On April 9, WOLA sent a letter to the Colombia mission of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with ample suggestions to support peace and human rights in Colombia. Before the annual consultation between USAID and U.S. civil society, WOLA informally surveys organizations, experts, academics, activists, and others partners in Colombia about U.S. cooperation in the region. We did the same for the 2021 consultation and solicited input from more than 50 entities, including groups receiving USAID assistance and many who do not receive funding. This input is not a scientific survey. Rather, it is a summary of the impressions we received combined with WOLA’s suggestions due to our long history of monitoring U.S. funding to economic, social, peace, and human rights matters in Colombia.
The document outlines optimism for continued peacebuilding with cooperation from the Biden administration and also highlights current obstacles. Topics include transitional justice, maintaining the independence of the justice system, protection of social leaders and communities, illicit crop substitution and alternative development plans, economic renewal after the pandemic, and migrant and refugee rights.
The original Spanish letter is here. The translated English letter is here.
The creation of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP in Spanish) as part of the 2016 Peace Treaty between the Colombian State and the guerrilla group FARC has seen its work much criticized over claims from certain powerful factions that it has a hidden agenda to free former FARC leaders and imprison senior military commanders.
Investigations carried out by the JEP have been a major success of the peace agreement and the process that followed. But most of the right-wing section of governing party Centro Democrático have been working to cut its funding and complicate the implementation of the peace deal.
Founded on the principle of transitional justice, the JEP works by recognizing accountability for past crimes from the conflict and establishing alternative sentences. This does mean some powerful people – politicians, businesspeople, and landowners – may feel threatened because its investigations may reveal their past connections to both official and nonofficial repression unleashed upon trade unionists, peasants, politicians, and civilians in the name of defeating the FARC.
Ariel Avila, from the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, states that as transitional justice moves forward ‘victims will be more at risk. As ex guerrilla members, military officers, parapoliticians, begin to tell the truth, they will inform on those who supported them, those who benefitted from the war, people who, for the most part, are within the scope of legality’.
Hostages and human rights violations
The JEP recently accused seven FARC leaders for promoting kidnapping as a systematic practice and inflicting human rights violations on hostages, and also announced it will investigate and prosecute state security forces for war crimes, as the Colombian army stands accused of allegedly murdering at least 6,402 innocent civilians under what is called ‘false positives’ – counting them as guerrilla fighters to give the impression they were winning the war against the FARC.
Almost 80 per cent of those crimes were committed between 2002 and 2008 when right-wing political leader Álvaro Uribe was president and, since the JEPs’ creation in 2017, he and some of his followers – known as ‘Uribismo’ – along with Iván Duque’s current government have been persistently critical of the body.
This has led the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to express concern about ‘persisting public statements questioning the suitability of the JEP and their staff, and about the legislative proposals to abolish the Special Jurisdiction for Peace’, and the damage being done to the JEP was revealed in a detailed report from 14 senators of different opposition parties in the Colombian Congress, led by Senator Juanita Goebertus (Green Alliance Party).
The main targets of the attacks by the government and Uribistas are the reforms in the rural sector, voluntary coca crop eradication, and the implementation of transitional justice, which the peace treaty committed the government to achieve. Returning land to thousands of peasants displaced by violence would reverse gross inequalities in land distribution, as would the political strengthening of local communities.
“The main targets of the attacks by the government and Uribistas are the reforms in the rural sector, voluntary coca crop eradication, and the implementation of transitional justice.”
But rural elites strongly oppose these moves and the state has been largely absent in these rural areas, contributing to a rise in illegal mining, illicit crops, and now the killings of social leaders and ex-FARC guerrilla combatants. The president of the JEP recently claimed ‘a social leader is killed every 41 hours’ and, according to a report by the Colombian Commission of Jurists along with other local groups, these killings are being committed by hit men, FARC dissidents, organized crime, and even members of the armed forces.
Most cases are not being solved and the Inter American Commission for Human Rights indicates most government investigations focus on the material authors of the crime, not those who gave the order. Human Rights Watch says that, because of such state shortcomings, investigations and prosecutions are facing significant hurdles particularly with regard to the ‘intellectual authors’ of many killings.
Rural communities under pressure from criminals
OHCHR estimates 513 human rights defenders and 248 former FARC combatants were killed between 2016 and the end of 2020 but this is disputed by the government. Many of those who died had accepted the peace agreement, committing themselves and their communities to stop harvesting coca in exchange for receiving state financial assistance and shifting to producing legal goods. But Duque’s government, believing alternative crops do not work, froze the scheme alleging a lack of funds.
This put communities under renewed pressure from organized crime and guerrillas to produce coca again, an option made easier by the ban on the coca fumigations which were used by the US government between 1994 and 2015 to keep crop levels down and reduce drug production.
Fumigations were ended in 2015 by the Colombian Supreme Court due to evidence that the crop spraying harmed the environment as well as human and animal health, but the risk of cuts to aid and loans from the Donald Trump US administration recently pushed Duque to try and lift these restrictions.
They also consider stabilization to be too dependent on the military, and various experts also consider this approach to be inefficient and a poor substitute for the lack of a proper state presence in rural Colombia.
“Peasants and indigenous communities see fumigation as another breach of the peace treaty and they intend to resist it.”
Now with the change of administration in the US, Joe Biden has already expressed interest in the protection of human rights and appears less likely to be supportive of restarting fumigation as well as any ongoing resistance of the Colombian government to the peace agreement, especially as key Democrats in the Obama administration and Congress supported the negotiation and approval of the peace deal and many are now in the Biden administration.
The trick for Duque now – and Uribe – is to successfully balance their own partisan policy preferences with the country’s need for long-term military, strategic, and economic ties to Washington.
In recent weeks, ethnic groups throughout Colombia have urged for necessary advancements in the peace process including, but not limited to: the fulfillment of the 2016 peace accord’s Ethnic Chapter, establishing the Special Peace Electoral Constituencies in Colombia’s Congress, and addressing the critical humanitarian situation in Alto Baudó, Chocó department.
Below are synopses of these recent statements and access to full versions in both English and Spanish.
Fulfill the Ethnic Chapter Now!
On March 1, the National Afro-Colombian Peace Council (CONPA) published a statement that outlined the lagging implementation of the 2016 peace accord’s Ethnic Chapter. They also point to obstacles for ethnic participation in the transitional justice system and the urgent need to address the humanitarian crises in Chocó department, the city of Buenaventura, and on the Caribbean coast. The statement also urges the national government to resume peace dialogues with the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group.
Read the original Spanish statement here. Read the translated English version here.
The Special Peace Electoral Constituencies are an Opportunity to Strengthen Colombia’s Democracy. “Delivering for the Victims”.
In this March 1 statement, Colombia’s Ethnic Commission for Peace and Territorial Rights gives an overview of the effects of ongoing conflict in ethnic and rural territories in the past year. The Commission urges for proactive action by the state and demands the immediate creation of the Special Peace Electoral Constituencies in Colombia’s Congress—a mechanism devised in the 2016 peace accord. The Special Peace Electoral Constituencies seek to create representation in Colombia’s House of Representatives, promoting democracy and participation among sectors of Colombian society that have been historically excluded from political and economic life.
Read the original Spanish statement here. Read the translated English version here.
Humanitarian Mission in Alto Baudó, Chocó Department
A March 1 statement by an Alto Baudó humanitarian mission delegation—composed of regional and international entities—corroborates the critical security situation of the Baudó people. Several human rights violations and breaches of International Humanitarian Law were documented and the delegation made appeals to the national government, the Chocó Governor, the Alto Baudó municipality, political leaders and the ruling class, the Attorney General and Comptroller’s offices, the Prosecutor’s office, the Constitutional Court, and the international community.
Read the original Spanish statement here. Read the translated English version here.
The former top paramilitary figure, facing extradition back to Colombia from the United States, changed his story about the 2001 murder of an indigenous leader.
A data-filled report on the current status of implementation of the FARC peace accord, compiled by a group of pro-peace members of Colombia’s Congress. (link at juanitaenelcongreso.com)
The JEP declares “precautionary measures” for ex-FARC members among its defendants, who are facing increased security threats. The transitional justice tribunal calls on the High Commissioner for Peace and the Presidential Counselor for Stabilization to convene bodies created by the peace accord to guarantee ex-combatants’ security, among other specific recommendations.
The transitional justice system has moved forward on its investigation of one of the worst massacres in the history of the conflict, the 2000 paramilitary attack on the people of El Salado, Bolivar.
Maximum FARC party leader Rodrigo Londoño repeats the claim, uttered a day earlier by FARC Senator Griselda Lobo, that the guerrilla group did not recruit children as a matter of policy—while also admitting that the FARC’s policy was to accept recruits as young as 15 years old.
Maximum FARC party leader Rodrigo Londoño talks about transitional justice and the FARC’s past human rights crimes, including forced child recruitment, which the guerrillas are denying took place.
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