Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos prepares to join FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez in signing a peace accord. Photo: State Department/Public Domain.
The Colombian case, monitored by the United Nations, can be characterized as an example of the theoretical and practical field of knowledge known as “transitional justice” since the demise of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983. Although for Professor José Zalaquett it is a misnomer – as it focuses excessively on judicial arrangements and leaves aside other measures such as truth-telling, the preservation of memory and the compensation of victims – transitional justice has become a household expression to refer to situations where a society has to deal with a legacy of political violence and human rights violations, aiming at compensating victims and preventing the recurrence of new institutional breakdowns.
Now, the Colombian case has particular features of its own that should be taken into account. As Leo Tolstoy famously put it, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” For one, Colombia’s is the oldest non-international armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere, dragging on since 1964, when the FARC and other armed groups embraced leftist doctrines that prompted them to take up arms against the government, at the height of the Cold War. Armed violence between “liberals” and “conservatives” in Colombia, however, predates the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union: it dates back to the 19th century and it reaches one of its peaks during the 1950s, in what became known as “The Violence.”
