Territorial Peace in Nariño, Colombia: An Opportunity for Grassroots Peacebuilders

Introduction

Nariño is one the departments most affected by Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict. Due to its strategic location and access to the Pacific Ocean, the department has the second-highest concentration of coca crops worldwide.[1] Additionally, its border with Ecuador contributes to human trafficking, forced disappearances, and smuggling. In 2023, Nariño had the second-highest number of human rights defender assassinations in Colombia and was heavily impacted by violence, including massacres, confinements, mass displacements, and recruitment of minors.[2]

In 2016, the Colombian government signed a Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP, the largest illegal armed group in the country at the time and one with a strong presence in Nariño. However, dissident factions of the FARC-EP, alongside other armed groups, remain active in the region and continue to engage in violent activity. But despite the recurrence of conflict, Colombia’s current political climate is ripe for local peacebuilders to actively and meaningfully contribute to territorial peace.

The Opportunity for Grassroots Peacebuilders

The election of Gustavo Petro in 2022 promised socio-political, economic, and cultural transformations for the country’s most vulnerable territories. Since taking power, Petro has made the pursuit of peace the cornerstone of these transformations; his ‘Total Peace’ policy aims to end all forms of organised violence through negotiations with the country’s largest armed groups. Ongoing peace processes include the National Liberation Army (ELN), Comuneros del Sur (CS), and two FARC-EP dissident factions.

In a paradigm shift from previous peace processes, where civil society participation was limited, ‘Total Peace’ has given Colombian civil society a central role in peacemaking and peacebuilding. The National Participation Committee, for instance, ensures diverse voices contribute to the peace process with the ELN through 80 representatives from all sectors of society.

Civil society is set to play a prominent role in the emerging process with CS. Previously an ELN faction in Nariño, CS established its own negotiation table with the government. The ´Territorial Peace Co-Construction Body for Nariño’, formed in July 2024, includes representatives from the CS, government, Church, international community, and grassroots social organisations. It seeks to disarm CS combatants, de-escalate violence, conduct mine action, ensure the return of displaced populations, search for missing persons, and improve indigenous peoples’ living conditions. In the long term, the process aims to rebuild livelihoods and facilitate a transition away from illicit economies in municipalities with CS presence. It is a territorial peace process that departs from conventional, national-level peacebuilding models.

Rodeemos el Diálogo

This favourable political context offers local peacebuilders in Nariño an unprecedented opportunity to make significant contributions to territorial peace from the grassroots. Our organisation, Rodeemos el Diálogo (ReD, Embrace Dialogue), can help bring this vision to life.

ReD is a transnational civil society organisation that promotes the power of dialogue to achieve a negotiated solution to the armed conflict. With presence in the UK and Colombia, ReD has established territorial teams in London, Bogotá, Valle del Cauca, Antioquia, and Nariño.

The Nariño team supports the 2016 Peace Agreement implementation, holds peace education workshops, conducts research, and promotes dialogic exercises between different societal sectors. ReD Nariño also participates in platforms that bring together grassroots peacebuilders, like the School of Memories, the Network of Allies for Truth, and local Peace Councils.

Leveraging this experience and expertise, ReD can play a vital role in empowering local peacebuilders during and after the process with the CS. Its positioning across local, regional, national, and international levels enables ReD to connect grassroots social organisations with state institutions at various levels. ReD can support local peacebuilders to become active agents of change in their territories, rather than passive observers of processes disconnected from their lived experience.

ReD’s participation in Peace Councils at the municipal, departmental, and national levels is an example of how the organisation connects and articulates the different levels of action. In these Councils, influence policies for peace, build bridges, and engage sectors of civil society that have traditionally remained distant from these issues. With the government's Total Peace initiative, parallel spaces are opening up that allow us to strengthen the autonomy of communities in Nariño to resolve their conflicts without resorting to violence.

Another example of ReD's potential to connect local voices are the 'Peace Breakfasts' that ReD organised in September in Pasto, the department’s largest city, and Samaniego, a conflict-affected rural municipality at the heart of the CS process. These breakfasts, funded by the British Embassy in Colombia, created an environment of trust and closeness where an expert on a given topic and a moderator opened transformative dialogues among participants. Our goal was to convene business leaders, religious leaders, and groups with different or opposing views on how to achieve territorial peace. Bringing together these diverse actors, we were able to build trust among individuals and sectors who have long been divided by conflicting worldviews.

Conclusion

As the emerging process with the FCS shows, the value of territorialising peace lies in changing the dominant paradigms of peacebuilding, which traditionally operate at the national level and are concentrated in capital cities. It suggests that a favourable political and institutional context can be created for the empowerment of local peacebuilders. ReD, with its experience and positioning at the local, national, and international levels, can help bridge and harmonise these different levels in the service of territorial peace. We hope that Nariño's experience will demonstrate that it is possible to design alternative peacebuilding models from the grassroots that respond to the realities and needs of the communities most affected by armed conflicts.

[1] https://es.mongabay.com/2023/09/area-sembrada-con-coca-en-colombia-aumenta-estudio/

[2]https://www.hchr.org.co/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/02-28-2024-Informe-Anual-Advance-Espanol-2023.pdf