*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

After almost a decade, on September 16 2025, Colombia’s “Special Jurisdiction for Peace” (Spanish initials JEP), a court system set up under the 2016 peace agreement with the country’s largest guerrilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), issued its first verdicts and sentences in two emblematic cases of gross violations of human rights. In one, members of the FARC’s senior leadership were sentenced for the group’s longstanding practice of kidnapping persons and holding them for ransom.  In a separate case, several Colombian Army officers and soldiers were sentenced for their involvement in murdering civilians and then describing them as guerrillas they had killed in combat—the so-called “false positives” scandal. Under the terms of the JEP, defendants who voluntarily submit themselves for judgment and agree to cooperate in establishing the details of their crimes receive maximum sentences of eight years to be served by engaging in activities of “restorative justice” to affected communities while facing some restrictions on their liberty short of incarceration.   

Given the brutality of the crimes committed, this will not satisfy all among the victims or their families or indeed among many in Colombian society at large. Nonetheless, in a country where insurgencies have usually ended with amnesties and the military have generally gone untouched, even a measure of accountability is a step forward.  Ironically, these verdicts come at a time when violence is once more on the rise; how and when this current surge will be resolved remains unknown, but these proceedings at least establish a precedent which may be useful in the future.

Human rights violations have long been a tragic aspect of Colombia’s national life.  However,  the determination of responsibilities for them by the courts marks a major change from previous practice.  Through much of the 1950s, rural Colombia was wracked by what was simply known as “la violencia,” in which armed groups associated with the two major political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, would seize land and attack peasants in areas in which each other had political control, often leading to wholesale massacres. This bloody internal conflict was eventually resolved politically through a power-sharing agreement with no insistence on accountability.

While the struggle between the Liberals and Conservatives was resolved, Ideologically-based insurgent groups sprang up by the 1960s.  By far the largest was the Communist, indeed Stalinist, FARC, which remained in the field until the conclusion of the peace accord in 2016, while the National Liberation Army (ELN), initially inspired by the Cuban Revolution as well as by liberation theology, remains active to this day.  However, other smaller groups were induced to disarm after suffering sufficient pressure from the security forces. 

The April 19 Movement........

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