We analyse recent homicide figures in Colombia’s capital.
Last month we looked at the latest homicide data for the city: in 2025 violent deaths went down 3.4% on the previous year. These 1,165 killings gave Bogotá – with a population of around 8 million – a homicide rate of 14.8 deaths per 100,000 of the population.
This month we look deeper into this statistic. Why homicides? Though an imperfect indicator, murder rates do give an insight into insecurity in a zone as they are often the extreme outcome of robberies gone wrong, gang feuds, political violence, domestic violence, fights, targeted killings, drugging of victims and bungled kidnappings. Put simply, the number of bodies means the amount of crime.
Crime patchwork
Where are homicides happening? In our own analysis of Bogotá’s 20 districts (see map below) the gritty downtown area of Sant Fe has the highest rate of 54 killings per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by nearby Los Martíres with 47, and Ciudad Bolívar with 33.
Sant Fe, like many Bogotá districts, is a patchwork of agreeable barrios, such as the touristy Las Aguas for example, and historic La Candelaria (with just three homicides last year) juxtaposed with crime-ridden neighborhoods.
But in the southwest corner of Santa Fe lies San Bernardo, or ‘Samber’ as it is known locally, generally recognized as the most dangerous barrio in Bogotá, a hub for gangs selling drugs to street people and the scene of several fatal grenade attacks in 2025.
Santa Fe is a reminder that in Bogotá safer streets are often just a block away from no-go zones. Rolos and long-term residentslearn to navigate these invisible barriers.
To emphasize this point, Santa Fe, statistically the most dangerous district in the city, lies adjacent to the leafy district of Teusaquillo with a homicide rate of 5 per 100,000 in 2025 (amounting to nine deaths), which according to this metric makes it the safest district in Bogotá.
Less grim up north
Other districts registering less than 10 killings per 100,000 in 2025 are the more upmarket northern districts of the city: Chapinero, Usaquén, Suba, Fontibón and Engativá. And as in most years, there is a gradient towards safer barrios in the north, with the dividing line running roughly along the Avenida El Dorado (Av Calle 26).
But in terms of reducing crime, there are success stories in the south. While still the most dangerous district, Santa Fe has reduced its homicide rate by 28 per cent in 2025 alongside Bosa, Usme and Antonio Nariño, all with reductions in double digits.
These results are hard to assess; organized criminal gangs are present in all these areas, so the peace could be transitory and a result of rival gangs declaring a truce, or one gang leveraging control, rather than societal shifts or better policing.
In some cases, large-scale operations have had an impact, combing security and social services in a carrot and stick approach called megatomas. In Santa Fe, for example, following the grenade attacks, the Bogotá administration both militarized the barrio and flooded it with development programs to support the huge homeless population there. This approach seems to have worked, at least temporarily.
On the negative side, three central districts (Puente Aranda, San Cristóbal and Rafael Uribe Uribe) have seen a spike in killings, a reminder of the balloon effect; pushing down on crime in one zone just forces it to pop up somewhere else.
Sicario scenarios
What’s behind the killings? Police databases do not reveal motives, but media coverage and occasional analyses by Bogotá’s Secretaría de Seguridad give insights into the city’s mean streets.
Targeted killings, usually carried out by paid hitmen (sicarios), are for the city the visible tip of an underworld iceberg of organized crime. Hits are carried out often on the street or public spaces against identified victims by professional gunslingers sometimes recruited specifically for the job with promises of cash.
Clear-up rates are low: in June last year city councilors complained that in the first half of 2025 out of 521 homicides, 156 were targeted hits, for which only 16 people had been arrested. “In other words, 90 per cent of assassinations on Bogotá go unpunished,” pointed out councilor Julián Espinosa in one debate.
This was despite the city police’s vaunted Plan Candado – Padlock Strategy – of mobile rapid response teams and drones to quickly catch perpetrators by locking down zones within minutes of a major crime.
The most high-profile killing was the gunning down of senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe, shot in the head during a walkabout in a Bogotá park. The police quickly apprehended the small-time gangsters behind the shooting in June 2025, including the 15-year-old shooter, but today despite nine arrests are no closer to revealing the paymasters behind the hit.
Another unsolved assassination was the targeted killing of emerald czar Hernando Sánchez, shot dead while walking with his family in a leafy northern suburb of Usaquén in April last year. The military-style killing, by a sniper hiding in nearby woodlands, was identical to the mysterious murder nine months before of a fellow emerald baron, known as Pedro Pechuga, also unresolved.
Weapons of choice
Despite Colombia having restrictions for private ownership of firearms, the majority of 2025 killings were with guns, at 703, according to the police database. Other weapons recorded were knives (304), blunt objects (84) and grenades (6).
This pattern has persisted for decades; Colombia, and its capital, are flooded with illegal firearms, many of them from the estimated 600,000 guns smuggled south across the border from the U.S. each year. Just in the first four months of 2025, police confiscated 8,466 illegal weapons across the country
According to Carolina Ortega, a political scientist at the National University, and quoted by UPI, illegal guns were used in 78 per cent of killings in Colombia.
Easy access to guns also raised the risk of spontaneous killings, according to data from the Secretaria de Seguridad which showed that40 per cent of Bogotá homicides followed a dispute, argument or scuffle.
Most of these happened outside on the street, late in the evening, and “amidst scenes of revelry and excessive alcohol consumption”, said the report, released as part of a media campaign called “Take a second before you shoot…”.
Violent machismo
Femicides went down on 2025, both in Bogotá and at national level, according to data released this week by the Observatorio de Mujeres y Equidad de Género de Bogotá.
In Bogotá during 2025 there were 97 females killed, around 8% of total violent deaths. Of these, 20 were classified as femicides. This was slightly less than in 2024 (22 deaths) and mirrored a similar reduction (7%) nationally. Nationally, approximately one killing in five of a female was later classified as a femicide, the “violent expression of machismo”, said the study.
A study by Bogotá’s Secretaria de la Mujer found that in 49 per cent of cases in the capital, the women had suffered physical violence in the weeks before the murder, and 40 per cent had previously sought help from the police.
According to observatory data, last year Secretaria staff supported 142,688 women, of which 48% were facing violence, a slight reduction on the previous years. The 2025 figures were a reminder that although more warning signs were being detected, timely intervention was not always possible, said the report.
“Femicide does not arise from nothing: it is foreshadowed, repeated, and often normalized before reaching its most tragic outcome,” it concluded.
Pay up – or pay the price
In 2025 many Bogotá murders were linked to extortion demands, with gangs ruthlessly gunning down small business owners if they failed to pay protection money. Sometimes shop staff or a passerby were also killed or injured, in some case with grenades or explosives.
Protection rackets are nothing new in the city, but cases and killings skyrocketed post-pandemic partly because of turf wars between gangs diversifying from the drug trade and Venezuelan gangs linked to the transnational group Tren de Aragua with names like Las Satanás and Los Coyotes.
Extortion reached epidemic proportions in 2024, with an average of 200 cases a month, and continued into 2025 with a rash of crimes such as the killings of informal minibus drivers in the south of Bogotá.
Overall, Bogotá in 2025 saw extortion go down by 20 per cent compared to 2024, though it was still higher than any year during the previous decade. And already in the first month of 2026 there have been several murders linked to extortion demands including a grenade attack on a nightclub in Los Mártires last week which killed one and injured a dozen more.
Millionaire’s ride
Another death last week, that of a university professor found dead and incinerated on the outskirts of the city, highlighted increased cases of Bogotá’s infamous Paseo Millonario, where armed gangs working with taxi drivers attack and extort passengers, often torturing them to reveal bank details while they empty their accounts.
Victims are often targeted late at night leaving bars or restaurants. In a chilling twist, recent cases pointed to victims being subdued with ketamine, with the drug either killing or severely incapacitating the victim.
According to data from the GAULA (Anti-Kidnapping and Extortion Group), 40 Paseo Millonario cases were reported in 2025, a rise of 207 per cent on the previous year. Even that figure was thought to be a huge underestimate since many victims were too scared to come forward. Hotspots were in Chapinero, Kennedy, Bosa, Ciudad Bolívar, and Fontibón.
In one case a taxi gang held a victim for 19 hours, prompting the Attorney General’s Office to reclassify such crimes as “kidnapping” with a potential 42-year prison sentence. In theory this prompted the police to start responding more robustly to a crime that has plagued Bogotá for decades.
Perpetrators of these high-impact crimes were also more likely now to get locked up, with 47 imprisoned last year out of the 52 captured, which was way above average jailing rate of 6 percent of criminals arrested, according to Bogotá police chief Giovanni Cristancho, talking to RCN News last week.
But he also admitted that the understaffed police force was struggling to keep up with constantly emerging kidnap gangs, usually small teams of four or five people which could easily move around the city.
“As soon as we reinforce one area, such as around Calle 85, the modus operandi shifts to other zones,” he told RCN.
It’s that randomness, and the risk of being drugged – or worse – that makes the Paseo Millonario one of the most feared crimes in Bogotá. And for 2026, the one to watch.