Colombia has signed peace with its guerrillas more times than a country should ever need to. Each signature repeats the same gesture, the promise of land that will finally change hands, and each time the land stays almost exactly where it was. Eighteen years separate the Caguán clearance from the Teatro Colón signing, two generations of negotiators and a Nobel Prize awarded five days after an electoral defeat. The one thing that never truly moved, not even in the most ambitious agreement in the country’s history, is the structure of rural land ownership this series has been tracing since its first episode.
I. The theatre of San Vicente
In July 1998, still only a presidential candidate, Andrés Pastrana travelled in secret into the jungle to meet Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s historic commander. The gesture worked simultaneously as an electoral manoeuvre and a diplomatic opening, and it worked well. Pastrana won the presidency weeks later, and kept his promise with a speed that unsettled his own military high command. On 14 October 1998, by presidential decree, he ordered the clearance of five municipalities in Caquetá and Meta, San Vicente del Caguán, La Macarena, La Uribe, Mesetas and Vista Hermosa. The zone covered forty two thousand square kilometres without any state presence, comparable in size to Switzerland, handed to the guerrilla as a precondition for sitting down to talk.
The formal ceremony took place on 7 January 1999, Marulanda absent from his own empty chair, Pastrana sitting beside it for hours in front of the world’s cameras. The image travelled the globe and the Colombian press never quite forgave him for it. The twelve point agenda discussed over the following three years formally included agrarian reform, alongside drug trafficking, human rights and political participation, accompanied by governments from more than twenty countries and by civil society delegations that travelled into the heart of the cleared zone to put their proposals on record. None of that stopped the FARC from using the cleared territory, while negotiators discussed land at the official tables, to reorganise troops, train combatants and consolidate the cocaine business on a scale the country had not yet seen. The clearance conceived as a gesture of trust turned, in practice, into a military rearguard and an economic sanctuary.
The end came with the hijacking of a commercial aircraft on 20 February 2002, carrying Senator Jorge Eduardo Gechem Turbay, chairman of the Senate’s Peace Commission. That same night Pastrana announced, in a twenty two minute television address, the end of the demilitarised zone and the immediate return of the armed forces to the five municipalities. The collapse of the process benefited one man electorally. Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who had been rising in the polls for months on a hardline platform against a guerrilla that public opinion had already written off as incorrigible, won the presidency outright in the first round with fifty four per cent of the vote, something unprecedented since the country adopted a two round presidential system.
The 1998 demilitarised zone covered forty two thousand square kilometres across five municipalities in Caquetá and Meta, kept free of the armed forces by presidential decree for three years, without a negotiated outcome.
II. The years of iron
Uribe governed for eight years on a premise exactly opposite to Pastrana’s, there was nothing to negotiate with an armed organisation while it retained military capacity. Plan Colombia, already under way since the previous government, became the budgetary instrument of that doctrine, and the entire country reorganised itself around the war as a national project, with the American military assistance described in this series’ previous episode. The results were real on the strictly military front, the guerrilla lost territory, historic commanders and strategic strike capacity, and several of its leaders fell in operations that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
What did not change during those years, because no one seriously put it on the table, was the structure of rural landholding the FARC had invoked for four decades as its founding argument. Worse still, that same decade of iron coincided with the paramilitary expansion documented in the previous episode, and with it came land grabs on an industrial scale across entire regions of the Caribbean coast and Urabá, carried out under the shadow of the armed forces while the state negotiated, in parallel, the demobilisation of the AUC under the Justice and Peace Law. The war against an agrarian guerrilla was won without touching the land concentration that war claimed to be fighting, and in some regions that concentration even deepened.
There is also a semantic detail that carries more weight than it seems. Uribe refused throughout his eight years in office to officially recognise the existence of an internal armed conflict, preferring to speak of a terrorist threat against legitimate institutions. The difference is not rhetorical, it carries direct legal consequences, because an armed conflict opens the door to transitional justice and victim reparation mechanisms that a mere terrorist threat does not require. As long as the official word was terrorism, restitution of stolen land lacked any legal framework of its own.
III. Havana, discretion and method
The turn came from the least expected quarter. Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s Defence Minister and architect of much of the previous decade’s military offensive, took office in 2010, and before even sitting down with the guerrilla he did something his predecessor had never been willing to do, sign into law in June 2011 the Victims and Land Restitution Law, which opened for the first time a legal path to return land stolen over decades. With that law the country officially accepted, through legislation and not merely rhetoric, that rural violence had not been a simple succession of isolated criminal acts but a conflict with structure and identifiable victims. Passed a year before any negotiating table was confirmed, it was the first sign that the new government thought of peace as something broader than a disarmament deal. Months later, exploratory secret contacts with the guerrilla began almost immediately. The lesson of the Caguán showed in every decision that followed. No demilitarised zone, no cameras ahead of time, no empty chair in front of the world. For nearly two years, government and FARC delegates met discreetly in Havana and Oslo, with Cuba and Norway as guarantor countries and Venezuela and Chile as accompanying countries, until Santos publicly confirmed the existence of the table on 4 September 2012.
The FARC arrived this time militarily weakened, a fact that completely altered the balance of forces compared with 1999 and largely explains why this process reached port where the previous one had run aground. Formal negotiations opened in Havana the following month, structured around a six point agenda agreed in advance in what became known as the General Agreement, and ran for four years, with parallel tables devoted to gender, victims and technical verification, and without a bilateral ceasefire until the final stages of the process, another lesson drawn directly from the Caguán’s failure. Delegations of conflict victims travelled to Cuba to speak directly to negotiators from both sides, a mechanism that had not existed in any previous attempt. The definitive text was announced on 24 August 2016.
IV. Six points, one underlying silence
The agreement’s first point, and the one that fills the most pages of the final document, is called Comprehensive Rural Reform. It promised the formalisation of seven million hectares farmed by peasants without legal title and the state distribution of a further three million hectares to landless rural populations, along with a multipurpose land registry designed, for the first time, to establish with precision who owned what in the Colombian countryside. The other five points, political participation, end of the conflict, solution to the illicit drugs problem, victims and implementation, structured the rest of the agreement’s architecture. The drugs point created the National Comprehensive Programme for the Substitution of Illicit Crops, aimed at the very coca growers that forced eradication policy had pursued for two decades. The victims point created the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Truth Commission, two transitional justice institutions without comparable precedent in the region. The political participation point guaranteed ten temporary congressional seats for the party that would emerge from demobilisation, eventually named Comunes.
None of those five other points, however, touched the question the FARC had placed on the table since La Violencia of the 1950s. The first one did, at least on paper, which is why it occupies the place it occupies in the document. The difference with earlier attempts lay not in the ambition of the text, which was considerable, but in the explicit recognition that land remained the unresolved matter. The problem, as the following years would make clear, was not how the agreement was written but how it was carried out.
The 2016 agreement set a target of handing over three million hectares to landless peasants. Nine years later, the United Nations Verification Mission recorded fewer than three hundred thousand hectares actually delivered, much of it provisional or still unregistered.
V. The plebiscite that said no
Santos put the text to a popular vote on 2 October 2016. The result surprised his own government and much of the international community, No won with fifty point twenty one per cent of the vote against forty nine point seventy eight for Yes, a lead of under half a percentage point according to the National Registry’s final count. Turnout fell to barely thirty seven per cent, abstention brushing sixty three per cent, worsened by the rain Hurricane Matthew brought that Sunday to much of the Caribbean coast, precisely one of the regions where Yes was winning most decisively. Such a razor thin margin reflected less a majority rejection of ending the conflict than deep distrust of the concrete terms of demobilisation and transitional justice, compounded by an election day the weather itself ended up tilting. The No campaign, led by Uribe and by conservative sectors that went so far as to spread the idea that the agreement imposed a supposed gender ideology in schools, concentrated in the cities and in regions that had suffered less directly from the armed conflict. Yes, by contrast, won overwhelmingly in the territories where the war had been longest and most brutal, Chocó, Cauca, Nariño, much of the Pacific coast, precisely the regions that have appeared across nine episodes of this series as a recurring stage for the conflict. The plebiscite’s geography reproduced, with almost cartographic precision, the geography of the war, which said more about the distance between urban and rural Colombia than about the technical content of the agreement itself. Those who had suffered the conflict firsthand voted mostly to close it. Those who had watched it on television for thirty years allowed themselves the luxury of doubt.
Five days after the defeat at the polls, the Norwegian committee awarded Santos the Nobel Peace Prize, a decision many Colombians read as an international tribute to a process their own country had just rejected. Santos did not call a second plebiscite. He renegotiated specific points with No campaign sectors over several weeks, produced an amended text and signed it a second time on 24 November 2016 at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá. This time ratification went not through the people but through Congress, which approved the agreement on 1 December. The procedure was legal and fell within presidential powers, but it left a political mark that would accompany the entire subsequent implementation, an agreement born of an electoral defeat and ratified without the direct popular backing the government had sought in the first place.
VI. Disarmament and what followed
From 1 December 2016, with the agreement ratified, began the process of laying down arms under verification by a United Nations political mission, the first of its kind deployed in Colombia. Over the following months, nearly nine thousand individual weapons were handed over and destroyed across twenty six transitional rural normalisation zones and seven transitional points scattered across the country, a tripartite mechanism between the government, ex combatants and the UN that the organisation itself described as one of the fastest disarmament processes, with one of the highest weapons per combatant ratios, ever verified in a conflict of this length. Those transitional zones would become, months later, twenty four territorial training and reincorporation spaces, the acronym Colombian media eventually adopted as everyday shorthand. The Office of the High Commissioner for Peace accredited, in total, thirteen thousand two hundred and two people as former FARC members entitled to the reincorporation benefits set out in the agreement.
The years that followed exposed the gap between signature and implementation with a clarity no official statement could fully hide. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace counted, by early 2025, more than four hundred and fifty reincorporated former combatants killed since the signing, overwhelmingly in regions the state never managed to occupy after the FARC’s withdrawal, and armed dissident groups that rejected the agreement from the outset, some born before the signing and others after it, fought over that same vacuum with the ELN and with structures inherited from the paramilitarism described in this series’ sixth episode. The pattern repeated with almost mechanical regularity, the state demobilised one armed actor and another occupied the territory before any civilian institution arrived to replace it. Comprehensive Rural Reform, the point meant to close the question first opened in the years of the United Fruit Company, advanced at a pace the UN Verification Mission itself called insufficient given the scale of what had been promised, and the multipurpose land registry meant to establish who owns every hectare in the country remains today, nearly a decade after the signing, far from complete.
Conclusion
Eighteen years separate the Caguán clearance from the Teatro Colón signing, and in that span Colombia changed its military strategy, its international interlocutors and an entire political generation. The one thing that did not change was the underlying question, who owns the land and under what conditions can they go on owning it. The 2016 agreement was the first to name it with legal precision and to build institutions meant to resolve it. Naming it was not enough to resolve it, and that gap between the signed text and the hectares actually delivered is, in all likelihood, the real key to understanding why Colombia is still burying peace signatories nearly a decade after officially putting out the war…
G.S.
Sources
- El Caguán, Informe Final, Comisión de la Verdad
- Recorridos por los paisajes de la violencia, Caquetá, Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica
- Acuerdo Final para la Terminación del Conflicto, Gobierno de Colombia
- Explicación de los puntos del acuerdo, Portal para la Paz
- El acuerdo de paz con las Farc cumple nueve años entre avances y nuevas amenazas, El Tiempo
- El Acuerdo de Paz de 2016 ha logrado avances notables, Naciones Unidas en Colombia
- Así fue la dejación de armas de excombatientes de las antiguas FARC hace nueve años en Mesetas, Meta, El Espectador
- La reforma agraria, la paz con las FARC, un compromiso aplazado de nuevo, Redalyc
- Plebiscito por la paz, una derrota inesperada, Señal Memoria
- Resultados plebiscito 2016, El Tiempo
- Plebiscito por la paz, resultados de la votación del plebiscito, Semana
- Cifras oficiales indican que 98% de exguerrilleros se mantienen en proceso de paz, ColombiaCheck
- JEP reporta que 456 excombatientes de las Farc han sido asesinados desde la firma del Acuerdo de Paz, Noticias RCN
