Forced internal displacement in Colombia is the history of a crime against humanity that has lasted for 75 years. Owing to the country’s multiple ongoing political and criminal conflicts, forced internal displacement continues to this day. Rural land workers, Indigenous communities, and Afro-Colombians are still being expelled from their lands, as different armed criminal groups vie for territorial control.
Since the 1950s, people from the countryside have arrived in Colombia’s big cities — including Bogota, Medellin, Cali, and Barranquilla — in an attempt to restart their lives away from violence.
Left-wing guerrillas, extreme right-wing paramilitary groups and state-sanctioned violence together generated an exodus into Colombia’s urban areas.
This resulted in a proliferation of new neighborhoods made of precarious, unsafe, and poor-quality self-built homes, in which new arrivals live in poverty and exclusion. The rise of the cocaine market in the 1970s and connected violence exacerbated this problem, which has now affected almost 10 million people.
Forced displacement in Colombia: seven decades of violence
According to Colombian government figures, as of Dec. 31, 2023, more than 8.5 million people had been victims of forced internal displacement since the internal conflict erupted in 1948. The assassination in Bogota of the Liberal leader and presidential candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, provoked an outbreak of violence which quickly spread to the countryside where the first left-wing guerrillas appeared.
Following a short-lived period of peace in the 1950s, during General Rojas Pinilla’s military dictatorship (1953-1957), the conflict entered a more acute phase in the 1960s. With Fidel Castro’s successful Cuban revolution echoing across the region, insurgent groups both grew and were expelled from politics by the major parties.
From 1964, two major Marxist-oriented guerrillas, FARC and ELN, appeared in Colombia. In response, extreme right-wing self-defense groups evolved, seeking to combat the Marxist guerrillas.
In the middle of this bloody confrontation, the state often acted more as an agent of war than as a guarantor of constitutional order, siding with paramilitary groups despite their violent and criminal methods.
The victims of this conflict, for the most part, were the inhabitants of the Colombian countryside. As they were dispossessed of their lands, rural property became concentrated in the hands of a small elite, in an unbalanced tenure structure that continues to this day.
While FARC was disbanded in 2016 following the country’s historic Havana Peace Accord with the Colombian State, the ELN guerrilla group is still active in rural areas of Colombia.
Arrival of displaced people transform Colombian cities
As violence continued, rural land workers, Indigenous people and Afro-descendants have all been affected by conflict between Colombia’s different armed groups. Owing to robberies, rapes, forced recruitment of minors, and constant threats of violence, more than 8.5 million Colombians have migrated to big cities. According to official government data, over 5 million people remain categorized as “displaced.”
The massive arrival of people to Colombia’s main cities from the 1960s onward was a clear consequence of violence, rather than the typical pattern of rural-urban migration which was taking place in many countries around the world at that time.
Bogota, the country’s capital, saw a huge influx of people, growing from 1.7 million inhabitants in 1964 to more than 2.8 million in 1973. By 1985, there were already more than 4.2 million people living in the city. Today, the city has a population of roughly 8 million.
Medellin also experienced rapid population growth. With only 772,000 inhabitants in 1964, it had grown to a city of 1,075,000 people just nine years later. By 1985, it had almost 1.5 million inhabitants. Today, it is Colombia’s second largest city and home to more than 2.7 million citizens.
Similar population surges took place in other large Colombian cities such as Cali, Barranquilla, and Bucaramanga. They largely welcomed displaced people from the interior of the country, a phenomenon that continues — albeit to a lesser extent — up until today.
Creation of sprawling urban ghettos
The forced displacement of entire communities, due to decades of sustained violence in Colombia’s countryside, generated a demographic imbalance in a predominantly rural society. Despite its massive urbanization, Colombia maintains a remarkable generator of agricultural products, unlike neighboring countries such as Venezuela, which has an economy practically monopolized by oil.
These displaced populations arrived with few belongings and a lack of knowledge and preparation for urban life. Crowded into the peripheries, slums and illegal settlements soon proliferated on the hillsides of Medellin and in the south of Bogota.
Rural sociological patterns, moreover, favored large families, leading to an ever-increasing growth of these populations. With a state incapable of absorbing these new urban demographic pockets, these populations became increasingly marginalized.
More displaced people arrived in big cities during the cruel decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when the violence in Colombia reached its peak, driven by drug trafficking among other factors. It is estimated that forced displacement in Colombia came to a climax in 2001, when 400,000 people were forcibly displaced over the course of one year, largely due to the activities of armed groups.
With an essentially young population unprepared for urban jobs, phenomena such as contract killings — practiced in the 1990s by, among others, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel — was an easy recourse. Hundreds of young people without options, with broken families and with no state support, were recruited from the lowest-income neighborhoods, such as Medellin’s Comuna 13, to serve as cheap executors of the narcos’ criminal objectives.
Current landscape of forced displacement in Colombia
After a difficult entry into the 21st century, violence in Colombia decreased considerably, owing in part to the successful peace processes of 2006 and 2016. The first, led by former President Alvaro Uribe, put an end to the large paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), while 10 years later, President Juan Manuel Santos achieved the demobilization of the FARC guerrillas.
Despite this, dissident groups emerged from both guerrilla entities. The so-called Gulf Clan or The Pachenca (paramilitaries), the FARC dissidents of EMC and the Second Marquetalia (Marxist guerrilla) continue their criminal activities, although they do not have the military strength of their parent organizations.
Today, the phenomenon of forced displacement continues to affect the Indigenous population of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, in northern Colombia, where Los Pachenca are active. In southwestern Colombia, in Nariño, Cauca, and Valle del Cauca departments, the dissident guerrillas of FARC and ELN — the longest-surviving insurgent group on the continent — continue to fight for the control of drug trafficking routes.
Inadequate government response
For years, Colombia’s different governments have tried to provide a state response suited to the gravity of the forced displacement situation in Colombia. However, they have never been able to resolve the violence within the country, which is the root cause that drives Colombians to leave their lands.
Programs for the return and relocation of displaced populations, the improvement of emergency humanitarian assistance, and the strengthening of the system for integrated displacement solutions have alleviated some of the consequences of forced migration, but still fall short.
The important Land Restitution Law of 2011 was the most complex and ambitious mechanism in the state’s efforts to achieve comprehensive reparations for victims of the conflict. While the legislation provided for the return of land to people who had been dispossessed, the complexity of each case, the lack of property deeds, and the destruction of such deeds made the process difficult.
This law complemented the landmark 2004 ruling of Colombia’s Constitutional Court that found that there was a serious, massive, and systematic violation of the rights of people internally displaced by armed conflict and violence, due to structural failures in the state’s institutional and budgetary response. This led the Court to declare the State of Unconstitutional Things (ECI) and to issue a series of orders to overcome this structural violation of rights.
For almost a century, Colombia has been facing the consequences of a lack of effective territorial control by the state. With a complex physical geography and a wide and permeable border with unstable Venezuela, which serves as a refuge for criminal groups, Colombia is still far from achieving its goal of ending forced displacement.
The Petro government’s approach
The government of President Gustavo Petro is trying to take a comprehensive approach to the problem of forced displacement in Colombia and to identify a solution by going back to the roots of the issue. His analysis suggests that the enormous inequality of Colombian society produces the phenomenon of violence and the subsequent displacement. Colombia has not lived in peace for practically a single year of its more than two centuries of existence as an independent state.
Petro argues that the repetition of colonial structures in the construction of the liberal state of Colombia, starting in 1819, revived the forms of exclusion that generate violence today, in the same way as they did during Spanish colonial rule.
The difficulties faced by Petro’s administration — the first leftist government in Colombian history — in the face of power structures that are reluctant to lose their historical privileges, curb the extent to which change can take place. What can be achieved in a four-year presidential term is also limited. As such, peace, and the end of forced internal displacement, remain elusive in Colombia.