Unfortunately I don't actually know what effect Colombia fighting in Korea or New Zealand and the Philippines fighting in Vietnam had domestically.
Colombia's participation in the Korean War is largely a very brief sidenote, if even mentioned, in general histories of Colombia and I'd be surprised if many Colombians were even at all aware of the
Batallón Colombia (but Colombians usually have a very poor knowledge of their own history). Of course, the Korean War and Colombia's minor military contribution to it is overshadowed by the very bloody partisan civil war in Colombia during that same period (
La Violencia) and the general political instability/conflict of that period (Laureano Gómez's presidency and the 1953 Rojas Pinilla coup).
The discussion of Colombia's participation in Korea began in the final year of Conservative president Mariano Ospina Pérez's presidency, but the decision to send an infantry battalion and the frigate
Almirante Padilla to Korea was taken in October 1950 early in the presidency of authoritarian Conservative president Laureano Gómez. The Conservative government justified participation in the conflict with their quasi-falangiste/clerico-fascist ideology as "defending Christian civilization against communist tyranny" while also trying to make a link between international communism and their own domestic enemies, namely the Liberal Party and specifically the Liberal guerrillas of the Llanos Orientales. There's a view that Gómez committed troops in an effort to whitewash his own anti-American views and fascist-leaning sympathies in the 1930s and World War II, and play himself up to the United States, much like his idol Franco did, in the hopes of gaining military assistance and support from the United States (which, of course, it did, although by that point Gómez was out of power). Certainly Colombia's participation in Korea did further professionalize the military and provided it with some valuable training, which it would later make us of at home.
The Liberal Party, which at this point in time was excluded from formal institutions of power, had a leadership elite which was broadly pro-American and therefore also sympathetic to the anti-communist side, but the Liberals and
El Tiempo (the main newspaper of the
bogotano Liberal oligarchic elite at the time) opposed Colombia's active participation in Korea. There's some debate over whether or not the infantry battalion had a disproportionate number of Liberal officers and non-commissioned officers or not (so as to 'get rid of' some annoying Liberals).