Forced displacement is the crime that has produced the most victims in the armed conflict in Colombia.
The Single Registry of Victims, as of December 31, 2023, identifies 8,578,269 people affected since 1985 — the second crime is homicide, with 1,099,246 cases.
Despite this, for years the problem occupied a secondary place in public debate and in the concerns of the State.
The protection actions of those who requested the protection of their rights accumulated in the judges' offices.
Until a ruling from the Constitutional Court put state negligence at the center of the agenda, with a declaration of the Unconstitutional State of Affairs that turns 20 years old on Monday.
The Final Report of the Truth Commission, presented in June 2022, defines forced displacement as an event that occurs “when people or groups of people have been forced to leave their residence or their usual place of work due to force or intimidation”, particularly for violations of human rights or to avoid the effects of armed conflict.
The victims remain within the country and, in general, move from rural areas to cities.
According to the report, Colombia is one of the States with the most displaced people in the world.
Ivonne Rodríguez, an investigator for the Commission, comments by phone that displacement is “the deepest scar” of an armed conflict that has been marked by the dispossession of land.
Not only is it the crime with the most registered victims, but it usually goes hand in hand with other events: behind displacement there are usually threats, homicides, forced disappearances or rapes.
Likewise, it implies a radical change in the life of the affected person, who can go from being a landowner to being a worker, from growing food to having to buy it.
“It is tearing a person away from his life, from his essence,” defines the researcher.
The impact of displacement is difficult to measure.
Rodríguez mentions, for example, that it is not so clear how to quantify the mental health problems that the victims have or the losses of agrarian knowledge that Colombia has had due to the emptying of its rural areas.
“There are grandparents who want to return to their towns, but their children or grandchildren grew up in the cities and do not want to return.
They say it is dangerous, or that they don't know how to work in the field,” he explains.
Furthermore, the figures may not even be reliable: many prefer not to recognize themselves as victims for fear of stigma or rejection.
Displaced children in a boarding school on a coffee farm in Tena (Department of Cundinamarca), in 2019.Juancho Torres (Getty Images)
The Constitutional Court handed down its ruling in a particularly difficult context.
2002 had been the year with the highest number of displaced people in history: 730,904 victims, according to the Truth Commission.
The conflict was at its worst, with fierce clashes between the guerrillas and paramilitaries and an upsurge in violence by armed groups against the civilian population.
The State barely had the tools to assist the thousands of people who arrived in the cities.
The 1997 law on the prevention of forced displacement and care for victims had several gaps: the budgets were limited and coordination between institutions and monitoring of the problem was not guaranteed.
Sentence
The Court based the declaration of the Unconstitutional State of Affairs on the high volume of protections it received due to displacement, which evidenced the institutional blockage of the State to respond to the requests for humanitarian assistance of so many victims.
“The accumulated processes (...) indicate that the violation of rights affects a good part of the displaced population, in multiple places in the national territory and that the authorities have failed to adopt the required corrective measures,” the text reads.
The high court also criticized “the lack of correspondence between what the rules say and the means to comply with them” and highlighted that the resources were not sufficient for a problem of a magnitude greater than that of the State.
For the Court, the State had responsibility for a structural violation of rights and, consequently, had the obligation to help the victims.
The authorities had to take measures to resolve problems such as the nonexistence of public policy evaluation systems, the lack of goals, and the insufficiency of human and economic resources.
In addition, the Court made a difference by creating for the first time a special chamber to follow up on the problem, a measure that it has since repeated in four other cases (health, prison system, crisis in La Guajira, and security of former FARC combatants).
A school in Magdalena, built on restituted land.Vannesa Jimenez (Getty Images)
Paula Gaviria Betancur, special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons at the United Nations, points out by phone that the ruling made it clear that the State had to raise its standards.
“Not every answer is valid.
Having an institution is not enough, having a law is not enough, having a budget is not enough (...).
It is not just any home that must be guaranteed... it is decent housing.
It is not just any education... it is quality education,” says the expert, who also values the civil society participation processes that promoted the Unconstitutional State of Affairs and its follow-up hearings.
The Court's jurisprudence helped develop the 2011 victims' law, which recognized for the first time the existence of an internal armed conflict and victims who needed reparation.
Gaviria, who was the first director of the Victims Unit (2012-2016), comments that Congress took into account the need that the Court had already established to pay attention to the specificities of the violence suffered by ethnic groups and women.
In her role as special rapporteur, she highlights that today several countries are studying similar laws based on Colombian experiences.
Figures
Forced displacement has decreased in the 20 years since the ruling.
The figures from the Victims Unit indicate that there were 291,126 victims of this event in 2022, compared to the 434,829 that were registered in 2004. But it is not necessarily because of the Unconstitutional State of Affairs.
Francisco Javier Daza, researcher at the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, points out by phone that there were significant drops when the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia were demobilized (2004-2006), and when the peace agreement was signed with the extinct FARC in 2016. “The main message is that peace processes work.
Seeking a negotiated path brings benefits in terms of these violent events,” says Daza.
The problem is that the demobilized groups were replaced by other actors of violence, and the numbers rose again in years such as 2011, 2018 and 2022. Although the current figure is lower than that of 2004, the rebound since 2020 is also evident, when 104,866 victims were registered.
The outlook is not encouraging: although there is still no consolidated data for 2023, the Norwegian Refugee Council warned on Thursday that so far in 2024, 3,000 displacements have already been recorded in the Colombian Pacific.
However, the experts consulted emphasize that we should not stop at just those figures to evaluate what has happened in the last 20 years.
It is also important to consider the capacity that the State now has to assist those who have been displaced for years and face discriminatory conditions to satisfy their fundamental rights.
The annual budget has multiplied from 2 trillion pesos (around 574 million dollars, at the 2004 exchange rate) to 15 trillion (about 3.8 billion dollars) and there has been important progress in areas such as the affiliation of displaced people to the health.
Gaviria, meanwhile, points out that there are substantial improvements in the income levels of the victims, according to a follow-up survey that has not yet been published.
A Colombian flag in the town of El Congal, in Caldas, from where the population was displaced by paramilitaries who burned everything.Juancho Torres (Getty Images)
symbolic effect
Experts highlight the symbolic importance that the Constitutional Court ruling has had in positioning the issue on the country's agenda.
Carolina Moreno, professor at the Law School of the University of Los Andes, highlights that displaced people now have more tools to claim their rights from the State.
“Someone who has a situation like this finds that there is great power in fighting with the law in hand and in making claims before a judge,” she explains in a telephone conversation with this newspaper.
“Forced displacement is no longer seen as a side effect of war.
It is a human rights issue,” she adds.
The media, politicians and civil society are more attentive to the affected population.
“If we had not had that ruling, we would not have the same recognition of that population, which was totally invisible in 2004,” says Moreno.
Likewise, experiences on how to support displaced people have served to think about tools to assist other vulnerable groups.
The professor points out her research on Venezuelan migrants affected by the armed conflict, and highlights that jurisprudence will increasingly serve the growing number of people displaced by climate change.
The high court has highlighted in its follow-up orders the progress made by the State after the 2004 claims. But it is unlikely that the Unconstitutional State of Affairs will be lifted with figures as high as the current ones.
Furthermore, there is concern that it has become normalized and that its impact has slowed down over the last decade.
Judge Natalia Ángel, coordinator of the monitoring room, regrets that forced displacement “has lost centrality” in the public debate.
“This is serious, since Colombia continues to be one of the countries with the highest number of displaced people in the world, and in recent years displacement rates have been increasing,” she comments in writing.
For Ángel, the importance of this commemoration lies in “drawing attention” to the problems that still persist.
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