Police Helicopter Downed by Drone in Colombia, Killing 12

A Black Hawk was attacked by cocaine-trafficking group, officials said, the latest in an escalating series of drone attacks against security forces.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia—A drone operated by a drug-trafficking gang brought down a Colombian police antinarcotics helicopter, killing 12 in an escalating series of drone attacks against the country’s beleaguered security forces, police and provincial officials said.

An image from a video posted by Antioquia’s provincial governor, Andrés Julián Rendón, on X shows smoke rising from the site where a Colombian police helicopter went down.

The U.S.-made Black Hawk had been operating Thursday morning in a rural area near the town of Amalfi in northwest Colombia when it was struck by a drone piloted by a cocaine-trafficking militia, authorities said.

“With deep sorrow, I mourn the killing of our police officers and express my full solidarity and support for their families,” said Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez, calling the officers “heroes who gave their lives for Colombia.”

Since the first attack by drone in Colombia in April of last year, the military here says there have been 301 strikes with unmanned aerial vehicles, more than two-thirds of them in Cauca and Norte de Santander provinces. Both regions are covered in coca, the plant used to make cocaine, with heavily armed militias fighting each other over drug routes. At least 22 soldiers and police officers have died in the attacks.

“It’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem,” said Evan Ellis, a Latin America scholar at the U.S. Army War College who has written about armed groups using drones. Ellis said drone technology is cheap and easily adaptable from commercial to military uses, as groups here like the National Liberation Army and the EMC have shown.

“These are technologies you just can’t contain,” Ellis said. “You can try to limit them, but as the knowledge frontier expands, it’s really difficult to say, ‘These certain technologies, you can’t have access to.’”

The attack on the helicopter was in Antioquia province in the northwest, a region where the powerful Clan del Golfo militia and other groups traffic cocaine and illegally mined gold, said the governor, Andrés Julián Rendón.

Provincial and military officials said the attack was carried out by a militia of fighters led by Alexander Díaz Mendoza, better known by his alias, Calarcá. His group is made up of former rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who chose not to disarm after a 2016 peace pact with Colombia’s government.

“This is the first drone attack we’ve heard of in Antioquia,” Rendón said. “These are wealthy criminals, emboldened, showing off new uniforms and state-of-the-art weapons.”

In recent years, armed groups have expanded across parts of rural Colombia, fueled by record-setting production of both cocaine and coca. Military analysts say the groups have also taken advantage of cease-fires called by President Gustavo Petro’s government aimed at encouraging them to take part in peace talks.

The drone attack wasn’t the only violent episode Thursday. In Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, a truck bomb detonated by the EMC drug group in the afternoon killed five civilians and injured dozens more, the military said.

Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com