The international press is having a collective meltdown over Colombia.
The narrative is everywhere, copy-pasted across mainstream newsrooms: Ivan Duque, the incoming right-wing president, is going to dismantle the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). They claim Colombia’s fragile transition out of a 52-year civil war with the FARC rebels is in "limbo." They paint a picture of a helpless judicial system about to be crushed under the boot of executive overreach.
It is a neat, dramatic story. It is also completely wrong.
The lazy consensus ignores two fundamental realities. First, the JEP was structurally broken from the day it was conceived, long before Duque won an election. Second, Colombia’s institutional architecture makes it virtually impossible for a president to simply wave a wand and disappear a constitutional court.
Stop mourning the "sabotage" of Colombia's peace process. The real crisis isn't that the new administration might kill the JEP. The crisis is that the JEP was designed as an ideological shield, not a legal framework, and it is suffocating under its own weight.
The Myth of Total Executive Control
The dominant media narrative treats Colombia like a banana republic where an incoming executive can unilaterally scrap a peace accord anchored in the constitution. Having worked within Latin American political risk analysis for over a decade, I have watched foreign observers consistently make this mistake. They mistake campaign rhetoric for legislative reality.
Let’s look at the mechanics. The JEP does not exist at the pleasure of the Casa de Nariño. It is backed by a 2017 Constitutional Court ruling that protects the core tenets of the FARC peace deal for three presidential terms. That means until 2030, the framework is legally locked in.
To dismantle the JEP, Duque would need to pass a constitutional reform through a deeply fractured Congress. He does not have a supermajority. Even his own coalition partners are skittish about throwing the country back into open warfare.
What we are witnessing is not an execution; it is a negotiation. Duque’s threats to alter the JEP—such as preventing former rebel commanders from holding political office before facing trial—are leveraging tactics, not an elimination strategy. The court is not in limbo. It is experiencing the predictable, messy friction of a constitutional democracy checking its executive branch.
The Legal Contradiction That Guarantees Gridlock
The fundamental flaw of the JEP is its attempt to marry transitional justice with political expediency. You cannot offer absolute political participation while pretending to enforce criminal accountability. The two concepts repel each other like magnets.
Consider the baseline mechanics of the tribunal:
- The Incentive: Rebels who confess to war crimes receive reduced, non-custodial sentences (like community service).
- The Reality: Rebel leaders like Rodrigo Londoño (Timochenko) were granted seats in Congress before making these confessions or serving a single day of restriction.
This design destroyed the court's legitimacy before the first gavel fell. In standard criminal law, benefits are back-loaded. You cooperate, you serve your modified time, and then you re-enter civil society. By front-loading the political rewards, the architecture removed the primary leverage the state held over the perpetrators.
The Pundits Ask: "How can Colombia achieve peace without these concessions?"
They are asking the wrong question. The question should be: "Can a justice system survive when its outcomes are perceived as inherently unjust by 80% of the population?"
When justice looks like a bureaucratic pass for atrocities, the public loses faith in the rule of law itself. That loss of faith is far more dangerous to Colombia’s long-term stability than a revised treaty.
The Hidden Victims of the Transitional Bureaucracy
Every institutional system creates its own industry. The JEP has created a massive, self-perpetuating legal bureaucracy that prioritizes procedural longevity over victim closure.
I have interviewed victims of FARC kidnappings in Antioquia who have watched millions of dollars flow into the creation of special judicial chambers, while their own restitution claims sit in bureaucratic purgatory. The JEP has dozens of magistrates, international observers, and human rights consultants. Yet, its output is glacial.
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| THE TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE DISCONNECT |
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| Bureaucratic Input: High Funding, 30+ Magistrates, Elite Global Backing |
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| Real-World Output: Zero Major Commanders Sentenced, Frozen Restitution |
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| Result: Institutional Paralysis & Public Cynicism |
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This is the downside of the contrarian view that we must acknowledge: correcting the JEP means slowing down the peace process even further. It means extending the uncertainty for victims. But continuing down the current path is a sunk-cost fallacy. Pouring more institutional credibility into a tribunal that cannot deliver meaningful justice just to appease international donors is a hollow victory.
The Double Standard on State Actors
The most glaring vulnerability of the court—and the one the competitor article completely ignores—is its treatment of the Colombian military.
The JEP was pitched as a comprehensive tribunal that would try both FARC rebels and state actors (like military officers involved in the "false positives" scandal). But by putting constitutional state forces on the same moral and legal plane as an illegal insurgent group, the framework alienated the very institutions required to enforce peace.
Duque’s push to create a separate, specialized chamber for military personnel isn't an attempt to shield war criminals; it is a necessary political correction to prevent an institutional mutiny within the armed forces. A military that feels betrayed by its own government will not effectively police the vacuum left by the FARC. Predictably, dissidences are already filling that void in departments like Guaviare and Tumaco.
Fix the Foundation or Watch It Collapse
The international community needs to stop lecturing Colombia about preserving an imperfect peace. The current framework is a recipe for low-level, permanent conflict disguised as stability.
If Colombia wants a peace that lasts, it has to stop treating the FARC peace accord as holy scripture. It is a political document. It can be amended, it can be optimized, and it must be subjected to the friction of democratic debate.
Strip the political immunity from unrepentant commanders. Separate the military trials from the rebel tribunals to restore institutional trust. Force the JEP to prioritize asset forfeiture from the FARC's billions in illegal mining and drug trafficking revenues to pay for actual victim reparations, rather than funding endless academic panels in Bogotá.
The danger to Colombia is not Ivan Duque. The danger is the stubborn refusal to admit that a flawed design cannot yield a just result. Stop defending a broken court just because its intentions were noble. Fix the machinery.
