The Columbian Civil War

The Columbian Civil War has been called “The Thirty-Five-Year-Old War” due to the fact that it has not stopped since it began in early 1964. At least that is what many contemporary news accounts report. There was a period known as La Violencia or the violence, between 1948 and 1958 which was the beginning of the formation of peasant self-defense movements. During this period, Columbia’s largest guerrilla group, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) started. Thus many could say that this war actually began in 1948. Beginning back in the nineteenth century, the Liberal and Conservative parties dominated Columbian politics. Their influences reached from Bogotá to almost every village in the settled regions of the country. The ideological

By the year 2000, the AUC had grown to include more than 30,000 combatants and had notorious members of Los Pepes (a drug cartel) in senior positions. The AUC had a goal to monopolize drug trafficking and production, and waged a campaign of brutal violence against anyone who stood in their path to include indigenous persons, trade unionists, human rights advocates, religious leaders, and other civilians. The AUC and other paramilitaries are responsible for the vast majority of the 70,000 civilians that are dead and the millions of forced displacements that have occurred since the beginning of the

The Justice and Peace Law established a legal framework for getting AUC combatants back into a civilian life. This law offered not only a framework to reintegrate these combatants into civilian life, but also offered leniency to paramilitary members. And paramilitary members of any rank who agreed to disarm, forfeit assets, and testify on human rights abuses were eligible for reduced sentences, regardless of the crime(s) they committed. By 2006, about 31,000 paramilitary fighters demobilized, and according to the Columbian government, about 3,712 of them applied for benefits under the Justice and Peace Law.

International and domestic human rights observers however, were not happy with this. The argued that the Justice and Peace Law granted amnesty to human rights abusers that shouldn’t have been given any at all. In May of 2006, the Columbian Constitutional Court removed parts of the Justice and Peace Law to address these concerns.

Once the law was revised, victims were allowed to have a limited role in the proceedings. Also, perpetrators were required to give full confessions in order to be granted these benefits. Even after the revisions though, the Justice and Peace Law has yet to hold perpetrators fully accountable or to fully integrate survivors into the