Through a monitor, two men watch a bomb tumble through the air toward a building at the edge of town. “Look at how they run,” one of the men says.
The drone’s camera follows a group of people below as they sprint down the road before the mortar explodes.
These scenes of destruction, carried out and filmed by drones, have defined the war in Ukraine. But this drone is thousands of miles away in Colombia, the latest mutation in the country’s deadly, long-standing conflict between the national government and militant groups.
It’s also an example of the growing use of drone warfare in Latin America and other parts of the globe.
Seventeen videos posted on social media and verified by NBC News show that these groups, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), are using drones for surveillance, intimidation and bombing campaigns — targeting rival groups, soldiers, police and civilians across the country, injuring and killing dozens in the past year.
Militants have focused their assaults on areas where they already possess greater control: in Catatumbo, a region of dense jungle bordering Venezuela, and Cauca, on Colombia’s west coast, notorious for its smuggling routes in the Pacific Ocean.
It was in Cauca last year in the town of El Plateado that a 10-year-old boy was killed by a grenade dropped from a drone onto a field during a soccer game. The boy, identified as “Dylan” by Brig. Gen. Federico Mejía, commander of the armed forces in Cauca, was the first death from a drone strike in the country. Twelve others were injured in the explosion.
The rate of strikes has rapidly accelerated since. “Every day they try and attack,” Mejía said.
In 2024, the Colombian Defense Ministry recorded 119 drone-related attacks. In 2025, attacks have doubled, with 180 incidents documented as of August.
The sound of fear
The drones — cheap, easy to operate and widely available online — are altered to carry explosives filled with nails, pieces of chainsaws and metal bolts, Mejía said. Used for surveillance and strikes, they can fly more than 1,000 feet above, making them virtually imperceptible to people on the ground.
“The human ear can’t hear it,” said Secretary Luis Fernando Niño Lopez, high commissioner for peace in Norte de Santander, a region that encompasses Catatumbo. Drones, he said, have allowed militant groups to go beyond traditional battlefields and reach civilians.
“Before, the war was body to body,” Niño Lopez said. “However, this changed to personal attacks, looking from house to house and using drones.”
In other instances, surveillance and intimidation go hand in hand. “The word is ‘zumbido’ (‘buzz’),” said Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Division at Human Rights Watch. In interviews the organization conducted with Indigenous communities in Catatumbo, residents described the “humming sound” from drones monitoring the population.
“There’s huge fear created now in Catatumbo whenever there’s the sound of a drone going around,” she said.
‘We can do that’
The adoption of drones marks the latest evolution in a conflict that has raged for over half a century in Colombia, experts said. In 2016, the government reached a peace agreement with the country’s largest rebel group, FARC. The agreement was criticized from many sides, including some FARC militants who refused to disarm and continued operating in smaller numbers.
With the reduction in their ranks, militant groups — no strangers to asymmetrical warfare — changed tactics. “It’s a great example of a sort of criminal learning,” Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said. “They see what’s happening in Ukraine, the extremely broad use of drones. They think, ‘Hey, we can do that.’ Then one group starts in Colombia, and it spreads like wildfire.”
Over the past few years, videos emerged on social media of militants experimenting with store-bought drones. A video from 2023 shows fighters from a FARC dissident group testing the weight of a grenade tied to the body of a drone with a piece of string.
“Often, these munitions are very rudimentary,” Dickinson said. “The majority of attacks have been aimed at police or military targets or rival armed groups, but often they are exploding, obviously, in areas that affect civilians, because they are, by definition, an indiscriminate weapon.”
‘Drone comes, drone goes’
Civilians, especially children, in Cauca and Catatumbo have ended up on both ends of drone attacks. Last August, authorities arrested a 16-year-old who they said had operated a drone that dropped a bomb on a police building.
“You see a lot of the guys who put together these drones, who run them being 16, 17, 18 years old,” Dickinson said. Child recruitment in Colombia has soared in the past several years, she said, increasing over 1,000% between 2021 and 2024.
Commercial drones are relatively simple to operate, and children, already predisposed to mastering new technology, are ideal targets for recruitment. “My son is 13 and manages a drone perfectly,” Mejía said.
Children in Colombia are increasingly vulnerable to the lures of militant groups, who have used social media apps like TikTok and WhatsApp to promote a glamorized version of the guerrilla lifestyle, according to experts, who also point to the absence of schoolteachers, many of whom have fled the violence in the region, as a contributing factor.
A cycle of attacks, forced recruitment and instability has brought about Colombia’s largest displacement from one region in at least 28 years. More than 73,000 people have fled Norte de Santander, according to the Ombudsman’s Office of Colombia.
For half a year, José del Carmen Abril, 55, known to his friends and family as Carmito, has been running for his life. The farmer and social leader from Catatumbo told NBC News he’s a target of the ELN. In January, he was rescued by military police along with 19 other farmers after the rebel group launched several attacks against rival FARC dissidents. Speaking to Colombian media weeks after he was rescued, he said he was targeted due to his past in farmworker struggles and his previous support for the Unión Patriótica, a party linked with FARC.
Now in hiding, Abril hears updates from his siblings and nephews who remain in Catatumbo.
Drones, which at one time promised to be a technological advancement for farmers in Colombia, have become a symbol of terror.
“Catatumbo is becoming drone comes, drone goes,” Abril said. “There is a fear of drones since farmers are military targets for the ELN.”
Amid the exchange of attacks from the ELN and FARC dissidents in the region, drones have dropped explosives on the homes of people in the countryside. In May, a 12-year-old and his mother were killed in Tibú when a drone dropped a grenade on their house, Abril said.
‘A major risk for the future’
The military and government of Colombia have recently taken measures to stem the surge of drone attacks. The Defense Ministry has proposed a series of bills that would create a national registry for drones and classify strikes on civilians as terrorism.
Soldiers have also started using anti-drone technology, devices that can locate unmanned aircraft and jam their signals. Since implementing these defenses, Mejía said, his forces have reduced the number of these attacks by 80% in Cauca.
Devices for countering drones are by no means ubiquitous. Soldiers and police often try to shoot drones out of the sky, a relatively ineffective measure that creates its own public safety risks when they are shot down above crowded areas.
“They’re very hard to shoot down,” said Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you’re a civilian living in rural Colombia, and there is a drone that can drop bombs from hundreds of feet above you or can fly in and detonate the explosive, you really have virtually no recourse.”
The country is facing another challenge to its ability to fight the rapidly evolving strategies and equipment of militant forces. At risk are hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid tied up in a certification process of the country’s commitment to the war on drugs.
Colombia has narrowly avoided decertification in past years, but it has failed to cut the illegal growth of coca crops, which has risen each year in the past decade, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
By Sept. 15, President Donald Trump will decide whether to cut off aid to Colombia. Cutting off the supply of resources and technologies to the country could cripple its efforts to fight militants in the future, said Alberto José Mejía Ferrero, a former general for Colombia’s armed forces. He added that it would be “very bad for our strategy, for approach, and especially for the very, very strong relationship that the military forces of Colombia and our national police had with the U.S. for decades.”
The adoption of drone warfare by militant groups in Latin America is not unique to Colombia. Already, Mexican cartels have used drones to attack police and one another. In Ecuador, a drone targeted the roof of a high-security prison to force a jailbreak.
“I think that’s a major risk for the future,” Ziemer said. “I think the region as a whole has yet to come to terms with the scale and potential scale of the threat we’re seeing.”
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