Ten years after the signing at the Colón Theatre, the war has not resumed and it has not ended either. It has fragmented into parallel processes, some judicial, some military, nearly all unfinished. The accord meant to close a century of agrarian conflict remains open on its hardest points, while the country elects a government that promises to dismantle it. This is the final instalment of a series that began with the United Fruit Company and ends, fittingly, without a clear resolution.
I. What the land really changed, and what it did not
Point 1 of the Final Accord, the Comprehensive Rural Reform, was always the hardest promise to keep, because it touched what no previous administration had touched, the very structure of land ownership. Ten years later, the balance is mixed in a way that neither dominant narrative, official triumphalism nor opposition contempt, manages to capture honestly.
The Land Fund, the reform’s central mechanism, incorporated 779,483 hectares over the last four-year period, of which 348,514 were allocated to peasant farmers. More than 2.2 million additional hectares were formalised and twenty new Peasant Reserve Zones were created, bringing the total to twenty-seven across the national territory. These are real, verifiable figures, and they represent the most significant advance in land policy since the accord was signed.
But the figure does not tell the whole story. Researchers who have tracked implementation since its first year document a persistent tension between the text negotiated in Havana and its later execution, a tension that systematically favours the agro-industrial sector and large landowners over the peasantry the accord claimed to prioritise. Coca crop substitution, for instance, collided for years with forced eradication ordered by the defence ministry, two policies of the same state working against each other on the same families.
Between 2022 and 2026, 779,483 hectares were incorporated into the Land Fund and 348,514 hectares were allocated to the rural population, the greatest advance in rural reform since the Peace Accord was signed. (Peace Accord Implementation Unit, joint statement, 3 July 2026)
Researchers who documented the early years of implementation describe something more serious than simple administrative delay. On several occasions, the national government filed decrees and bills on rural reform without securing approval from the bilateral body created for that exact purpose, the Monitoring, Verification and Follow-up Commission. While the High Commission for Post-conflict signed crop substitution agreements with coca-growing families, the defence ministry kept applying, in the same regions, the forced eradication strategy inherited from Resolution 3080 of 2016. Two offices of the same state, two contradictory policies, one rural population bearing the cost of the lack of coordination.
The question that opened this series, why the Colombian guerrilla emerged from an agrarian question never resolved through legal channels, still carries the same uncomfortable answer ten years after the accord. It is not that nothing changed. It is that what changed arrived too late and too partially to dismantle the logic that produced the conflict in the first place.
II. The sentence that closes nothing
On 16 September 2025 the Special Jurisdiction for Peace handed down its first restorative sentence against the last Secretariat of the former FARC-EP. Rodrigo Londoño, Pablo Catatumbo, Pastor Alape, Milton de Jesús Toncel, Jaime Alberto Parra, Julián Gallo Cubillos and Rodrigo Granda were found to bear the greatest responsibility for a systematic kidnapping policy carried out between 1993 and 2012, with 21,396 documented victimising acts and 4,325 accredited victims before the tribunal. The sanction, eight years of effective restriction of liberty and rights under restorative work, is the maximum penalty this model of justice provides for.
Nine months later, on appeal, the relevant section of the Peace Tribunal upheld the conviction but rewrote substantial parts of the original ruling, spelling out more precisely which decisions and which period bind each former commander. On 1 July 2026 the first second-instance conviction issued under the JEP’s dialogical procedure became final.
It is a genuine legal milestone, the first time a restorative justice model has operated at this scale in Colombia. It is also, for the opposing camp, proof that the entire system deserves to disappear. The same tribunal had already sanctioned, in the parallel case on extrajudicial killings, twelve former soldiers of the La Popa Battalion for murder and forced disappearance. The jurisdiction tries both sides of the conflict, a fact rarely mentioned in the discourse that reduces it to a tool of guerrilla impunity, and one that has made it, precisely because it tries both sides, the most targeted political object of the current government transition. At the time of writing, the Appeals Section had issued more than two thousand two hundred orders and six hundred rulings, an unprecedented volume of judicial work in the country’s recent history, and yet barely two of those decisions are final convictions under the dialogical procedure. Colombian transitional justice does not move slowly out of negligence, it moves slowly because it investigates with a level of detail that ordinary justice never applied to the same facts.
III. The cost nobody negotiates
While the courts move forward, the country keeps burying those who defend the territory. According to the Institute for Development and Peace Studies, 2025 closed with 187 social leaders killed, an 8.1 percent increase over the 173 recorded the previous year. Violence against signatories of the Peace Accord grew even faster, with 39 former guerrillas killed, 25.8 percent more than in 2024.
The geography of that violence is not random. Cauca accounted for forty killings of social leaders, Antioquia thirty, Valle del Cauca seventeen, and the pattern repeats year after year in the same corridors where illegal mining, coca cultivation and territorial disputes converge among armed structures that replaced the FARC without inheriting any of their ideological limits. Among the signatories, Norte de Santander was the hardest-hit department, with seven killings.
Colombia closed 2025 with 187 social leaders killed, 8.1 percent more than the previous year, and 39 signatories of the Peace Accord dead, a 25.8 percent increase over 2024. (Indepaz, Observatory of Human Rights and Conflict, annual report)
Signing an accord never meant the state could guarantee the lives of those who signed it. That is, perhaps, the hardest lesson of implementation, paper is fulfilled with relative ease, territory is not. Protection schemes exist on paper too, individual security details, early warning alerts, collective protection plans negotiated village by village, and still the killing continues at a pace the state’s own institutions describe as alarming rather than contained.
Indepaz itself had warned, before the electoral year even ended, that voting cycles in Colombia have historically been accompanied by a fresh wave of threats and killings aimed at reorganising local power. Violence against social leadership is not, in that sense, collateral damage of the armed conflict. It is, very often, a deliberate tool of territorial control that precedes each election and outlives any change of government, precisely because it answers to economic interests and contested criminal rents that no peace accord, however ambitious, can dismantle on its own.
IV. Total Peace, partial result
Paz Total was the outgoing government’s most ambitious project, negotiating simultaneously with every armed group in the country under a single legal architecture. The balance, one month before the handover of power, is one of fragmentation more than success.
The table with the ELN has been frozen since April 2024, never resuming despite at least six documented government attempts to reopen the channel. The ELN offensive in early 2025 against the dissident 33rd Front left, in the Catatumbo region alone, five hundred people displaced in five days, the starkest proof that freezing a negotiating table does not freeze the war that table was meant to resolve. The Central General Staff, the largest FARC dissident group, split between factions led by alias Calarcá and alias Mordisco, each holding its own relationship, or lack of one, to the peace process. The table with the Segunda Marquetalia, the dissident group commanded by Iván Márquez, was provisionally suspended by the Council of State in July 2026, a judicial decision that called into question the legal foundation of the entire policy and that threatens to drag down with it the parallel table with the Coordinadora Nacional, whose ninety-nine members had already been relocated to a temporary settlement zone in Putumayo.
The current freeze is not an anomaly, it is a repetition. Betancur attempted it in the 1980s, Gaviria resumed contacts in Venezuela and Mexico after the assassination of a former minister, Pastrana managed to open spaces for dialogue that the parallel FARC agenda ended up swallowing, and only Santos, nearly three decades after the first approach, managed to install a formal table in Quito. The ELN remains, as it was in the period covered by the fourth episode of this series, Colombia’s oldest and most negotiation-resistant guerrilla, on terms any Colombian government has ever been willing to offer.
None of these processes produced a signed agreement. All of them produced, to varying degrees, partial ceasefires, goodwill gestures and, just as often, violent ruptures that left dead among the troops and displaced among the civilian population. The ambition of negotiating with everyone at once ended up proving what this series had already suggested, each Colombian armed group answers to a distinct economy and territorial logic, and treating them as a uniform bloc was, at best, badly calculated optimism.
V. The turn that closes the cycle
On 21 June 2026 Colombia elected as president Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right lawyer, with 49.66 percent of the vote against 48.70 percent for Iván Cepeda. The margin, under one percentage point, leaves little ambiguity about the message a near-identical share of the electorate wished to send in the opposite direction.
De la Espriella takes office on 7 August 2026 with a platform that explicitly declares the end of Paz Total and the elimination of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. He has given armed groups a one-month deadline to submit to ordinary justice, has publicly warned dissident commanders that his government will come after them, and has described Rodrigo Londoño’s recent appearance before the JEP as proof of an impunity he promises to end without forgiveness or forgetting.
Whether he can deliver on that promise is another matter. The 2016 Peace Accord and the JEP carry constitutional protection under Legislative Act 02 of 2017, which would require a full constitutional reform to dismantle them, not a simple presidential decree. Analysts consulted by specialised outlets agree the incoming government will inherit a country more fragmented than a decade ago, with more numerous armed structures and more diversified criminal economies than existed when the original accord was signed. Hardline rhetoric may prove, against that complexity, as insufficient as the promise of an unconditional total peace once was to sustain it.
Conclusion
This series began nine weeks ago with a banana plantation and a massacre the Colombian state chose not to investigate. It ends with a tribunal that does investigate, that does convict, and that a new government proposes to dismantle. Between those two extremes lies a century of the same unresolved question, who has a right to the land, and what does the state do when that question is raised through legal channels.
Colombia’s answer, for a hundred years, was mostly the same one, postpone, repress, and let violence occupy the space reform left empty. The 2016 accord marked the first time that answer changed substantially, and the figures in this final instalment, formalised hectares, confirmed convictions, but also murdered leaders and frozen negotiating tables, show exactly what it costs to sustain such a change in a country that has not stopped being at war at any point in its modern history.
The long fire does not go out with a signature or a sentence. Nor will it go out, presumably, with a change of government that promises to extinguish it by decree. It changes fuel, it changes name, and it keeps burning on the same ground that was never redistributed in time…
G.S.
Sources
- Comunicado Conjunto, Unidad de Implementación del Acuerdo de Paz
- La JEP dicta su primera sentencia por los secuestros, el último Secretariado de las Farc-EP es condenado
- Caso 01, JEP
- En 2025 fueron asesinados 187 líderes sociales y 39 firmantes del Acuerdo de Paz
- Elecciones presidenciales Colombia 2026, presidente electo Abelardo de la Espriella
- Abelardo de la Espriella lanzó dura advertencia para los exlíderes de las antiguas Farc
- El justo medio de una paz segura que deberá buscar De la Espriella, La Silla Vacía
- El único grupo con estatus político y con el que puede haber un proceso de paz es el ELN
