In San Antonio, in the department of Tolima, 38-year-old Mayerly Rojas Feo and 45-year-old Juan Carlos Garcia sit on white plastic chairs, sipping their coffee and Pony Malta, a Colombian carbonated malted drink. As they chat and smile it is hard to imagine that the couple are former guerilla fighters who spent six and eight years, respectively, in prison on charges of rebellion, extortion, sedition, homicide and terrorism.
They both served in Front 21, a unit of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a former guerilla group known by its Spanish acronym, FARC. Front 21 operated in the center and south of Tolima, a coffee-producing region in the Andes, west of Colombia’s capital city of Bogota. “There was a lot of violence here,” says Jamie Guzman, a 34-year-old mother of two kids and one of more than 9 million registered victims of the conflict.
Like others living in the municipality of San Antonio, the former guerillas have tasted war, prison and now peace and reconciliation. Today, Garcia is the legal representative at Sembrando Paz, a Colombian organization working with peace signatories, Indigenous communities and farmers on economic development projects. Rojas Feo takes care of the animals at their farm.
They are proof of both the success and fragility of Colombian attempts to achieve peace. They laid down their arms, formed a family with their three kids and reincorporated into society, now growing coffee and other agricultural products. Yet building this new, peaceful life has not been easy. Like other peace signatories in Colombia, they have been threatened by current guerilla and criminal group members, who see the couple as traitors to the groups’ revolutionary ideas. Although Garcia remains committed to the peace process, he somewhat understands frustrated guerilla fighters. “Now we’re at a crossroads because the Colombian state has not fulfilled what was agreed upon,” he says. Sometimes Rojas Feo and Garcia are shunned by locals, who don’t trust them because of their bloodstained past.
In 2022, Colombia elected its first avowedly leftist president, Gustavo Petro. A former guerilla member who has since embraced the democratic route, Petro made it his flagship policy to achieve “total peace.” Whereas previous efforts to attain peace were focused on one or two specific groups, Petro’s ambition is to negotiate simultaneously with as many of the country’s guerillas and gangs as possible. He also promised comprehensive reforms to address structural issues behind the Colombian conflict. Yet, more than halfway through his presidency, these promises seem ever more elusive. Petro’s ambitious reform agenda has made little progress while the influence of armed and criminal groups continues to grow.
For years, Colombia had the world’s longest-running active civil war, often traced back to 1964 and the formation of the country’s two largest armed groups, the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN).
In 2016, the FARC signed a peace agreement with the Colombian government, led at the time by President Juan Manuel Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to achieve peace in the country. The agreement was celebrated as the end of a 52-year-long war that cost over 260,000 lives — more than 80% of them civilians — and displaced about 6 million people. FARC guerilla members demobilized and laid down their arms in exchange for political participation, restorative justice and promises of reform. A 310-page document outlined the conditions for ending the conflict and building a stable and lasting peace, in what has become known as one of the most significant peace accords in the world.
The 2016 peace agreement was preceded by three failed attempts to negotiate peace with the FARC since 1982, under the Belisario Betancur, Cesar Gaviria and Andres Pastrana administrations. Santos’ road to peace was a long one. On Sept. 4, 2012, he told the Colombian people that “the [peace] talks will not be of an unlimited time, they will be measured in months not in years,” a phrase he has since regretted, with the peace process having dragged on for almost four years. His government had an ambition of achieving “complete peace,” wording that — despite referring to ambitions to achieve peace with ELN — does not sound far from Petro’s current promises of “total peace.”
Even after happily signing a peace deal with the FARC in Havana, Cuba, on Aug. 24, 2016, Santos faced new disappointment when, about a month later, the deal was narrowly dismissed by 50.2% of the approximately 13 million Colombians (less than 30% of the total population) who voted in a referendum. Studies showed that people were more supportive of the peace agreement the more they had been exposed to violence. Yet Santos resumed his work, incorporating critiques of the deal by making 50 changes to the original text. With that, he secured the agreement in Congress and put an end to the conflict with the world’s oldest guerilla group.
Abraham Guzman Aguiar, another victim of Colombia’s armed conflict, reflects on how the 2016 peace agreement changed his life and brought peace to his community. “The conflict was tremendous,” says Aguiar from Tolima. He explains how civilians found themselves caught in the crossfire between the Colombian army, the FARC and ELN guerillas, and paramilitaries. “Who dies is the one in between. The one who doesn’t have a weapon,” Aguiar says.
Civilians were often trapped between violent actors during the Colombian conflict, explains Oliver Kaplan, an associate professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and the author of the 2017 book, “Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves.”
“But things changed from one moment to another. This happened very fast,” Aguiar says, reflecting on the impact of the 2016 peace deal. Yet, as he stands on his coffee plantation, he points to another mountain and says that behind that, in a town called Rioblanco, the fighting between armed groups continues. The Ismael Ruiz front, one of the dissident groups of the FARC, now exerts control in Rioblanco and other parts of southern Tolima.
In an even more remote part of Tolima state, Canon de las Hermosas, Saul Quijano, a 60-year-old member of the Amoya Indigenous Territorial Guard, an unarmed, self-organized, community-based security force formed by Indigenous people to protect their lands, has felt the change too: “This is a gesture of peace.” He points at a mountain where FARC guerrillas killed a leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a far-right paramilitary group. Canon de las Hermosas was seen as a strategic corridor between different states: Cauca, Valle del Cauca, Huila and Tolima, and it’s also known as the birthplace of the FARC guerilla. “That we can stand here today, peacefully, is incredible,” Quijano says. He hopes that he will soon be able to live not just from his coffee production, but also from ecotourism on these precious lands.
Yet Quijano also recognizes that peace is fragile, and Colombia continues to be a country plagued by violence and armed criminal groups. “We need to guard peace,” he says. “Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.”
On Nov. 24, Colombia celebrated the eighth anniversary of the signing of the revised 2016 peace agreement, but violence still prevails in parts of the country. While some 13,600 guerilla fighters laid down arms (more than 94% of them remain committed to peace), others were not part of the agreement. And a myriad of dissident and new criminal groups has since emerged.
Colombia holds the world record for killings of human rights defenders, with 181 killed in 2023 alone. So far in 2024, Colombia has suffered 60 massacres — defined as the murder of three or more people in a single act of killing — according to Indepaz, Colombia’s Institute for Development and Peace Studies.
“Signing the agreement was never gonna be enough to achieve a stable peace in Colombia,” says Emilio Archila, presidential adviser for stabilization and consolidation under former President Ivan Duque Marquez. “It’s a good agreement, but it wasn’t signed with the ELN. It wasn’t signed with Clan del Golfo. It wasn’t signed with Los Caparros, with Los Azules it wasn’t signed, with Los Montadores it wasn’t signed, with Los Mexicanos it wasn’t signed,” Archila says, referring to some of the numerous armed and criminal groups that are still spreading violence and fear.
This leaves Petro with a monumental task. Colombia’s armed and criminal groups have become even more fragmented than in the past. The four major armed groups (the ELN, Clan del Golfo, Estado Mayor Central and Segunda Marquetalia) and 23 gangs that Petro is trying to reach deals with are estimated to have more than 17,600 members. Each group has its own history and modus operandi.
As monumental as the 2016 peace agreement was at the time, it was also burdened by a subsequent lack of reforms to upend the country’s striking inequalities. Following Santos’ presidency, Colombians elected the right-wing Duque, who staunchly opposed the peace agreement as their president. While Duque vowed to uphold the agreement, he was no advocate for structural socialist reforms.
Colombia’s social and political divisions continue to this day. Its Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, was 54.8 in 2022, making it the most unequal country in Latin America, which, along with the Middle East, is considered the most unequal region in the world. Colombia’s urban-rural divide is particularly striking. According to DANE, Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics, multidimensional poverty — a measure that considers health, education and employment, among other factors — stood at 27.3% in rural areas in 2023, or more than triple the 8.7% rate in urban areas.
“War is a result of many of these problems,” says Mariano Aguirre, associate fellow at Chatham House and former senior adviser on peacebuilding at the Office of the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in Colombia, after describing profound issues with inequality in access to resources, health, education, justice, security and public transportation. Peace, he argues, is about more than “just” putting violence and attacks to an end. It’s about addressing these fundamental social and economic issues.
“These armed groups became de facto rulers,” says Ana Arjona, a political scientist at Northwestern University and the author of the award-winning 2016 book, “Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War.” “They fix governance gaps,” she explains, in parts of the country where the state fails to do so.
Arjona asserts that it will be hard to curb violence in Latin America given the prevalence of illicit economies like drugs and illegal mining. “We need a new approach for the region,” she says. Petro seems to agree. He has challenged the effectiveness of the United States’ “war on drugs,” and last year his administration, along with Bolivia, presented a proposal to the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs to remove the coca plant from its list of illicit drugs. The World Health Organization’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence is currently conducting a critical review of the coca leaf.
Peace signatories had hoped for agrarian reform where the government would give out lands for farmers to work on. “That hasn’t happened,” Garcia says, disappointed. “Peasants are in the same situation, striking and protesting because this promise hasn’t been fulfilled,” he says.
More than halfway into his presidency, Petro is indeed struggling to deliver the reforms he pledged under his self-proclaimed “government of change.” While he has approved tax and pension reforms, he has stalled on health and agrarian reforms. His government has bought up to 166,000 hectares (approximately 410,000 acres) of land for redistribution — which is nearly 10% of the more than 1.5 million hectares (approximately 3.7 million acres) promised in the peace deal. Rojas Feo, Garcia and other peace signatories, along with victims, are disappointed as Colombia continues to have one of the highest land concentration rates in Latin America. According to an analysis by Oxfam, 1% of the largest farms in Colombia control more than 80% of all productive land.
Another challenge facing Petro is the threatening — and killing — of FARC peace signatories, making it hard for many, including active combatants, to believe in the implementation and success of peace. More than 400 peace signatories have been killed since the signing of the deal, and 68% of the provisions in the 2016 peace agreement are unfulfilled, a proportion that has remained almost unchanged since Petro took office.
There will be no peace without the implementation of the 2016 agreement, according to Andres Mauricio Zuluaga Rivera, known under his artistic name Martin Batalla, a former FARC guerilla fighter who left arms and signed the peace agreement in 2016. “Our companions are being killed,” he says, frustrated. Now, he’s leading Confecciones la Montana, an entrepreneurial project to reintegrate former guerilla combatants into society by producing and selling camouflage, clothes and bags. As a former student leader, Batalla was wrongfully imprisoned for two years — with the Colombian government subsequently condemned for arbitrarily capturing him and other students. It was inside the prison that Batalla got to know the guerillas. When he was released with his new acquaintances, angry at the state for the injustices he had suffered, he joined the ranks of the FARC. Now, he’s a firm believer in peace, but he’s disappointed that the Colombian government has not kept its promises to protect him and other peace signatories.
“A good agreement is not enough for there to be a good implementation,” Aguirre says. The problem with the implementation in Colombia, he says, is that “the machinery” of the traditional political parties is very strong. The country’s political and economic elites are resistant to reforms that disturb the status quo.
As the country’s first leftist president, Petro ignited some hope that structural issues would finally be addressed, and his personal experience has made peace a top priority. As an 18-year-old, Petro joined the Movimiento 19 de Abril, known under its acronym M-19, an urban guerilla group created as a response to alleged election fraud against the National Popular Alliance, known as La ANAPO. The president’s experiences in the guerilla movement as well as in public office, as a senator and the mayor of Bogota, have formed him and his vision for peace.
In a TV interview organized by the Spanish media conglomerate El Pais, Petro explained how hard it has been to enact change even as the country’s president. “I’ve always lost in life,” he said.
Recently, Petro has suffered numerous setbacks in his peace process. Some notable threats and attacks make Petro’s peace look even shakier. Ahead of this year’s United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Cali, the Central General Command (EMC), a FARC dissident group, threatened to disrupt proceedings while violent attacks occurred near the city ahead of the conference. The government previously secured a ceasefire and initiated talks with the ELN, but the truce expired in August. The following month, the ELN attacked a military base in Arauca state, killing two soldiers and injuring 26. Ceasefires with the EMC and the Clan del Golfo, a neo-paramilitary group and the country’s largest drug cartel, as well as with urban gangs in cities like Quibdo, have all collapsed.
Daniela Castillo Aguillon, a former government official involved in the Colombian peace process, says ceasefires have been used as a tool for armed groups to rearm, recruit and strengthen their organizations.
While the rate of reported killings in Colombia dropped by a slim 5% under Petro’s presidency, likely thanks to the temporary ceasefires, extortions and kidnappings — which were not prohibited by the ceasefires — have shot up by about 30% and 70%, respectively. Meanwhile, armed groups have expanded, now controlling about half of Colombian territory.
But Petro’s efforts still have some merits. He has established peace talks with at least nine different armed groups — something no other Colombian president has attempted. “It is better to have dialogues with all groups,” says Leonardo Gonzalez Perafan, director of Indepaz.
But according to Castillo, the government would have done better by focusing its efforts. Instead of pursuing all-encompassing talks, the government could have benefited from engaging in fewer talks with the right technical capabilities and expertise in place, she argues.
“Total peace might be too ambitious, but at some level, it’s worth trying for,” Kaplan says. Part of the challenge in Colombia is that, in past efforts, there has always been a power vacuum where new groups emerged and filled the gaps. “So the principle behind total peace is to avoid that,” he concludes.
As someone who was once fighting for a now demobilized guerilla group, who was imprisoned and who has been part of a left-wing opposition that, before him, had not been able to win the presidency, Petro has reason to believe that the past doesn’t dictate the future. He campaigned on a “government of change.”
Do the former guerilla members believe in Petro’s promise of “total peace”? Not really, in the case of Rojas Feo and Garcia. Total peace requires reforms and full protection of peace signatories, they say. “The situation is really complicated here,” Garcia says, and recalls fellow peace signatories who have been killed and displaced recently.
The road is still long, and how far Petro will make it in his pursuit of total peace remains to be seen.
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