Interview with Mateo Merchan Duque.
The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.
Today’s tribulation is the first one not directly related to digital sovereignty. I wanted to investigate the most Colombian political topic: the peace process with the armed guerrilla since I discovered that the current Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, took part in one of them. I only knew it as a charismatic figure and a great orator on the international stage, where he hadn’t been afraid to stand up firmly against Trump, as well as a friend of Pepe Mujica—the former president of Uruguay and one of the few to rightfully enter the Olympus of leftist politicians who were simultaneously upright, wise, intelligent, and successful. The first leftist president in Colombia’s history, Petro even holds Italian origins and citizenship. A devoted fan of García Márquez, radicalized by the coup against Allende, he had joined the M-19 (19th of April Movement) at the age of seventeen—a leftist insurgent guerrilla movement formed to establish democracy in Colombia after the right wing had stolen the elections.
For instance, the story of the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice strikes me as one of those incredible South American tales: while the future president was in prison and tortured for days, his compañeros took twenty-five Supreme Court justices hostage, and the then-president Betancur decided to send in the army, resulting in the deaths of almost everyone; the justices themselves were killed by army bullets. After the 1990 peace agreement, when the M-19 became a political party, he became a senator, spent four years in exile to avoid being killed, and eventually served as the mayor of Bogotá.
In 2022, he ascended to the presidency with a bold socialist program that promised a great deal: land reform to end narco land ownership; an environmental policy halting all new oil exploration; infrastructure for water access and the development of a railway network; and investments in public education, research, and healthcare. Three years into his term, the results were mixed. Certainly, the fears of the conservatives hadn’t materialized, as the Colombian peso remained at a stable exchange rate with the dollar—the only variable that seemed to interest everyone I talked to.
My usual conservative Uber driver swore to me that Petro was a murderer, that the Colombian economy was going to ruin, and that he was the worst president in the history of the country. My progressive friends had voted for him and were not satisfied with the results achieved, though they recognized that the alternatives were worse. The personal driver of a friend’s aunts thought differently: he argued that despite having everyone against him, Petro had increased wages by more than twenty percent, made Colombia safer, boosted tourism significantly, and redistributed land to the poorest who had been previously dispossessed. Where he had not shone was on the front of agreements with other armed groups, having promised a “Total Peace” that had not yet been realized.
To navigate this labyrinth, I met Mateo in his native Manizales, in the eje Cafetero, at a local brewery. A former insider at the JEP and an NYU doctoral student I had known from my time as a visiting fellow, he offers a perspective born of both academic rigor and lived disillusionment.
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Why did you become interested in the topic of transitional justice in Colombia and how did you end up working for the Transitional Justice Tribunal?
I have always been interested in the entire peace process. The peace process with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, lasted from 2012 to 2016, and almost the entire peace process unfolded during my time as a law student. Because of that, I also became an activist for the process: I used to take part in marches and to go to Congress during the implementation of the agreement. When the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, was created, I was hooked. The agreement was signed at the end of 2016, but the tribunal was already included within the agreements. It began to be implemented and the tribunal was created in early 2017. When I finished my classes and completed my degree, I was working as an assistant for a professor. He started working at this tribunal and called me. That was the doorway in, but I had been looking for a way to get in all year because I dreamed of working there.
What was the experience like from the inside?
The experience was very good in the sense that I learned a lot, not only about law but also about life. I learned what it’s like to work in a public entity, how to deal with general labor issues, and workplace coexistence. I was part of a project that was, and is, very important for the country: a tribunal that processes the conflicts of the armed conflict. Working on cases as delicate as extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, and forced disappearances.
But I also realized how difficult it is, first, to create an entity from scratch, and second, to be part of an entity that deals with these types of matters, because there are also many internal tensions. The judges each have their own agenda and their own way of seeing the world. Consequently, the JEP has had many problems in the sense that it has to make strategic decisions very quickly. It only has a 15-year mandate; it ends in 2032, but it has very large responsibilities. They have to create restorative sanctions that are not prison, but rather developing projects—for example, building roads or schools—as a form of restoration for crimes against humanity and war crimes. This requires full coordination with state entities and securing resources and money to create and implement those programs. And the implementation has been very difficult, partly because the governments—both Petro’s current government and Duque’s previous government—did not cooperate with the JEP.
I found that there was a bit of a challenge with humility when it came to reaching agreements and working efficiently within the tribunal. Having been part of the JEP and working in the Executive Secretariat, which helps coordinate the judges and the tribunal’s offices, I experienced this firsthand. It was quite complex because everyone seemed to want to run their own show. This situation led to some disillusionment for me, as I discovered that many respected academics and judges I had looked up to—people from the Constitutional Court and various universities—are just like everyone else. They have their own egos and sometimes don’t meet the expectations we had hoped for.
For me, that has always been a bit of an internal conflict because I continue to study things about the JEP from an academic perspective, but I want to remain critical. However, at the same time, I have to hold back because being overly critical of the JEP can provide tools for those who oppose peace and seek total impunity—especially those aiming for impunity for the military. This could give them ammunition to help a far-right government come to power this year and attempt to pass a reform to eliminate the JEP, which is unlikely but still a potential risk.
The Colombian case of a guerrilla group that became institutionalized after many years is unique. It was one of the oldest guerrillas in the world: 50 years. How was such a guerrilla group possible?
The origin of the guerrilla problem is that it began, in principle, as a land issue. Later, they adopted communist ideology, and they started a guerrilla movement. It was no longer about defending their territory, but about taking power. Then in the nineties, drug trafficking arrived, and that poured a lot of gasoline on the guerrilla: access to resources, technology, and weapons. And with that, they were able to strengthen themselves. In 1998, there was a peace process called the Caguán process. There was a president, Andrés Pastrana, a conservative, who was elected under the banner of conducting a peace process. But his process was to open up almost an entire department to the guerrilla. It was called the “clearance zone” (zona de despeje). He pulled the army out of there and told the guerrilla to do whatever they wanted—kidnap, kill—while they conducted a peace process in that area. So, the entire guerrilla was concentrated there, but that also served as an engine for them to strengthen themselves.
And I think the conflict in Colombia became fractured in the sense that at some point—I would say in the early 2000s—the war wasn’t felt as strongly in the cities, but it was felt more in the countryside. Life went on in the cities. If you talk to me about the guerrilla in Manizales, it makes no sense. But in the villages, it does. When I visited my mother’s village, which is two hours from here—it’s called Marulanda, actually it is a smaller municipality called Montebonito—I remember that sometimes at Christmas people would come warning that the guerrilla had burned a bus at the entrance of the village. The guerrilla was very close to that, but it wasn’t felt in Manizales; it wasn’t there. At one point in Bogotá, they might have kidnapped people entering the city; but the point is that in the cities, the war wasn’t felt with such force.
This created a dynamic where the conflict continued and the governments fought the guerrilla in the countryside, but for people in the cities it didn’t generate much impact. I think that made it easier for the conflict to continue, because for many—and especially for those who make the important decisions in the country, those who have power—the war wasn’t something truly relevant. For some, it even yielded benefits, because presidential elections were always about whether to negotiate or go to war. That was the big debate. It was always like that until Petro’s election. That was the first one where the peace process and the agreement with the guerrillas weren’t the center of the discussion, because even in Duque’s election, although there was already a peace process, the discussion was about implementation. Duque arrived with a critical agenda; they were the ones who always opposed the peace process. People knew that with Duque, the process was going to have a negative impact on implementation, and that was a large part of the discussion.
There is a book by Carlos Pizarro León Gómez—the brother, in fact, of the M-19 commander who later became a presidential candidate and was killed. He wrote this book on the history of peace processes, and it hasn’t just been with the FARC; most guerrillas have used negotiation processes to strengthen themselves. They say they want peace, that they want to negotiate, but in reality, they negotiate as a mechanism to be left alone, to have a ceasefire, and to grow stronger. In fact, that is what is happening today with the peace processes Petro is conducting with FARC dissidents. They are strengthening. During these four years, the dissidents have grown stronger because he arrived and opened a process he called “Total Peace.” He said: I am going to negotiate with all the remaining armed actors. None of the processes he opened has turned out well, and it is already documented that it has served to strengthen them.
But how is it possible that a guerrilla that calls itself communist harms the people as a war strategy?
It’s a total contradiction. They were talking to a country that didn’t exist. They thought people really believed they were saviors, but nobody believed that. Nobody, really. These were guys who committed indiscriminate massacres, who kidnapped. In fact, several of the FARC commanders who were part of the last national command, who later entered politics with the peace agreement, have said that by listening to victims who went to Havana to speak at the process, they understood that the country they had in their heads didn’t exist. That is also very well reflected in the electoral results of the party they created afterward, which is completely irrelevant.
And what is the role of the military and paramilitary groups in all of this?
The guerrillas had grown significantly stronger following the failure of Pastrana’s peace process, which had granted them an entire department as a demilitarized zone. In the 2002 election, a man emerged who had served as a senator and Governor of Antioquia, acting as a sort of dissident within the Liberal Party before eventually resigning from it. While he was a prominent figure in his home region, he wasn’t well known nationally. His name was Álvaro Uribe, and he ran as a political outsider on a platform of total confrontation: we must fight, we must bolster the military, and we must defeat the guerrillas. His popularity skyrocketed almost overnight, leading to an unprecedented first-round victory. Upon becoming president, he launched his ‘Democratic Security’ policy.
This strategy focused on modernizing the military through increased resources, intelligence sharing, and close cooperation – primarily with the United States. His goal was to establish territorial control through sheer force, creating the stability necessary to attract foreign investment. While he funneled massive funding into the armed forces, he also reshaped military doctrine—the guidelines for how war is waged in Colombia. As part of this policy, he introduced performance incentives to motivate troops. These rewards, which included cash bonuses and extra vacation time for battalions that achieved a high number of combat kills, fostered the creation of illegal internal structures within the army.
It sounds like the Soviet Union, with impossible goals and everyone lying to achieve them.
Exactly. For example, one of the most paradigmatic cases: near Bogotá, there is a municipality almost integrated into the city, like Villa María is attached to Manizales. This municipality is called Soacha. What did they do? There were military personnel, and also civilians who collaborated with them, looked for young men—either with mental health issues, addiction problems, or without work—and offered them a job opportunity in eastern Colombia, in a region called Catatumbo, very close to Venezuela. They took them away, recruiting them to work: “we are going to work in the fields, a good job opportunity.” They arrived there in Catatumbo, made them dress in camouflage clothing, killed them, and made them appear as guerrillas killed in combat.
Those are the well-known falsos positivos, false positives, one of the darkest cases of the Colombian state, a practice repeated in different military units throughout the country. The JEP has documented at least 6,402 extrajudicial executions, but I understand that they are now going to reach about 10,000. About this, there is a whole debate. Some people say: no, this wasn’t a policy of the Uribe government; these were ‘rotten apples’ within the army. But I believe that in any decent country, if this happens to a president during his government, even if he didn’t directly order them, he is responsible for creating a system of perverse incentives.
To meet those targets, many army units began operating alongside paramilitary groups that had supposedly already demobilized. The paramilitary phenomenon in Colombia had grown dramatically throughout the nineties and early 2000s, eventually prompting Uribe to negotiate their demobilization as well. Unlike the guerrillas, paramilitaries were right-wing armed groups that positioned themselves as fighting against the FARC. They originated partly as private security forces, some collaborating openly with the army, others acting independently. Over time, they became deeply entangled in drug trafficking and were responsible for some of the conflict’s worst atrocities: massacres, forced disappearances, and the systematic killing of anyone even remotely suspected of guerrilla sympathies, including civilians.
They underwent their own peace process in 2005, which gave rise to a separate transitional tribunal called ‘Justice and Peace’—the subject of my own undergraduate thesis, and the reason I first became drawn to these issues. In practice, the lines between the army and the paramilitaries were often blurred. They operated jointly, and in some cases paramilitaries would kidnap civilians and hand them over to military units to be registered as guerrillas killed in combat. In other cases, they killed actual guerrillas and delivered the bodies to the army for the same purpose. Either way, these still constitute false positives: they were not the result of lawful military operations, but of actions carried out by illegal armed groups. A paramilitary organization does not become legitimate simply because it targets the guerrilla. It remains outside the law. There is no such thing as justice by one’s own hand.
Ultimately, a perverse system of incentives was established. What I have never been able to grasp is how Uribe remains the head of his party, the Democratic Center, without ever assuming even a shred of political responsibility for what transpired. He is no longer in the Senate; he resigned after a criminal investigation was launched against him. In Colombia, sitting senators are investigated and prosecuted by the Supreme Court of Justice, so by resigning, he found a strategic exit: his case was transferred to the Attorney General’s Office, where the process has been bogged down for years. Yet, he continues to run for office and remains the undisputed leader and owner of his political movement.
It seems incredible to me that he is still considered a legitimate political actor. Even if we concede that he bears no direct criminal responsibility for the false positives —since proving he gave a direct order to kill civilians is nearly impossible, and he likely never did—there is a matter of basic political decency. How could this happen under your watch for eight years? You were one of the most powerful presidents in our history. This went on for two full terms, and you did nothing to truly confront it. There should be some sense of shame.
One of the first people to blow the whistle on these extrajudicial executions was Philip Alston, now a professor at NYU. He was the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. He was among the first to denounce what was happening in Colombia, and he once told us in class that he confronted Uribe about it directly in Bogotá. Yet, there is still no willingness to admit that a grave error occurred. Instead, they double down, claiming the JEP is merely a tool to prove that anyone accusing the Uribe government is a FARC sympathizer. To me, that narrative is entirely fictitious.
This is why I feel such a deep internal conflict. I understand the argument that someone like María Corina Machado has to dance with the devil and align with figures like Trump as the only hope to oust Maduro. But she has praised U.S. operations in the Caribbean—where they are shooting at boats—as legitimate protection against drug trafficking. Those are extrajudicial executions. They are killing people without any semblance of due process. Regardless of whether those targeted are criminals, they are being executed. I simply don’t understand how, after everything we have suffered in Colombia, people can still justify such actions.
How do we get to the creation of the tribunal?
In 2010, Juan Manuel Santos was elected president. He had served as Uribe’s Minister of Defense, and when Uribe was barred from seeking a third term, Santos ran and won under Uribe’s banner—a platform of total war against the FARC. However, in what many saw as a betrayal of that political project, Santos pivoted and announced: ‘I am going to negotiate.’ Following six months of secret talks in Cuba, the government announced the public phase of the peace process in 2011 from Oslo, Norway. It was a stunning moment; overnight, FARC commanders who had been hiding in the jungle appeared in Oslo alongside a government delegation to announce a formal dialogue table.
The negotiations moved to Havana, Cuba. What was supposed to take six months stretched into five years. By the 2014 election, Santos was no longer running on Uribe’s war platform, but on a platform of peace. Many leftist groups that had originally opposed him felt compelled to support his reelection, as the survival of the peace process depended on it. He won, and in 2015, he passed a constitutional reform to prohibit future presidential reelections—conveniently after securing his own, but a relief nonetheless, as it prevented a pro-Uribe candidate from taking power and dismantling the talks.
The final 2016 agreement is a massive, 350-page public policy document built on five pillars: rural reform to address land distribution; a strategy to combat the drug trade that had funded the FARC since the nineties; concrete measures for the transition from war to politics; and a central focus on victims through a system of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition.This system established a Truth Commission, a Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons, and the JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace).
What is the JEP and what are its tasks?
The JEP is a tribunal with the authority to judge war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all sides—the military, the police, and the FARC—up until the 2016 cutoff. It also allows for the voluntary submission of civilians. The core trade-off of the JEP is that perpetrators avoid prison if they provide the full truth, acknowledge their responsibility, and offer reparations to victims. These reparations are often symbolic or restorative rather than monetary; for instance, military personnel convicted of killing members of indigenous communities on the Caribbean coast was ordered to build a ‘harmonization center’ or cultural house for those communities.
However, putting this into practice has proven incredibly difficult. Since 2011, the Victims’ Law has already provided a framework for financial compensation, so the JEP focuses on restorative projects. But who pays for them? The convicted soldiers don’t have the money, and the JEP has no independent budget for construction. Implementation depends entirely on the coordination of state entities—the Ministries of Culture, Environment, or the Interior—but that coordination has been non-existent under both the previous and current administrations.
This leaves the JEP in a vacuum. There is a growing disconnection from reality; for example, the tribunal might order a housing program for victims, but such programs already exist under the Victims’ Law. The JEP shouldn’t be duplicating existing state functions. The real danger is that if these sentences remain merely ‘on paper’ due to a lack of resources, the International Criminal Court (ICC) could intervene. The ICC has currently suspended its case against Colombia because the JEP is active, but if they decide these restorative sanctions are ‘fictitious’—that we are letting war criminals off without real punishment—they could reopen their investigation. This would destroy the legal security promised to both soldiers and guerrillas and undermine the entire peace process. For now, the JEP has managed this risk by maintaining close ties with the ICC and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but the future remains uncertain.
What has worked so far, and what do the Colombian people think of this? How can Colombia get out of this situation?
It is a profound dilemma. For decades, the choice was between total war and allowing the guerrillas to strengthen during failed talks. With the FARC, however, the peace process finally worked because several factors aligned. Santos’s strategy was unique: ‘We continue the war while we negotiate.’ This meant that even as delegations met in Havana, the fighting continued on the ground. In fact, during the negotiations, the military killed the top commander of the FARC. His successor chose to stay at the table because the ground rule from the start was that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.’ This prevented the guerrillas from using the talks as a breather to regroup, as they had in the past.
Today, however, the Colombian public is deeply skeptical of peace processes. This is largely due to the perceived ineffectiveness of President Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ initiative over the last three and a half years. People are simply not open to the idea right now. To be fair, they weren’t particularly open to it when Santos started either; it took five years of grueling work to convince society of its importance. I remember being in high school when it began, and in my ignorance, I thought it was madness to negotiate with the FARC. I didn’t believe they had any real will for peace.
But my perspective changed as I understood the stark divide between the city and the countryside. In the cities, people often say, ‘No, we must crush them.’ But in the rural areas, the sentiment is often the opposite: ‘We need this to end.’ Rural families are the ones whose children are kidnapped and forcibly recruited, and they are the ones trapped in the middle. In many villages, the conflict is a daily nightmare of impossible choices. If a soldier asks a farmer for a glass of water and a guerrilla sees it, that farmer might be killed or displaced the next day. If the farmer gives food to a guerrilla, the army or paramilitaries might arrive and brand them a collaborator. That is how the war was actually lived.
While the FARC did carry out operations and bombings in cities like Bogotá, it was never comparable to the rural experience. This divide was laid bare in the 2016 plebiscite. When the first version of the agreement was put to a vote on October 2nd, the ‘No’ side won by a narrow margin. For those of us who supported the process, it was a scandal; I was devastated for days. It seemed unthinkable to vote ‘No’ to peace.
The defeat was partly due to the complexity of the 350-page document and a massive disinformation campaign by the opposition. They spread absurd claims, like the idea that the agreement contained ‘gender ideology’ or even a ‘homosexualizing ray.’ Yet, the statistics told the real story: the regions most affected by the violence voted overwhelmingly for ‘Yes,’ while the cities voted ‘No.’ The bitter irony was clear: those who didn’t live the conflict were the ones voting to continue it. Eventually, the government renegotiated the deal to address some of the ‘No’ camp’s concerns and, in a strategic maneuver, bypassed a second plebiscite by having Congress approve the final version in November 2016.
So is the peace agreement still an important document?
I believe that at some point it stops being important because of the FARC, because the FARC became an irrelevant political actor. But the peace agreement is designed in such a way that it seeks to address the roots of the conflict. So, what are the roots of the conflict? The land issue—land management, land distribution. We don’t have a clear registry of who owns the land in Colombia. That could help a lot.
There is also the issue of drugs and the issue of political participation—not necessarily the political participation of the FARC, but a broader political participation, because due to the conflict itself, leftist movements in Colombia were very overshadowed: every leftist movement was automatically associated with the guerrilla. So, several mechanisms were created to try to open more spaces for participation. The peace agreement includes an Opposition Law that was issued and has some guarantees. For example, things as simple as parties having to officially declare themselves as government, independent, or opposition, and those in opposition having a seat on the board of Congress. That is important because it helps define the order of debates and the projects they will discuss. These are small things, but I believe that in that sense, the peace agreement can have an impact far beyond whether the FARC, or the party they were reduced to, seems relevant or not.
But now there is a president who was in the guerrilla.
He was in a guerrilla, but not that guerrilla: he was in the M-19. The M-19, or 19th of April Movement, was originally born out of a claim of electoral fraud in the 1970 presidential elections. Unlike the rural, peasant-based FARC, the M-19 was largely an urban, nationalist, and intellectual movement that used ‘armed propaganda’ and spectacular symbolic acts to capture public attention. Their greatest achievement was not a military victory, but their successful transition to civilian life, which paved the way for the 1991 Constitution.
The M-19 demobilized in the early nineties, transitioned into a political party, and played a foundational role in the 1991 Constituent Assembly. It is a ‘better’ guerrilla compared to the FARC. While they were responsible for high-profile, bloody events—most notably the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice and the 1980 takeover of the Dominican Republic embassy—they were never defined by the same systematic, long-term atrocities, such as mass kidnappings or drug-funded territorial control, that characterized the FARC. Their political impact was so significant that, after laying down their arms, their party won nearly a third of the seats in the assembly tasked with rewriting the nation’s charter.
Finally, how do you see the future of the JEP and the peace agreement?
That is a difficult question. I believe the future will depend largely on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. We initially had high hopes for Petro; while he was never the most vocal defender of the 2016 peace agreement, he certainly wasn’t a critic of it. However, an issue of egos seems to have emerged. Because Petro wasn’t directly involved in the 2016 negotiations, he has never truly embraced the agreement as his own. Upon taking office, he downsized the specialized unit responsible for its implementation, failing to give it the priority it deserves.
It appears he wanted to prioritize his own ‘Total Peace’ initiative, perhaps to overshadow Santos’s legacy. In a particularly jarring move, he sent his first foreign minister to the UN Security Council to speak disparagingly of the JEP, claiming it was ineffective and suggesting that a new tribunal should be created. This caused a major rift at the UN, as the Security Council had been a staunch supporter of the JEP from the beginning. They couldn’t understand why the Colombian government itself was suddenly undermining the tribunal’s work without any real foundation.
Ultimately, the path forward is uncertain. If someone like Iván Cepeda—a senator from Petro’s party—were to become president, there might be renewed support for the 2016 process, as he was directly involved as a facilitator during the negotiations. But if the right-wing opposition wins the next election, I see the future of the peace agreement becoming very complicated
Because they don’t want peace?
I don’t know if they don’t want peace, but they don’t want the peace agreement. That’s a different thing.
