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

differences between the two caused violent outbreaks between those loyal to the Liberal and Conservative factions. In the coming years after 1948 much violence occurred in Columbia as a whole, and caused too many deaths to count, to include those of Government officials.
In the late 1940’s, Liberal candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was a leading candidate in the race. However, in 1948, he was assassinated in the streets of Bogotá. He violent uproar that followed caused the Liberal party’s absence in the 1950 race, where Conservative Laureano Gómez won. After Gómez was overthrown in 1953, General Pinilla came into power. Pinilla’s decisions and rulings only caused more violence, and thus more death. Pinilla was responsible for a major military offense known as the War of Villarica, in the department of Tolima where the armed self-defense movements that will later be known as the FARC came into existence. For this the Conservative and Liberal elite blamed the renewal of La Violencia on Pinilla and he was forced to resign in 1957.
After Pinilla’s resignation, the Conservative and Liberal elite decided to implement a power sharing deal that was called the National Front. The National Front stated that beginning in 1958, the two parties would alternate every 4-year term in the presidency and would distribute all public positions evenly between the two parties.
This agreement however did not resolve the original problems and causes of the violence, being state neglect, inequity in land distribution, and poverty. Because of the lack of resolve for these issues, the leftist guerrilla party took initiative in the 1960s inspired by the Cuban Revolution.
In the 1980s, the Columbian landowners and members of the armed forces responded by creating paramilitary militias to wage a counterinsurgent “dirty war”. At the same time, cocaine productions shifted from Bolivia to Columbia, funding the paramilitaries.
The paramilitaries formed a national network, financed by drug trafficking, in 1997 called the AUC (the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia or the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia).

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

1980s.
The violence and deaths continued for years on end. In 2002, Alvaro Uribe Velez was elected as president, and the United States indicted AUC commanders for drug-related crimes. Because of this action by the U.S. the AUC began to negotiate with the Columbian government, producing a demobilization plan for AUC belligerents.
In 2005, the Justice and Peace Law was enacted by Columbia.

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

process.
Despite the efforts made by the Columbian government and human rights activists, paramilitary violence continues still today. There is also evidence that indicates that they still influence the judicial and legislative branches of the Columbian government.
Along with the violence, there is also a norm of impunity in Columbia today. As a result of security forces’ conspiracy with the paramilitaries and drug traffickers as well as the subversion of the judicial system, impunity is something that isn’t questions. There have been reports of Judges, prosecutors and witnesses being intimidated and assaulted. In April of 2010 there was report of increasing threat to the country’s judiciary, and three judges being assassinated.
This civil war is one that hasn’t ended in about 51 years, and isn’t seeming to be ending any time soon. The government has tried, has made efforts, but it will never be enough.