Keywords

1 Introduction

The European Union has played an important role in Colombia in fields related to development and peacebuilding. Unlike the United States’ cooperation, European cooperation has been characterised by a less militarist approach to the armed conflict, which has been reflected in lines of intervention more directly linked to civil society; these include peacebuilding cooperation and realising victims’ rights. This chapter aims to identify and analyse the ways in which the European Union (hereinafter EU) has contributed to the realisation of victims’ rights, and the potentials and limiting factors of this cooperation.

This text is framed by critical studies in peacebuilding and political transitions. In this regard, we situate victims’ rights as an essential part of transitional justice, which is understood broadly here. Transitional justice includes a set of legal and extra-legal mechanisms for moving towards peace and full democracy, and for guaranteeing victims’ rights. At the same time, it is an invitation to think in terms of transition, change and peacebuilding, ideas that have no single meaning for society as a whole.

Understanding transitional justice broadly leads us to explore both EU approaches and programmes that have explicitly contributed to victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition; as well as others that are crucial to peacebuilding and political transition, since we consider that separating rights from processes, policies proposed and contexts, stops us from reaching an adequate understanding of the contributions and effects of the EU’s support in Colombia.

In order to achieve the goal proposed, we cover the most significant initiatives implemented by the EU since the turn of the millennium, which includes its major lines of support and working approaches. We then identify the contributions of its actions in the sphere of guaranteeing victims’ rights. In a third section, we analyse the limits to its action, and we end with some brief conclusions.

2 The European Union and Victims in Colombia

The EU’s cooperation in favour of victims and the realisation of their rights can be grouped into three significant stages. The first, between 2002 and 2010, is related to the Peace Laboratories and the first experience of applying transitional justice in Colombia focussing on the process of paramilitary demobilisation. It is important to point out that the background for this first stage was characterised by negotiations with the FARC-EP and explorations of dialogue with the ELN in the very late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; and, later, by a closure of the channels of negotiation and the entry into power of a right-wing government.

The second stage (2010–2016) coincided with a change of government and of approach to peace-related matters, with the election of Juan Manuel Santos as president. Unlike his predecessor, Santos recognised the importance of a negotiated outcome to the conflict; he continued with the application of transitional justice, granting the victims a central place is the discourse; and at the same time made progress in establishing a negotiating table with the FARC-EP, which concluded with the signing of the Havana Peace Agreement. The third stage (2016–2022) is related to the implementation of this Peace Agreement.

The EU’s cooperation work during the first two stages followed the outlines of the European Commission’s Country Strategy Paper, an instrument that was adopted in the early 2000s as part of a reform of the way the Commission managed foreign aid. Part of this involved the introduction of the bilateral EU-Colombia Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI), which ran practically up to the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016.

This document prioritises three sectors of intervention, according to which plans and programmes have been implemented covering broad areas of action of the EU’s international cooperation in Colombia. These sectors are:

  1. (a)

    Peace and stability, which includes sustainable human development as an alternative to the illegal drug economy, as well as the creation of spaces for peaceful coexistence, dialogue and socioeconomic development as a means to promote peace and resolve the armed conflict.

  2. (b)

    Rule of law, justice and human rights, which has sought to strengthen the rule of law by means of a more effective legal system, safeguarding human rights and promoting good governance. The programmes within this sector have been focussed on legal attention to victims of the armed conflict, prioritizing access to justice, uncovering truth and comprehensive reparation.

  3. (c)

    Competitiveness and trade, involving prioritising increases in the capacity of the country’s regions to join and form a part of the global economy; and supporting local economic development.

2.1 The Peace Laboratories and the Justice and Peace Law (2002–2010)

The Peace Laboratories, initiatives of Colombian origin, can be considered as the first programmes in which the EU developed its international cooperation policies with regard to resolving the armed conflict in Colombia. The EU linked up with a social mobilisation process that was begun in 1995 by different civil society actors in Magdalena Medio as part of the Peace and Development Programme (PDP). The EU became involved in the Laboratories within the structure and experience of the PDP in Magdalena Medio, in 2002, in the midst of peace negotiations between the ELN and the Pastrana government.

The Magdalena Medio Peace Laboratory (2002–2006) was considered to be a pilot experience, and it attracted considerable national and international attention. It was to be reproduced in other regions with similar scenarios: peripheral, rural areas that faced situations of extreme poverty, deprivation, violence, the existence of coca plantations and a weak State presence (Guerrero, 2016). In 2003 negotiations began between the European Commission, the Colombian government, the PDP and the World Bank with the goal of creating other Peace Laboratories. Between 2000 and 2010 the Laboratories were present in 11 states and 220 municipalities around the country.

From the beginning of the Peace Laboratories, the EU’s work focussed on three thematic lines: (a) Peace and human rights; (b) Governance; and, (c) Sustainable socioeconomic development (Baribbi & Arboleda, 2013). With regard to attention to those victims of the armed conflict that formed part of the Peace Laboratories, EU reports state that, through the Peace and human rights line, an increase in the effective realisation of rights of the victim population of the conflict and “vulnerable communities” was achieved through support for different economic and social initiatives (Baribbi & Arboleda, 2013).

Likewise, the EU accompanied victims and their organisations in individual and group reparation processes during the first decade of the century. The Peace Laboratories overlapped with the process of paramilitary demobilisation and the application of the Justice and Peace Law (2005). In this context, the Colombian State created measures for guaranteeing victims’ rights, focussing on processes of justice, uncovering the truth and reparation. The EU estimates that, through the Peace Laboratories, legal attention was provided to 7,200 victims with respect to their applications for reparation (Baribbi & Arboleda, 2013).

The EU’s work contributed to reinforcing the structure of various social organisations with the intention of promoting demands for human rights through the Laboratories. Finally, it is important to highlight the role of the Laboratories in strengthening the Ombuds Office for the protection of victim populations, as well the public policy recommendations resulting from the implementation of the Peace Laboratories. An example of this is Document CONPES 3726 of 2012, entitled Guidelines, Target Execution Plan, Budget and Monitoring Mechanism for the National Plan for Attention and Comprehensive Reparation for Victims; and the contribution to the formulation of the Victims and Land Restitution Law (Law 1448) of 2011 (Baribbi & Arboleda, 2013).

2.2 Extending the Application of Transitional Justice in Colombia (2012–2016)

When the Peace Laboratories were concluded, in 2009, based on the experiences and learnings extracted from these initiatives, other peacebuilding projects funded by the EU were undertaken, including the New Territories of Peace, and the Regional Development Peace and Stability plans (1 and 2). The programmes were carried out during the change of government from the Álvaro Uribe Vélez to the Juan Manuel Santos administration, reflecting the difference of approaches, given that there was a change from a government that emphasised a military response to the continuity of guerrilla organisations to one that prioritised the negotiation of the armed conflict and the realisation of victims’ rights. This last aim was to be tackled by means of the creation and implementation of Law 1448 (Victims and Land Restitution Law) and the peace process with the FARC-EP.

The New Territories of Peace programmes, implemented by the EU and the Colombian government, had a cross-cutting approach, and included the matters of human rights and innovation for peace. From 2011, they ran peacebuilding initiatives in four regions of the country strongly affected by the armed conflict: Canal del Dique and Zona Costera, Bajo Magdalena, Caquetá, and Guaviare (European Union, 2016). In order to implement this initiative, the EU linked up with 16 implementing partners, and it achieved a figure of 22,336 beneficiaries.

The lines of strategic intervention, following the path set by the Laboratories, were: socioeconomic inclusion, land and territories, strengthening local capabilities and knowledge management. With regard to attention to victims of the armed conflict, the strengthening local capabilities line involved the creation of spaces for consolidating dialogue and local governance. In this regard, a network comprising 39 victims’ organisation was created (European Union, 2016). All this was happening at a time when the victims’ demands were becoming recognised by the State and civil society, when organisational processes were much more consolidated, and the victims’ agendas and the application of transitional justice had become urgent matters.

The EU (2016) states that 1,190 victims were attended with legal and psychosocial guidance during the first six years of the project. Furthermore, strategies were designed for monitoring Territorial Action Plans for the attention of victims. Finally, according to an EU report (2016), in the area of training, the empowerment of six victims’ committees, with the participation of 85 community leaders, was achieved. It should be noted that victims’ committees were included in the design of Law 1448, and they were conceived as a mechanism by which victims could participate in making their rights a reality.

Within the context of this Law being passed, the European Union also offered technical assistance on the matter of support for reparation, in which a chapter was included about the restitution of land to people who had been dispossessed (El Espectador, 2011). The European Commissioner for Development at the time, Andris Piebalgs, stated that the EU’s focus “was on the victims and land restitution because this process is crucial for Colombia” (Reliefweb Colombia, 2011). This assistance was targeted at State institutions and had three elements: political dialogue, institutional reform and specific actions.

The reports on this collaboration indicate that, through the activities supported within the framework of land restitution, work was done on recognising the rights of victims of the Colombian conflict to land and territories (Ruiz & Cantero, 2015). The support granted to the Restitution Unit was useful in making progress in the “creation of legal instruments, methodologies and documents that support the facilitation and guarantees of the right to land restitution” (Ruiz & Cantero, 2015).

With respect to the Victims and Land Restitution Law, and with the support of the EU and Intermon Oxfam, the project “Offering Protection and Support to Victims and Those Reclaiming Land in the Fulfilment of the Rights Granted to them by Law 1448”, was implemented. The project funded organisations such as the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, the Corporación de Mujeres Ecofeministas-COMUNITAR, and the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP) and its Peace Programme, in order to carry out reports and research with regard to the application of the Law and land restitution. Additionally, other non-state actors were provided with backing via various projects.Footnote 1

Furthermore, from 2009, the European Commission, by means of a collaborative agreement with the Colombian government, set in motion what were called the Regional Development, Peace and Stability 1 and Regional Development, Peace and Stability 2 plans, with goals similar to those set for the Laboratories: “to strengthen conditions for development, peace and reconciliation, through processes that promote human, territorial, alternative and socioeconomic development”. While the first programme was located in Meta, Montes de María and Nariño, the second was located in Magdalena Medio, Oriente Antioqueño, Norte de Santander and Macizo Alto Patía (Government of Colombia, 2016).

The programmes were focussed on helping the displaced population though actions aimed at socioeconomic recovery, strengthening institutions and communities, and reconstructing the social fabric; and they supported monitoring the fulfilment of the recommendations of Ruling T025 by the Constitutional Court “for the attention of victims of forced displacement” (Government of Colombia, 2009).

Additionally, through the European Union’s Instrument for contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP), other victim support projects were carried out whose general goal was to help build the rule of law, aid in the fight against impunity, and the effective exercise of victims’ rights to truth, justice and reparation.Footnote 2 In this same context, publications were produced with the support of the EU, dealing with justice and the penal process; human rights violations and the penal code; and forced disappearance and genocide.

Within the framework of EU instruments other than the IcSP, in the 2010s, additional projects were carried out that dealt with crucial matters for the realisation of victims’ rights such as participation, democracy, peace, memory, impunity, torture and mental health.

2.3 Victims’ Rights in the Implementation of the Peace Agreement (2016–2022)

With the ratification of the Peace Agreement and the start of its implementation, the EU’s main efforts to support peacebuilding in Colombia have occurred through the work of the European Fund for Peace. The Fund was created in late 2016 when the EU was given the role of international accompanier to Point 1 of the Agreement (Integrated Rural Development) and Point 3 (End of the Conflict), on this last point, specifically with regard to the socioeconomic reincorporation of former FARC-EP members.

The Fund set up five Strategic Pillars in order to make its scope and work operational. One of these pillars, Reconciliation and Conflict Reduction, was the one that most explicitly channelled EU support for victims. The EU states that this pillar builds strategies for strengthening the social fabric in the communities most affected by the armed conflict, by means of backing for “social networks, movements and organisations for their effective participation in planning and decision-making spaces” (European Fund for Peace, 2021b).

By 2021, the Fund had backed 12 local and territorial participation processes, which received technical assistance and backing in defence of human rights and peacebuilding. The processes involved contributions by victims’ committees and municipal peace councils in the states of Guaviare, Nariño, Valle del Cauca, Cauca, Chocó, Meta, Caquetá and Putumayo; which were supported on matters related to communication and advocacy with the aim of generating coordination platforms at the local level (European Fund for Peace, 2021b).

The EU has also given its backing the Integrated System for Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-repetition (in Spanish, the SIVJRGNR), created by the Peace Agreement for the realisation of victims’ rights (point 5). This system seeks to consolidate “the universe of guarantees that must be granted to victims in order to achieve the satisfaction of their rights” (Mora, 2021), and comprises three authorities: the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (“Special Jurisdiction for Peace”), or JEP; the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Conveniencia y la No Repetición (“Truth, Coexistence and Non-repetition Commission”, or CEV; and the Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas en el Contexto y en Razón del Conflicto Armado (“Unit for the Search for Persons Assumed Disappeared in the Context and Because of the Armed Conflict”) or UBPD.

In 2019, the EU granted funding, political support and technical assistance to the SIVJRGNR and its institutions, with funds of over 7.7 million Euros (Ioannides, 2019) in order to back its mission and its work.Footnote 3 In early 2019, the EU donated 4.5 million Euros in order to “encourage the participation of victims in the [Truth] Commission, especially the participation of those located in the areas most affected by the conflict”. As Patricia Llombart, the then Ambassador and Head of the EU Delegation in Colombia, explained, the donation was aimed at backing territorial deployment and the participation of ethnic communities, as well as “spreading the word regarding the activities of the Truth Commission and its importance in the dignification of victims”. At a press conference, Llombart stated that the goal of the EU and its member states was to “support the active role of the victims and their centrality” (Truth Commission, 2019).

The EU also donated money (3.2 million Euros) to the UBPD. With regard to the JEP, this has received considerable political, technical and financial assistance from the EU. In July 2020, the two entities initiated the project Support for Boosting Judicial Decisions and Building the Legitimacy of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and 3.5 million Euros of funding was donated. According to the EU, the goal of this project was to boost skills in compiling, analysing and comparing information in order to satisfy victims’ needs (Special Jurisdiction for Peace, 2020).

It is important to consider the fact that all these donations occurred at a time in which the Duque government was making budgetary cuts that affected the implementation of the Agreement, particularly the Integrated System.Footnote 4 In this regard, the EU’s support for the implementation of the Peace Agreement has not been only economic, but also political, granting legitimacy not only to the Agreement, but also to the institutions that were created in order to realise victims’ rights. This has been ratified in the interviews we carried out with Truth Commission personnel.Footnote 5

One of the people with whom we spoke (2022) pointed, for example, to the EU’s political support for the CEV. “In political terms, the EU has been accompanying us publicly since we began. (…) The EU’s assistance is part of what we call structural supports, because they are really deep-rooted”. The CEV staff-member interviewed pointed out that the EU’s work with the SIVJRGNR has been aimed at the institution-building of public bodies for peace, which has allowed them to be present in the territory in order to work with the population and victims’ groups directly. The interviewee also said that the “EU [is pushing] the matter [of peace] in Colombia”.Footnote 6

In parallel with the Fund, Eurosocial+, a programme for cooperation between the European Union and Latin America that “contributes to reducing inequalities, improving levels of social cohesion and institution-building”, began work by giving support to the post-agreement in Colombia. In general, Eurosocial+ projects work with the goal of adapting the development plans of many of the country’s states to the needs of the victim and historically marginalised population. Eurosocial+ selected some pilot states (Bolívar, Tolima and Putumayo) and municipalities in order to back the methodological route for constructing the Programas de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial (“Development Programmes with a Territorial Focus” or PDET), a central part of the Peace Agreement (EUROsociAL+, 2021a). Since 2017, Eurosocial+ has accompanied victims of the armed conflict with the objective of achieving comprehensive inclusion in territorial planning in order to make progress in terms of reconciliation.

In this line, the programme accompanied the creation of the methodological proposal for articulating the Territorial Action Plans for the victims policy with the PDETs, with the aim of adapting the Agreement’s directives to the particular realities and needs of the victims of different Colombian territories. For 2021, “through victim support personnel”, six Territorial Plans for the improvement of sub-national policies for attending to victims of the armed conflict had been drawn up (EUROsociAL+, 2021b).

Eurosocial+ has likewise worked directly with the Attention to and Integrated Reparation of Victims Unit on the incorporation of the territorial focus into victim reparation policy (EUROsociAL+, 2021a). One of the organisations involved in this process is Narrar para Vivir, an organisation of women victims present in the Montes de María.

For over 20 years, and now, during the post-agreement period, EU work has been characterised by the three thematic pillars indicated above: human rights, institution-building and governance, and the sustainable socio-economic development of the regions affected by the armed conflict. These have linked up with the three sectors of intervention mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, which have structured the EU’s cooperation in Colombia since it began. Until now, attention to victims has mainly been covered within the human rights pillar, although there is also evidence that the EU works with victims’ organisation through the other lines of action.

3 Contributions by EU Cooperation to Realising the Rights of Victims in Colombia

The EU has made various contributions to the realisation of victims’ rights. These contributions can be classified as follows: (a) Defence of life; (b) Promotion of the peaceful resolution of conflicts and support for a negotiated outcome to the armed conflict; (c) Peacebuilding; (d) Positioning of human rights as a right; (e) Constructing active citizenship; (f) State building; and (g) Promotion and guarantee of victims’ rights. It has done this to different degrees through the three thematic pillars indicated above. Although these contributions are significant, the cooperation that the EU has offered so far has had its limits, including ones of a structural nature. Below, we look at these contributions, and, in the following section, the limits, by means of an assessment of its peacebuilding endeavours in Colombia.

As has already been mentioned, the human rights thematic pillar has been the EU’s way into Colombia. Since 2002 this has been one of the main focusses of its work. This is visible in the first Peace Laboratories, through which the EU sought to contribute, as noted by Barreto (2016), to the protection of life; to do this it supported social processes in defence and protection of the most vulnerable civil population. The launch of the human rights pillar was, at that time, intimately related to efforts to reduce attacks on civilians and on social, private and/or productive spaces (Guerrero, 2016). In this context, work was done on preventing forced displacement, on reducing villagers’ vulnerability, and on passing on to them instruments of civil resistance (Barreto, 2016).

The view of human rights in the programmes funded by the EU meant that, from the beginning, a contribution to the empowerment of the communities affected by the armed conflict was included, which resulted in the construction of active citizenship. The human rights-related work in the Peace Laboratories and in the New Territories of Peace focussed on raising awareness in communities with regard to human rights as rights. These have been understood by the EU as an instrument that the population should appropriate and demand, as a direct way to rebuild a fragmented social fabric and to recover collective symbols of solidarity and dignity (Barreto, 2016).

Through the human rights pillar, work was done on dynamics of dialogue and negotiation in order to foster social cohesion and contribute to building active citizenship in the management of problems resulting from the armed conflict (Guerrero, 2016). This emphasis on rights as contributing to building active citizenship was an essential part of the EU’s focus during the peace negotiations with the FARC-EP and the stage of implementing the Agreement with regard to victims’ rights.

Human rights have kept a position as a transversal element in all the interventions funded by the EU, although depending on the context, in terms of place and time, this has covered different actions. During the running of the Peace Laboratories it is possible to see that the defence of human rights focussed on efforts to reduce attacks on civilians and their social, private and/or production facilities; and in the context of the 2010s this emphasis evolved and expanded to also cover the raising of awareness of these effective rights among communities (Guerrero, 2016). Within the framework of the Peace Agreement and its implementation, the EU became renowned for the efforts it made to contribute to realising demands for truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition; that is to say, having their human rights recognized as rights by the victims, the State and society as a whole.

What is more, the EU has performed a role as an accompanier and, sometimes, as a mediator and facilitator of the efforts at peaceful conflict resolution in the country, at the local and national scales. As Dorly Castañeda (2017) says, the EU’s understanding of human rights is integrated into the Human Security perspective proposed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the end of the 1990s. This view of security has favoured a negotiated outcome to the armed conflict, which has been of great importance for the country given that, instead of contributing to the consolidation of military strategy and war as a form of politics, as other approaches have done, it has enabled a de-escalation of the armed conflict and an opening of the possibility of dialogues and local, regional and national agreements. This viewpoint is evidenced by the EU’s support for the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP and for the Agreement’s implementation.

The EU has also contributed to encouraging active citizenship in the country through the institution-building and governance pillar. With respect to the implementation of the Peace Laboratories, for example, the EU understood governance as boosting civil society, with a view to empowering important social actors in order to create active political subjects. As Barreto (2016: 216) explains, its actions were focussed on “increasing democratic governance by means of strengthening expressions of civil society and through the transformation of institutions at local and regional levels”. This process of building active citizenship certainly was not the exclusive responsibility of the EU, and has been coordinated with local and national initiatives, which were also favoured by discussion in the country about democracy during the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, and by the new views on the matter, globally speaking, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The institution-building and governance pillar was set up as a direct way to have an impact on the matter of political exclusion and the fragility of the State in different regions around the country, which was a way of undermining one of the causes of the armed conflict in Colombia (Barreto, 2016). This view of the Colombian State has stayed with the EU’s actions since the Peace Laboratories and in its efforts to contribute to the realisation of victims’ rights. One example of this is the support for Law 1448 on Victims and Land Restitution and the building of institutions created within the framework of the Peace Agreement that were directly responsible for guaranteeing victims’ rights, for example the CEV, the JEP and the UBPD.

With this emphasis, the EU has, to a certain extent, contributed to building the State by means of various processes and actions. As Guerrero (2016) has pointed out, the EU understands institution-building and governance as the implementation of models of representative democracy, and so it has sought to close the gap between public institutions and citizens. Apart from contributing to State building, this has also contributed to constructing active citizenship.

The State building goal has grown in importance over the years in the work of the EU. With the New Territories of Peace, a commitment was made to relations between communities and public institutions in order to foster a “process of legitimising the public” (Madridejos & Coy, 2018). Since 2016, the EU, as an international accompanier of the Agreement’s implementation, has conceived institution-building as a legitimizing presence of the State throughout Colombian territory. The European Fund for Peace defends “expanding State coverage (…) as one of the key elements in terms of consolidating peace” (European Fund for Peace, 2021a).

Since the signing of the Agreement, it has been widely noted that State building has become a greater priority for the EU. The Fund’s interventions favour “institution-building in each region in order that the State’s presence play its role in coordinating the territory”. The EU has understood governance as the construction of a legitimate authority in the country (Guerrero, 2016); while “it comprehends institution-building as accountability, in the sense of the public good and legality, which allows a legitimate authority and democratic representation” (Barreto, 2016: 249). As will be argued below, these concerns for democracy and State building are in harmony with the views of peace and political transition that the EU supports, and with the historical contexts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Some of the contributions pointed out so far indirectly assist the realisation of victims’ rights, as they impact on building citizenship. More explicitly, during the first application of transitional justice in Colombia, which focussed on paramilitary demobilisation and the implementation of the Justice and Peace Law (2005), and later on throughout the 2010s, the EU undertook more direct actions explicitly linked to promoting and guaranteeing victims’ rights. This has included the prevention of forced displacement, strengthening organisational processes with regard to victims and human rights, as well as the consolidation of State institutions and laws and mechanisms directly responsible for the rights of this population, such as the Ombuds Office, the Public Prosecution, Law 1448 and the SIVJRGNR.

It is worth pointing out, for example, that with the passing of Law 1448 on Victims and Land Restitution, in 2011, the European Commission’s budget item with regard to this line of action focussed on empowering both the ordinary and transitional justice systems in order to concentrate on improving institutions and public policy with respect to victims. The EU was looking for more coordinated work between State institutions and civil society in order to make progress on resolving problems such as impunity and political corruption.

All this has constituted political backing from the EU for peace, and has been a help in peacebuilding. Its firm and open support for the Havana negotiation process and the implementation of the Peace Agreement have been vital in a context in which the negotiation, signing and implementation have had serious opponents. The support, as was briefly pointed out, has not only been in economic terms, but also in technical and political dimensions. As on other occasions, with the recent peace process, the EU has played an important role in pressuring the Colombian State, politically speaking. This has served to bring greater attention to civil society’s unheeded demands and needs.

4 Limits to the EU’s International Cooperation in Terms of Realising Victims’ Rights

The contributions of the EU’s cooperation with respect to the realisation of victims’ rights and to peacebuilding set out already in this chapter have also been accompanied by major limitations. One of these is related to the above-mentioned work on political pressure. This is possible due to the current world order in which Colombia occupies a subordinate place; and at the same time is limited by the conditions imposed by diplomacy in contemporary nation-states, and by the economic and political interests of the EU.

This limited political pressure can be seen, for example, in the implementation stage of the Peace Agreement. As some EU delegates in Colombia have noted, they have been obliged to reduce their critical interventions regarding the guarantee of citizens’ rights and a faster and/or more correct implementation of the Peace Agreement due to direct pressure by the then president, Iván Duque. Furthermore, faced with “diplomatic political pressure” the civil society organisations interviewed called on the EU to break its neutrality and take a clear position with respect to the human rights violations and killings of social leaders in Colombia. This is how a human rights defender interviewed in 2022 put it: “the constant decision to be seen in a position of neutrality, being such an important political subject as the EU is, limits the scope of its support considerably.”Footnote 7

Castañeda (2017) points out that the EU has been “politically timid” on many occasions, showing passivity with regard to the State and the different Colombian governments. The same author mentions that the EU, in general, has prioritised smooth diplomatic relations with the Colombian government over political support for civil society (2017). This is also related to the EU’s commercial interests in Colombia.

A second limiting factor is associated with the distribution of the financial resources of cooperation. A large proportion has been devoted to the building of state institutions, which do not always respond to victims’ needs and to the parameters that they have with regard to realising their rights. Another significant share of resources reaches mainly national organisations which manage the funds and set in motion projects for victims.

Although the work they do is very important, and many of these victims’ organisations are rigorous in their work and recognise victims as subjects of rights and political subjects, victims’ organisations have not been strengthened by the experience of resource allocation. Although there has been a recognition of victims as citizens and political subjects, the vertical way in which cooperation has been distributed continues to conceive victims as beneficiaries. In addition, approaches created by national organisations and international cooperation, which have sometimes been very far from resolving victims’ needs appropriately, are applied.

This is risky in the sense that it can contribute to consolidating a reified identity of victimhood, to making these victims dependent on cooperation and creating citizens who, although active, are not critical. Additionally, this distribution of cooperation reinforces power relations among social organisations, while also reproducing the centralism that has so strongly characterised Colombia, given that the majority of the organisations that administer and benefit financially from this administration of resources and projects are from Bogota, as we were able to see when carrying out this study.

Part of building the organisational processes of victims includes the possibility of possessing financial autonomy. This can contribute to strengthening the agency of victims, their character as active and critical citizens and to a reduction in the conditions of economic marginalization that many of these subjects live in. With the allocation of resources, organisations, NGOs and State institutions that receive these funds not only finance actions that contribute to realising victims’ rights and to their well-being, but they also benefit, funding themselves. Part of the weakness of victims’ organisational processes is related to the lack of economic resources for the funding of their activities and in order to guarantee dignified living conditions for their members.

This idea was corroborated by an interviewee who forms a part of a national victims’ organisation, and who considers that the current form of distributing cooperation, focussing on consolidated bodies and organisations, “is not conducive to building the civil society [so fundamental to peacebuilding] … in the areas most affected by the conflict … [C]ooperation is not reaching those that it should reach”.Footnote 8

The EU itself admits that this kind of financial distribution is a limiting factor for the effectiveness of its support for social projects implemented in the context of the peace process in the Colombian territories. In an interview, a member of the Human Rights area of the EU’s Delegation to Colombia stated that these dynamics are part of the institution’s working model: “we are demanding when we run a project: we require capacity, prior knowledge, certain financial guarantees, etc. This means that we often work with organisations that are used to receiving this kind of cooperation. Perhaps we sidestep organisations that are not so good at formulating proposals, but which do have good ideas, and which we do not reach because they are not sufficiently trained in formulating good quality projects (…) This is a problem that maybe we should look into.”Footnote 9 Footnote 10

This weakness with regard to the way resources are distributed is not only related to the place of victims’ organisations in different actions and projects, but also to the dependence that international cooperation generates in them and in other organisations that receive EU support. This dependence is not limited only to financial reliance, but, in a situation that has been analysed by feminist intellectuals, is also a technical and political dependence, as well as a loss of autonomy that can even be characterised as a new form of colonialism (Cumes, 2014). Barreto (2016) sees this as a dependence on the policies of foreign bodies; while Castañeda (2017) indicates that cooperation fosters an environment of competitiveness and fragmentation of the organised social fabric, which, in turn, contributes to atomising social processes, making them unsustainable as soon as funding ends. Furthermore, some of these funding streams run the risk of being short-term solutions that do little to help in eradicating the structural causes that caused the armed conflict, something that would serve to realise the right to non-repetition.

In this regard, an academic who worked as a coordinator in the Barrancabermeja area on the first Magdalena Medio Peace Laboratories, interviewed for this study, discussed the changes that the EU’s action brought to local dynamics and power relations. “The [EU’s] bureaucracy changed the axes of power. The commitment of these development strategies was empowerment, that is to say, to put the capacity for agency onto local and social actors, onto peasants, women, leaders, youth… that they would have the capacity to decide and choose from among certain options … the EU bypassed all of that. It changed the axis of power and, then, the power of decision-making lay in their procedures.”Footnote 11

This last sentence spoken by the interviewee brings us to a third factor that has limited EU cooperation. This is related to the introduction of a cooperation bureaucracy that has ended up prioritizing technical aspects and neglecting the political side. Staff from Colombian civil society organisations that are central with respect to carrying out peacebuilding and victims’ rights programmes funded by the EU shared this view in the interviews run for this chapter.

One researcher with the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP), for example, argued that high administrative and bureaucratic demands continue to be an essential part of the selection processes for receiving EU funding.Footnote 12 The interviewee pointed out that these demands eventually displace the political goals of the organisations, putting them in second place, due to the obligation to focus more on the process’s results. This had already occurred with the Peace Laboratories, where the correct allocation of financial resources acquired a greater level of importance than the project’s main activities and its goals in terms of peace and development (Castañeda, 2014: 169). This limiting factor reproduces a problem that we have already mentioned and which is related to the imposition of agendas, and even to perspectives on well-being and paths to follow.

From the beginning, the EU understood the governance pillar as a concern for building civil society, with a view to empowering important social actors so they would create active political subjects. For over 20 years, the EU has said that it has accompanied and empowered the presence of local civil actors for their participation in public life, the defence of their rights and the inclusion of these agents in all areas of public decision-making. However, this work of advocacy and mediation is not always assessed in the most positive terms.

Some of those interviewed shared the perception that the EU has a very State-centred view of democracy and advocacy: “the actor that it addresses is the State: if you achieve changes, you do so as part of the institutional network. (…) Advocacy is looking up from below, and never, or almost never done horizontally. What has happened to this work of analysing our own processes, or the internal empowerment of organisations and their own mandates?”.Footnote 13

People from civil society interviewed bemoaned the direction taken by the focus of the EU’s international cooperation for development in Colombia, feeling that this focus moved towards State actors: “cooperation [in] the 90s was largely focussed on civil society. Now, particularly after the Agreement reached between the Santos government and the FARC-EP, we feel that the Colombian State is the actor that attracts the cooperation funding. This matter is often complicated, because resources are becoming scarcer and organisations have to adapt more and more to the interests of international cooperation.”Footnote 14

European assistance and funding have traditionally brought with them a series of administrative procedures and regulations that have often distorted and fragmented the participation processes of civil society (Castañeda, 2014). In this regard, authors such as Barreto (2016) make themselves very clear when they state that the EU’s participation put in serious danger different social processes when it introduced an inappropriate and burdensome technical and bureaucratic methodology. This not only shows an obvious incoherence between the goal of the EU, to combat the socio-political exclusion of the population, and the excluding reality of its technical and financial processes; it is also an indication of the Western and liberal perspective of the density of the European body of regulations with parameters imposed regarding efficiency, effectiveness, measurement of impacts, etc. In this regard, Castañeda (2014: 192) considers that the “quality standards” proposed by the EU “reflect the European understanding of what the correct use of public resources is and… a liberal doctrine with respect to the economic and the political”.

A fourth limiting factor to the EU’s actions is related to coherence between goals and actions. Critical readings of its work have considered that, although the EU has privileged political negotiation and the social participation of grassroots organisations, as well as the promotion and protection of human rights and attention to victims, its programmes “at all times lacked the coherence needed to support such ideas” (Guerrero, 2016). It has even been considered by civil society and academic actors that, for a time, the EU departed completely from political support of the territory; and that on some occasions did not react publicly in cases of paramilitary violence and serious violations of the human rights of people on the programmes it was behind, generating, within some initiatives, victim creation processes (Barreto, 2016, 460).

Furthermore, related with this last limiting factor, the emphasis on forms, sometimes at the expense of content, has made it impossible to fulfil the goals set by the EU itself. In this regard, Barreto (2016) analyses how the EU’s participation in the Peace Laboratories had “harmful effects on the social fabric and on grassroots mobilisation” by making organisations “think about cooperation resources, projects and quantifiable elements, and the activity and timing parameters defined by the EU, instead of about the real social processes”. This has other effects, including, it is worth pointing out, the construction of liberal subjectivities that are eventually problematic in contexts where this is not the logic that governs the organisation of life and society.

A fifth limiting factor, linked to the previously-mentioned ones, is related to favouring universal resolutions, such as transitional justice, which ultimately limits the national and local political imagination to the politics of global governance. Although transitional justice is already a standardised form of transition towards peace, of realising victims’ rights and of peacebuilding, serious criticism is faced regarding the impossibilities of fulfilling what has been promised. This fifth limiting factor leads us to what we consider to be the most serious of them all, and the most difficult to confront, since this would involve structural transformations of cooperation and the global political system. The next section covers these kinds of limiting factors.

4.1 Structural Limits

International cooperation has attained its structure in a world with serious social, political, economic and cultural inequalities. These are directly related to the modern geopolitical order, a result of long-term relationships and processes, such as the colonial experience. This global order orients and conditions the EU’s cooperation in countries such as Colombia, while also giving rise to structural limits to the EU’s cooperation, such as a Eurocentrism and the coloniality of its power. These are expressed, among other ways, in political and economic interests. The political interests are related to what kind of society is sought and the routes by which to achieve it; and the second with economic policies that favour the countries of the global North.

As decolonial theorists have pointed out, the end of colonialism did not bring the end of colonial relations between the Americas and Europe. These relations were sustained through the coloniality of power, a central element in the global pattern of capitalist power and in the modern/colonial world system that has been constituted through the encounter of the two worlds and which has lasted after the independence processes (Quijano, 2007).

In the twentieth century, the discourses of development, peace and transitional justice became expressions of this global pattern of power. These discourses, which are also global governance mechanisms, are a means by which the power of the dominant West is deployed, through benevolence and the imposition of a specific model of society. This model of society has various cornerstones, including the nation-State, liberal democracy and capitalism. The discourses of global governance demand, generally diplomatically, although violence has also been employed, the consolidation of societies in which these three cornerstones replicate the way in which the “first world” is organised.

The imposition and consolidation of these three cornerstones occurs independently of whether the societies in which development projects or peacebuilding processes are implemented seek to do so in the way proposed; whether the policies and actions that have gradually become models and recipes have worked in other contexts; or whether these cornerstones and their replicas are responsible for the problems that the societies which receive the cooperation have experienced.

In this way, the discourses of development, peace and transitional justice reproduce a linear view of time that contributes to the invisibilization and elimination of plurality. On this path, the diversity of proposals on the economy, conflict resolution, the organisation of society, views of the world, and even notions of peace, run the risk of becoming lost, concealed or marginalised, losing the potency they have to build scenarios of well-being that are more in accordance with those desired by the societies in which the problems have emerged that are being worked on in order to find solutions.

This is, in turn, accompanied by a masking of the deep reasons behind armed conflicts or what are incorrectly called “states of exception”, which serves to hide the responsibility of the global North in the creation of these very problems (Gómez, 2016). Although the EU recognises that political exclusion and social inequalities are structural causes of the armed conflict in Colombia, its perspective does not involve a questioning of the role of capitalism in creating these inequalities, or the repercussions of colonialism in the structuring of nation-States of former colonies, or the problems that have been created by the imposition of a Western model of civilisation, or the limits of transitional justice and the dominant peacebuilding models.

As noted in previous sections, the EU’s cooperation explicitly favours consolidation of the State and the introduction of liberal democracy, and is aimed at fostering peacebuilding and the application of transitional justice. Additionally, it structures peace and transition processes according to its lines of work, with the consolidation of a capitalist economic model. This is something that characterises the liberal peace and transitional justice models, as described by Paris (2010), and Chesterman et al. (2005).

These models have serious difficulties when it comes to attending to the structural problems generated by armed conflicts and socio-political violence, and at the same time they impose a very specific roadmap for transformation, one that is kept within the limits of liberal thinking. Change, for example, is seen as possible only through the State, public policies and the exercise of representative democracy, which consolidates State-centric practices that leave out other visions of peace and transformation, such as those that emerge in local contexts or from social movements.

For all the above reasons, EU cooperation should bring to bear a more critical view of the peace and transitional justice that it promotes. This is even more necessary because in different contexts of application of both, there is evidence that the promises for change that are trumpeted meet serious difficulties in practice when the formulas used up until now are employed. This is to the direct detriment of the victims’ rights, including, particularly, the right of non-repetition.

Although the EU’s call to consolidate the State makes sense in the contemporary world, this has not been done correctly in the Colombian case. Although the State has been called to account for its responsibility in the violation of human rights in the different applications of transitional justice that have taken place in the country, the structural changes that this way of organising society requires have not been tackled seriously. An example of this is the increase of State violence under the Uribe Vélez and Iván Duque governments.Footnote 15

The EU’s effort to consolidate active citizenship and democratic societies has acted, to a certain extent, to strengthen organisational processes, contribute to realising victims’ rights by means of their enforceability, and in some contexts improve the relationship between the State and civil society. However, the representative democracy that is defended via its programmes continues to be restrictive both in terms of its vision of change and the possible routes for achieving it, and in terms of what the true essence of democracy is. In Colombia, since the 1990s, there have been a growing number of participatory democracy scenarios; however, this continues to be limited since citizens have no real impact on decision-making. Political exclusion can be maintained through exercises in representative democracy that do not question the different logics of exclusion that can coexist with liberal democracy.

Another problematic aspect of the EU’s actions is the insistence on linking peace and human rights with development. This has been done through the lines of action prioritised by the EU and in the different programmes that it has set up. Through the Peace Laboratories, the socioeconomic development line has been based on the integration of “unprotected groups and poor communities, by allowing them to enter and take advantage of the market’s potential” (Barreto, 2016).

Although it is hardly recognised, both war and peace have specific political economies, as do transitional justice and international cooperation, something that makes the EU’s action even more complex in the contexts being discussed here. The application of transitional justice and peace processes since the 1980s in Latin America has been accompanied by the implementation of neoliberalism (Chile), neo-extractivism (Guatemala and Peru) and a reduction of the State in terms of its social function.

During the Peace Laboratories, the productive projects supported by the EU, such as rubber, cocoa and particularly the African palm tree, have been surrounded by controversy (Barreto, 2016). Critical voices state that villagers and peasants were encouraged to give up their forms of producing traditional crops in order to commit them to agricultural products that had subsidies and tariff preferences, prioritizing monoculture produce (Guerrero, 2016).

Furthermore, EU projects have sought to introduce traditional economies into the market in order to make them profitable and competitive, and enable producing families to overcome subsistence economies (Madridejos & Coy, 2018). This is problematic because it imposes economic logics other than those of the diverse economies (subsistence versus economic growth; reciprocity and solidarity versus competition; redistribution versus accumulation) that have existed for decades and even centuries in the country.

Although the EU understands poverty as one of the structural causes of the armed conflict and in this regard it promotes economic trends focussing on job creation and economic alternatives (Barreto, 2016), it does not ask the question of where poverty comes from. This is something that, in Latin America, is strongly related to colonialism and capitalism, but instead of interrogating this matter, much orientation in terms of EU development is aimed at consolidating the existing liberal economic logic.

A serious problem with regard to the EU’s action is that it has hardly analysed the role of development and of the economic model in the generation of violence. It would be important, then, to think more carefully about what the most useful development policies would be with regard to an effective construction of peace, in order to contribute to the eradication of the structural causes of violence and to guarantee victims’ rights. Precisely one of the most serious limiting factors of the dominant views of peace and transitional justice is related to its difficulties in identifying and transforming the many roots of armed conflicts and violence.

To a certain extent, this has been changing in recent years, with a turn, in the work of the EU, towards more Latin American and local perspectives on development. An example of this is the joint work of the Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios del Desarrollo (CIDER) and the Asociación de Agencias de Desarrollo Económico Local (ADELCO), funded by the EU. In a publication that has come from this collaboration (Montero, 2021), while it is recognised that local economic development (LED) was designed in the global North, this approach is theoretically reworked; guidelines for making it a reality are presented; the relationship between illegal economies and LED in a post-conflict context is analysed (Vargas et al., 2021); and perspectives regarding well-being that are more linked to the historical and cultural traditions of Colombia are proposed (Gómez & Pineda, 2021).

5 Conclusions

The EU has contributed to the realisation of victims’ rights in different ways during three different periods in Colombia: Peace Laboratories and the implementation of the Justice and Peace Law (2002–2010); the Santos government and the peace process (2010–2016); and the implementation of the Agreement (2016–2022). During these three periods, the main contributions have included: (a) Defence of life; (b) Promotion of the peaceful resolution of conflicts and support for a negotiated outcome to the armed conflict; (c) Peacebuilding; (d) Positioning of human rights as a right; (e) Building of active citizenship; (f) State building; and (g) Promotion and guarantee of victims’ rights.

The EU’s cooperation has also faced significant limits in terms of realising victims’ rights. These are related to a limited political pressure at crucial moments; a distribution of the resources for funding cooperation that has not been channelled directly at victims’ organisations and that has been very centralised, and of which a large proportion has been directed at the Colombian State; the replication of a cooperation bureaucracy that neglects political as well as social processes; the distances between some of the goals proposed by the EU and the actions taken and results achieved; and the favouring of universal solutions for promoting peace and transitional justice that lack more particular and local viewpoints.

This last limitation is directly related to what we call, in the text, structural limits to the EU’s cooperation and which are related to Eurocentrism and the coloniality of power, and which are also expressed in political and economic interests. These are linked to the realisation of a model of society that reproduces the Western civilisation model and which, economically speaking, favours the countries of the global North in the development processes proposed and in commercial exchanges.

The EU supports a civil peace, with social participation and that tackles local needs, and it incorporates into its action some of the premises of critical peace studies. However, the way that this peace is being built is of a liberal kind, and this is reflected in its actions and in the three pillars that have guided its activity in Colombia. Following the reflections of Barreto (2016) and Castañeda (2017), the model proposed by the EU is one of “intermediate peace”; a proposal that falls between “peace as the mere absence of violence and peace as social justice”. The liberal bias carries within it the legitimisation of values such as the market economy, representative democracy and consolidation of the State; insufficient to guarantee the right of victims to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition.

The EU needs to revise the approaches to peace and transitional justice that it is promoting in Colombia. One way of consolidating the realisation of victims’ rights comprehensively is to implement peacebuilding processes that carry national, regional and local perspectives within them. Another is to implement transitional justice from below, which, in a manner closer to the victims’ demands, makes progress in terms of the materialisation of the rights to truth, justice and reparations, and in structural changes able to eliminate the conditions that created the armed conflict and socio-political violence.

To do this, it is crucial to rethink the pillars of State building, representative democracy and economic development, in order to encourage and give space to those other ways of organising society that are already present in Colombia and which foster the sustainability of life. It is also necessary to think and implement a much more horizontal cooperation between the EU and countries such as Colombia, which allow for a dismantling of ethnocentrism and the coloniality of power.