How are Harry and Meghan being protected on their Colombian visit?

The security team protecting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in Colombia, a country with a history of political violence and a decades-long conflict between the state and guerilla rebels, is considered among the best in the world.
Harry and Meghan have been travelling around Bogotá as part of the vice-president’s convoy of at least a dozen bulletproof cars, along with two ambulances and back-up vehicles. The security personnel, who also protect President Petro, are recruited from the military, the police and state prosecutors.
The army protection officers are mostly from a special forces background, trained as part of a co-operation agreement with the United States at the Fort Liberty military academy in North Carolina, said John Escobar, a former Colombian soldier and now associate director of the consultancy Control Risks in Bogotá. “They have a very, very detailed selection process,” he said.
Escobar said the close protection provided to Harry and Meghan would be under the military formula of “triple belt” security. The first and most important belt comprises specialists wearing civilian clothes who discreetly surround the VIPs. “The second belt is the one that everybody sees, in uniform,” Escobar said.
The third belt is a mixture of uniformed and non-uniformed officials, including intelligence staff. They oversee the technical aspects of security, including the jamming of signals that could be used to trigger explosive devices or drones. Some of the training for this side of protection is believed to be provided by MI6, which has longstanding agreements with the Colombian intelligence service, the DNI, focussing mainly on halting drug smugglers, as well as other threats the state may face.
Occasionally the protection that senior Colombian officials deploy is old-school, low-tech and very visible. That was evident on Tuesday when Petro arrived in the city of Pereira, in the centre of the country, and was seen descending the steps of the presidential plane shadowed by a security officer holding an unrolled ballistic blanket.
Petro had earlier said there was information that a rebel group, which had abandoned government-sponsored peace talks in June, was planning an assassination attempt.
On Friday, while the duke and duchess were visiting a school in Bogotá, the Colombian government ordered extra security at the Palace of Justice, home to the country’s supreme court, after police said they had found explosives and a model of the building during a raid in the south of the capital.
There was no connection to the couple’s visit, or risk to them, but the episode did highlight the declining security situation in the country, where Petro’s efforts to forge peace deals with various rebel groups are unravelling.
“From the moment the situation became known, the government, in close collaboration with the national police and the army, reinforced security at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá,” Petro’s office said. It added that it had advanced surveillance systems, “explosive-proof equipment” and “drones for continuous monitoring.”