Month: November 2021

No one said it would be easy. Closing the wounds caused by an internal armed conflict that lasted more than half a century and settling the debts that not only unleashed it but also the violence it generated loomed on the horizon as a titanic task that would need the support of the whole society.

However, the union as a country to welcome the end of a prolonged armed confrontation was not achieved and the task of implementing what was agreed in Havana, Cuba, became much more complex because different sectors were in charge of putting sticks to that wheel that advances, with many difficulties, on a steep uphill slope.

The result of the plebiscite of October 2, 2016, which was intended to endorse the agreement reached by the delegates of the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) and the former FARC guerrillas, after more than four years of intense negotiations, marked a breaking point where the future implementation began to crack.

That day, with a minimal difference (50.21 percent of the votes were negative), the No vote was imposed. Quickly, the negotiators listened to the opponents, included several modifications in the Peace Agreement in response to their demands and the final text was endorsed in the Congress of the Republic.

This process allowed on November 24, 2016, for the second and final time, President Santos and the former head of the FARC, Rodrigo Londoño, to sign the Final Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace. From then on, the implementation process began through the issuance of laws and decrees to give it constitutional protection, but the legitimacy of this pact was shrouded in a supposed cloak of doubt.

The opposition to the Peace Accord, led by the Democratic Center party, which has governed the country since August 7, 2018, and whose head is former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010), has been frontal and became one of the main obstacles to the implementation of the Peace Accord.

Their animosity began, even, since the negotiations were made public and as a strategy to delegitimize the process, they instilled lies to arouse fear in Colombians and make them vote “verracos” the plebiscite, as recognized by the manager of the No campaign, Juan Carlos Vélez, then trusted man of the former president. 

President Santos also has his share of responsibility in the rarefied and polarized atmosphere of the plebiscite. He did the same as his opponents, qualifying as “enemies of peace” those who had objections to the negotiations and also appealed to fear, warning about the possible passage from a rural to an urban war, if the Havana Pact did not materialize.

Once the Peace Agreement, consigned in 310 pages, started to land in reality through the issuance of norms in the Congress of the Republic, the opposition continued imposing obstacles and fears, and alluded to various strategies such as breaking the quorum of the legislative sessions so that the necessary votes for its approval would not be reached.

The main casualty of that strategy was the creation of 16 seats in the House of Representatives for the victims of the conflict, which was sabotaged in that way on November 30, 2017, alluding that in reality those seats would be managed by armed groups. Only until May of this year, that measure found the green light in the Constitutional Court, which established that, despite the political moves of the Democratic Center, it did reach the number of votes needed to fulfill that promise to the victims.

On June 17, 2018, the Democratic Center became the governing party, after its candidate, Iván Duque Márquez, was elected as President of the Republic. From that moment on, being at the head of the Executive, the opposition to the Peace Agreement had more weight.

One of his most drastic decisions was to object to six articles of the Statutory Law of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), created to investigate and punish former FARC guerrillas and members of the security forces responsible for human rights violations during the armed conflict.

As it happened with the seats for victims, in March 2019 the Congress of the Republic was the scenario where the struggle between opponents and supporters of the Peace Agreement was fought. Finally, a couple of months later, after a long process of attrition, polarization and delegitimization of the institutionally created by the Havana Pact, the Constitutional Court ended up burying the pretensions of President Duque and his coalition in the Legislative.

These two attempts to reform sensitive points of the Peace Agreement, related to the victims of the armed conflict, show the adversities that its implementation has suffered from the political point of view.

To these are added the constant illegitimacy of the governing party. One of the most recent cases is that of former president Uribe Vélez, who decided not to appear before the Truth Commission (CEV), but to talk to its president, Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, in one of his farms and under his conditions, alleging that he did not grant legitimacy to that entity because it was created by an agreement that the plebiscite of October 2016 rejected.

That stance has permeated different sectors of society and sharpened polarization, putting more sticks in the wheel of the implementation of the Peace Agreement. However, the disunity has not only been on the part of society and the Colombian ruling class.

The Peace Accord was also rejected by some members of the then FARC before it was signed and they decided not to lay down their arms. Some of the most visible exponents of this situation are ‘Gentil Duarte’ and ‘Iván Mordisco’, who created the first FARC dissidents, perpetuating the violence in the Eastern Plains.

They were joined by other dissidents in different parts of the country, mainly in the southwest. But the most certain blow that undermined confidence in the Peace Accord came from ‘Iván Márquez’, ‘Jesús Santrich’, ‘El Paisa’ and other important former guerrilla leaders who participated in the negotiations in Havana, who, at the end of August 2019, announced their return to arms alleging serious breaches by the national government and forming an armed organization that they called Second Marquetalia, assuming with that name the continuity of their founding milestone of May 1964, when the guerrilla that would later adopt the name Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was born.

Along with these critical circumstances, the implementation has taken place in the midst of a race that seems to be winning criminality over institutionalism. The territories left behind by the former FARC on their way to disarmament and reincorporation into legal life were soon monopolized by new and old armed groups, which reproduced new cycles of violence and territorial control, so that the promise of non-repetition of violence did not last more than a year.

Other sticks in the wheel are what some analysts and regional leaders call a gradual implementation according to the interests of the national government, which has taken the provisions of the Peace Agreement more as government policies than State policies distorting the spirit of the agreement.

Some cases that exemplify the above are the creation of the Plan for Timely Attention (PAO), to the detriment of the National Commission for Security Guarantees (CNGS), which excludes civil society representatives from making decisions that guarantee the lives of human rights defenders; the creation of the Custom-Made crop substitution program, when the Executive alleges that there are no resources to fully comply with the Comprehensive National Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (PNIS); and raising the banner of the policy of Peace with Legality, when in fact the Peace Agreement should be promoted in a general manner.

On the other hand, although the Duque administration presents balance sheets with billions of dollars in investments and high management indicators, representatives of communities hard hit by the war warn that these figures do not correspond to reality.

For example, leaders of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities argue that, in terms of land formalization and adjudication, the Executive claims the delivery of thousands of hectares through the Land Fund, created by the Peace Agreement, but that in reality they correspond to claims that are not related to the Havana Pact. And they argue that this indicator is impossible because five years later, the ethnic account has still not been created in the Land Fund to acquire land. Meanwhile, the national government considers that this is a “political and legal discussion”.

However, despite the difficulties, the implementation of the Peace Agreement has green shoots. Some of them are that the majority of former FARC combatants remain firm in their process of reincorporation to legal life despite the lack of security guarantees -more than 290 have been murdered- and delays in the creation of their productive projects.

In addition, the Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition presents tangible results for the victims of the armed conflict, who are the reason and center of the Peace Agreement. Although it has not issued sentences to date, the JEP has issued 50 thousand judicial decisions and made significant progress in the areas of kidnapping, extrajudicial executions and illegal recruitment; the Truth Commission has heard as many people as possible in different corners of the country to work for reconciliation and build its Final Report; and the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons built, hand in hand with communities, its search plans.

However, the U-turn of some former FARC leaders has also contributed to fissure the confidence in the implementation of the Peace Accord. While the sentences of the JEP are being issued, Sandra Ramírez and Rodrigo Granda have launched derogatory phrases about the hostages they held for years in captivity: the former indicated that they had comforts and the latter that they did jobs at their own request. In view of this, various social sectors are demanding truth, justice and reparation.

In these five years, beyond the budgetary shortcomings and the difficulties of the State to have a comprehensive presence in the Colombia of the peripheries, it has become clear that the biggest problems for the implementation of the Peace Agreement come from the lack of understanding of its ruling class, which has not been able to live up to the historical moment the country is going through and has given more weight to its political calculations, exacerbating polarization and creating potholes in the path towards the construction of a stable and lasting peace.

To learn in depth how the implementation of the pillars of the Peace Agreement is progressing, we invite you to consult the articles in this special report.

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“Help us as much as you can so that this information, which is coming from the communities, can have the greatest possible echo”, says to VerdadAbierta.com a community leader from the Middle Pacific sub-region, who prefers to keep his name confidential for security reasons, distressed because the welfare of his black communities has not arrived after the illusion awakened by the Development Programs with a Territorial Approach (PDET), agreed in the Peace Accord.

“The institutions in charge of the PDETs -continues this black leader- are deceiving the rest of Colombian society and also the international community because when the PDET’s management reports are presented in the Middle Pacific, they show that millions of dollars are being invested here and, in the end, nothing is happening”.

With the departure of the former FARC guerrillas from the territories where they had been present for several decades, the immense abandonment of this other Colombia, which for years has lived on the margins of access to fundamental rights, under the threat of day-to-day needs and without a comprehensive and effective presence of the State, was revealed with greater clarity.

It was found, for example, that in the south of the region of Meta, in the villages of Caño Amarillo and Albania, in the municipality of Vista Hermosa, there are five streams that have no bridge and on rainy days they swell and no one can move between villages, much less transport the harvest; also, it´s been seen that several Pacific communities are left in the dark when the light of day goes out, waiting for an electrification project.

To close the gap between the countryside and the city and provide welfare to rural communities, as part of the point on Comprehensive Rural Reform, the PDETs were agreed and came to life in March 2017 with Decree 893, a strategy expected to reach with social investment 170 municipalities in the country considered to be the most historically hit by the armed conflict. However, in several areas their inhabitants express dejection and annoyance because they still do not see concrete results.

An example of this can be seen in the distant village of Gaviotas, in the municipality of Uribe, in Meta, which has to be reached by a dirt road and stones for more than two hours. There, the communities say that the crops are not profitable because of the difficulties they face in getting them to the larger markets and the economic impulse has not arrived.

“The product is here, we plant it, but what do we do?” asks a farmer. “We have had to deforest a little bit because the only way is with cattle. When there was coca, some would cut down a hectare and plant it, process it and take it on foot, but to take plantain, for example, to the market we can’t take it on ‘foot’, we have to find means of transportation and pay for it. With PDET we were expecting roads”.

Like this one, other similar testimonies can be heard throughout the country while the phrase “we are complying”, repeatedly pronounced by Emilio Archila, presidential advisor for Stabilization and Consolidation, echoes in the microphones when he speaks about the implementation of the Peace Accord.

Closing the gap

Attached to the Presidency of the Republic, the Agency for Territorial Renewal (ART) began operating as of January 1, 2017. This entity is responsible for coordinating the intervention of national and territorial entities in rural areas affected by the conflict. As part of that objective, it abandons the coordination of the PDETs.

The process of consultation with the inhabitants to determine needs and project implementation tasks was carried out through a large participatory exercise that, at the time, the then President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) described as “the largest social dialogue in the world”.

The needs of the communities were included in the Action Plans for Territorial Transformation (PATR), whose construction concluded in the first quarter of 2019 and involved the participation of more than 200 thousand people, of which 65 thousand were women, and involved 715 indigenous councils and 517 community councils of black communities.

This consultation process gathered the needs of more than 11 thousand villages that are part of 170 prioritized municipalities, grouped in 16 sub-regions, and categorized as the most affected by the armed conflict, poverty, illicit economies and institutional weakness.

As a result of this diverse dialogue, 32,808 initiatives were identified - 4,606 initiatives with gender and rural women, 8,381 ethnic initiatives and 619 ethnic and gender initiatives - to be implemented over a 15-year period, guided by the PATR.

These initiatives respond to the needs of these communities within eight pillars: Social Management of Rural Property and Land Use; Infrastructure and Land Adaptation; Rural Health; Rural Education and Early Childhood; Housing, Drinking Water and Basic Rural Sanitation; Economic Reactivation and Agricultural Production; System for the Progressive Guarantee of the Right to Food; and Reconciliation, Coexistence and Peace Building.

Measuring the progress of the PDETs, which are projected for 15 years, is no easy task. A single one of the more than three thousand initiatives may cover different and broad needs of a municipality or sub-region. This implies, according to ART, that "not necessarily through the execution of a single 'project' or a specific 'management' it is possible to achieve the execution or total fulfillment of an initiative. Also, some of the initiatives require permanent actions for their execution, such as, for example, those initiatives related to periodic maintenance or endowments".

According to ART's balance sheet, as of September 10, 2021, 8,594 initiatives had an active implementation path, i.e., associated with projects and actions that promote their implementation.

"Of the 8,594 initiatives, 9.82% are associated with the Land Management pillar; 12.83% with infrastructure; 8.46% with Rural Health; 25.04% with Rural Education; 7.30% with rural housing, drinking water and basic rural sanitation; 21.53% with Economic Reactivation; 5.32% with the Right to Food pillar and 9.70% with Reconciliation and Peace," states the entity.

Although it is difficult to qualify the fulfillment of the progress, as ART itself explains, when looking at the projects and works for the fulfillment of the initiatives, the general pulse when the communities are asked is that they expected more by this date.

The Agency has generally observed situations that generate risks associated with the execution stage of the projects, such as delays in the schedules for various reasons, shortage of raw materials due to the pandemic generated by Covid-19, climatic situations, hold ups due to road blockades during the National Strike in mid-2021, invasion of land where the works are being executed and some other cases due to price readjustments.

For a human rights defender from Alto Patía and Northern Cauca sub-region, who prefers to keep his name confidential for security reasons, the biggest problem in the implementation of the PDETs is the role of the ART, as he justifies that "in view of the expectations raised with the communities, the ART says: 'We are a coordinating entity, we are a facilitating and accompanying entity; we look for sources of financing, but we are not responsible for the execution of the PATR".

Following the money

The PEDTs are executed through three sources of financing: the Collegiate Body of Administration and Decision (OCAD Paz), which manages royalty resources; Works by Tax, with which the private sector can effectively participate; and resources from international cooperation.

On November 23, one day before the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Peace Agreement, the Rural Development Agency reported that the national government has invested 11.44 billion pesos in the 170 PDET municipalities.

According to reported information, the sources of those resources are discriminated as follows: OCAD PAZ, 6.23 trillion pesos; Works for Taxes for 607,456 million pesos; Colombia in Peace Fund, one trillion pesos; general budget of the Nation, 3.10 trillion pesos; and international cooperation, 428,105 million pesos.

On the other hand, when ART is asked about the resources that have been used for the initiatives, it maintains that up to August 31, 2021, with respect to the number of works executed with resources from the OCAD PAZ and Works for Taxes funds, 432 and 76, respectively, were carried out.

The regions with the highest number of projects in the OCAD Peace fund are Sierra Nevada, Perijá and Plantain Zone (72), Caguán Basin and Piedemonte caqueteño (49), Macarena - Guaviare (38) and Chocó (35). Of the total 432 projects in this fund, more than half (295) are set for pillar two Infrastructure and Land Adequacy, followed by Rural Housing, Drinking Water and Basic Rural Sanitation (89).

In the case of Works for Taxes, the subregions that occupy the first four positions are Alto Patía and Northern Cauca (11), Southern Tolima (11), Putumayo (9) and Arauca (9); most of them related to various supports for education and rural early childhood and rehabilitation, improvement and construction of roads.

In the information provided by ART on executed works, a road improvement project for the stretch that goes from the municipality of El Paujil to Cartagena del Chairá in the region of Caquetá appears as "finished", in which 35 billion pesos have been invested; however, a journalistic team of this portal verified, at the beginning of November of this year, that there are still some stretches to be concluded, which affects mobility in the area due to works on the road.

One of the aspects that draws attention in the response given by ART to VerdadAbierta.com is the clarification made by this agency about projects data that it does not manage, since they come from information exercises captured from other systems or external sources and "do not constitute the primary or official information about them". What is worrying about this clarification is that the entity does not have certainty about the works that are not under its control.

Outstanding accounts

The PDET programs contemplated the execution of "low scale and fast execution works", through which projects such as school classrooms or playgrounds were intended to be built while the PATR was being constructed through local and regional community dialogues.

For Pacífico Medio, made up of the municipalities of Guapi, López de Micay and Timbiquí, in the region of Cauca, and the municipality of Buenaventura, in Valle del Cauca, the execution of at least ten of these small works for each of these four municipalities was agreed upon, but the PATR was signed, on February 23, 2019, and to date not a single one of them has been delivered. (Read more at: PDET is still on paper in the southwest and In the Middle Pacific they get their hopes up with peace money).

EGA Consortium, formed by Galán School Corporation for the Development of Democracy and Asfaltart S.A., is the operator of these works. To date, in Buenaventura, the most advanced work of this type is a children's park in the community council of Zacarías del Río Dagua; however, the contract signed by EGA Consortium and this Afro community has been in force for more than three months and the advance payment has not been made.

In the case of the municipality of Guapi, on the Cauca coast, according to information from ART, a park in the village of San Antonio de Guajui has been completed, but the complaint of the community council of the Guajui River is that they have not been paid the 221 million pesos that had been agreed for this work. In Timbiquí and López de Micay, as of the date of this publication, they have not started with the first work.

VerdadAbierta.com sought the directors of EGA Consortium. The spokesperson was assumed by Sergio Párraga, its legal representative, who specified to this portal that some of these small works that he has under his responsibility in several communities of the Pacific are in a state of structuring for those that have a higher degree of complexity, but the simple works, such as the playgrounds on which the communities expect payment to be made, did not require this type of process and that the chain of non-compliance begins with the State.

"As of today, I have been appropriated 14 million pesos after we signed the Middle Pacific contract in December 2019," says Párraga. "We do not have the contractual obligation to finance the works, it is up to the Colombia en Paz Fund to wire us to be able to pay. As of today, the Fund has not transferred the resources to us and we have had to assume many administrative costs".

The consortium's legal representative adds that they have had to seek loans to start making the small payments they have given to the communities.

In the case of the community council of the Guajui River, Párraga said that 60 million have been paid and a second payment of 120 million was scheduled for the end of November, leaving a balance of a little more than 41 million to be paid.

In Buenaventura they are scheduling a meeting in the course of this week to start the work and he maintains that it has not been possible to start with the execution of the playground project because the EGA Consortium still does not have the advance payment.

"Here there is an issue, and it is a document of the Consortium that we have put on the table in Technical Operating Committees before the national and regional ART, is that the structure of the contract does not point to the works being done as quickly as possible, it is a rather complex structure. Things should be much more agile, there should be resources", says the representative of EGA and specifies that this problem is not an isolated case of the Pacific, but that non-compliance is widespread with other operators in other sub-regions of the country.

"But to be as fair as possible, from two months ago the processes with the Fund began to advance", says Párraga and warns that the sanitary crisis due to the Covid-19 affected the execution of the works, in time and costs: "The materials went up a lot, the steel shot up, the concrete is impossible, the transports are tenacious, and now we are in a strong winter season".

Regarding the resources coming from the OCAD Paz, the communities of the Middle Pacific highlight that there is not a single work supported by this fund. No community council in the Middle Pacific is strong enough to formulate projects of this type," says the leader of the sub-region, who prefers to remain anonymous. The formulation itself is done through the mayor's offices, but if it is difficult for the mayor's offices because they do not have a defined budget and the personnel required for the formulation and follow-up of these projects, how will it be for the community councils? That is why there are no projects!".

In the case of the other PDET subregions of the Pacific, the spokesperson for the Middle Pacific considers that, although there are some works in these other municipalities, in general they are very few in comparison to other regions of the national geography. A worrying situation because the time for execution of the works, with each passing day, is less, given the 15-year compliance goal.

"It is aberrant. This also demonstrates to us that this country, from those who lead it, is still deeply racist and discriminatory, because here they are, the black and indigenous communities, so 'we should not send anything to them'", feels the leader of the Pacific.

Phase of “little participation”

As part of a process of relationship of the leaderships of Alto Patía and Northern Cauca, human rights defenders constituted the Regional Articulation for Peace, from which they autonomously carry out a regional, as well as municipal oversight in relation to the implementation of the PDET in 24 municipalities in the regions of Valle del Cauca, Cauca and Nariño.

They are taking this initiative as they consider that the members of the oversight PDET that were established in the PATR, approved and signed in December 2018, were not trained to follow the implementation of the Program and "they are used to validate decisions in which the leaderships have not participated," says a human rights defender from the Cauca Regional Peace Space, who prefers to keep his name confidential due to the high rates of violence experienced in that region.

In this tension, the organizations of this sub-region stated that they have complained to the ART that information does not reach them, they do not socialize the initiatives that are being implemented and they do not communicate with them.

"There is very little participation, limited participation of the leadership of the driving group and social organizations that were present in the Regional Transformation Action Plan; in the prioritization, structuring and securing of resources for the 4,466 initiatives of Alto Patía and Norte del Cauca", for this reason the communities state that "they do not feel that peace has reached the territories".

In addition, the leaderships feel worn out, because, as this spokesperson explains, "some communities blame the people who were left as delegates of the driving groups or social organizations that participated in this process for the fact that nothing has been implemented".

The most recent activities carried out by the members of the driving group in each subregion was the validation of the road maps, a tool that allows the implementation of the PDETs, articulating national and territorial plans that are being developed in each territory. This document specifies execution times, responsibilities and financing, in addition to establishing monitoring mechanisms.

Eleven roadmaps are published on ART's web page, with the Middle Pacific, Macarena-Guaviare, Arauca and Alto Patía and Northern Cauca still pending. In the case of the latter, the human rights defender of the Cauca Regional Peace Space explains that they were still making adjustments to the document so that it would respond more accurately to the reality of the region, and include human rights and environmental aspects.

"Although, as a result of the construction and validation of the roadmap, some initiatives will be prioritized, which in this case are at the municipal and sub-regional levels, the process by which the source of financing is found and its execution is nowhere near ready", states the Cauca leader, who specifies that the initiatives will be prioritized, but will not have a due structuring and financing process.

They leave the table

The PATR of the Pacific region bears the signatures of ethnic communities (community councils and indigenous organizations), municipal mayors and governors; it is, in the words of the leaders an "ethnic PDET".

In the case of the Middle Pacific subregion, in order to continue with community participation in the initiatives of the Reconciliation, Coexistence and Peacebuilding pillar, it was agreed to build a subregional roundtable to follow up and monitor the implementation of the PDET, in addition to the creation of a roundtable to address issues that were not within the competence of this Program, such as the organizational needs of black communities, the possible role of indigenous communities as environmental authorities or modifications in the maritime division of the region. However, none of these initiatives were developed as planned.

"We, the communities, on our own, had to form the PDET Subregional Roundtable for the Middle Pacific," says the human rights defender consulted, as a strategy to follow the implementation of the PDETs. And since August 29, they decided to cease meetings on PDET issues with state institutions until three requests were met.

The first is the creation of a coordination for the Middle Pacific, because since its conformation it has never had one of its own, instead it’s been managed from the coordination of Alto Patía and Northern Cauca. "The fact that this coordination has not been created to a large extent also means that there have been no results here in the Middle Pacific", says the leader of this region.

In the second, they demand the recognition of the monitoring table that they created as a community and, in the third, they demand a plan to solve the deficit that the sub-region has in terms of formulation, feasibility and financing of projects so that the 629 initiatives agreed upon can be fulfilled in the time foreseen by the PDETs.

The Pacific leaders also asked the ART to have a space for conversation in which officials from the Renewal Agency, the Presidential Council for Stabilization and Consolidation and national and international guarantors would address these points. On October 13, they met with each other, but it did not turn out as the communities had hoped.

"We arrived there and there were the same people with whom we have always been talking to and with whom no results have been achieved for the Middle Pacific. The ethnic authorities of the Pacific took the decision that there was nothing to talk about and until today, November 22, we have not received an answer. We hear unofficially that (ART) is preparing a response".

Although at the failed meeting of October 13, ART representatives tried to persuade some of the leaders to continue the dialogue by stating that work would begin on November 1, as of the date of this publication there had been no progress.

In addition to the possible bureaucratic obstacles, there is the atmosphere of hostility that surrounds those who, from the communities, ensure compliance with the programs agreed upon in Havana, Cuba. Several human rights defenders throughout the country agree that they fear for their lives.

One of these regions is Cauca, which has rebounded, year after year since the signing of the Peace Agreement, as the region with the highest rates of lethal violence against leaders and ethnic authorities and where at least six dissident groups of the former FARC are present.

"The leaders of the driving groups -says a leader from Cauca-, who participated in the construction of the PDET, who have been demanding compliance with the PDET, increase their risks because in some places being a defender of the implementation of the Peace Agreement, of the PDET, becomes a risk due to the presence of armed groups, but also because the communities blame the non-compliance on the driving groups, on the social and community movements".

Therefore, he calls on the ART and other state institutions to avoid stigmatization, to support the role of monitoring the PDET works and to insist on the defense of the integrity of social leaders who still believe in the Peace Agreement and defend its implementation to the hilt as a way to repair the communities from so many decades of violence and marginalization.

There are regions where communities no longer believe in the National Program for the Integral Substitution of Illicit Crops (PNIS) and they regret, despite themselves, having believed in the Peace Agreement signed five years ago between the Colombian State and the former FARC guerrillas. While recognizing some of the benefits of this initiative, they also complain about its non-compliance. 

After the issuance of Decree 896 of 2017 that created the PNIS with the objective of attacking the drug problem, several leaders and social organizations agreed that the Program was an invaluable opportunity to cut the link of thousands of families with illicit crops, but every day that passes and what was expected is not met, the communities lose confidence in the State.

One of those visible faces complaining from the regions is Arnobis Zapata, national spokesman for the National Coordination of Coca, Poppy and Marijuana Growers (Coccam), who early on became a standard bearer for the implementation of the Peace Agreement, especially the PNIS.

“This government (of Iván Duque) from the beginning stated it did not agree with voluntary crop substitution and expressed that it was not going to be one of its main policies in the fight against coca crops and, for that reason, it has not allocated the necessary budgets for the PNIS. This government has no political will,” says this leader from southern Córdoba.

The history of the substitution of illicit crops in Colombia comes from programs such as the National Alternative Development Plan and Forest Warden Families, in which economic transfers were not direct, but through some goods and services, and which sought to comply with rural development policies: land titling, social housing and access to health services, drinking water, education, among others.

With the PNIS, as conceived in the Peace Agreement, a comprehensive project was proposed. “If one is asked ‘and how are you doing with what you are doing’, well, wonderful, perfect, everything divine. But that is not the reality. One has to be self-critical,” says Hernando Londoño, National Director of the PNIS, attached to the Territorial Renewal Agency (ART) and who has been in charge of the initiative for three years.

Since Havana, a model was planned that would benefit coca-growing, non-growing and coca leaf-gathering families, so that these villages would be free of illicit crops. At the time of its implementation, it was conceived as a population-based program with direct economic transfers to the families. There, the PNIS contemplated payments of 36 million pesos for each family registered as part of the Immediate Family Attention Plan.

The payments would be delivered through five components: immediate food assistance payments, for 12 million; technical assistance support, for 3.2 million; delivery of inputs and materials for food security projects and home gardens, for 1.8 million; short-cycle productive projects, for 9 million; and long-cycle projects, for 19 million.

Obviously, the program was born without thinking that it was going to enroll almost 100,000 families,” says Londoño. So, 100 thousand families for 36 million pesos are already worth 3.6 billion pesos and the State does not have that money. So, we start with a debt of 3.6 trillion pesos to be executed in two years”.

The official insists that the PNIS was poorly planned in aspects such as the timing of technical assistance: “How long does it take the State, which is very slow in itself, to get the money to hire, to start operating, to hire an operator and that operator to hire technicians and go out to provide technical assistance? That does not take 24 months, because the assistance alone was thought to be invested in 24 months”.

With all these remnants, the PNIS began and the families were leaving, as never before, the coca leaf. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) states that, as of December 2020, 43,711 hectares of illicit crops had been eradicated voluntarily and with assistance in the 14 regions and 56 municipalities where the Program is being implemented.

As of December 2020, 99,097 families had registered to obtain the benefits of the PNIS, of which 67,251 are listed as growers; 14,989 as non-growers; and 16,857 as harvesters. However, according to information from the Directorate for the Substitution of Illicit Crops as of March 31, 2021, of the total number of families involved, 80 percent were active; 10 percent had withdrawn; 6 percent were entering; and the remaining 4 percent were in a state of suspension.

Regarding suspensions, the data show that these were mainly due to non-compliance with the required program activities (1,044), non-compliance with the requirements of the beneficiary families (645) and non-compliance with administrative requirements (454).

Regarding exclusions, 2,181 of the cases correspond to the low density of illicit use crops in the postulated lots -one of the PNIS targeting criteria-; 1,730 are due to the fact that they were not accredited by the Community Assemblies or that the Community Action Boards do not recognize them; 1. 269 for not complying with the obligation to participate in the required activities -such as the monitoring and verification exercises of the eradication of illicit crops, the activities of the technical assistance operators and the implementation of productive initiatives-; 1,007 attended by other previous substitution programs; and 1,007 voluntary withdrawals.

In the Third Report to Congress on the State of Progress of the Implementation of the Peace Agreement, published in August of this year by the Attorney General’s Office, the control entity is clear in reproaching that there is no regulation to define the permanence of PNIS families in the Program.              

Of the total number of registered families, by the end of 2020, 58,940 received the full amount of immediate food assistance, which corresponds to monthly cash amounts of one million pesos to be paid in 12 months for economic support. According to the Attorney General’s Office, that number rose to 68,950 by March 2021, thus, in three months this phase of the PNIS increased by 10 percent.

They question implementation

The non-compliances in the implementation of the Program and the onslaught of the Public Forces against peasants who cultivate coca leaf generated last May the protest of hundreds of peasants, who left their regions to join the National Strike called by trade union centers and student organizations and to plant themselves in key sites of Villavicencio and Buenavista, in Meta, or Altamira, in Caquetá, and demand, as one of the first points, the fulfillment of the PNIS.

Eucario Bermúdez, social leader of the municipality of Cartagena del Chairá, in Caquetá, says that his disagreement with the national government is because in the villages where he works, most families have received between three and four payments for food security, more than three years after the Program began.

In this municipality, there are a total of 2,347 beneficiary families and as of December 31, 2020, the total payments of the Immediate Attention Plans had been made to 1,342 families, according to UNODC. After that contribution, Bermúdez recalls, “they gave some seeds, some nets, some wheelbarrows, some zinc sheets, some hens. And the productive projects… nothing. That is no longer coming”.

Similar situations are experienced by farmers in the villages of Caño Amarillo, Caño Limón and La reforma, in the municipality of Vista Hermosa, Meta, where 2,202 families are enrolled in the PNIS. The communities emphasized that the initial amount of food assistance, 12 million pesos, was paid in full. Then “a project for a vegetable garden with coriander seeds or something like that came along… and that was it,” acknowledged a farmer from the region who asked his name to be withheld.

Several leaders agreed that the current national government has discarded the PNIS implementation route that had been proposed with the communities during the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) and proposed another one without socializing it.

“President Duque wants to fulfill the 100 thousand families, he wants to deliver the resources to fulfill the 100 thousand families, even if they are 3 trillion pesos. We have already invested more than 1.7 trillion, then what is left is 1.8 and I have 700 billion this year, that is, I will be left with 2.5 trillion pesos at the end of 2021”, highlights the PNIS director.

However, given the failure to meet the deadlines, “what has happened is that the people have eaten what the government has given them,” Zapata says. The government is handing over the resources to the peasants on a drop-by-drop basis, every two years a new component comes in, and it is only from the Immediate Attention Plan”.

When Farid Murcia, leader of Bajo Caguán, is asked about the fulfillment of the productive projects in the region, after laughing with disdain, he says “nothing, nothing at all”. He agrees that the actions have been focused on the Immediate Attention Program (PAI), in several regions still unfinished, and the rest of the components have been unfulfilled.

“Progress in the delivery of resources for short-cycle and long-cycle projects is still far below the established goals,” states the Attorney General’s Office in its report. It also reminds that in the cases where some of these phases have been advanced, it should be concerned about accompanying the families in a more assertive way so that, as the Coccam spokesman says, the resources of the Program are not lost.

“As this control entity has learned, the technical assistance consists of characterization visits, definition of investment plans and delivery of inputs, but they do not continue once the process is completed. Although the DSCI (Directorate for the Substitution of Illicit Crops) has a territorial support team, this is not enough to cover this process of constant technical assistance for the families in the Program”, states the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Another point that shows timid progress is the community PAI, which had been formulated as actions to improve the conditions of each of the villages that joined the PNIS.

The communities denounce that there is no major progress in the construction of health posts, rural day care centers, school meals, small infrastructure works and employability. In its report, the Ombudsman’s Office also found debts in some of these areas.

With respect to the Municipal and Community Integral Plans for Substitution and Alternative Development (PISDA), which proposed to implement programs in the territories related to the social organization of rural property and land use, infrastructure and land adaptation, health, education and housing, among others, the Ombudsman’s Office shows progress.

As of March 2021, “there was a universe (sic) of 812 PATR (Action Plan for Regional Transformation) initiatives with PISDA marking, for 48 municipalities where PDET and PNIS coincide. Of these initiatives, 268 had an implementation route activated, and 353 were contained in the ART 2020-2021 work plans. These initiatives are concentrated in the municipalities of Tumaco (27), Puerto Asís (23), Puerto Rico (20), Miranda (19), La Montañita (16), Puerto Leguízamo (10), Mesetas (10) and Orito (10)”.

Collectors, bearing the brunt

The harvesters, also known as ‘raspachines‘, who once served as laborers to scrape the coca leaf, have been the ones who have been most neglected. This is what peasant spokespersons and the Attorney General’s Office agree on.

For one year of work in tasks of community interest (such as school canteens or rural roads) they would be paid 12 million pesos. According to the last PNIS monitoring report delivered by UNODC, as of December 31, 2020, 5,701 collectors were involved in community interest activities in which they performed maintenance on 15,305 kilometers of tertiary roads or bridle paths and 9,682 public spaces.

In some regions they were paid for this work; others have not even received their first payment, according to complaints from communities in some villages in the municipality of Mesetas, Meta. 

“Although this component presented an improvement with respect to 2020, it continues to be the one with the greatest lags in its implementation, since administrative and budgetary efforts are concentrated on complying with the family PAI of the bulk of the families assigned as growers and non-growers,” reads the report of the Attorney General’s Office in relation to the situation of the harvesters.

In the municipalities of Puerto Libertador, Montelíbano and San José de Uré, in the south of Córdoba, the collectors received payments for the first phase, but in the municipality of Tierralta not even one of the 132 collector families has received the first payment, and the response the communities say they have received from the national government is that “there are no resources”.

Several communities in Mesetas, Meta, where 1,103 families were enrolled in the PNIS: 712 growers and non-growers and 391 harvesters, agree with this version. Many of the latter got tired of waiting for the Program’s promises and went to the regions of Cauca, Northern Santander or Guaviare to continue working with illicit crops.

“There are those collectors that every time we hold meetings, they complain to us (the leaders who promoted the Peace Accord), because at the end of the day we were crucified for playing the role of redeemers. We were the ones who took the government there,” laments Zapata.

No clear solutions

The PNIS proposed to technically assist productive projects to which the families were accustomed with a 19 million pesos budget to generate income in the lands they inhabited. However, in environmentally protected areas the reality is different.

In the case of the National Natural Park System, restrictions on anthropogenic activities are quite strict. According to information provided by National Natural Parks, in the protected areas administered by this entity in Meta, Guaviare and Caquetá there are 1,855 families with 5,569 people as characterized between 2015 to 2021 that should be engaged in conservation or ecotourism activities, but in practice they have based their economies on cattle ranching and coca leaf cultivation.

“If coca leaf cultivation must end, well, it must end, but where is the solution? If today a plate of food is on the table it is because coca leaf is producing it, so ‘I take this away from you, but I will give you the plate of food with this’, but that has never happened, it is only ‘pass me that plate of food and you will see how you defend yourself'”, comments Ronald Echeverri, president of Nueva Colombia, one of the villages of Vista Hermosa, in Meta, which is part of the Serranía de La Macarena National Natural Park.

The communities settled in areas of environmental interest aspire to “territorial security”, that is, they want to be granted land titles for the lands they inhabit. Some settlers have been settled in this region since the 1960s, long before it was declared an unadjudicated zone.

Londoño recognizes that when the PNIS has come to the territories to try to implement the productive project, the people have no land: “Today we find all the problems. People are asking for land and a substitution program cannot become a land program, because that is what the National Land Agency is for”.

I know that people who have titled land do not plant coca,” he continues, “because they know they will lose it. So, the people who plant illicit crops are either in the non-titled Law 2 reserve zone or they go into the parks or into the indigenous reserves or the community councils or wherever they don’t lose anything because they know that if they are caught, they will lose the land.

To solve the problem of the communities settled in the Forest Reserve Zone, the national government has formulated proposals such as the Natural Conservation Contracts, which grant the families settled in these areas the right of use for up to 10 years, extendable from 1 to 10 more years, in activities that the land management plans allow, with payments for environmental services of 800,000 pesos delivered every two months.

“It is expected that before the end of this government 9,596 Natural Conservation Contracts will be delivered in Colombia, a process that additionally has a key component to implement processes of voluntary substitution of illicit crops in Forest Reserve Zones”, published in February of this year the Presidential Council for Stabilization and Normalization.

However, several communities expressed their mistrust to this portal because they believe that after these contracts are terminated there would be no legal guarantee that would allow them to continue living on those lands they have inhabited for decades.

Pedro Arenas, a Viso Mutop researcher, recalls that with several families located in Parks they signed individual PNIS pacts, by which the State was obligated to provide maintenance money. “More than four years have passed and the government, with multiple excuses, has delayed the fulfillment of the commitments with the families,” he says.

Londoño has highlighted that one of the biggest obstacles is the lack of funding for the program, the poor planning with which it was formulated and the alleged reluctance of the National Natural Parks’ directors to develop productive activities in these protected areas.

Dr. Londoño,” says Arenas, “has always used the excuse of blaming everything that happens with the program on the previous government, on the previous officials. I am not going to defend either the previous president or the officials who were originally in charge of the program, what I want to make clear is that three years have passed and this government should have found a solution to the problems it found in the PNIS”.

In its report, the Ombudsman’s Office highlighted that no initiative to generate income from park areas was being implemented. “As reported by the DSCI (Directorate for the Substitution of Illicit Crops), and corroborated by identifying that there were no investments for short or long cycle projects in these regions. On the other hand, in Forest Reserve Zones, an average investment per beneficiary of 95,344 pesos per family was identified in the productive projects’ component, whose cap is of $19 million pesos.”

For Zapata it is a work of the PNIS with National Natural Parks: “They are throwing the ball to each other and then go out and say that they cannot do things because there are limitations, but those limitations have to be resolved by the government, they cannot throw the limitations to the farmers as if they were the guilty ones”.

Custom-made

In several regions, a parallel initiative to the PNIS is being heard, which is published as “Custom-Made”. “There is no public policy document that shows what this program is about,” reproaches Pedro Arenas. According to information from the Directorate for the Substitution of Illicit Crops of the Territorial Renewal Agency, this proposal was adopted by Resolution 27 of May 6, 2020, however, this portal could not find it available on the Internet.

In a document that VerdadAbierta.com consulted from the Presidential Council for Stabilization and Consolidation, it is specified that “Custom-Made” is a joint and participatory strategy that is presented as an alternative for those families that are not registered in the PNIS.

“It is assumed that with the launching of these other strategies there would be money for other proposals, but to comply with the PNIS, which is derived from the Peace Agreement, there is nothing, which shows a little bit of bad faith behind saying that for the PNIS there is no money, but for another program there is,” complains Arenas.

In the regions there is already confusion with the appearance of this program. Some believe that now the PNIS becomes “Custom-Made”, others that the PNIS will not continue and now they must look for a place in “Custom-Made. What Arenas highlights is that the socialization of this program has not been clear.

The leaders who have followed up on this proposal see it as a “parallelism to the PNIS” and point out that in order for the peasants to enter this program they must eradicate without receiving any type of aid, they must own land and there is no fixed amount for the execution of the projects. Because of this, for Zapata, this program does not offer the necessary guarantees to the peasants and does not build confidence in the territories in the face of the already undermined image of the State with the implementation of the PNIS.

“It is a substitution strategy that depends on the territorial entities having a budget for it. It is like putting one more burden on the territorial entities and taking resources from where there are none to implement a thing that is not going to get anywhere because they are not going to be able to comply with any of it. If they cannot comply with the PNIS, which was supposed to have funding…”, sentences the Coccam spokesman.

Does the PNIS have a future?

Several leaders highlighted the commitment of their communities to voluntary eradication and the establishment of coca leaf free zones, as in the case of the Gaviotas village or the Nasa indigenous reservation of Candilejas, in the municipality of Uribe, in southern Meta.

These communities now grow bananas, avocados, cacao and passion fruit, but none of this is working: the poor condition of the roads makes agriculture unprofitable. The farmers hoped that the works promised in the Peace Accord would be carried out in harmony with the implementation of the PNIS, but so far there has been no clear progress.

A human rights defender from the Cauca Regional Peace Space, who prefers to keep his name confidential due to the high levels of violence in that region, acknowledged that in several parts of that region coca leaf crops are growing at the same time that the communities’ distrust of the Territorial Renewal Agency is increasing.

On the other hand, communities that have inhabited regions that are part of the Forest Reserve Zones, established since 1959 with Law 2, and that had eradicated all coca leaf, have begun to open patches in the Amazon jungle, as told to this portal by peasants of Bajo Caguán.

The national spokesman of Coccam considers that the most regrettable panorama is observed in those regions where there are no strong organizational processes and where there is discontent, but where their demands are not raised. “There, the government has done whatever it wants and the people have been given whatever they want,” he says.

The communities have considered not receiving any more PNIS resources if the national government does not sit down with the communities to correct the direction of the program, secure the resources and make progress in the comprehensive rural reform, because they are concerned that if the implementation is done in dribs and drabs at the end it will be said from Bogota that it was fulfilled when the reality in the regions reveals that it was a failure.

With political will, allocation of resources and linking it to the integral rural reform, there is a great possibility that a large number of peasants will get out of illegitimacy, says the Coccam spokesperson.

For its part, the Attorney General’s Office considers that the greatest challenges for the PNIS management are in materializing its contents in terms of inter-institutional articulation, coverage of the issues of greatest need together with the Integral Rural Reform, and follow-up of the operators contracted for the implementation of the Program.

“People continue with the idea that the PNIS can work, that it has opportunities. What must come is a government that has the capacity to understand that peasants are not criminals, that they are subjects of rights and that it must allocate budget to get them out of the situation they are currently in”, concludes Zapata who, despite everything, risks saying that the Integral Program for the Substitution of Crops for Illicit Use continues to be a viable alternative.

“Not everything has been bad,” says Yulieth Villa, a former combatant of the defunct FARC guerrillas, talking about what the reincorporation process has meant for her, a woman who was in the armed struggle for more than 10 years. “As people, we have had opportunities: to form a home, to have a new life, to be close to our children. In a way, it has been positive for us,” she adds.

But her vision of this transition from life in arms to legitimacy becomes critical when she delves into her reflections and contrasts her past in the war with the present, currently her life is spent in El Oso, a Territorial Training and Reincorporation Space (ETCR) located in the municipality of Planadas, region of Tolima, one of the 24 spaces that exist in the country to strengthen the process of comprehensive reintegration into civilian life of at least 3,000 former guerrillas who still remain in them.

“Sometimes we think about whether or not we wasted our time in the organization (the FARC),” says the ex-combatant. “There were many days in which lives were lost, a lot of blood was shed, and when we look at how we are now we don’t find answers. We were risking our lives for a change, then they come and make a peace agreement up and instead of advancing, we went backwards”.

To justify her assessment, she invokes the figure of Pedro Antonio Marin, known as ‘Manuel Marulanda Velez’, one of the founders of the former FARC guerrillas: “The struggle of comrade Manuel was for schools, roads, a health centers. And one looks at the needs and they are still the same: there is a lack of schools, roads, health centers”.

Fredy Escobar Moncada, a university-educated ex-combatant who currently carries out academic activities in one of the country’s main cities, attaches significant value to the demobilization and disarmament of ex-combatants, presenting them as one of the main achievements of the Peace Accord.

“Beyond the political project, beyond the aspirations they may have as an organization, and now as a political party, the truth is that in Colombia, these people are already thinking about something other than the armed struggle”, he highlights and adds that this decision contributes “to a different society, to a peaceful society; it also contributes to what we could begin to call coexistence, harmony, tolerance, respect for differences, for political opposition; and they are no longer placing victims in this conflict”.

But when contrasted with the reality of the men and women who began the path to legitimacy under the Peace Agreement, Escobar’s vision also becomes critical and calls attention to the vision of the State in this process: “The Peace Agreement was stipulated as collective reincorporation and in any case the State continues with individual reincorporation”.

And what are the consequences of this state policy? For Escobar, a reincorporation with an individual approach “clashes politically, ideologically, economically and socially with a collective reincorporation, because the former depoliticizes, de-ideologizes, individualizes, and finally the objective seems to be dispersion and not continuity, for example, of an integrated community”.

The other side of the coin is exposed by the Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN), the state entity responsible for the reincorporation process of those men and women who laid down their arms under the Peace Agreement, under the policy of Peace with Legality, promoted by the national government.

According to the ARN, 14,708 people belonging to the former FARC were demobilized, of which 12,925 are in the reincorporation process. And according to the Council for Stabilization and Consolidation, 3,661 productive projects have been approved to date, of which 101 are collective and 3,560 are individual, for a total value of 75,264 million pesos, involving 7,822 people in reincorporation, thus reaching 60.5 percent of the reincorporated ex-combatants.

Five years after the beginning of the reincorporation of ex-combatants into legal life, there are contrasting views and their interpretation depends on the lens through which this process is viewed. On the side of the beneficiaries, there is recognition of achievements accompanied by criticism; and on the side of the State, there are figures that contradict them.

From the territories

Carlos Grajales went from having a rifle slung over his shoulder to presiding over La Roja craft brewery, one of the most recognized productive projects of the reincorporated who´s idea emerged in 2017 in the ETCR set up in the municipality of Icononzo, region of Tolima, as a response, according to him, to the national government’s failure to comply with the Agreement in the financing of viable productive projects for ex-combatants.

However, the process of setting up and developing this brewing initiative has not been easy. At the beginning, they were faced with the regulations required by the Food and Drug Surveillance Institute (Invima) to grant them the sanitary registration, including having a production plant, and with the planning rules that applied to the ETCR of Icononzo.

“We got the money to build the plant and it cannot be built because the POT (Land Use Plan) of the municipality has a pastoral land use and to switch to industrial use we have to make an exercise of political will of the government and the mayor’s office and none of them helped us. That is why we came to Bogotá”, explains Grajales, which implied abandoning the ETCR, a decision that had not been part of his plans until then.

This former FARC guerrilla defines the brewing project as “an association in the logic of solidarity economy”, whose profits are donated to territorial projects of the communities, among them the construction of kindergartens for the children of his comrades in the process of reincorporation. “It wouldn’t make sense to have fought against capitalism for many years to set up a capitalist company so that four or five of us could become millionaires; that’s not our objective,” Grajales emphasizes.

Bureaucratic obstacles also make it difficult for ex-combatants to access productive land to advance their economic and social reincorporation process, a situation that worries them ostensibly if one takes into account the rural origin of hundreds of former guerrillas who joined the Peace Accord.

“We need land for our productive projects, to have our houses, if we can have productive projects, we are building peace”, insists Joverman Sánchez, a former guerrilla leader who is leading a social and economic reintegration process in the municipality of Mutatá in Urabá, Antioquia.

In his opinion, the national government’s measures are insufficient and are also flawed: “They are giving us very little food, with many difficulties and there is always conflict and. We have a bankarization, in that they comply with us, but it is not the essence of the Agreement. We need the land to work and we need them not to kill us so we can work the land”.

Sánchez’s concern about the security of ex-combatants has a basis in reality: to date, 290 signatories of the Peace Accord have been murdered in various regions of the country, a tragic balance for those who trusted in the pacts reached in Havana, Cuba.

Hundreds of kilometers from Antioquia’s Urabá, towards the south of the country, former guerrilla Diego Ferney Tovar draws attention to another of the most sensitive issues in the reincorporation process: municipal public policies that guarantee access to rights for demobilized former FARC members and their families.

Tovar is part of the group of ex-combatants who gathered in the ETCR built in the municipality of La Montañita, region of Caquetá, and from there he accentuates the situation of those who live in that territorial space.

“Today we are excluded from the public policy of the municipality of La Montañita. Go to the territorial planning scheme, which is where the action plan of the Mayor’s Office is derived and see what there is for Agua Bonita, for the town of Héctor Ramírez, and there is nothing because it does not appear in the public policy”.

And he continues: “In public administration it is said that if you do not exist in the public policy, you do not exist for any institution, here we have had to fight for the people to be able to join the Sisben, and the local government, protected by the national government, had the nerve to say that here we could not join it because we were signatories of the Agreement and we belong to a different program”.

The Sisben (System for the Identification of Potential Beneficiaries of Social Programs) is a state tool through which the least favored communities are classified according to their living conditions and income in order to focus social investment and ensure that it is allocated to those who need it most.

“To access health care, we need to be Sisbenizados, but it turns out that it is not only about the signatories, it is about the children of the signatories. Here we have communities of more than 100 children,” says Tovar and denounces that in La Montañita they are not admitted to the Sisben either, which limits access to basic rights, such as health and education.

In chiaroscuro

Escobar recognizes that the social, economic and political reincorporation process responds to the balance of the implementation of the Peace Accord which, in his opinion, “has very positive aspects, but, obviously, also has very unfortunate aspects”.

Although he highlights the continuity of the monthly allowance or basic income, which consists of a state contribution of 90 percent of the current legal minimum wage for former combatants, he considers, however, that this contribution “does not have the accompaniment, the simultaneity, the synergy of the productive projects, so the basic income ends up being useful, but not sufficient for the return to civilian life”.

This former guerrilla makes a critical assessment of the productive projects after considering that those projects with an impact, “that generate income, that help to solve problems, that lead people to move from a war economy to a family economy”, are yet to be seen.

In his opinion, the main threat in the ETCR is misery and poverty, “and with that a reincorporation, a reintegration to civilian life, are in the same conditions that, in certain occasions, propitiate the armed conflict”.

He also draws attention to those who are outside these spaces, such as the 350 ex-combatants based in Medellín, who, in his opinion, “live in conditions of great social, economic and political risk”.

And he adds: “When the work on causes and consequences of the war was finished, axes of persistence were also identified, and one of the axes of persistence that contributes to the survival of the armed conflict is precisely the failure of ex-combatants to return to civilian life. Failure in that means a failure of a peace policy”.

Pastor Alape, former guerrilla leader who is part of the National Council for Reincorporation (CNR), assures that the reincorporation process “is moving forward, facing and overcoming many obstacles because there has been no effective commitment on the part of the government”.

Regarding progress, he recognizes the permanence of most of the ETCRs which, little by little, are becoming populated centers, despite the difficulties they have faced, especially in security issues.

In these five years of implementation of the Peace Agreement, at least four of these spaces have faced problems: the first of them was the one in the Gallo village, in Tierralta, Córdoba, which was transferred by decision of the ex-guerrillas to the municipality of Mutatá, Antioquia; the second was La Elvira, in the municipality of Buenos Aires, Cauca, whose inhabitants were displaced and dispersed; the third was Santa Lucía, in Ituango, which had to move to Mutatá, in order to preserve their lives.

And just the fourth was recorded this weekend, in the ETCR Urías Rendón, in the municipality of El Doncello, region of Caquetá, from which 106 families who signed the Peace Agreement were forced to move due to the action of illegal armed groups. To address this situation, the Integral Resettlement Route was activated. (See press release)

Despite the difficulties, the representative of the former FARC in the CNR highlights the initiatives of the ex-combatants, who “have been building productive processes that are being recognized in the country. What we are seeing here is a permanent initiative and creativity of the reincorporated combatants”.

And to back up his criticism against the national government, Alape makes a list of shortcomings that, if they were to be made effective, would strengthen the reincorporation process: “there is still no land for productive projects, neither collective nor individual; there is no land for housing or housing plan; there is no concrete program for education; and there is no program that guarantees access to concrete rights for the elderly, people with disabilities and high-cost illness”.

And he adds to this list the lack of access to bank credits, an issue that complicates the process of economic insertion. “Every time they apply for a loan, legal proceedings appear. We all have that situation and, obviously, the banks set off alarms,” says the former guerrilla leader.

“It is not possible to develop concrete activities in associations, in cooperative and associative processes,” he adds, “because, in the same way, we find ourselves with these limitations” and warns that, in this sense, “there has been no concrete action of transformation or regulatory adjustment to guarantee the reincorporation, the concrete transition of the men and women of the FARC to the institutional framework”.

In his analysis, Alape considers that part of the shortcomings faced by the reincorporation process is due to the disarticulation of the State, a situation which, in his opinion, the Peace Agreement tried to correct, but which, after five years of its implementation, has not yet been achieved, among other reasons because there are “officials who do not understand, who are not clear, that it is not a matter of a subdued citizenry, but a citizenry that signed a Peace Agreement, and is a protagonist of that Agreement”.

And private enterprise?

Escobar and Alape underline the progress that has been achieved by integrating alliances with the private sector, both national and foreign, into the reincorporation process. Escobar highlights the willingness of some businessmen to “want to help, to express their philanthropy, their social responsibility”, but insists on pointing out that, due to their individual approach, political reincorporation is being relegated because, in some way, it clashes with the debate over the dispute for political power.

Alape, for his part, emphasizes the productive alliances with the private sector which, in his opinion, offer an experience in the struggle to implement the Peace Accord, and says that “they have been joining in, but with great fear. We believe that it is part of this process to be more informed, to see more of what is being done”.

He stresses, however, the role that Proantioquia Foundation, which brings together a large group of businessmen in the region of Antioquia that promote regional and national development initiatives, and the National Federation of Coffee Growers, have been playing in the reincorporation process. But more assistance is needed,” he affirms, “more activity on the part of the government, so that the business community sees that there are also opportunities here and that if alliances are established, peace can be built in the territories”.

The information provided by ARN for this report makes it possible to establish in detail the participation of private companies at different levels of the reincorporation process of former FARC combatants. In its presentation, it highlights that this agency “has managed to consolidate a strong relationship with strategic external actors that have supported the National Reincorporation Policy from different fronts”.

In line with this, it details that, in relation to the support to productive sectors, both individual and collective, it has received contributions “in kind, in strengthening, monetary, consulting, commercial alliances, marketing support, vaccination for livestock and training” from 24 private organizations.

Another way of linkage is through the strengthening of associative forms in "commercial, financial, productive and organizational areas through different local, national, public, private and international cooperation leaders". According to ARN, these types of actions are reflected in "support for formalization procedures, training processes, technology transfer and financial services".

Regarding the support for social inclusion of former combatants who signed the Peace Agreement, the ARN reports the execution of "actions oriented to sensitize the private sector, which include the socialization of reintegration and reincorporation policies, and the characteristics and needs of the communities served by the entity, being this a fundamental element to promote their labor liaison".

According to this state agency, in this line of work "the needs of the communities are presented in order to identify ways of articulation with the private sector", a key aspect to strengthen the processes of integration to legal life.

Housing, a bottleneck

In his analysis for this report, Alape draws attention to the difficulties that exist in implementing housing programs that favor ex-combatants. Ex-combatant Villa, from the El Oso ETCR, asserts that the Colombian state should build decent houses. "The ones we live in now we call them cardboard boxes," she says ironically. "It's our turn, and it's not hard for us because we have been taught to live in worse situations, to live under rubber. In this new reality of our life, we were expecting something better".

In fact, she warns that, at the beginning, they had been consulted on what material they wanted the houses to be made of and all those who were in that ETCR proposed adobe and concrete, but the reality was different: they were built in superboard, fiber cement boards of which they questioned its quality. "Even a stone can go through it," says Villa.

In a reply to this portal, the ARN explains that the housing processes in the ETCRs are carried out jointly with the National Land Agency (ANT) and must go through three processes until they are executed: development of pre-feasibility studies, identification of subsidy beneficiaries and technical formulation.

According to this state agency, the Universidad Nacional Medellín accredited the viability of the development of housing projects in the ETCRs of Llano Grande, municipality of Dabeiba, Antioquia; La Fila, municipality of Icononzo, Tolima; Filipinas, municipality of Arauquita, Arauca; Mutatá, municipality of Mutatá, Antioquia; and Los Monos, located in the indigenous reservation of San Lorenzo, municipality of Caldono, Cauca.

This higher education institution is also conducting pre-feasibility studies for eight ETCRs: Los Monos II, Tumburao indigenous reservation, municipality of Silvia, Cauca; Las Colinas, municipality of San José del Guaviare, Guaviare; El Estrecho, municipality of Patía, Cauca; La Variante, municipality of Tumaco-Nariño; Charras, municipality of San José del Guaviare, Guaviare; Yarí, municipality of El Doncello, Caquetá; La Plancha, municipality of Anorí, Antioquia; and Pondores, municipality of Fonseca, La Guajira.

As of the closing date of this article, the remaining 12 ETRCs were pending pre-feasibility studies.

With respect to housing subsidies, the ARN is in the process of identifying potential beneficiaries in the ETCRs of Los Monos I and II (San Lorenzo and Tumburao Reservations), Pondores, Mutatá, La Plancha and Yari. Additionally, this agency sent the list of potential beneficiaries of the Llano Grande (109 potential households) and Filipinas (187 potential households) to Fonvivienda for their respective studies.

External evaluations

In the midst of the positions put forward by the ex-FARC guerrillas and the ARN, on behalf of the State, there are control entities and civil society organizations that monitor the implementation of the Peace Agreement, whose analyses ponder the progress and pending tasks.

In the Third Report to Congress on the status of the implementation of the Peace Agreement presented to the Congress of the Republic, submitted last August, the Attorney General's Office expressed its concern about the ARN's vision of the National Reincorporation System (SNR), an instrument created with Conpes 3931 of 2018 to follow up on the reincorporation process of former FARC combatants.

According to the report of this control entity, five years after the signing of the Peace Agreement there is no "plan to advance in the formalization of the SNR, and, on the contrary, it is not perceived as a necessary instance for the implementation of the policy [...] In this sense, it is unknown that the creation of the SNR is a commitment that was consigned in the Conpes 3931 of 2018".

In addition to this, the Attorney General's Office was concerned that "the actions of the ARN continue to expand without having a formal instrument that guarantees the accompaniment of the competent institutions to assist the communities, as this control body has reiterated in past reports to Congress and in other instances".

The Public Ministry highlighted some achievements of the implementation, such as the regulations governing access to housing, the approval of the long-term social and economic reincorporation route, the consolidation of the ETCRs, the land purchase processes and the development of their productive projects.

However, it reiterated the "call to guarantee an impact and improvement in the quality of life of people in the reincorporation process and their families, for which it emphasizes, the importance of having an instrument to measure the impact of public policy and thus identify aspects to be strengthened in the social offer of the State", in reference to the National Reincorporation System.

The subject was taken up again, in its last quarterly analysis, by the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, for the period July-September of this year. This institution also highlighted the achievements so far, but indicated that "the construction and implementation of the National Reincorporation System (SNR) for the articulation and follow-up of the programs, plans and projects of the reincorporation process" is yet to be completed.

The former guerrilla leader summarizes what is required to strengthen the reincorporation process for the coming years: "it is necessary to join actions, efforts of the whole Colombian society, change the correlation of forces, strengthen the emotion of peace to advance on a clearer path".

“Today it is as if we were back in the time of war: we have to watch out for ourselves, we have to stay in places until certain hours and look for security schemes because we cannot be alone”.

Those words, loaded with anguish and disappointment, are from Carlos Grajales, who went from having a rifle slung over his shoulder to presiding over La Roja craft brewery, one of the most recognized productive projects of the 13,000 former FARC members who laid down their arms between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017.

That feeling is not a matter of perception, exaggeration or schizophrenia. In practice, since 2017 not a month goes by without news of the murder of a former FARC combatant, signatories of the Peace Agreement with the Colombian State five years ago.

The records of the FARC component of the National Council for Reincorporation are conclusive: as of October 22, of this year, 290 murders, 53 attacks and 15 forced disappearances have been documented.

In the first two years after the signing of the pact, which took four years of negotiations in Havana, Cuba, 78 former combatants were murdered and one more was saved from a hired assassin attack. And under the presidency of Iván Duque (2018-2022) there have been 211 homicides and 46 attacks.

The most violent regions for the reincorporated members of the former FARC are in the southwest of the country. The list is headed by Cauca, with 52 murders; Nariño, with 33; and Caquetá, with 30. They are followed by Antioquia (29), Meta (25), Putumayo (22), Valle del Cauca (19), Northern of Santander (18) and Chocó (17).

The United Nations Verification Mission (UN) in Colombia has been in charge of constantly monitoring this situation in its quarterly reports submitted to the Security Council. It identified that in 2021 homicides against ex-combatants have been concentrated in 25 municipalities in the country and that security conditions have deteriorated in regions of the departments of Bolivar, Caquetá, Guaviare and Meta.

For its part, the Investigation and Indictment Unit of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has raised alarms about the violence suffered by demobilized FARC members in the municipalities of Tumaco (Nariño); Puerto Asís (Putumayo); San Vicente del Caguán (Caquetá); Cali (Valle del Cauca); Tibú (Norte de Santander); San José del Guaviare (Guaviare); Santander de Quilichao, Corinto, Miranda and Caloto (Cauca).

In addition to describing the situation in these municipalities as “critical”, the JEP has identified two main patterns of violence against the signatories of the Peace Accord. The first is related to the profile and the work carried out by the reincorporated persons, since those who lead the implementation of the so-called post-conflict policies are victims of attacks. This was pointed out in its Sixth Security Risk Monitoring Report: “This pattern demonstrates how the leadership positions assumed by some reincorporated persons during their transition to civilian life are related to the causes that produced their victimization”.

Thus, it is understood that “2 out of every 10 reincorporated persons who were killed were leaders in political issues, productive projects (representatives of cooperatives), substitution of illicit crops, etc.”.

The second pattern is related to territorial disputes and the actions of different armed groups. For the southwest of the country, a region to which the Investigation and Indictment Unit of the JEP dedicated a specific report as a result of the seriousness of the violence in Nariño, Cauca and Valle del Cauca, where 115 former combatants were killed between November 24, 2016 and August 13 of this year, established that there is a “pattern of lethal violence associated with the prevalence and dispute between FARC-EP dissidents in former rearguard areas of the Eastern Bloc, the Southern Bloc and the Joint Western Command.”

On the other hand, as of December 2020, 72 percent of the murders of ex-combatants occurred in rural areas and in municipalities where Development Programs with a Territorial Approach (PDET) are implemented. This is according to one of the reports of the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia, on the events that occurred in the last quarter of last year.

In addition, the most recent report of that multilateral body presented at the end of September this year, documented that 22.8 percent of the murdered ex-combatants are from ethnic communities: 45 Afro-descendants and 23 indigenous people.

Since 2018, the murders of reincorporated members of the extinct FARC have maintained a similar trend, ranging between 65 and 78 cases per year. Jorge Mantilla, director of the Conflict Dynamics Area of the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP), explains that this phenomenon is due to a resurgence of violence in some regions of the country and that ex-combatants may be immersed in contexts of rearmament.

“This is also related to problems in the dynamics of reconciliation and economic reincorporation, in which, upon returning to their former territories, ex-combatants may face new recruitment dynamics, involved in organized or common criminal dynamics,” says this analyst.

And he adds: “They may find themselves in processes of settling scores. Above all, in a context where there is dissidence, it is very likely that repertoires of violence associated with retaliation and radicalization of dissident groups, which are identified as military targets, will be unleashed.

Isabela Sanroque was a member of the FARC’s Eastern Bloc for 12 years, participated in the negotiations in Havana and is currently in the process of reincorporation into civil society. From this background, she speaks of the impact of the assassinations of her comrades who have laid down their arms.

“For security reasons, they have had to move away from the territorial spaces -places suitable for their reincorporation and development of productive projects-. They have had to go in search of new horizons and it has become a collective struggle. This has some negative impacts, since the continuity of processes is lost, even if there have not been many advances,” she says with concern.

An example of this is the case of the Santa Lucía Territorial Space for Training and Reincorporation, located in Ituango, Antioquia, where 93 ex-combatants, together with their families, fled from the violence in July last year and relocated to Mutatá. (Read more in: Relocation of ex-combatants in Mutatá, a challenge for the national government).

The Peace Accord contemplated a set of security guarantees for former combatants and social leaders; however, the constant succession of murders shows that they are not sufficient or that they are not being implemented in an ideal manner.

The Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, in charge of monitoring the implementation of the Havana Pact, states in its bimonthly report from May to June 2021 that 48 percent of the 140 measures contemplated in Point 3, referring to the end of the conflict, have been fulfilled, most of them related to the FARC’s process of laying down their weapons and the transition to civil society of those who bet on the peace process.

However, it drew attention to the situation of the Comprehensive Program for the Security and Protection of Communities and Organizations in the Territories, an instance created through Decree 660 of April 2018, with the purpose of “defining and adopting comprehensive protection measures for organizations in the territories, including social leaders, officers, representatives and activists of the social, popular, ethnic, women, gender, environmental, communal, LGBTI and human rights defenders”.

According to this norm, “the comprehensive security and protection measures adopted within the framework of this Program are aimed at preventing violations, protecting, respecting and guaranteeing the human rights to life, integrity, freedom and security of communities and organizations in the territories”.

According to the Kroc Institute’s analysis, this program has an insufficient budget for its implementation. To support this assertion, it cited the Human Rights Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior: “This Directorate indicated that, although in 2020 diagnoses were made, protocols were formalized and community peace promoters were trained, at the end of June, the search for resources with international cooperation continued, considering the decrease in the budget allocated for this year due to the pandemic”.

In addition to this, the changes of the team in that Directorate, which, according to the North American institute, “are two factors that have led to a delay not only in the implementation times of the components, but also in the articulation with the social organizations that are directly and indirectly part of the Integral Program”.

For Federico Montes, who was in the former FARC guerrilla for 18 years and left the weapons to reunite with his family and return to legal life, that slowness and bureaucratic red tape are responsible, to a large extent, for the effects of the violence that haunts the reincorporated.

“Unfortunately, we have been the target of threats. Many of them lie in the government’s irresponsibility with each of the components of Point 3 of the Peace Accord, which have to do with guarantees. Unfortunately for the peace process, no forceful measures have been taken,” he reproaches with great disappointment.

He also questions the stigma attached to those who continue on the reincorporation route on account of those who did not disarm or take up arms: “Now anyone who picks up a weapon is said to be a dissident and we are declared traitors of the Peace Accord. They targeted us and this is accompanied by an official speech. They are trying to sell the idea that the FARC has not complied”.

Another factor that fuels the violence suffered by reincorporated combatants is impunity and the lack of information on the progress of judicial investigations, the inaction of the justice system has encouraged the attacks on them and no one is suffering the consequences of these crimes.

In this regard, the Technical Secretariat of the International Verification Component, composed by the Cinep and Cerac, in its most recent report, presented in mid-October of this year, states that in 2020 there was an investigative advance of 40.4 percent of the cases; and that between January 1 and September 17, 2021, 48 alleged perpetrators of attacks against demobilized members of the former FARC were captured.

Regarding this record, the report draws attention to the fact that the lack of knowledge of the advances in investigative matters “represents an enormous limitation to identify the capacities, challenges and obstacles to overcome and, therefore, it is a challenge that persists in terms of institutional capacity to contribute to the purpose of dismantling criminal organizations”.

Other guarantees are lacking

Manuela Marín belonged to the FARC and operated in the Sumapaz páramo. Currently, she is involved in politics with the Comunes party, which was created by the men and women of the former FARC after laying down their arms. She warns about the “cross-cutting risks” that the signatories of the Peace Accord have.

“What we are denouncing are the collective risks, which are the lack of political, economic and cultural transformation”, Marín exposes, and adds: “The government has no concern when saying that the balance is not so negative because in other peace processes there were more deaths, when a single murder should already be a concern and is a defeat for the Colombian State”.

Her words are supported by daily life and the records of the FARC Component of the National Council for Reincorporation, which point to 2019 as the most violent year for the signatories, with 82 murders and an average of six cases per month.

This wave of violence also has repercussions on the political work of the Comunes, who sought the opening of democratic and participatory spaces, to lay down their arms.  “We have to take a lot of measures to accompany them in some regions. There are direct and indirect threats that make the exercise difficult. It is not that we cannot reach them as individuals, but we cannot do it as a political project,” says Marín.

Stigmatization also takes its toll. Joverman Sánchez Arroyave, also known as ‘Rubén Cano’ or ‘El Manteco’, who commanded the 58th Front of the former FARC, says that he has not suffered threats or harassment, but he has suffered judicial montages that link him to the Gaitanistas Self- Defense Forces of Colombia, or ‘Clan del Golfo‘, the name by which the authorities call this illegal armed group. (Read more in: “They want to extradite me and attack the peace process”).

“I have been the victim of three judicial set-ups. That tells you: ‘Open your eyes because they are going to kill you or imprison you’. They once said that I had abandoned the process, when I had to leave Gallo (a village where his front surrendered weapons) due to lack of guarantees. They said that I was already with ‘Clan del Golfo’ and with ‘Otoniel’, recalls Sánchez.

And the protection?

According to the most recent report of the UN Verification Mission, from January 1, 2021 to mid-September of this year, the National Protection Unit (UNP) approved 597 protection requests, including 86 measures for women and 29 collective protection measures.

However, the document reviews that, although 470 of the 686 additional escorts ordered by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace in July 2020 have been “contracted, budget cuts are affecting funds for travel and per diem protection schemes, which negatively impacts the ability of ex-combatants to fully develop their economic, social and political reincorporation activities throughout the country.”

Federico Montes, a former FARC guerrilla who participated in the formulation and development of the reincorporation process, questions the efficiency and management of the UNP’s security schemes. His schemes consist of four bodyguards and two vehicles, one of them armored.

“In the last 40 days I had a mechanical failure that derived from a bad maintenance. After 15 (days) it was returned to us, during that time we could only use the conventional vehicle, but during those days it ran out of fuel and I had to use the bus. One cannot go out with the escorts in public service because of the issue of carrying weapons and I was forced to go out without a security scheme. A week after the armored vehicle arrived, it was damaged again and the other one was taken away for maintenance. I am without cars and I cannot move around with those schemes”.

In the midst of the panorama of violence and the difficulties in protecting FARC reincorporated combatants, Mantilla, of the IFP, urges that this high-risk context be addressed “in an urgent and inter-institutional manner, so that there are security guarantees and this dynamic of selective violence against ex-combatants is stopped”.

However, when comparing the current situation with other processes of laying down arms and reincorporation that have taken place in the country, this analyst recognizes that progress has been made in the area of security. Some examples are the demobilization of the EPL in 1991, in which around 15 percent of the former combatants were killed; in the case of the Socialist Renewal Current, which laid down its weapons in 1994, 18 percent were killed; and with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, whose demobilization process took place between November 2003 and August 2006, the number of deaths reached 11.3 percent.

“This does not mean that what is happening with the FARC is not serious, it is very serious, but put in context, about two percent of FARC ex-combatants have been killed,” Mantilla points out.

The country is in time to take a step back and avoid further bloodshed. It is urgent to take measures to effectively protect the men and women who laid down their arms, believing in the State, to work for national reconciliation and the construction of a better society. Otherwise, as predicted by a statistical projection of the Investigation and Indictment Unit of the JEP, in three years Colombia will not be talking about 290 murdered ex-combatants, but 1,600.

The situation of leaders and ethnic authorities in Colombia has not been the most favorable since the Colombian State signed the Peace Agreement with the now defunct FARC guerrillas five years ago. They face multiple risk scenarios in their daily work on behalf of the most vulnerable communities.

The grueling reality they face is far from the hope that was envisioned after the government of then President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) and the extinct FARC guerrillas took steps to put an end to an armed confrontation that lasted for 53 years. Many thought that, finally, they would be able to carry out their social work and the defense of human rights without tension or fear. The figures show another side.

According to the records of the non-governmental organization We are Defenders, which since 2002 documents all kinds of aggressions against social leaders, between November 24, 2016, the day the Peace Accord was signed, and last September 30, 682 people committed to defending the rights of various communities were killed.

This death toll takes on a more absurd dimension when we broaden the spectrum of time: the figures reveal that the search for peace ended up detonating a wave of violence that worsened over time. During the peace negotiations, between 2012 and 2016, killings fluctuated, surpassing the records of previous years, but took a drastic upturn when the implementation of the Agreement began in 2017.

The so-called post-conflict period ended up being lethal for human rights defenders and full of paradoxes. One of them was in 2017, when the FARC demobilized and the country recorded the lowest homicide rate in 40 years, but for the first time the threshold of 100 social leaders murdered in a single year was surpassed. Likewise, although the current year will probably end with fewer murders than the last three, in its third quarter there were more cases than in the years prior to the beginning of the peace negotiations.

According to We are Defenders‘ monitoring, the regions with the most murdered social leaders since the signing of the Peace Accord are Cauca, with 171 cases; Antioquia, with 95; Nariño, with 54; Norte de Santander, with 45; Valle del Cauca, with 45; Putumayo, with 43; Chocó, with 32; Caquetá, with 31; Córdoba and Arauca, both with 19.

Multiple concerns

One of those voices hopeful about the Peace Accord was that of Maydany Salcedo, a peasant leader for almost two decades. She took her first steps in social leadership working with children in the municipality of San Vicente del Caguán, Caquetá, to whom she taught the importance of the 1991 Political Constitution.

“I worked with a circle of children, called Círculo de Lectores (Circle of Readers). From that time on, the desire to teach children and to discover what was happening in my country was born with a growing interest and I stopped being just a common housewife,” recalls Salcedo.

Her involvement with the National Federation of Unitarian Agriculture Union (Fensuagro) took her to Piemonte, in the region of Cauca, in 2012. She is currently the legal representative of the Municipal Association of Workers of Piamonte (Asimtracampic). She arrived in that area the same year that peace negotiations began in Havana, Cuba.

Five years after the peace agreement, she does not contain the anger in her voice, a product of the disappointment of feeling that they have had to carry the Agreement on their shoulders: “The government was not interested in the peace agreement, we were interested in the people who believed or thought or dreamed of a different country. So that was our great illusion, that it would be signed, but even the plebiscite went against it and then we, social organizations, took the Agreement on our shoulders”. 

Salcedo is a fierce defender of the rights linked to land ownership and the voluntary substitution of illicit crops, and for this reason she is a regional advocate in the process of listening to the communities. After the signing of the Peace Agreement, she says that for a year and a half she was able to move around different areas of Cauca without problems, but then the disputes between illegal armed groups returned and the risks increased.

“If the government had complied with the Agreement, with the restitution of land, it would have been a different story, but the government was not interested in complying with the agreement, with the voluntary substitution. This is a business that comes from above and that has led to us being in dispute in our territories,” says Salcedo with a hint of anger.

In addition to the complaints of this peasant leader, Víctor Moreno, former senior advisor of the Association of Community Councils of Northern Cauca (Aconc), also suffers from the tensions generated by his social work.

Moreno highlights what he experienced months after the signing of the Peace Accord, highlighting the tranquility and security in the municipalities of northern Cauca and southern Valle del Cauca: “I was able to visit places I never imagined I could have visited, such as Buenos Aires, up in Cauca, for a symbolic surrender of weapons. Now it is almost impossible to go there again”.

Moreno participated in the construction of the ethnic approach in Havana, Cuba, in the last stage of the negotiations and ever since Aconc has focused on the defense of the environmental rights of black communities. His concern is also focused on the degradation of regional security.

“There has been an increased paramilitary presence in the territory. Today we have a community called Mazamorrero (Santander de Quilichao, Cauca) where practically all the families had to move out of the territory because a person from the dissidents (of the former FARC) was murdered nearby and I do not see a return plan, these families are dispersed”, says Moreno.

And he questions some of the executions linked to the Peace Agreement in the territory where he exercises his leadership: “Here we have not seen more than the PDET (Development Programs with a Territorial Approach); the demining issue has not advanced; it started, but I believe that there are territories with more antipersonnel mines; and businessmen have only invested in areas where they can take some advantage of them and not in the community per se”.

Another critical voice is that of Ana Deida Secué, indigenous leader of the Nasa people. Her analysis is also based on the optimism that was experienced during the peace talks in Havana: “In four years of negotiation, it generated a lot of expectations and a lot of desire. We worked on this peace agreement so that it would come about in Colombia, but not without some concerns, which became a reality.

This leader has been working for more than 20 years at the head of her communities as a member of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (Acin), she is recognized by UNESCO as a teacher of wisdom and currently belongs to the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC).

Her authority and experience lead her to state that the implementation of the Peace Agreement in her territories of incidence was blurred five years after it was signed: “We see that they have not represented us, we had a lot of hope in its signature and in its development, how it was going to be implemented. But with the current president, the Agreement is torn to shreds, its work unknown and delegitimized, and now we are in a crisis of extermination that ignores and destroys the Peace Agreements”. 

This violence, says Feliciano Valencia, senator of the Alternative Indigenous and Social Movement (MAIS), “happens in many cases because it is the indigenous communities that carry out territorial control exercises to mitigate drug trafficking, violence and conflicts in their territories”.

And he refers that due to the continuity of the armed conflict there have been areas vetoed by the institutions because of forests, mountains and difficult areas to access “the guerrillas used to plant there”.

With the demobilization, adds the Senator, “those lands have been left at the mercy of atomized armed groups, many of which keep the drug trafficking business alive, but it turns out that those lands, those zones and regions have been ancestral territories that the ethnic communities have been recovering and trying to maintain and preserve because in several cases they are strategic ecosystems and areas of environmental protection”.

But this territorial control requires, according to Valencia, the accompaniment of the State to prevent the indigenous people from being more visible and immediate targets of an increasingly degraded violence. “By State accompaniment we do not mean military presence because there is plenty of that: Cauca, for example, has the municipalities with the highest number of soldiers in the country, such as Argelia, and that is one of the municipalities where most violence is experienced. That is why the accompaniment of the State is of integral attention, guaranteeing basic rights such as health, education, work, and that young people have real opportunities, other than being recruited by illegal armed groups or by the Army and the Police”.

He concludes his analysis by suggesting that “the exacerbated violence is also evidence of non-compliance with the Peace Accords”. 

The risk of exposure

As evidenced by Salcedo, Moreno and Secué, the first year after the signing of the Peace Accord generated a sense of tranquility and security that led dozens of leaders and ethnic authorities to speak out publicly in favor of the agreements reached in Havana and to strengthen their implementation, but those who opposed what was achieved on the Caribbean Island lurked in the shadows.

Arnobis Zapata, a peasant leader from the south of Córdoba, who has worked hard to position himself as territorial coordinator of the Southern Córdoba Peasant Association (Ascsucor), president of the National Association of Peasant Reserve Zones (Anzorc) and national spokesperson for the National Coordination of Coca, Poppy and Marijuana Growers (Coccam), gives account of this risky situation.

“When the Peace Accord was signed, the leaders began to come out, to make themselves visible, even some who had never left their villages, became targets,” said Zapata.

But the lack of a quick action by the State to monopolize the territories left by the former FARC on their way to reincorporation into legal life, the rearmament of some ex-guerrillas and the atomization of illegal armed groups interested in hindering the implementation of the Peace Agreement, pointed to these social leaders in ebullition.

“Today the situation is very complicated”, Zapata highlights and specifies the consequences: “After all the assassinations, many leaders have withdrawn, they don’t want to know anything about leadership and organizational processes. Some of the circumstances are that a few of them are subjected to the rules imposed by the armed groups and others have opposed doing what the armed groups tell them to do and have had to leave”.

The leader Salcedo bursts into tears when she tries to answer why people like her suffer these pressures: “We, the peasant leaders, the social leaders and the defenders of rights, I don’t think we are hurting anyone, I don’t know why they are looking for us to kill us. We want to defend the Peace Agreement and we are going to defend it with our heart and soul”. And she emphasizes: “If you have to give your life, it is better to give your life standing up than kneeling down”.

Diana Sanchez, director of the Minga Association and with extensive experience in the defense of human rights, explains that violence against social leaders has increased because “those who have carried the banner of a better quality of life are the leaders”.

This work has also been stigmatized by what Sanchez calls “the establishment”, which associates leaders with the armed insurgency: “And they continue to kill them because they have justified claims”. This has resulted, according to her, in two circumstances that aggravate the situation: on the one hand, the strengthening of militarization in some regions of the country, which prevents leaders and ethnic authorities from having full mobilization; and on the other hand, that, as a consequence, communities lose contact with their spokespersons.

Senator Valencia adds that the interlocution with the national government is not the most adequate and to exemplify this statement he refers to a recent session of the Permanent Table of Concertation, held in Bogota.

“The delegates of the Ministry of Interior, facing the security demands of the communities, referred to the Plan of Timely Action (PAO), which was issued in 2018, stating that this is the main tool to provide security guarantees to social leaderships. But referring to the facts, and the violence statistics, the question then remains as to whether the government is finally saying that this growing violence, the murders, the massacres, could have been even worse,” Valencia details.

“And if so, it is infamous -adds the Senator- because every life lost in such an act of violence should be repudiated and should have been protected. Therefore, one cannot agree with the government that the protection mechanisms and security guarantees provided through the PAO have been sufficient.”

Does the State protect?

The institution responsible for the security of human rights defenders is the National Protection Unit (UNP), attached to the Ministry of the Interior. In the event that a person or a community is a victim of threats due to political, public, social or humanitarian activities, they may request an evaluation of the situation in order to determine what type of security scheme they require, in application of current regulations.

In relation to the implementation of the Peace Agreement, the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, in charge of monitoring the implementation of the Havana agreement, highlights that the UNP strengthened its Specialized Sub-Directorate with the incorporation of 40 risk analysts and 686 men and women assigned to protection.

Sánchez, from Minga, has a critical stance on the UNP: “I have never agreed with the fact that we are filled with security schemes. For example, the panic button, I won’t be able to activate it if I get a bullet in the back. I don’t agree with physical measures, there must be guarantees and a change of context because it prolongs the problem”.

For this activist, the excess of security schemes not only takes the protected people, many of them leaders and ethnic authorities, out of context, but also distances them from the community “and puts them in a different status, puts them in a bubble. This has political, social and economic implications and they can get used to the schemes, even if there is a change of context”. In this sense, he considers that the security risk goes far beyond having security schemes: “It is necessary to have constant guarantees so that it is not necessary to resort to these schemes”.

Senator Valencia, on the other hand, recognizes that there are some mechanisms that the State has provided for the security and protection of social leaders, but, in his opinion, “reality shows us that the figures show that these mechanisms are not working”.

These types of difficulties were also contemplated by the Attorney General’s Office (PGN) in its Third Report on the Implementation of the Peace Agreement, submitted last August to the Congress of the Republic.

In that report, the Public Prosecutor’s Office highlighted the publication of the Risk Analysis Protocol for Women Leaders and Defenders of Rights, however, it indicated that “there is no clarity regarding the progress in its implementation, especially in the incorporation of the gender approach within the entity to ensure that the actions carried out respond to the provisions of the Protocol. At the same time, it is necessary that the UNP advances in the development of a Protocol for the attention and punishment of cases of sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence by escorts against the beneficiaries of its protection programs”.

Despite so many difficulties, leaders and ethnic authorities continue to work in their regions to achieve the goals proposed in defense of the rights of their communities and the environment. Peasant leader Salcedo explains: “We are protecting 1,680 hectares of primary forest; we are protecting 160 hectares of stubble forest that is being recovered. We have a plant for the transformation of Amazonian products, we work with communities that are committed to change.

And he adds: “We have human rights schools, environmental care schools, gender equity schools, youth schools, with resources that sometimes come from the peasantry. So, I don’t understand why they are looking for us to kill us, why they threaten us, why they persecute us. I do no harm to anyone; I take care of mother earth”.

“At breakfast one can guess what lunch would be,” goes the saying. This phrase exemplifies the implementation of the set of safeguards that the native peoples were able to include, at the last minute, in the pact that put an end to more than 50 years of confrontation between the Colombian State and the once oldest guerrilla group in the continent.

Breakfast comes to be the peace dialogues that the government of then President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) and the extinct FARC guerrilla held in Havana, Cuba, between November 2012 and August 2016. Since it was announced that a negotiating table would be established to discuss a six-point agenda to build a stable and lasting peace, Afro and indigenous people asked to be allowed to participate.

Despite their insistence, their words were not heard, as was the case with the Gender Sub-Commission, which was created to guarantee the rights of women and members of the LGBTI community to be harmoniously included in the Peace Agreement. In the face of the refusals, ethnic communities responded with more insistence and various advocacy actions, such as the creation of the Ethnic Peace Commission to join efforts and even ask for support abroad, especially before the U.S. Congress.

Not giving up finally paid off: between June 26 and 27, 2016, the negotiators of the national government and the extinct FARC received a delegation of ten representatives of the black communities, ten from the indigenous communities and two from the Rrom communities.

By that time in Cuba, five of the six points of the future Peace Agreement had already been agreed upon. The ethnic delegates had little room for maneuver and they had to return to the Caribbean Island in August. For that reason, of the 310 pages that make up the peace treaty with the FARC, only four give life to the Ethnic Chapter.

On the 24th of that month, when it was announced to the world that “everything was agreed”, the Afro and indigenous representatives were still fighting for their rights. They finally succeeded in having them enshrined as Point 6.2 of the Final Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace.

Its guiding principle recognizes that ethnic communities “have suffered historical conditions of injustice, as a result of colonialism, enslavement, exclusion and having been dispossessed of their lands, territories and resources; they have also been seriously affected by the armed conflict”.

Feliciano Valencia, an indigenous member of the Nasa people and senator of the Republic for the Indigenous and Social Alliance Movement (MAIS), explains that the Ethnic Chapter contemplates four safeguards that prevent the implementation of the Havana agreements from being detrimental to the rights of ethnic peoples. For this reason, any so-called post-conflict policy must preserve the primary and not subsidiary nature of free and informed prior consultation; the right to cultural objection as a guarantee of non-repetition; the cross-cutting ethnic, gender, women, family and generational approach; and the guarantee of non-regression.

Such was the ‘breakfast’ of the Ethnic Chapter and for the last five years its ‘lunch’ has been served. And as the old saying suggests, its implementation is being similar to its negotiation, as it has been full of delays, non-compliances and refusals.

New scenario, old habits

Just as the ethnic communities were heard only at the end of the peace dialogues, the same happened with the construction of the Implementation Framework Plan (PMI), which is the roadmap for translating the provisions of the Peace Agreement into public policies.

“Four months were available for the implementation of Point 6.1, related to the development of the Implementation Framework Plan. The government immediately continued with the parameter of systematic exclusion of ethnic peoples: we did not begin the construction process, even though the safeguards of the Ethnic Chapter established it,” explains Helmer Quiñones, coordinator of the advisory team of the Special High-Level Instance with Ethnic Peoples (IEANPE).

To rectify this shortcoming, the communities resorted to their most powerful tool: protest. “We ended up participating also at the end of the Implementation Framework Plan, between the months of September and December 2017, but as a product of the indigenous and Afro-descendant minga that blocked the Pan-American Highway and forced the government to make us participate in the process,” recalls Quiñones.

Only by the de facto ways, the four pages of the Ethnic Chapter became 80 provisions and 97 indicators, distributed in 27 pillars in the six points of the Peace Agreement. This delay has been constant in the implementation.

According to the most recent report of the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, which monitors the level of implementation of post-conflict policies, until last June, most of the ethnic points were below minimums.

As a result of this pachydermia, Richard Moreno, coordinator of the Afro-Colombian Peace Council (Conpa) and member of the Chocó Interethnic Solidarity Forum (Fisch), affirms that ethnic peoples have a bittersweet feeling about the Peace Agreement.

“We had high hopes and aspired that the Ethnic Chapter would serve to advance in the backwardness that, historically, our communities have had, in terms of unsatisfied basic needs. In our overall assessment, implementation is around eight percent. And the advances are not precisely in the most transcendental points that we need,” he laments.

Charo Mina, a member of the Black Communities Process (PCN), which brings together dozens of Afro-Descendant organizations, agrees with Moreno, detailing that the few advances have been in small infrastructure projects.

“That is very problematic because it means that it is not related to the priorities established by the Ethnic Chapter, at the level of territorial rights, but is more related to the commitments of the national government with the territorial entities, which are not our priorities as ethnic peoples. There is no titling or expansion of collective territories, nor return opportunities for the displaced,” Mina points out.

Land, the main debt

Different Afro-descendant and indigenous organizations agree that there are huge failures in the Integral Rural Reform. They even point out that the national government is inflating the number of hectares awarded through the nascent Land Fund.

Camilo Niño, president of the Technical Secretariat of the National Commission of Indigenous Territories (CNTI), tells that they found out about this situation when the National Land Agency (ANT), notified them that they had been awarded 245 thousand hectares from the Land Fund, product of the implementation of the Peace Agreement.

“Upon review, we found that the 245 thousand hectares come from processes that were underway before the peace agreements were signed. For example, we have a reservation that had requested its extension 42 years ago and others that corresponded to judicial processes, but were included as a result of the Peace Agreement,” he explains.

Niño emphatically states that such granting is not possible because the requirements defined for that purpose have not been met. “A FISO (Registration Form for Management Subjects) and an indigenous RESO (Registry of Management Subjects) had to be constructed that would be differentiated from the peasant one. To date, there is no ethnic FISO, nor an ethnic sub-account in the Land Fund. That is why we are still wondering where these lands came from, if the differential instructions that the decree law considers do not exist”, he argues.

In this regard, Mina, of the PCN, asks that the safeguard that established that the claim processes that the ethnic communities had been carrying out before the signing of the Peace Agreement would not be included as part of the implementation be respected.

“The government has shown collective titling that does not correspond to the commitments of the Agreement, but to commitments that came from the past. This means that the new commitments are not being fulfilled,” he insists.

About the debts that they hope the Peace Accord will help to settle, there is a need of around one million hectares for 200 community councils that are requesting collective titling. “There are community councils that have lost spaces and have never achieved their collective titling, such as the 40 in northern Cauca, because different governments have refused to recognize that there is an Afro-descendant community in those territories”, refers Mina.

In a similar situation are 779 indigenous reserves throughout the country, which have been acquiring land by their own means through the General System of Participation, but which have not been annexed to their collective titles. In the offices of the ANT there are 1,014 requests for expansion, constitution and regulation.

On this particular point, Niño, of the CNTI, clarifies that it is not true that the indigenous peoples are demanding that the State buy and adjudicate them millions of hectares, because “we already have use and possession of many areas that only require formalization”. Although he does not rule out that some indigenous reserves do require adjudication.

And the Guards?

One of the few mentions with its own name in the four pages of the Ethnic Chapter is dedicated to the collective protection mechanisms of the native peoples. “The strengthening of the ethnic peoples’ own security systems, both recognized nationally and internationally as the Indigenous Guard and the Maroon Guard, will be guaranteed,” it requires.

Armando Valbuena, secretary of the IEANPE, an entity created by the Peace Agreement to follow up on the implementation of the ethnic provisions, states that it is still a debt due to the lack of political will of the national government and that they have been given few resources.

“The National Protection Unit has supported with resources some of the main processes of collective protection, but they are not a state policy for territorial control to be exercised. In the Pacific we are present in 30 municipalities and we do not have the necessary resources for the mobilization of the guards. We need simple things like communications in regions without connectivity, that is why we ask for communication radios and it is a long process that has not been accepted”, he says.

The situation of the Maroon Guard is worse because it has no legal recognition. “There is a discrepancy with the national government to recognize this Guard as a mechanism that is part of the government system of the black people and it has been very difficult to reach an agreement,” says Mina.

And he continues: “There is a discriminatory act on the part of the national government with respect to the Maroon Guard. It does not need a law to be recognized, it has the recognition for being part of the struggle process. This is within the framework of discriminatory actions of the government. There is no political will to recognize the Afro-descendant people”.

Edwin Mauricio Capaz, one of the spokespersons of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (Cric), says that the Guard in that region has received some logistic equipment that is not sufficient for the contexts of violence it faces: “They have given boots, radios, vests. Useful things for daily use, we are not going to undervalue what has been given; but boots and vests every year, compared to what we assume, is not enough for the adverse dynamics that exist in our territories, which merit greater efforts. Surely they would be enough in other contexts”. Between 2016 and 2020, only in the northern part of Cauca, 175 indigenous community members were killed.

Integral System, a different story

In the implementation of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the Truth Clarification Commission (CVE) and the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons (UBPD), unlike other measures of the Peace Agreement, ethnic communities were taken into account. These three entities give life to the Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition.

In this regard, Helmer Quiñones, from IEANPE, states that this case shows how the correct implementation of the safeguards of the Ethnic Chapter changes the destiny of the native peoples.

“The selection mechanism received the message that it had to implement an ethnic and racial approach. That is why care was taken in choosing Patricia Tobón and Ángela Salazar to the Commission; we had the possibility that eight of the 38 magistrates are ethnic; and in the Search Unit we had an equal referent and with its director we designed a more sophisticated consultation mechanism and we have paths of dialogue that allowed the National Search Plan to have specific chapters for Afros and indigenous people”, he refers.

For Marino Córdoba, president of the Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians (Afrodes), despite the fact that the Integral System has been strongly opposed by the national government, it is the only component that so far is yielding concrete results for ethnic communities.

“It hurts to hear that reality, but for us it is important to understand how the conflict affected us in a differential way. There has also been progress in terms of participation, in the construction of reports, in presenting our points of view, we have been heard and we are represented. The only thing we can highlight from this whole peace process, with limitations included, is the Integral System”, he specifies.

Regarding the indigenous communities, Senator Valencia points out that the work of the three entities created to repair the victims of the armed conflict can generate “a recognition and a truth about the conflict from the voices of the indigenous communities themselves, because although the armed conflict has deeply affected many social sectors and rural communities, the impacts it has had on the indigenous communities have a particular meaning since they transcend individuality and have permeated the collective subject”.

The magnifying glass of the control entities

The Attorney General’s Office and the Comptroller General’s Office have closely monitored the implementation of the Ethnic Chapter. In different reports they have questioned the delay in its implementation and asked for speed in settling the debts with the ethnic peoples.

In its Third Report to Congress on the State of Progress of the Implementation of the Peace Agreement, presented last August, the Public Prosecutor’s Office concluded that the application of the Ethnic Chapter, five years after the signing of the Peace Agreement, is at a very low level.

“The peoples continue to suffer the historical conditions of injustice and inequity and continue to be seriously affected by the dynamics of the reconfiguration of the internal armed conflict and the intensification of violence in the territories,” it states.

One of his main criticisms was directed towards the management of the Land Fund, since the ethnic sub-account is not yet regulated and has no funds allocated. And in line with the denunciations made by CNTI and PCN spokespersons, he points out that the constitution of three indigenous reserves and the expansion of two others are not related to the Peace Agreement, as reported by the ANT.

In this regard, Emilio Archila, senior presidential advisor for Stabilization and Consolidation, explains that the goals achieved during the government of President Iván Duque (2018-2022) are more than satisfactory, as they have managed to enter the land bank 1.2 million hectares in the last three years, when the goal for 15 years is three million, and of the 7 million hectares that were projected to be delivered to peasants without land or with very little, more than one million have already been granted.

“There is both a political and legal discussion that has to do with land formalization. In the reading made by the Attorney General’s Office, the lands that come from previous processes should not be able to be counted and neither should those that are uncultivated, but our vision is that we need peasants with land”, emphasizes the official.

The lags of the Integral National Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (PNIS) were also highlighted because it does not have an ethnic approach and only until December last year, a consultation with the indigenous communities was agreed for its execution, but the national government “expressed its will to implement the program in territories that have not been formalized as reservations, so there would be no consultation with the communities that inhabit these spaces”.

Another point pointed out by the Attorney General’s Office is that the prior, free and informed consultation “has not been effectively carried out in the communities, so there is a high risk of regression in this aspect”. And it also questions the fact that only until March of last year, a budget allocation was made to the IEANPE so that it could fulfill its mandate to act as consultant, representative and interlocutor on issues related to the Ethnic Chapter.

On their behalf, the main criticism of the Comptroller’s Office is that five years after the signing of the Peace Agreement, there is no indicator to measure the budgetary investment to comply with the implementation of the Ethnic Chapter.

In its radiography, the fiscal entity agrees on several points with the Procurator General’s Office. But it presents hard findings on the land issue, the most sensitive for the ethnic communities due to their needs and cosmogony. It established that, up to March 31 of this year, none of the National Plans for Integral Rural Reform had effectively incorporated the ethnic approach.

“The participation of ethnic peoples in the design and implementation of the National Plans has not been guaranteed, since in addition to the lack of a strategy for the attention of this communities, in some cases (water, irrigation) the absence of an ethnic differential approach has been justified in the universal nature of the public service, and although in the remaining cases it is mentioned in the text of the Plan, it is only pointed out as a differentiating criterion”, he detailed.

All these debts, in addition to the resurgence of violence in the reservations and community councils, by new and old armed groups that dispute the territories controlled by the former FARC, show that the Ethnic Chapter is confined to the four pages of the Peace Agreement.

Nevertheless, the Afro and indigenous communities have asked their leaders to continue fighting for the implementation of the Ethnic Chapter, because they do not lose hope of living in peace.

The gender approach is understood as a principle that articulates the points that make up the Peace Agreement from a perspective of equal rights. In addition, it was conceived as a guarantee for the participation of a segment of the communities that have been historically excluded and violated in a differentiated manner during the armed conflict.

The origin of these measures dates back to September 11, 2014, when delegates of the then Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018), and the former FARC guerrillas, at the negotiating table set up in Cuba, gave free rein to the creation of the Gender Subcommittee. 

From that moment on, this space ensured that the rights of women and the LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex) communities were taken into account throughout the six points that were discussed and that ultimately gave life to the Peace Agreement. The Subcommittee was made up of five delegates from the national government and another five from the continent’s largest former guerrilla group.

Magnolia Agudelo Velásquez, a survivor of the Patriotic Union genocide and vice-president of the National Association of Colombian Women (ASONAM), which is part of the Women’s Movement for Peace, believes that, thanks to the work of feminist organizations, the Peace Agreement has a gender focus. 

“We women have worked for this. In the last decade we have played a decisive role in mobilizations and national and international meetings. Since we knew that the (peace) talks were going to begin, we began to pressure so that the table would not be raised without a focus on this issue and that we would be part of the pact and not out of it ” recalls Agudelo.

On this regard, Manuela Marín, who laid down the arms and is currently a member of the political party Comunes, created by members of the former FARC who supported the Peace Agreement, agrees on this point: “The negotiation process with the government was mainly due to the rooting, empowerment and struggle of women in Colombia who, through their organizations, put strong pressure with clear proposals for inclusion”.

In turn, the former combatant emphasized that the gender focus included in the Peace Agreement “is not a specific or special chapter that privileges women over diverse communities; on the contrary, it is a prioritization for these sectors in each of the programs derived from the Peace Agreement”.

On the other hand, Isabela Sanroque, who for 12 years was a militant in the Eastern Bloc and was part of the negotiations in Havana, emphasizes that one of the great struggles of the Gender Subcommittee was to achieve differential recognition for the affectations suffered by women and LGBTI people in the midst of the armed conflict and for the so-called post-conflict policies. “The gender approach recognizes these historical and profound patriarchal inequalities. We cannot talk about peace if we do not recognize this gap,” Sanroque emphasizes.

Balance of compliance

Following the signing of the Peace Agreement, held at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá on November 24, 2016, the Special Instance for Women for the Gender Approach to Peace, composed of 16 women, was created to monitor the 130 provisions of the Implementation Framework Plan, which gives life to the adoption of this approach. 

These measures are linked to the six points of the Peace Agreement. Therefore, they depend directly on the resources allocated to implement post-conflict policies, which are intended to heal the wounds caused during the war and close the socioeconomic gaps that caused and prolonged it over time.

According to the most recent report by the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, which was commissioned to monitor the implementation of the Peace Agreement, of the 130 measures contained in the gender approach, as of June of this year, only 10 percent of the measures included in this approach have been fully implemented, 16 percent are in the intermediate phase, 48 percent have made minimal progress, and 26 percent have not even begun.

The Gender in Peace Group (Gpaz), formed by Sisma Mujer Corporation, Diverse Colombia, the Colombian Commission of Jurists, Humanas Corporation – the Regional Center for Human Rights and Gender Justice, Dejusticia, the National Women’s Network and Women´s Link Worldwide, formed the Gender in Peace Group (GPaz) to follow up on the matter.

According to its third report of observations on progress in the implementation of the gender focus of the Peace Agreement, which analyzed the period between September 2019 and December 2020, only 20 percent of the agreed measures had been implemented.

Regarding the Comprehensive Rural Reform (RRI), it found that only three gender measures have been positively implemented or have made timely progress; while 44 percent have made partial progress and the other 44 percent have made no progress at all. 

Another voice that set alarm bells ringing was the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic (CGR). In a recent report presented to the public, it described as “insufficient” the resources “destined to the application of the gender approach within the framework of the Victims Policy and the Peace Agreement”.

According to the analysis carried out for the period 2020-2021, on average “only 4% of the total resources of the General Budget of the Nation directed to the implementation of the peace agreements could be identified for gender actions”. 

This percentage is equivalent to 403 billion pesos, a figure that Andrea Ordóñez, gender consultant at the control entity, considers “marginal”. In her opinion, “the mandate established in the Final Agreement indicates that the gender approach must be transversal to all the implementation”, reason for which she insisted that it is quite low if the agreed challenges are taken into account.

In addition to this, the CGR found that there is no gender resource identifier in the peace-building budget tracer, which would make possible to visualize and follow up on the resources allocated for the implementation of this approach.

According to the analysis of this control body, “in spite of having reports of women benefited in different projects, in most cases it is not clear what the added value of the implementation of the FA (Final Agreement) is, in contrast with the general policies developed by State in the past. Likewise, the reports are limited to providing disaggregated figures for women, without this necessarily translating into a gender focus, with the aggravating factor that there is a generalized omission with respect to the LGBTI communities”.

The report adds: “In terms of the execution of resources by pillars, it is relevant to mention that no gender-related resources were reported for Land Adequacy and Health in 2020. In the same way, despite the fact that one of the main interests of women in the AF is associated with the social management of property, this pillar registers only 10% of RRI resources and 4% of the total AF”.

In the area of political participation, five measures have been implemented, corresponding to 19 percent of the total. The remaining 78 percent have made partial progress or have not been initiated.

In the third point, oriented to provisions for the end of the conflict, only one measure had the green light in this period: the creation of the National Commission for Security Guarantees with effective participation of women. Of the other measures, 13 registered partial progress and five no progress at all.

The fourth point of the Peace Accord, dedicated to solving the problem of illicit drugs, also shows no improvement and follows the same line as the previous points. Only two measures have been implemented, covering 17 percent of the total, while eight are in partial progress and only one has not. 

Point 5, dedicated to the victims of the armed conflict, is the one that shows the greatest progress. Eight of its 20 measures have been fulfilled, covering 40 percent of implementation.

Finally, in the sixth point, which involves verification, three of the proposed measures achieved timely progress or were completed positively.

At a snail’s pace

Linda Cabrera, director of Sisma Mujer, assures that in relation to the Peace Agreement there are general advances, but also challenges. “There is progress with the indicators system.  Today we have gender indicators framed in the institutional framework, which have follow-up tools,” she emphasizes. 

As for the challenges, she accentuates the low percentage of implementation of the gender measures in the Peace Agreement, since only one fifth has made significant progress: “This implies great challenges in the future. We also have challenges regarding the disaggregation of figures, we have not yet managed to make a complete disaggregation to know exactly all the measures of the Agreement”. 

Likewise, she warns that, in practice, a ‘familial’ approach is put before the gender approach, in which “many times women are counted as beneficiaries and policy holders, simply because they are part of a family, when in reality the holders are men”. 

On the other hand, the implementation times of the gender approach are not in accordance with the needs of women and members of the LGBTI community. The Kroc Institute points out in its report on the first half of this year that these safeguards, together with the ethnic safeguards, “register lower proportions of compliance than the Agreement as a whole”.

For example, the formulation of the Protocol for the incorporation of the gender approach in the diagnosis, development, implementation and monitoring of the Comprehensive National Program for the Substitution of Illicitly Used Crops (PNIS) is one of “the most notable advances” of these special measures in recent months. It is, in the words of the Kroc Institute, “a document that promotes gender parity in the program’s decision-making entities, and defines strategies for the prevention of violence and stigmatization based on gender”.

The problem with this achievement is the moment in which it was issued: four years late, when more families are not being linked to the PNIS due to lack of economic resources and when the national government is making all kinds of efforts to resume aerial spraying with glyphosate to combat drug trafficking, leaving aside the solutions proposed by the Peace Agreement. This protocol should have existed before the implementation of the substitution program.

In this regard, the Comptroller’s Office points out that this delay has made it difficult for women to strengthen their participation in community spaces related to the PNIS.

Another measure that comes late is the creation of the Observatory of Violence against Women in Politics. It studies, analyzes and makes visible the violence against women in politics. As highlighted by the Institute, the Observatory must “generate protocols and good practices to confront this phenomenon in political and electoral spaces”, to guarantee the participation of women without violence or discrimination. 

In the midst of the inclement wave of violence suffered by social leaders and ethnic authorities, which breaks records of aggressions and murders year after year, this important prevention measure with a gender approach was only approved last June 30.

What about the LGBTI community?

Homosexual, bisexual, transsexual and intersex people are the complement of the gender approach. Wilson Castañeda, director of Affirmative Caribe, an organization that has been defending the rights of the LGBTI communities for 12 years, participated in its construction in the peace dialogues, a process that was initially elusive to this community.

“We had the opportunity to be at the negotiating table. We were the first LGBTI civil society organization to arrive in Havana. They did not invite us, they invited the women’s movement and they, who have always been very supportive of us, took us in their combo,” he says about how the community he represents arrived at the Peace Agreement.

This situation reflects the exclusion that people of diverse sexual orientation have suffered. “Coming out of the closet in any part of the world is difficult, but here it is more complicated because we were immersed in an armed conflict that has a social and political line, where diversity has no place,” he stresses.

These kinds of difficulties were documented by the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH) in its report Annihilating Difference, 2015, which gives an account of the way in which the armed conflict hit the LGBTI community differently and systematically.

“It is important to know that people who deviate from gender and sexuality norms have lived a continuum of violence, so that the violent situations they face did not begin with the armed conflict, they precede it and originated in the heterosexual thinking that structures social dynamics.  However, the context of the armed conflict has transformed the dynamics of this violence, accentuating the negative imaginaries against these people, as well as the practices of surveillance, control and punishment towards them”, states the CNMH. 

For Castañeda, the signing of the Peace Agreement has brought important benefits to the LGBTI communities and thanks to it, significant spaces for participation have been allocated.

“It was necessary to sign the Peace Agreement, five years later we feel it was worth it. Today Colombia is a better country for LGBT people because there is a state structure committed to peace that is seeking to build truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition for LGBT people and because spaces for participation have been generated in the territories of conflict where historically we could not be or live. With the PDETs and the Peace Councils they are listening to our needs”, he highlights.

Despite gaining spaces for expression and visibility, this community continues to suffer violence. “It was beneficial and necessary to sign an agreement that has improved the quality of life for LGBT people and has given us spaces for participation, but structurally, Colombia, due to the lack of commitment of the government, continues to be a country where prejudices, homophobia and transphobia are still rampant. This has meant that the visibility that the LGBT movement has had in the territories due to the Peace Accord has begun to have strong traces of violence,” he laments. 

Such is the case of Camilo*, an LGBTI rights activist, who had to flee Medellín to save his life. He has a track record of more than 20 years in community activism and currently supports the Unit for the Search for Missing Persons (UBPD) to find victims of diverse sexual orientation.

“I think the only positive balance I can make of the Agreement is the greater possibility of recognition and participation in the system”, he highlights and emphasizes that, in this sense, he has been able to show his forms of resistance and the damages suffered based on her sexual orientation and gender expression.

Laura Gisselly Beltrán, political scientist of the Peace Area of the organization Diverse Colombia, expresses her concern for the life and safety of leaders, women leaders and human rights defenders belonging to the LGBT community, since, in addition to the murders, there are other acts of violence against them. 

“In 2020, the cases of violence against LGBT people in the country doubled. In most cases the violence they suffer is directly related to their sexual orientations or non-normative gender identities. This constant threat to LGBT leadership in the regions is related to the profound exclusion and lack of protection of gender identities and non-normative sexual orientations from the institutional framework,” says Beltrán. 

This activist regrets the ineffectiveness of the Executive to implement the gender approach: “From the beginning of the Duque government, the lack of willingness to understand that what happened to LGBT people in the armed conflict was systematic and that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity was also imminent at the heart of the war”. 

He continues: “This has had practical effects, it has severely hampered the implementation of measures for LGBT people which, in more than 80 percent, is unsatisfactory.”

This pessimism is not only expressed by women’s and LGBTI organizations, nor by those who are leading the implementation of the gender approach. State entities have issued reports on the matter and consider that this point of the Peace Agreement is in a marginal situation.

In this regard, the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic made a heartfelt call for attention in its Fifth Report on the execution of resources and compliance with the goals of the peace component of the Multiannual Investment Plan, which covers the period between November 2016 and March 2021.

Its main warning focuses on the fact that, of the total resources allocated for the implementation of the Peace Agreement during the past year, only 3 percent was allocated to meet the demands of women and LGBTI communities.

“As of December 2020, $194,119 million would have been executed and oriented to the cross-cutting gender approach, which represents 3% of the total resources of the AF (Final Agreement).

Of these resources, 53% were oriented to the payment of incentives for PNIS families headed by women; 38% to the integral rural reform; 9% to justice, truth and reparation; 0.4% to political participation; 0.4% to technical assistance for the structuring of projects with a gender approach; Point 3 on the end of the conflict did not present the execution of resources for gender during 2020″, details the report of the fiscal control entity.

Likewise, it questions that, as the five-year period of the signing of the Peace Agreement approaches, “the absence of a specific report on gender in the peace budget outline persists, which hinders the programming of resources for the implementation of such approach”.

The lack of a robust budget, according to the needs of those who suffered specific violence in the midst of the armed conflict due to gender and sexual identity, and the lack of a fiscal monitoring system, are signs of the unwillingness for the gender approach to transcend the 310 pages that give body, but not life, to the Peace Agreement.

* Name changed at the request of the source.

The Single Registry of Victims is about to reach the shameful figure of 9.2 million Colombians affected by the war. In practice, all sectors of society have been hit by it: some in a worse way than others, but all have suffered from the ‘blindness’ produced by mixing weapons with political and economic interests.

From peasants, indigenous people and Afro-descendants living to their own devices in the rough rural areas of the country, to university students, trade unionists, politicians and businessmen in the cities, all have suffered some kind of affliction by the armed conflict. Women and people of diverse sexual orientation have also been affected by gender issues.

And all groups, both those granted a monopoly of arms by the Political Constitution to protect the Nation and its inhabitants, as well as the illegal groups that appealed to different ideologies to defend different causes and accumulate power, attacked civil society with fury.

The launching of the Truth Clarification Commission opened the door to begin to heal those wounds, by knowing and understanding how the events that filled the country with pain, fear and absences occurred. Diverse voices want to be heard and there are many unanswered questions; for that reason, the expectations for the report to be published by the Commission in the middle of next year are enormous.

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accord, VerdadAbierta.com spoke with the president of this extrajudicial body, Father Francisco De Roux, who, with ten other commissioners and a large team of researchers from various disciplines, has the difficult task of bringing society face to face with a reality that for decades has turned its back on it.

VerdadAbierta.com (VA): How do you define these three years of mandate entrusted to you by the Peace Accord?

Francisco de Roux: It has been a very strong experience of meeting with the country from the depths of the human tragedy, of what was the armed conflict and, very particularly, of the very hard war years.

It has been a gathering that has touched the soul of all the members of the Commission and has set us on a complex path, with many questions. What is it that we really should and can say to the country, in a perspective of understanding of what happened to us to have reached such a deep dimension of human destruction?

How can we have a discourse that summons us to build together, in our differences, the country that the children of Colombia deserve from now on, knowing that we have legitimate different political positions, that we have different ethnic groups, different cultures, different gender approaches and different ages? And how can we get from there to a joint vision to work towards?

VA: What is your assessment of the management of the Truth Commission? What has the entity achieved?

FDR: First of all, I am absolutely convinced that the truth event, as I would call it, has been a fact and I believe that the Commission has contributed very seriously to that. Not only in the 24 Truth Houses in different regions of the country, but in the number of events held.

The events of listening to people, the events of social dialogue; the multitude of films, of small videos, but above all of the events of dialogue with the unions, with the indigenous, with the Afros, with the Rrom world, with the LGBTI communities, with the people who are in prison, with the FARC, with religious groups, with businessmen, with the media, with the military, with the police, with politicians.

It is what we would call the happening of the truth: a growing interest of the people, who had at the beginning a great deal of reluctance.

On the other hand, the Commission’s study. We have personally met with 23,000 people in long meetings. Any such event lasts a day, to try to delve into their perspective of what they suffered in the conflict. They are basically victims from all sides.

This Commission wonders how to come up with a discourse that helps us Colombians to move forward. We have experienced this with enormous honesty, asking ourselves many questions. In this regard, I would like to say that none of the commissioners belong to any political party, nor are we interested in any party winning. We are interested in this country facing the truth of what happened.

We are convinced we are not the holders of the ultimate truth. As we are a state institution, will we have a state truth? No. That would be the most stupid and false thing to do. We want to open a path, but starting from solid truths, which must be affirmed, and which hurt on all sides.

That is why our discourse is not politically correct, but with a proposal: we can build this together.

VA: There are many expectations about the Final Report that the Commission is preparing. How will it reflect all the afflictions and differentiated impacts that Colombians suffered in more than 50 years of armed conflict?

FDR: This is the type of question that is currently being focused on us in a deeper way. We have a method that we are fine-tuning. The report will have a public ethics introduction, it is a call to the country.

Then it will have a summary, a very organized and rigorous compendium, which will be the central document that gathers what each of the chapters teaches and goes up to the recommendations. It is written for the public of the Republic, for the common people. It is not for academics.

Then it will have the chapters. We are not historians, but they will have an approach from the feeling of the communities, from the way people lived this and also from the feeling of people who were protagonists in this. The country felt this; that is a point of difference from what the Truth Commissions do: they are very experiential, but we will tell a story.

The chapter of cases is one of the most difficult things. To be able to state something with absolute seriousness, after contrasting, weighing, seeing different points of view and even giving up the hypothesis you had, is a very deep work. But once you know a truth, ethically you have the obligation to say it no matter what.

We have to say it, even if it bothers our families, the politicians on one side or the other. That is the challenge of truth. I hope we have the courage, the cleanliness and the determination to do it, but always being careful to say it in such a way that it is not a presentation of things to encourage revenge, finger-pointing and stigmatization, because that does not serve us at all, but to help us understand what happened.

VA: How many chapters will the Final Report have and what topics will it deal with?

FDR: In addition to the historical chapter and the chapter on cases, there will be a chapter on the effects or suffering of the communities. There we see the effects on businessmen, indigenous people, women, unions, educators, health personnel…

Then we have a chapter on how the people, in the midst of so many difficulties, had peace initiatives and fought for democracy; and we find journalists who gambled for peace; the Indigenous Guard and the Maroon Guard who acted without weapons; the peace movements of the country, the number of things that the social pastoral did, what the Mennonite Church did, what the universities did for peace.

We will have a chapter on women and the LGBTI communities, those who were beaten because of their gender condition. We will have a chapter on how children were taken to war. We will have an ethnic chapter that focuses on the differentiated history of indigenous and Afro-Colombians.

We have a chapter on the community in exile. The Commission has been in contact with 24 different countries and we are moving in a scenario of 500 thousand Colombians who left for reasons of the conflict exclusively and there is a bit of everything. There are military personnel who did not accept to make ‘false positives’, there are judges who would have been killed if they did not leave, there are people who were in the Prosecutor’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office, there are indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, trade unionists, journalists and businessmen who left after very painful kidnappings.

We have a chapter that is rather oral and very moving, which are the voices of the conflict. And we have a chapter of recommendations.

This gives an idea of the structure of the Report, but it has very deep crossroads. The Commission has received 67 reports directly from the Army and the Police, and these things we cross and focus them in the dialogue between different chapters.

VA: What difficulties has the Commission encountered in carrying out its work?

FDR: There are some external difficulties. The Peace Agreement, with all its limitations, brought about a change and made the FARC stop its war and the State stop its war against the FARC; 20 percent of them gave up and went back to war, which is very normal in these processes worldwide.

There really was peace between the Colombian State and a group that was very hard at war, but paradoxically Colombia was much more divided. The plebiscite made it evident and then the presidential elections. I would not say that the country is politically polarized, but that it is divided: there are aggressions, suspicions and distrust.

And the Commission has had to navigate within that. We are one of the institutions born from the Havana Agreement and for a significant number of Colombians, because we were born from there, we do not have legitimacy. It happened to us with former President Uribe who told us: ‘I do not accept your legitimacy and I am going to speak because I want to contribute to the truth’. (Read more in: Former President Uribe’s staging of the Truth Commission).

These political constructions that not only Uribe have done, of picking up this pain and mobilizing this rage and indignation to turn it against others, have happened from side to side in Colombia. This is the scenario in which the Commission navigates.

The other difficult scenario is that it has been a risky scenario for the victims who come to talk to the Commission; for the people who have talked to us in the prisons, who fear that they will be killed for talking to us. For example, when we spoke with Mancuso -extradited paramilitary chief-, his lawyers were threatened.

Another difficult element is the pandemic. That is why victims’ and human rights organizations asked for the extension of the Commission’s time. It was supposed to end on November 28, but as we are a state entity, we fell under the restrictions imposed -to contain the pandemic-. For us it is very important to go out in the field to meet with the victims in all corners of Colombia and this was totally obstructed.

We did not stop. All that year we continued working through computers, but you cannot enter into conversation with a victimizer who is in his house, next to his children and wife, to ask him what he has not wanted to tell anyone, least of all his family. Or how to reach an indigenous community in the mountains that has no possibility of communication?

Thanks to that, we asked for seven more months to finish the report; and a couple extra months in which we are going to do the socializing, going around telling the country what it needs to be said. Fortunately, we are going to do that once the new President of the Republic is elected. The Final Report will be presented one week after the second presidential round.

VA: Victims’ and human rights organizations are afraid that the Final Report will not be presented and that it will remain in small circles or will remain eating dust on shelves. How will it be presented and what will happen afterwards? What will be done to make the report useful for the communities in remote regions that bore the brunt of the war?

FDR: Unlike other Truth Commissions, which handed in the report and left, we are going to show our face for two months all over the country. Starting by talking to the Congress of the Republic, to the President’s team, to the Courts, to the universities, to the communities, to the unions, to the Army and to the FARC. We are going to do this personally, as well as with the media.

Secondly, we are going to create a Monitoring and Follow-up Committee. That is part of Decree 588 that formed us. As we have proposed, for seven years, this Committee will ensure that the recommendations made by the Commission in the Final Report are implemented.

Thirdly, we are creating a network of allies and entrusting them with this effort we are making. To receive it critically, of course, but also to continue the process in their hands. We started with a little more than 3,000 organizations of all kinds throughout the country.

And then we are going to make a great pedagogical effort to prepare society and deliver the report. A significant element is the transmedia: the Commission is going to leave it in the hands of the country, with absolutely free access, so that everybody can take it on their cell phones and get into all the documents, all the testimonies and all the films, so that the country can make its own interpretation of what we did, and so that it can continue advancing in the conversation.

VA: Victims’ organizations point out that the lack of time did not allow many people to be heard, some even allege that the Commission did not adequately reach rural Colombia. Do you share that assessment? How was the effort to reach the deepest corners and take testimonies?

FDR: We did what we could and we will continue to do what we can. There will always be a totally legitimate dissatisfaction on the part of the victims. In the formal registry of victims of the State today there are about 9 million 200 thousand victims.

With each victim, or when we go to jail, we spend one or two days; visiting a whole victimized community in the mountains takes a week. If we were to dedicate one minute to the 9 million victims, it would take us 17 years, working 24 hours a day, to hear them all. This claim is perfectly legitimate, but I can say: we have honestly received with all our heart all those who have come to the Commission, we have gone out to look for them, we have gone to the places where it seemed to us those things were the hardest.

VA: Some sectors perceive that the Commission gave more importance to talking to all those involved or to the reconciliation than to the construction of truth. As examples, they refer to the appearance of former president Juan Manuel Santos on ‘false positives’, the conversation with former president Uribe and the appearance of Salvatore Mancuso with Rodrigo Londoño, where they were not refuted or contrasted. Do you share that opinion? Will there be contrasts in the Final Report?

FDR: That will be fully contrasted in the report. The final objective is the reconciliation of this country, and that can only be done on the basis of the truth, and the truth in the most solid way. Perhaps what happens is that, in our method, there are some things that must be looked at with care.

We are not a legal entity. We cannot force anyone to come to the Commission, we invite and give people the possibility to speak. We ask questions, but we do not ask them in such a way that we seek to force them to admit their guilt in public before the country. If in a legal process a person cannot be forced to testify against himself, much less can we.

However, in all these public cases we have a very long and deep personal preparation. We made a personal visit to Mancuso in prison. A commissioner went to the United States to talk to him and we have 26 hours of detailed recordings and we did not pressurize him to say it publicly, which it is absolutely important.

Prior to the conversation with President Santos, there were two long conversations with the members of the plenary of the Commission. And we accommodated ourselves to the manner of each president. Former President Gaviria received us in his house twice, President Pastrana came to the Commission, President Samper also. We visited President Uribe because he did not want to come, but we wanted all the presidents to be there and listen to them. Afterwards we had a private conversation with President Uribe.

If you take any of these episodes, it may seem that they do not give everything. I would say that these are processes. The total answer cannot be given in one step and all partial answers are incomplete. One accumulates things, to arrive at something that we hope to deliver in the Final Report.

In any case, we also know that whatever we do, we are going to be criticized from all sides. We will be criticized by the Army, the Police, all the candidates, the presidents… We will be criticized from all sides because the truth is a struggle. We hope it will do well and we are working for it to do well.

VA: We ask the same question to all the people we consulted for this special report: in retrospect, after five years of implementation of the Peace Accord, with its successes and mistakes, despite the fact that some regions are burned by new cycles of violence and that the country is not living in the projected scenario, was the peace process with the FARC worth it?

FDR: I am convinced that it was. Not only because the big war was very hard and it is over. And there is a second reason why I am convinced: after talking with trade unions, social organizations, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, young people from universities, there is a very strong rejection of the war in the country, which was not there before.

I lived through times when social organizations and organizations that fought for rights were not in the war, but they legitimized it. They said: ‘Well, at least there has to be a rearguard to protect the social struggle and to defend us – excuse me – against these bastards’.

Today there is no such thing. Today you see unions, social organizations and peasants fighting for peace and a real conviction that everything the war touched, it damaged. This is new in Colombia. There are very few who think that the war of the ELN or the dissidents is legitimate.

One of the components of the Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition that has been most criticized for its poor results is the Unit for the Search for Missing Persons (UBPD). The expectations generated by its creation contrast with the critical perception of its current work.

Various sectors hoped that an institution specialized in the search for victims of the armed conflict and the recovery of bodies, with a humanitarian and extrajudicial character, would be more agile than the Prosecutor’s Office, which makes its work conditional on a criminal process, but the results contradict that purpose.

Pablo Cala, human rights defender of the Until Find Them Foundation, which fights to find the disappeared left by the war in the region of Guaviare, accompanied the creation of the Search Unit from the very beginning. Speaking on the subject, he recalls the high expectation that generated, in 2017, the creation of that entity, but four years later he regrets that a response in line with those hopes has not been achieved.

“The Unit, in these almost four years of existence, has managed to sensitize society much more to the situation of missing persons,” Cala acknowledges. “It is a work that the organizations had already been doing, that the relatives had already been doing, that some media had already been doing in some way; it is an important work that the Unit does, but it should not be its main focus, it should not be its primary objective and it is where we see the most results”.

According to the UBPD, the number of missing persons in Colombia as a result of the armed conflict is 98,820, a figure that reflects more than 50 years of war in which this crime was used as an instrument of war. And what are the results of the entity?

As of September 30, of this year, the Unit had received 18,344 search requests, corresponding to 13,442 people. In addition, it reports the recovery of 289 bodies and the realization of 127 dignified deliveries of the bodies to their relatives in the regions of Antioquia, Arauca, Bolivar, Bogota, Caquetá, Choco, Cundinamarca, Guaviare, Meta, Northern Santander, Risaralda, Sucre and Tolima.

In addition, it has found five people alive and facilitated reunions with their families in Arauca, Antioquia, Magdalena and Valle del Cauca, ties that had been broken, in some cases, for more than 35 years.

The entity reports that 468 people are registered as voluntary contributors of information for the search of persons reported missing, of which 73 have done so as a collective contribution and 395 as individual contributions.

These achievements have been made despite not having the voices of actors who are not appearing before the JEP or those who benefited from the Justice and Peace law, through which former paramilitaries are being tried. “Since there are no legal incentives for these people with their contribution to the UBPD, there are no major contributions reported by the entity,” the Attorney General’s Office recorded in the Third Report to Congress on the State of Progress of the Implementation of the Peace Agreement, also published in August of this year.

Centralization questioned

One of the biggest criticisms of the UBPD is that the search work of the existing teams is insufficient to deal with the magnitude of the phenomenon in Colombia and is centralized in the city of Bogota.

“These teams are not directly searching for or recovering bodies. They collect information, they transfer it to the central level, they do pedagogy, they make relations with the relatives, but what they were looking for was that, in those territories, they could be carrying out day to day field work search”, Cala explained.

If it works as planned, the UBPD would have, at least, 18 territorial forensic teams with a general coordination. However, this human rights defender estimates that there are between 40 and 50 people in recovery work, and regrets that there is only the capacity to have up to five teams doing field work simultaneously.

The other major problem Cala identifies is the conditions for accessing the sites where there could possibly be bodies. The Unit can enter the sites with the authorization of the possessor, holder or owner, and in cases where the latter refuses, legal action will be sought to gain access.

However, it highlights that in order to enter a place where there are presumed to be graves, the entity created an internal rule that includes requesting the certificate of tradition and freedom of the property or requesting information from the National Land Agency about the type of property. A process that can take months.

“In regard to the will of a land owner, holder or occupant who says ‘yes, they can enter to do the recovery’ but then all these obstacles as requirements are placed, they are likely to get scared and say ‘they are going to end up taking away my little farm, so I prefer that they do nothing,'” this human rights defender questions.

On the other hand, there is participation. This component has been shown as a priority for the UBPD and according to its report of accounts for this year, “for this purpose, since the beginning of operations of the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons and until the first half of 2021, advice and guidance was provided to 4,492 people who strengthened the conditions for their participation on an individual basis”.

Several victims consider that the calls to participate by the UBPD have been in terms of good will, but do not end up well directed. They feel that information only circulates in a unidirectional manner, they are not allowed to accompany decisions and participation ends up being subordinated to the will of the entity’s officials.

The analysis of the Attorney General’s Office praises the participation efforts, but “it reiterates the importance of the entity defining a mechanism that facilitates the delivery of information to the families about the persons reported missing as the search process progresses”.

Sebastián Velasquez, legal representative and spokesman for the Colombian Federation of Victims of the FARC (FEVCOL), maintains that this organization delivered to the UBPD in December 2020 information on the existence of 12 graves in which there would be victims of the extinct guerrilla with more than 49 bodies, but there is no progress. “Where are they looking for the victims of the FARC? For them it is not a priority”, he emphasizes.

For her part, María José Rodríguez, daughter of Uruguayan citizen José Washington Rodríguez Rocca, hoped to have more participation in the search for her father. In July 2019 she began to provide information to the UBPD about the case, but then she felt that her relationship with the Unit stopped without much reason. “To me personally it demotivated me a lot and little by little, with insistence, we managed to resume the dialogue,” she says.

Rodríguez Rocca was a worker at the Uruguayan Tire Factory S.A. (FUNSA) and was part of the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement. When he saw no guarantees for his life and faced with the expectation of a coup d’état, he left the country in 1973 and, according to his daughter’s information, after passing through several countries he arrived in Colombia in 1976, where he joined the M-19 guerrilla movement. It seems that in April 1982 he died in a confrontation with the Army in the region of Caquetá.

The UBPD promised to carry out prospecting actions at the end of February or beginning of March of this year, but Rodriguez complains that it did not comply with the agreement and after insisting a lot to the entity, the mission took place on July 19, 20 and 21. She was able to attend thanks to the support of the ICRC, which gave her financial help to come to the country: “I do not live in Colombia, so the distance generates other feelings and other times that are not good allies in these searches”.

On that occasion they did not find her father’s remains, but they did find the grave in which it is believed he was buried. She highlights the great treatment she received during the prospecting, but after that “silence returned again. This was in July and as of today we have not had a meeting, not even as a resolution of what happened in July and what the next steps will be”.

Information to search for

Victims and civil society organizations consider that the UBPD has not made real use of the legal mechanisms of access to reserved information granted to it by Decree Law 589 of 2017, through which the structure of the entity was organized.

This decree clearly states that reservations regarding access to information are not opposable in the case of human rights violations or breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and that the UBPD is free to request public information from State entities without the reservation of information being an obstacle.

The Attorney General’s Office, in its analysis of the implementation of the Peace Agreement, states that the UBPD has seven agreements of willingness to exchange information with various State institutions. However, it evidenced that the flow of information has not been as expected. An example of the above is the case of the inter-administrative agreements signed since 2019 between the Unit and the Prosecutor’s Office.

“While the Prosecutor’s Office has responded to most of the requests for basic information made by the UBPD,” reads the document, “regarding the file number, office or Unit in which a case is located, there are very few responses that the Prosecutor’s Office has given regarding access to active files related to crimes of enforced disappearance, kidnapping and illegal recruitment. In particular, out of 308 requests for access to files, as of the cut-off date of this report, the UBPD had been able to access only 11 of the requested files”.

The victims hoped that the Unit would quickly access information that is in the hands of the security forces, a fundamental step, they say, to establish the whereabouts of persons disappeared by state agents, mainly in the decades from the seventies to the nineties.

This information would be useful, for example, to establish the whereabouts of the body of Martha Gisela Restrepo Valencia, a young woman from Cali who joined the ranks of the M-19 and who died, at the age of 19, presumably in an operation by the Military Forces in the region of Chocó, on April 25, 1981.

The reconstruction of that attack, carried out by Martha Gisela’s family with the support of the Until We Find Them Foundation, states that at least 40 young members of that guerrilla group were moving between the municipalities of Lloró and Bagadó, and at some point in Alto Andágueda they were intercepted by Army troops and annihilated.

Rodrigo Restrepo, Martha Gisela’s brother, speaks from outside Colombia about how he revisited the case of his sister’s forced disappearance in 2015. Like Martha and another of his brothers, he was a militant in the ranks of the M-19, but he was the only one who managed to keep his life when he migrated in September 1982.

When on October 17, 2015 the national government and the FARC announced the creation of the UBPD, the Restrepo Valencia family saw in that entity an invaluable opportunity: “Before that, it was very difficult to imagine that one would go looking for a combatant who had disappeared. When that announcement is made, well, for us it was the perfect instrument to be able to carry out that search and it opened all hopes.”

In December 2018, this family began sharing information with the Unit that they had gathered on their own. At the beginning of 2019, hand in hand with Until We Find Them, they organized a visit to where Martha Gisela’s remains were presumed to be to track down information with some delegates from the Consejo Comunitario Mayor of the Alto Atrato Peasant and Popular Organization (COCOMOPOCA), since the area is under their ancestral authority.

At that time, the UBPD declined the invitation, as this family recalls, because the entity was not yet ready for this type of work. Back in Bogota, they shared the information with the Unit and based on it, in March 2020, conducted a survey in an area of almost two hectares with anthropologists, surveyors and photographers.

“In that kind of situation, the tension is great, the sensitivity of everyone is much greater, that of the relatives, that of us, the sensitivity is at the surface,” recalls Rodrigo and highlights that that time a disagreement was generated with the UBPD because they did not let them record the procedure. “We witnessed the effort that was made, however, nothing was found”.

In this regard, Cala emphasizes that this was the first direct prospection made by the Search Unit without associating with another entity: “It has made other prospections since March to now in an autonomous way, several in different places, but still not within the dimension of response expected or due to the dimension of the situation of people found in the country”.

The universe of missing people

The Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons established forced disappearance as “the deprivation of liberty of one or more persons, in whatever form, committed by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State”. In the Colombian case, forced disappearance was only criminalized by Law 589 of 2000.

Despite this, there is no consistency in the figures, a situation that Cala highlights: “In the country there is a problem now: there is an institution that says there are 24 thousand forced disappearances, another says there are 46 thousand, another says there are 60 thousand, others say there are 89 thousand and another says there are 120 thousand or more. And that is part of the debt that exists in the face of an exercise of trivialization of the responsibility that the Colombian State has made”.

An observation that the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances had already raised in its most recent report of recommendations for Colombia, published in May of this year, in which it reminds the Colombian State that its approach to this crime against humanity does not fully comply with international standards.

By September 2021, the UBPD estimated the universe of victims at 98,820 people, a figure that results from crossing information from the databases of the Integral System for Peace with the Unit’s Registry of Search Requests. (Read more in “The disappeared are not only of the families, the disappeared are of this society”: Luz Marina Monzón)

Participation of ex-guerrillas

The way in which former FARC combatants are involved in the search for the disappeared can be in several ways. On the one hand, because they may have information on people who died under their responsibility, having been recruited, deprived of their freedom or executed.

On the other hand, because they have knowledge of areas with bodies that were not necessarily their responsibility, but which were in areas they controlled. Also, because they are looking for militiamen, ex-militiamen or relatives of guerrillas who were executed and disappeared by the Colombian State or paramilitary actors.

One of the roles being developed by the signatories of the Agreement, as part of their reincorporation process, is the collection of information on missing persons as part of the component of the former FARC of the Commission for the Search for Missing Persons, which through five work zones (Northeast, East, Middle Magdalena, South and West) seeks to cover the national territory.

Initially, 72 former guerrilla signatories of the Peace Accord began a training process with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to begin this documentation work. Currently, the Commission has 101 members, including former combatants of the former FARC and inhabitants of some regions committed to this process.

Velasquez, from FEVCOL, strongly criticizes this Commission, as he considers that the families who lost their loved ones at the hands of the FARC will not contribute with them and considers that its management is questionable because “it would be self-blame for a systematic crime such as the kidnapping, disappearance and death of many people”.

Up to September, the Commission documented 586 possible cases of missing persons. This information was delivered to the Unit to activate the route on these records. In this regard, John León, coordinator of the Commission, considers that the articulation with the UBPD has been positive even though they do not have the resources to carry out these tasks and have used their protection schemes to move around the country.

“It must be said that there are a series of delays that, to a certain extent, generate concern, that put victims and relatives who are looking for people who are missing on alert, above all, and that includes former FARC combatants who are looking for our loved ones who disappeared in the context of the conflict,” said León.

Restrictions in the field

The expansion of Covid-19 slowed down the actions of several institutions, but none was as affected as the UBPD’s work in the field. The restrictions to prevent contagion forced the Unit to prioritize the work of contrasting information and processing search requests which, by mid-June this year, exceeded 16,000.

During this time, it delivered recommendations for the protection and preservation of bodies of people who could correspond to missing persons and remain in different cemeteries in the country, strengthened through precautionary measures that have been advanced in coordination with the JEP for their protection.

On the other hand, the levels of violence and territorial control of illegal armed actors in different regions where the Search Unit must carry out its humanitarian work, as well as the building of trust with the communities, has been one of the most worrisome obstacles.

The signatories of the Agreement who have advanced collection work in regions such as Meta, Arauca, Nariño, Cauca or Antioquia expressed “the presence related to the search for missing persons is not very well received”.

The former FARC component of the Commission for the Search for Missing Persons has denounced that its members have been persecuted, threatened, harassed and even attacked, as was the case of the shooting of Jaime Alberto Parra Rodriguez, also known as ‘Mauricio Jaramillo’, national in charge of the FARC Search Commission, on August 19 of this year in Popayan, Cauca.

The Attorney General’s Office acknowledged the risk scenario and added one more that complicates these tasks: “The presence of antipersonnel mines and explosive devices in the territories, which puts at risk the officials of the entity who travel to carry out actions of location, prospecting or recovery of bodies. It is important for the UBPD to coordinate with the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP), as coordinator of the Integral Action against Mines, to guarantee a minimum level of protection when carrying out work in the field”.

Actions to improve the search

“Where is the search strategy?” asks Diana Arango, director of Equitas, an organization dedicated to the location of missing persons from the application of various areas of knowledge.

“I believe that one of the big problems of the Search Unit is that there is no clear search strategy”, and that is why she considers that it is not clear how to implement the search in territory, how to deploy the teams of the institution and prioritize regions of the country that have high cases of disappearance.

According to the Unit, there is a National Search Plan (PNB) and 22 regional search plans that are considered participatory planning tools that allow the collection of information, localization, prospecting, recovery and dignified delivery in a delimited and differentiated geographic region.

Regarding the PNB and its regional chapters, one of the alerts was issued at the end of 2020 by the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, in its follow-up to the implementation of the Peace Agreement. In its judgment, the Search Unit had not outlined a timeline for its implementation.

This flaw began to be corrected in June of this year, with 10 meetings with victims and civil society organizations and 16 meetings with State entities, in which it outlined the goals, responsibilities and timetable of the PNB. Thus, in the short term, 1,754 persons reported missing in 20 regions of the country will be sought.

It is clear that the search is not simple, but “it is not a task that can be tackled case by case because then we will never finish,” warns the director of Equitas. For Arango, prioritizing the consolidation of the universe of victims is one of the key points to achieve greater results, but she is concerned that only until a few months ago the discourse of the director of the UBPD, Luz Marina Monzón, alluded to massive searches.

“The regional plans should not be based only on the request made by the victims, but the Unit, so to speak, should be investigating ex officio, and that is what the analysis and cross-checking of different databases is for, which allows it to establish that in Antioquia, for example, there are 36,000 people who are still missing to date,” Arango says.

While the Unit’s work takes off, the victims and their organizations will continue to advocate for the UBPD to deliver better results and for their loved ones to be found in order to dignify their memory and honor their lives.

*VerdadAbierta.com attempted to interview Luz Marina Monzón, director of the UBPD, but at the time of going to press the institution had not set a date for a meeting.