The fifty-one million Colombians, statistically distributed according to their geographical, social and ethnic position. The heaviest losers are the indigenous peoples, the Afro-Colombian communities, the rural poor, the smallholder class. Less heavily affected is the urban middle class, whose day in the waiting room is cancelled, whose journeys to Europe require visas, whose flat in Bogotá is adequate, whose treatment is delayed. The least affected is the economic upper class, which lives in gated neighbourhoods, uses its own hospitals, maintains its own security structures.
The Colombian Megamachine is thus not the failure of a single policy. It is the form of life of a country in which certain things have to be produced and distributed — coal, cocaine, conflict commodities — and in which the distribution of costs and returns is organised so that the costs are borne locally and the returns siphoned off globally. Whoever sits in the EPS waiting room in Bogotá is not waiting by chance. She is waiting because the system that administers her is a system whose decision-making logic was laid down a quarter of a century ago in Ley 100 and which has functioned ever since the way it functions. She is waiting because her lifetime is worth less than the margin of the EPS that administers her. She is waiting because the reform of her system has foundered on a political constellation that lies beyond her influence — but nevertheless consumes her lifetime.
The Megamachine does not live everywhere with the same intensity. In some countries it is a layer that becomes visible when you look. In others it is the place where life takes place. In Colombia it is the place.
XII. Conclusion — What Colombia Teaches
Whoever compares the German or European experience of the Megamachine with the Colombian one gains two insights that matter for the Megamachine in general.
First, the difference is not qualitative but quantitative. In Germany too there are Kafka experiences — the health insurer whose treatment is delayed, the court whose judgment takes ten years, the mine whose decommissioning does not happen, the takeover whose guarantees of continuity expire. The Megamachine is at work everywhere. But in Germany it is more thinly staffed, because fewer actors with less power operate in one space. In Colombia it is more densely staffed, because more actors with more power operate in one space. The experience is therefore different. But the structure is similar.
Second, what Colombia shows is the limit of the reform potential of a left-wing, democratically elected government. Petro's mandate was unambiguous. His programme was detailed. His political will was evident. But the Kafkaesque geometry of the country turned against him — not through a single counter-power, but through the entanglement of many. The EPS owners, the Comisión Séptima, the Consejo de Estado, the mining corporations, the international arbitration tribunals, the FARC dissidents, the ELN, the AGC, the German electricity importers — they did not coordinate with one another. But together they ensured that Petro's reforms could not break through. That is the Megamachine as political reality.
Whoever in Germany today observes the shifting of industrial substance — the consolidation described in the DMG Mori papers, the ongoing discussions about Chinese takeovers of the Mittelstand (small and medium-sized) machine-tool industry, the relocation of BASF research to China — sees a different intensity of the same logic. What shifts slowly in Pfronten or Bielefeld shifts daily in La Guajira or Catatumbo, visibly, bloodily. Whoever knows the Colombian experience can better place the German one. Whoever knows the German one can recognise the Colombian one as systemic — not as a peculiarity of another country, but as a variant of a global phenomenon.
What Colombia teaches the outsider is not that something terrible is happening there. Terrible things happen everywhere. What Colombia teaches is that the Megamachine is not an abstraction but a concrete chain of actors, interests and systems whose interplay, intended or unintended, produces a form of life in which fifty-one million people lose their day — and nobody feels responsible for it. This form of life is not particularly Colombian. It is the form that can arise anywhere the entanglement becomes dense enough. The Colombian lesson is a warning to the spaces that are still more thinly staffed — above all the German, the European, the North American ones.
Whoever knows the Colombian waiting rooms knows that the Megamachine is not abstract. It is the counter at which the membership is suspended without anyone being able to explain why. It is the central office that is somewhere else. It is the day that is lost. It is the treatment that does not take place. And it is the question of what you will do tomorrow if the membership is suspended at the counter again — and whether the next central office will again be somewhere else.