Shaping the Peace Process in Colombia

Peace talks started between the Colombian government and the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2012, an outcome International Crisis Group had helped work toward for a decade. Our ideas fed directly into the 2016 peace agreement, and helped resolve the difficult tension between securing both justice and peace.

When Crisis Group began work in Colombia in 2002, the conflict between the government and FARC guerrillas was entering its fifth decade. The latest attempt at negotiations had just collapsed, giving way to a tough military approach under President Álvaro Uribe. This policy prioritised security gains at the expense of addressing the conflict’s root causes – frequently with disastrous results for civilians caught up in the violence.

We also sounded the alarm for emerging threats. Our 2004 report on the regional dimension of Colombia’s counter-insurgency policies was prescient in warning that the conflict could spill over the country´s borders. Four years later this danger materialised, causing a major Andean diplomatic crisis and threats of war between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

A new impetus for peace came in 2010 with the election of President Juan Manuel Santos, who signalled his ambition to find a negotiated end to the conflict and address its root causes. Crisis Group seized the moment to lay out possible negotiation paths. A high-level government contact was among Colombian and U.S. officials who praised our early report laying out this new agenda – President Santos’s Conflict Resolution Opportunity – saying that Bogotá used a number of our recommendations in initial informal talks with the FARC.

In September 2012, as formal peace talks opened in Havana, Cuba, our report Colombia: Peace at Last? summarised our private advocacy and quickly became a reference point for media and public debates. In one meeting, a top-level Colombian official brandished his copy of the report, with parts of it underlined: our analysis of post-conflict security risks was of great interest, he said, especially when it pressed for particular care over the reintegration of mid-level FARC commanders.

Arguably the most difficult part of the peace talks still had to be negotiated: accountability for devastating crimes carried out by guerrillas and state operatives in a decades-long conflict that killed some 220,000 people and displaced seven million more. Justice was crucial for a sustainable peace, but the prospect of lengthy prison sentences could easily deter the FARC from agreeing to lay down arms.

Crisis Group could combine intimate knowledge of the Colombian conflict with decades of transitional justice expertise: our then President Louise Arbour was previously UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Chief Prosecutor of war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and our Latin America Program Director Javier Ciurlizza had served both civil society and government sides of truth and reconciliation processes in his native Peru and four other countries. We did extensive field work on victims’ experiences and expectations, local transitional justice initiatives and the national and international legal context and standards for victims’ rights. Our conclusion: a strong emphasis on judicial prosecution for the most serious crimes committed by all parties to the conflict needed to be accompanied by some kind of amnesty for lesser crimes.

Though controversial, we decided to propose a comprehensive model of transitional justice, including an amnesty for political crimes and “effective restriction of liberty” sentences for lower-ranking FARC perpetrators under conditions linked to reconciliation. These elements would be accompanied by an independent truth commission and grassroots initiatives for truth-seeking and truth-telling, and a commitment to comprehensive reparation for victims.

We published these recommendations in Transitional Justice and Colombia’s Peace Talks (August 2013), accompanied by intense advocacy with the government and FARC. Louise Arbour met with President Santos, former President Uribe (the principal opponent of the peace talks), and the government’s chief negotiator in Havana, Sergio Jaramillo. We discussed our proposed solution across Colombian society, including the victims’ groups and activists we had consulted throughout our research. We argued in Washington DC for U.S. support for the peace deal, and engaged key actors in Oslo, The Hague, London and Brussels. President Santos publicly cited our analysis and messages, including in a speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2013. In March 2014, Louise Arbour was consulted by the Colombian government’s Advisory Panel on the peace talks.

After many months of contentious debate, Crisis Group’s proposals on transitional justice emerged as one of the basic building blocks of the breakthrough agreement on transitional justice that the parties reached on 23 September 2015. Several elements ­directly mirrored Crisis Group recommendations, above all regarding the distinction between the most serious wartime crimes and lesser crimes ­liable for amnesty, as well as the selection system for judges in the Special Juris­diction for Peace. President Santos cited Crisis Group’s statement on and analysis of the transitional justice agreement while presenting it to the Colombian public.

The peace deal was signed on 26 September 2016 at an emotional ceremony in the Colombian port of Cartagena as fourteen Latin American presidents looked on. Just days later, however, the process suffered a terrible shock. In a referendum on the final agreement, Colombians rejected it by a margin of 0.5 per cent, and with a turnout of only 37 per cent.

The entire peace process hung in the balance, even if the “no” vote was partly a reflection of the government’s general unpopularity. Crisis Group kicked into action, advocating a renegotiation of the agreement with the government and FARC, the opposition and international actors, and identifying ways to mobilise popular support for it. The two sides were already deeply committed to making peace work, leading to a new deal signed in late November and approved by the Colombian congress shortly thereafter.

Despite many uncertainties in late 2016, the FARC-government ceasefire mostly held. Crisis Group continues to press ideas for smooth implementation of the deal, including, for instance, overcoming delays in the FARC handover of weapons, and reducing violence in rural and urban areas. Our analysts are now focused on the next step: advancing the newly-opened peace process with Colombia’s second traditional guerrilla group, the ELN.