Apple makes iPhones in India. Nike makes shoes in Vietnam. Tesla builds in China and Mexico. And every time an American company depends on a factory that is half a planet away, it is also depending on long shipping lanes, geopolitical luck, and a whole lot of things going right at once.

Colombia is 3.5 hours from Miami. It sits in essentially the same business day as the U.S. East Coast. It has a free trade agreement with the United States that has been in force since 2012. And yet when executives talk about nearshoring, the conversation still defaults to Mexico first, then maybe Central America, and only much later — if at all — to Colombia. That gap is the story.

Let’s define the term first, because “nearshoring” gets used like everybody already knows what it means. For three decades, the model was simple: make it where labor is cheapest and ship it where it sells. The U.S.-China trade war, the COVID supply-chain shock, the war in Ukraine, and repeated shipping disruptions changed the calculus. Companies now care more about resilience, political predictability, and how quickly managers can get on a plane and visit a site without losing two days and twelve time zones in the process. That is the whole nearshoring logic in one sentence: closer, faster, safer.

Mexico has captured most of that wave, and to be fair, it earned it. Reuters reported that Mexico hit a record roughly $36 billion in foreign direct investment in 2023, with more than half flowing into manufacturing. It also replaced China as the biggest trading partner of the United States. That is not hype. That is execution.

But Mexico is no longer the easy answer it looked like a few years ago. Reuters Breakingviews noted that the expected nearshoring boom has run into rising land, labor, and construction costs, aging infrastructure, and security risks tied to organized crime. In other words, Mexico is still winning, but it is getting fuller, pricier, and more complicated. That usually means large companies start asking the next question: where else?

That is where Colombia should enter the room.

The country already has some of the pieces multinationals say they want. The U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement entered into force on May 15, 2012, and the USTR describes it as a comprehensive trade agreement that eliminates tariffs and removes barriers to trade in goods and services. For companies serving the U.S. market, that is not a small detail. That is the difference between a nice story and an actual operating advantage.

Then there is the energy story, which matters more now than it did five years ago. Reuters reported in May 2026 that hydropower still accounts for roughly 66% to 70% of Colombia’s electricity generation. AP reported the same range during the 2024 drought story. For any multinational under pressure to lower emissions and clean up its supply chain, that is real leverage. A factory powered mostly by hydro is a very different corporate ESG conversation than one running on coal-heavy power.

Colombia also has institutional tools that, on paper, look tailor-made for this moment. Its free trade zone regime offers a 20% corporate tax rate and customs advantages, while the general corporate income tax rate is 35%, according to Invest in Colombia and PwC’s 2026 tax summary. That is exactly the kind of legal structure countries use to attract export-oriented manufacturing. The mechanism exists. It just is not yet a headline.

And there is a broader investment base to build on. Banco de la República notes that FDI has been one of Colombia’s main sources of external financing, and OECD’s 2025 country-level FDI work says Colombia has been using foreign investment to move beyond extractives toward manufacturing, ICT, and cleaner industries. So this is not a fantasy from zero. The country already has the beginnings of a platform.

Now, let’s be honest, because if this were already easy, Colombia would have captured far more of this wave by now.

The country has real constraints. Security is still a boardroom issue in some regions. Reuters reported in 2025 that Colombia was expanding troop deployments as part of a renewed offensive against armed groups after peace efforts stalled. That kind of headline matters if you are a U.S. executive comparing a 15-year manufacturing investment across countries. It does not kill the case for Colombia, but it absolutely narrows where certain industries will feel comfortable locating.

Infrastructure is another real issue. Cartagena is a natural Caribbean gateway and Buenaventura gives Colombia Pacific access, but logistics across the Andes are still more complex than they are in Mexico’s northern industrial corridor. That is not ideology. That is geography. Colombia can fix parts of that with roads, ports, and dedicated industrial planning, but it cannot pretend the problem is imaginary. Reuters’ coverage of infrastructure awards and maritime projects shows that the country is investing, but nearshoring at scale would require more, faster, and more deliberately targeted work.

There is also the matter of administrative friction. Colombia has attractive structures for foreign investors, but the system still feels more complicated than it should for a country trying to win manufacturing flows. If Mexico’s pitch is “we already do this at scale,” Colombia’s current pitch is more like “we have the ingredients, now give us a minute.” In a global competition for supply chains, that minute can cost you a factory. This is an inference, but it is a grounded one based on the contrast between Mexico’s current FDI scale and Colombia’s still more fragmented investment profile.

So what actually makes sense for Colombia?

Not everything. This is not about waking up tomorrow and building a full Detroit in the Andes. It is about the categories where proximity to the U.S. matters enough to outweigh the country’s remaining frictions.

Textiles and apparel are the obvious one. Colombia already has a real base there, especially around Medellín, and the combination of tariff preferences, short transit times, and design-to-market speed should be more valuable than it currently is. The same goes for food processing, packaging, certain medical and pharmaceutical products, consumer goods assembly, and selected auto-parts or electronics components. These are categories where “closer to the customer” can actually beat “lowest-cost labor in the world.”

The big picture is this: Colombia does not need to beat China at being China. It does not need to beat Vietnam at being Vietnam. It needs to become the place where American companies say, “This doesn’t need to be on the other side of the planet anymore.”

And that is a much more achievable goal.

If Colombia captured even a modest slice of the broader nearshoring reallocation now flowing overwhelmingly toward Mexico and a handful of other destinations, the payoff would not just be more exports. It would be formal jobs, supplier ecosystems, technical training, more tax revenue, and a deeper industrial base in a country that still needs all of those things. Mexico’s experience shows the scale of what is possible when the pieces line up.

So why is almost nobody talking about it?

Partly because Colombia is still marketed more as a tourism story, an oil-and-mining story, or an expat story than as a serious nearshoring platform. Partly because “same time zone, hydro-heavy grid, tariff-free U.S. access, and lower operating costs than Mexico” is not yet a sentence most people associate with Colombia. But it could be. And if the right government, private-sector coalition, and infrastructure agenda decided to push that story hard for the next decade, this could become one of the most important economic shifts in the region. That is not guaranteed. But the opportunity is real.

The short version is this:

Mexico has already proven the nearshoring thesis.

Colombia has not yet proven it, but it has more of the raw ingredients than most people realize.

And in a world where resilience, speed, and political diversification matter more every year, countries that are “close enough and stable enough” suddenly become much more interesting than they used to be.

Colombia is one of those countries.

It just needs to act like it knows it.