Brief Background on Colombia

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Colombia is considered the longest existing democracy in Latin America, dating back to the 1830s. Indeed, Colombia has all formal democratic institutions in place and there have been no interruptions to the democratic rule since 1958. At the same time, Colombia is strongly marked by political violence, and numerous and systematic human rights violations and crimes against humanity have been reported. The conflict has its origins in the civil war between 1946 and 1957 and in the formation of two guerrilla groups - FARC and ELN - in the 1960s. The counter guerrilla strategy of the Colombian State included the legalisation of so-called self-defence groups in 1965. The legal framework that permitted the army to give weapons to civilians was declared unconstitutional in 1989 but re-legalised in 1994; enabling a massive increase of ‘self-defense’ groups who in 1997 converged into the umbrella organization AUC.

In part, the paramilitary expansion may be explained as a consequence of the weak and vulnerable state institutions that were fragmented by the process of decentralisation, dictated in the constitutional reform of 1991. Others claim that this expansion was made possible by the historical connections between paramilitary structures and sectors of the armed forces, politicians, state officials and businessmen. Those connections have increasingly been exposed in the past two years.

A precondition for demobilized paramilitaries responsible for crimes against humanity to be judged within the framework of the controversial “Law of Justice and Peace” is that they voluntarily declare about all the crimes committed by them. After being under the scrutiny of the Constitutional Court, several changes have been made to the law text, particularly regarding the rights of victims to justice and reparation. The Colombian “National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation” (CNRR) was created in 2005 as a result of this law, to regulate the demobilization of paramilitary forces willing to give up arms. Although the CNRR has been implemented at record speed, and work towards the establishment of a victims register, a reparations program and a truth commission has been initiated, there remains the issue of the current conflict: what are the prospects of transitional justice mechanisms in a context of continuous conflict?

While the process and its media coverage have enabled the general public to access new information about what happened during the paramilitary expansion, the victims and their lawyers claim that former paramilitary commandants are not telling the whole truth. Alternative initiatives, such as the Public Audiences organized by the National Movement for Victims of State Crimes (Movimento Nacional de Víctimas de Crímenes del Estado- MOVICE) together with other organizations and institutions, aim to give the victims of the violence the possibility to give their testimonies. Victims are denouncing both former crimes committed by AUC members, and the ongoing threats and killings by new groups such as Black Eagles among others. The victims of the conflict predominantly reside in rural areas where new paramilitary groups reorganize, thus continuing to suffer violence and threats without proper protection from the state.