Colombia's Reparations Debate

Six months on the job, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has secured an approval rating of 86 percent. One way Santos is using that political capital is to push a law that could provide reparations to as many as two million victims of Colombia’s civil conflict. But even as he builds support for the Victim’s law, the legislation faces obstacles ranging from costs to political opponents.

As it currently stands, the Victims Law would allow victims of violence and their direct heirs to seek reparations from the government if a panel of five judges finds that a person suffered an abuse—whether that abuse was committed by left-wing guerrillas, paramilitaries, or the state. Reparations would include repayment for victims’ funerals, subsidies to offset schools costs, and cancelation of tax debts. Victims would also receive priority attention for access to social programs, including technical training, subsidized land purchases, and welfare support. The measure would oblige the government to help those displaced by violence recover illegally usurped land, or relocate them to new plots of land.  The Santos administration has already begun the process by restoring territory to 38,000 families since October through a new program administered by the Ministry of Agriculture.

A similar law failed in 2009, after then-President Uribe voiced his opposition, arguing that the state could not afford it. Blessed with Santos’ support, however, the law now stands a likely chance of passing. Santos has reached out to Colombia’s four major political parties—La U, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and Cambio Radical—to create a “National Unity” coalition. With the addition of the Liberals to his supporters, Santos has more backing in Congress for his legislative priorities than Uribe did during his eight years in office. 

But while Santos’ support has given the law new impetus, it still faces obstacles. One point of contention that has emerged is the date from which a person can be legally considered a victim of political violence. The version passed by Colombia’s House of Representatives in December would apply the law to acts committed beginning in 1993, the year the country’s Congress passed its first Public Order Law, marking official recognition of the armed conflict. 

But the selection of the year 1993 sparked an uproar among victims’ groups and the political left. They argue that the pattern of violent displacement of farmers was already well established and documented by the late 1980s, citing research by CODHES, a prominent Colombian NGO. Setting the year of application at 1993 would also exclude the victims of the Unión Patriótica (UP). The UP formed in 1985 during a brief period in which elements of the leftist guerrilla army known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (better known as the FARC) agreed to lay down their arms. Paramilitary organizations murdered thousands of UP members and supporters, including eight congressmen. Senator Juan Fernando Cristo, of the Liberal Party, has said he intends to push the year of applicability to 1985. 

Colombia has a lot of victims to attend to. Estimates of the number of Colombia’s internally displaced population vary, with the government recognizing about 3.4 million displace people and CODHES setting the figure at 4.9 million. The Attorney General’s office has recognized 113,000 people as victims of political violence since the inauguration of the country’s Justice and Peace process in 2006. The Colombian government has documented over 32,000 “forced disappearances” since establishing a commission and a registry to document the crime in 2000. 

Such stark tallies mean that the cost of the measure presents another stumbling block. Santos does not deny the proposal will be expensive. Speaking in New York in December, he said preliminary estimates indicate the law will could run the Colombian state roughly $22 billion over the next 15 years. Though the Colombian Treasury has approved the law as fiscally viable, some conservative politicians continue to oppose it. Senator Roy Barreras of the conservative Party La U has said the cost “would be unpayable—we have to make the law fiscally sustainable.” 

The high cost has not dissuaded the president, however. “In the past, amnesties and pardons were the accepted practices for dealing with atrocities in pursuit of peace,” Santos said in New York. “Nowadays, nobody doubts that reconciliation process require a component of justice to be sustainable.”

Learn More:

• Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos discussing the Victims’ Law in New York.
• Hear the opinion of the victims about the law in this multimedia project by investigative news website La Silla Vacía.
• Interview with CODHES Director Marco Romero discussing the importance of land in the Colombian conflict.
• Conservative Colombian Senator Roy Barreras discussing the Victims Law in an interview with daily newspaper El Tiempo.
• “Breaking the Silence: In Search of Colombia’s Disappeared,” a Dec. 2010 report by the Latin America Working Group and the U.S. Office on Colombia.
• Anastasia Moloney’s feature for World Politics Review, “Colombia’s IDP Crisis: Caught in the Crossfire.”
• A report by Colombian weekly Semana outlining the controversial issues in the Victims Law.