COUNTRY:  COLOMBIA.

The sixth monitoring report on Colombia’s Truth Commission recommendations — finding that at the current rate of implementation, the country would take 62 years to provide full compensation to its 10 million registered conflict victims — is a measurement of institutional failure whose implications extend well beyond Colombia’s specific transitional justice context into the broader global debate about what reparations actually require to be meaningful rather than declaratory. A reparations framework that exists in law and is celebrated in international transitional justice discourse but whose implementation pace would extend the waiting time for justice to 62 years is not a reparations programme in any functional sense; it is a deferral mechanism whose effect is to acknowledge the obligation while ensuring it is never fully met. The victims registering today would be in their eighties or nineties — if still alive — before the framework’s promises were fulfilled at current pace.

The specific obstacles the report identifies — delayed land restitution, constrained access to justice, housing shortfalls, and inadequate victim support — are not incidental implementation challenges but structural reflections of the political and economic constraints that determine how seriously states pursue reparatory obligations when doing so requires redistributing resources and confronting the interests of those who benefited from the conditions that generated victims. Colombia’s ongoing violence, which continues to add new cases to the victim registry even as old cases remain unresolved, creates a compounding dynamic whose cruelty is systematic: the state is simultaneously acknowledging past victims and generating new ones, with the institutional capacity to address neither keeping pace with the scale of obligation that both create.

Colombia’s reparations crisis carries lessons for the global reparatory justice movement — including the CARICOM framework advancing Caribbean reparations for slavery — that are uncomfortable but necessary to engage. The gap between legal commitment and operational reality is not unique to Colombia; it characterises reparations processes across contexts where the scale of obligation exceeds the political will and institutional capacity that states bring to fulfilling it. The 62-year projection is therefore not simply a Colombian governance failure but a global lesson: that reparatory justice requires not only legal frameworks and international recognition but the sustained political commitment, adequate financing, and institutional capacity whose combination has proven elusive across virtually every large-scale reparations process in the contemporary era. Closing that gap — in Colombia and elsewhere — is the practical challenge that the reparations movement must address alongside its moral and legal arguments.

Photo Source: El Universal Colombia