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PUTUMAYO, Colombia—As the afternoon heat set in on La Granja de Paz in July, cooperative members returned from their shifts at the fishponds, taking a break before preparing their catches for the next day’s market. They trickled into a communal gathering space, where they shared their anxieties around what the country’s new government could mean for their way of life.

The Cooperativa Multiactiva Comunitaria del Común, or Comuccom, comprises nearly 100 former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) fighters and their families. They have established their lives on this farmland in southern Colombia: building homes, digging fishponds, setting up a plant nursery and an apiary, and founding a daycare for nearby rural communities.

PUTUMAYO, Colombia—As the afternoon heat set in on La Granja de Paz in July, cooperative members returned from their shifts at the fishponds, taking a break before preparing their catches for the next day’s market. They trickled into a communal gathering space, where they shared their anxieties around what the country’s new government could mean for their way of life.

The Cooperativa Multiactiva Comunitaria del Común, or Comuccom, comprises nearly 100 former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) fighters and their families. They have established their lives on this farmland in southern Colombia: building homes, digging fishponds, setting up a plant nursery and an apiary, and founding a daycare for nearby rural communities.

The local municipality, Puerto Guzmán, loaned the land to the collective’s founders in 2019 through a reincorporation program established under the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC, once Latin America’s largest left-wing guerrilla group. The accord ended more than five decades of fighting and created an extensive transitional justice framework to facilitate demobilization and the reintegration of former combatants.

A member of the Carlos Patino Front, a FARC dissident group, patrols next to coca crops in Micay Canyon in southwestern Colombia on March 24, 2024.Raul arboleda/AFP via getty images

A decade on, however, the peace agreement has failed to meet expectations, and armed groups are expanding again in Colombia. New armed factions, some led by former FARC members, have capitalized on the power vacuum left by demobilization in strategic areas—particularly in Putumayo, a coca production enclave with access to drug trafficking routes to Brazil and Ecuador.

With new Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella implementing an increasingly militarized security approach, members of Comuccom—along with thousands of other former FARC fighters—fear that the peace agreement will be undermined, leaving them in limbo and endangering the lives that they have built over the last decade.

After the FARC demobilized in 2017, Comuccom members resided alongside a few hundred other former fighters in La Carmelita, a stretch of land designated by the government for their transition into civilian life. But many ex-combatants left La Carmelita over the years, returning to their old homes, pursuing other........

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