Country Context
COLOMBIA
Colombia has endured more than 70 years of multifaceted internal conflict, beginning with La Violencia between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party in the 1950s. In the 1960s, farmworker and communist uprisings evolved into the left-wing guerilla movements Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército Popular (FARC-EP) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). These groups fought both the Colombian government and the paramilitary forces that emerged in the 1980s and the majority of whom eventually united under the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). After 52 years of conflict, the government and FARC signed the Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace (2016 Peace Accord), which ended fighting between several of the conflict parties, although parts of Colombia continue to experience significant violence.
The multi-decade conflict “inflicted suffering and loss on the people to a degree unparalleled in our history,” wrote the drafters of the 2016 Peace Accord.[i] At least 450,000 Colombians are estimated to have died in this civil war, one out of 10 of whom were civilians.[ii] More than 50,000 people were kidnapped and more than 7 million were displaced.[iii] Both the Colombian military and the guerilla forces engaged in extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and widespread human rights abuses. SGBV was “a habitual, extensive, systematic and invisible practice” throughout the conflict, according to a 2008 finding by Colombia’s Constitutional Court.[iv] Fighting groups forcibly recruited children, with FARC alone recruiting at least 18,600 children between 1996–2016.[v] In addition, the Colombian armed forces are reported to have illegally surveilled political rivals and framed leftist groups for the murders of at least 6,400 people during the “false positives” era of 2002–2008. Although the conflict had its roots in unequal distribution of land ownership, drug trafficking became a significant economic driver of violence.[vi]
Civil society, victims and survivors have worked hard to ensure that the 2016 Peace Agreement, and others, recognize the need for truth. The 2016 Peace Agreement established the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV) and the Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas (UBPD), each of which has a role in preserving memory, discovering truth, seeking accountability and meeting the needs of victims and survivors. It built on a series of transitional justice initiatives stretching back to peace negotiations in 1984.[vii]
The Colombian government has sometimes championed truth initiatives and at other times has been an obstacle to truth. Congress has adopted legislation to establish truth, justice and memory institutions and to mandate instruction on peace and justice in preschool and primary schools. However, past Colombian presidential administrations, particularly that of former president Ivan Duque, have sought to undermine or obstruct these institutions by limiting their jurisdiction, denying them funding or limiting their access to information.[viii] Some formal institutions, such as the Constitutional Court, have been an important bulwark; for instance, in January 2022, the Court ruled that Duque’s government had failed to adequately protect ex-combatants affiliated with FARC and their families.[ix] It ordered the government, particularly the National Protection Unit, to implement security guarantees for ex-combatants as agreed upon in the 2016 Peace Accord.[x] Civil society advocacy has also played an essential role, maintaining momentum, drawing attention to areas where the government or other combatant parties are not cooperating in good faith and keeping attention focused on the needs of victims and communities.
Memory
Government institutions, civil society and community initiatives play interrelated roles in preserving the memory of Colombia’s past and ongoing atrocities. Some government-led initiatives pre-date the current peace process, such as the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (CNMH), while others, such as the CEV, are products of the 2016 Peace Agreement. State-sponsored memory and truth-telling have at times been critical to advancing truth in Colombia, but these initiatives are not immune to political manipulation. They are also not capable of fully encompassing Colombia’s need for memorialization. Civil society and community-led memory efforts have often led the way, reaching new victims and survivors and ensuring that state-sponsored initiatives reflect a diversity of perspectives. Communities also preserve memory through traditional, culturally rooted processes that have nothing to do with state-sponsored truth and memory work but instead reflect the needs of victims and survivors within those communities to share the truth of their experiences.
State and International Initiatives
A number of different initiatives related to memory and truth-telling operate simultaneously in Colombia—the legacy of different peace processes over the many decades of conflict. Two state-sponsored institutions are key anchors of formal memorialization efforts: the CNMH created in 2011 by Congress through the Victims and Land Restitution Law,[i] and the CEV, established in 2017 as part of the peace agreement reached between the government and the then FARC guerrillas. They build on the work of the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation as well as two earlier institutions: the Bogotá Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation (CMPR) and the Medellín Museo Casa de la Memoria (MCMM). The CMPR, built as a meeting and memorial space, contains within its walls more than 2,000 memory capsules holding individual stories and pinches of soil, symbolic of one of the main drivers of the conflict.[ii] The MCMM was built in 2006 as part of the Victim Assistance Program established by the Medellín municipal government to share victims’ perspectives on the conflict and give them a space to grieve.[iii]
Community and Civil Society Initiatives
Formal memory and memorialization initiatives in Colombia have always been supported, supplemented or driven by communities, collectives, CSOs, families and individuals. These groups have been carrying out unofficial memorialization activities for decades, often during active conflict when preserving memory was a dangerous and persecuted activity. Some of these activities have proven critical to the work of formal institutions. For instance, Fabiola Lalinde’s personal archive, which contains the extensive dossier she compiled while searching for her missing son, not only is a symbolic memorial to the search for disappeared persons, but also became an essential source for the CEV.[i] Other organizations have worked to ensure that the outcomes of the transitional justice process reach a wide audience. For instance, the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP), which is one of the oldest CSOs dedicated to preserving human rights and memory in Colombia, has sponsored discussions and trainings around the CEV report with the Jesuit Society.[ii]
In addition to civil society and community-preserved archives of documents, communities and collectives have also preserved memory through deep-rooted cultural practices that reflect their ways of knowing. For instance, the Chocoan singers of the Medio Atrato River traditionally perform alabaos, poem-songs that relate feelings of pain and loss, during periods of mourning. The Chocoan cantadoras composed alabaos related to the atrocities suffered by their communities, particularly the 2002 massacre of Chocoan people by FARC in Bojayá, and have been performing them at official government functions for at least 20 years. Performing the alabaos not only gives Chocoan people a way to express their suffering, but also serves as a stand-in for other mourning processes that are not possible in the case of disappeared or missing persons.[iii] The Women Weavers of Dreams and Flavors of Peace of Mampuján similarly preserve memory and share the impact of the conflict on their lives through art, in their case, through quilts and tapestries.[iv] In some cases, such as the Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, they have shared those practices or the information gathered through them with the CEV.[v] Artist collectives and cultural groups have presented the conflict from victims’ perspectives through a variety of mediums, which has not only opened space for discussing those experiences but also created an avenue to reach youth at risk of being recruited into gangs or armed groups.[vi] The CNMH has supported and elevated these initiatives by publishing an interactive map online of 451 memorialization initiatives in more than 100 municipalities across the country.[vii]
The Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica
The CNMH was established by a Ministry of Justice decree in 2011 with a mandate to compile documentation and testimonies related to violations committed during the armed conflict.[i] After eight years in operation, the CNMH now acts as both a hub for initiatives supporting victims and affected communities as well as a site of historical memory. It has gained national and international recognition as a rigorous space for academic research, public outreach and social awareness of Colombia’s diverse understanding of violence. Some of its achievements include the publication of 140 books—including 80 case reports—the collection of 13,000 testimonies of ex-combatants and maintenance of a human rights archive containing 330,000 documents. The CNMH also produced the Museum of Historical Memory’s conceptual guidelines and created the Observatory of Memory and Armed Conflict, a database of documents related to the conflict.[ii],[1]
The Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition
The CEV is the primary truth-telling mechanism established by the 2016 Peace Accord.[i] From 2018 until mid-2022, the CEV collected nearly 30,000 testimonies from victims, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, campesinos,[1] military, members of illegal armed groups, politicians, businesspeople, members of the diaspora and even former presidents.[ii] The CEV also trained interviewers to collect testimonies[2] from Colombians living in the diaspora.[iii] It created an Ethnic Peoples Directorate to guide the Commission’s work with Colombia’s ethnic communities, and was the first truth commission to explicitly incorporate intersectionality into its methodology.[iv] It also received more than a thousand reports from CSOs on acts of violence during the armed conflict.
The CEV published its initial findings and recommendations in June 2022.[v] The report details massacres, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, extortion, torture, sexual assault, child recruitment and other human rights violations. Accompanying the written report, the CEV pioneered a “Sound and Memory” platform, where victim and survivor testimonies can be heard.[vi] A Follow-up and Monitoring Committee has been established to oversee implementation of the CEV’s recommendations over the next seven years.
Justice
Colombia’s “Comprehensive System for Peace” is a system of formal institutions and procedures designed to address different aspects of justice. The system includes interconnected mechanisms intended to address a range of victims’ demands, including accountability for crimes committed during the conflict, reparations via a land redistribution program, truth-telling via the CEV and a forensic bureau charged with searching for and identifying the remains of missing persons. Ex-combatants must meet certain criteria to participate in different aspects of the system, and no component of it is allowed to override another. In this sense, the system does not prioritize different forms of justice, but rather recognizes that they are all indispensable components of a holistic response to victims and the public at large.
State-Led Accountability and Justice Mechanisms
The government of Colombia has established two accountability and justice mechanisms: the Justice and Peace System and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. The Justice and Peace System, created by Law 975 in 2005, offers reduced sentences to former members of paramilitary groups who committed crimes against humanity in exchange for full confessions and reparations for their victims.[i]
The La Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP) is a transitional tribunal set up to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes committed during the armed conflict between FARC-EP and the Colombian government.[ii] It operates as an autonomous and preferential jurisdiction with budgetary autonomy, empowered to hold trials to determine individual criminal responsibility. In addition, through the Chamber for Recognition of Responsibility, it sheds light on the patterns of behavior and internal policies of both FARC-EP and the Colombian military to identify the circumstances that promoted or facilitated violations.[iii]
These efforts have produced an unprecedented acknowledgement of responsibility by former FARC combatants and members of the military. In May 2021, seven FARC leaders held a live-streamed press conference in which they formally accepted the JEP’s findings related to their role in more than 2,500 kidnappings committed between 1990–2012.[iv] FARC leaders acknowledged that they’d kidnapped people for ransom to create pressure for prisoner exchanges and maintain political leverage in certain areas and asked for forgiveness from victims and survivors.[1] In April 2022, 10 military officials publicly acknowledged their role in kidnapping and killing 120 youths from the Ocana area.[v] The kidnapping and murders were committed as part of the “false positives” campaign meant to advance the military’s narrative by portraying civilian victims as militants. The acknowledgement was secured by the JEP tribunal, which is authorized to offer alternatives to imprisonment for perpetrators who confess and make reparations. It included an explicit recognition that the victims were not guerrillas in order to rehabilitate their reputations and those of their families.[2]
Colombia’s Comprehensive System for Peace also includes institutions focused on victims, survivors and their families. The Special Administrative Unit for Assistance and Reparations of Victims is responsible for coordinating the National System for Comprehensive Care and Reparations for Victims a collection of public policies administered by 39 ministries, agencies and units within the government.[vi] The UBPD is an autonomous and independent judicial body that contributes to forensic justice by coordinating searches for persons who are presumed to have disappeared because of the conflict. If it is established that a person has died, the UBPD is mandated to recover and identify the remains, return them with dignity to their relatives and then prepare a report on what was discovered in the investigation.[vii] Individuals and communities who were forcibly expelled from their lands can seek reparations through the Unidad de Restitución de Tierras, a government agency that oversees land restitution. The purpose of the program is to facilitate the return of internally displaced communities wherever possible by securing their property and housing rights through land registration.
In 2020, the government approved its largest ever victim assistance budget, approximately $263 million.[viii] The government of Colombia reported to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that monetary compensation had been paid to 339,740 victims, while a further 34,387 victims had agreed to non-monetary reparations such as letters of acknowledgement or the return of remains.[ix] As of November 2021, the UBPD had located 344 bodies of people presumed missing and returned 132.[x] Between 2016–2021, compensation or restitution orders covering more than 150,000 hectares were issued.[xi] Due to the volume of claims filed, the implementation period for the Victims and Land Restitution Law was extended in 2021 by a further 10 years.[xii] However, the IACHR noted a lack of progress on other land reparations measures, including recognition of restitution rights for indigenous communities that do not have formal land deeds and the creation of areas reserved for campesinos.[xiii]
Legal, Political and Social Constraints to Accountability
The Comprehensive System for Peace has made crucial achievements, but has had to overcome significant political and institutional obstacles to do so. Government institutions and agencies have struggled to coordinate with each other and have refused or been reluctant to cooperate with truth and accountability mechanisms. For instance, the UBPD’s operations have been significantly hindered by law enforcement and security agencies that restrict access to documentation, including access to military archives. The CEV has also reported difficulties obtaining information from the Defense Ministry, even though a 2018 Constitutional Court decision requires all state agencies to share “reserved” information.[xiv]
The COVID pandemic also disrupted the work of the Colombian transitional justice system. Courts were forced to transition some proceedings and procedures to a virtual setting, which limited the participation of victims in rural areas or those otherwise lacking access to the internet. The UBPD had to develop safe procedures for handling and returning remains during COVID-19.[xv] In addition, justice and accountability efforts have been hindered by ongoing poor security conditions in certain territories. Protection for victims, defendants, witnesses and the press remain insufficient, with Colombia’s Constitutional Court ordering the government in 2022 to protect former FARC combatants.[xvi]
Community and Civil Society Contributions to Justice
Civil society groups, victims’ associations and survivor communities have been instrumental in ensuring that transitional justice processes in Colombia reflect victims’ perspectives. This has been particularly true for marginalized communities and groups. For instance, human rights groups have pushed for justice for people who experienced gender-based violence during the 2021 national strike, tying that violence to a long history of gender-based discrimination, threats, assault and torture by Colombian security forces. A 2022 report by Amnesty International, The Police Do Not Protect Me, highlighted 28 cases of gender-based violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people during the 2021 protests.[xvii] Amazon Frontlines made a public call in April 2021 for greater attention to threats against indigenous leaders in Colombia, highlighting the murder of Sandra Liliana Peña Choqué, governor of the Laguna Siberia Indigenous Reserve. The signatories to that call demanded that attacks on indigenous leaders be investigated, that the perpetrators be punished and that the Colombian government adopt measures for non-recurrence.[xviii]
Education
Colombia is one of the few countries featured in this report that has integrated truth about the past into its formal curricula. The General Education Law mandates that preschools, elementary schools and middle schools provide instruction on justice and peace issues.[i] Law 1732 of 2014 further requires that schools at these three levels teach the “Cátedra de Paz” curriculum, whose purpose is to “create and consolidate a space for learning, reflection and dialogue on the culture of peace and sustainable development that contributes to the general welfare and improvement of the quality of life of the population.”[ii]
Civil society and public-private partnerships have also developed and disseminated peace and memory curricula in Colombia. For instance, the National Program of Education for Peace, or Educapaz, launched “Schools Embrace the Truth” in 2022. This program prompts schools to teach about and reflect on the CEV report on a single common day. More than 4,000 educational institutions participated in the first event, held in September 2022.
Despite the availability of official and unofficial teaching materials on memory, truth and peace, schools provide this type of education only intermittently. This is due to a number of factors, including structural weaknesses in the formal education system, limited training for teachers, inconsistent efforts by the government to disseminate peace curricula and evaluate their efficacy and opposition to teaching these subjects by certain political factions. The Ministry of Education can create support materials, train teachers and encourage schools to adopt its guidelines, but it does not have the authority to impose content or methodologies.
Teachers and school administrators are not always aware of or receptive to memory, truth and peace education.[iii] The Comisión Asesora para la Enseñanza de la Historia de Colombia found that many teachers have neither the access to materials, training nor space to teach history critically and reflectively.[iv] The CEV staff reported that teachers and school principals know very little about the Ministry’s initiatives on historic memory. They also found that some schools reject the curriculum of Cátedra de Paz because it was developed with little input from teachers or principals.
Memory education in Colombia has been subject to attacks by political factions. The Centro Democrático party publicly attacked memory education efforts while it was the ruling party, accusing teachers who taught content critical of former president Álvaro Uribe Velez (2002–2010) and his government[1] of “political indoctrination.”[v] Party affiliates submitted bills to Congress designed to prevent the dissemination of truth and memory reports, including the CEV report, and have criticized the largest union of public school teachers: Federación Colombiana de Educadores.[vi]
GIJTR HIGHLIGHT BOX FOR COLOMBIA
GIJTR has been partnering with Colombian CSOs and state institutions to advance truth since the 2016 Peace Agreement was signed. Since that time, GIJTR has supported 19 CSOs piloting community-based art projects such as murals, weaving and doll-making to break taboos around speaking about the impacts of the conflict in rural areas of Colombia. GIJTR has also worked with both the CEV and local partners to ensure that documentation of violations meets international standards for truth-telling and accountability, raise awareness about the CEV’s work and create lasting digital archives. Additionally, GIJTR helped develop forensic capacities with the CEV, Search Unit and CSOs to search for and identify missing and disappeared persons. Through these partnerships, state- and community-led truth-seeking initiatives have expanded to include the perspectives of marginalized people such as youth, women, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, rural people and the families of missing and disappeared persons.
Recommendations
The government of Colombia should ensure that the CNMH and other state-led spaces of memory have non-partisan leadership and are empowered to operate autonomously from the government.
The government should ensure that state institutions, including the military and police forces, cooperate with transitional justice mechanisms, including by wholly and expeditiously providing information to the courts and the UBPD.
The government of Colombia should collaborate with educators and civil society groups throughout the country to design and implement an educational curriculum around the CEV’s findings and recommendations.
The government of Colombia and international donors should intensify their efforts to fund the reparations program established in the Victims and Land Restitution Law.
Notes
Download the notes for this chapter here.