For decades in Colombia, guerrilla insurgents and criminal mafias alike weaponized kidnapping, with over 50,000 abductions documented during the country’s conflict between 1990 and 2018.
For years, victims were known only as hostages. Chained in the jungle and moved from camp to camp, they were reduced to bargaining chips in a long and brutal war. Today, many of those same people are helping to redefine what justice and peace look like in post-conflict Colombia.
In January 2021, Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) charged eight former leaders of the FARC guerrilla movement with crimes against humanity and war crimes for systematic kidnapping. In a landmark ruling in September 2025, seven of those ex-leaders were convicted and ordered to perform restorative sanctions, including projects to preserve victims’ memories. But for the thousands of people abducted during the armed conflict, accountability alone was never going to be enough. What has made Colombia’s transitional justice process distinctive is not only that kidnapping has been placed at its centre, but that victims themselves have become active protagonists in shaping how justice is pursued.
Macro-case 01 of the JEP, formally known as Hostage-taking, serious deprivations of liberty and other concurrent crimes, focuses on one of the most emblematic crimes of Colombia’s conflict. The tribunal has identified more than 21,000 kidnapping victims, ranging from politicians and soldiers to farmers, traders, children, and entire families. Many were held for months or years under degrading and violent conditions. Some never returned. Nevertheless, within this judicial process, something unexpected has been happening. Victims have not remained passive witnesses to their own suffering. Instead, many have stepped forward as peacebuilders, transforming personal trauma into collective demands for truth, dignity, and non-repetition.
Democratising pain in the public sphere
For decades, kidnapping survivors were largely absent from public narratives of the conflict. Their experiences were often reduced to statistics, sensationalised by the media, or absorbed into broader accounts of violence that left little room for individual voices. The JEP hearings have begun to change this. Through written testimonies, regional meetings, and public hearings, former hostages have described not only the moment of abduction, but the everyday violence of captivity: chains, isolation, hunger, illness, sexual abuse, humiliation, and the constant uncertainty of not knowing whether they would live or die. Families have spoken of years spent searching, negotiating ransoms, or waiting in silence.
These testimonies do more than inform judges. They create what many victims describe as a ‘democratisation of pain’: the movement of suffering from the private realm into shared public knowledge. By telling their stories in official spaces, survivors challenge the social silence that often follows their release. In doing so, they assert a simple but powerful claim: what happened to us matters.
This public articulation of pain is itself a peacebuilding act. It disrupts the denial and normalization of violence, and forces society to confront the human cost of armed conflict. It also lays the groundwork for non-repetition by exposing the structures and decisions that made mass kidnapping possible in the first place.
Justice beyond punishment
Colombia’s transitional justice system was designed to balance accountability with the possibility of peace. Under the JEP, perpetrators who fully acknowledge responsibility and contribute to truth-telling can receive reduced, restorative sanctions rather than long prison sentences. This approach has been controversial, particularly among victims of grave crimes. Many former hostages express anger, frustration, and fear that justice may amount to impunity. Yet interviews conducted with kidnapping victims involved in macro-case 01 reveal a more complex picture. While punishment matters, recognition matters just as much.
For many survivors, hearing former FARC commanders publicly admit that kidnapping was a systematic policy, not an unfortunate excess or isolated mistake, has been a turning point. Acknowledgement, naming responsibility, and confronting victims face-to-face have allowed some to begin grieving properly for the first time. Truth, in this sense, becomes a form of reparation. This does not mean that the process is easy or healing by default. Recounting captivity often reopens psychological wounds. Many victims live in regions where armed groups remain active, making participation risky. Psychosocial support is uneven, and expectations frequently exceed what any legal mechanism can realistically deliver. Yet despite these obstacles, victims continue to engage. Their insistence on participation challenges a long tradition of top-down justice, in which laws are written and applied without meaningful involvement from those most affected.
From victims to political actors
One of the most significant shifts produced by macro-case 01 is the transformation of kidnapping survivors from ‘beneficiaries’ of justice into political actors within it. Victims are not only providing testimony. They are commenting on indictments, proposing forms of reparation, and shaping how responsibility is understood. Many insist that justice must address more than individual acts of violence; it must confront the social and moral damage inflicted on communities, families and trust itself.
This is particularly evident in victims’ demands for collective memory. Survivors frequently describe their experiences as fragmented, scattered across files, hearings, and databases. They call on the JEP to help construct a coherent narrative that recognises kidnapping as a systematic crime with long-term social consequences, not a series of disconnected incidents. Such demands reveal a deeper ambition: to reclaim agency after years of dehumanisation. By participating in the justice process, victims reassert themselves not only as survivors but as citizens with the right to shape Colombia’s future.
A global milestone, with local roots
International observers have recognised the significance of Colombia’s approach. The International Center for Transitional Justice has welcomed the JEP’s first sentences as a milestone, highlighting their emphasis on truth, victim participation, and restorative sanctions. Globally, Colombia stands out as the first country to address kidnapping so comprehensively within a transitional justice framework. But what gives macro-case 01 its transformative potential is not simply legal innovation. It is the persistence of victims who refuse to let their experiences be marginalised once again.
Their participation exposes the limits of what some critics call ‘magical legalism’: the belief that laws alone can repair societies shattered by violence. Without social recognition, security guarantees, and material support, justice risks remaining symbolic. Victims know this. That is why many see their involvement not as the end of their struggle, but as part of a longer process of peacebuilding from below, one that links truth-telling to dignity, accountability to social repair, and memory to the prevention of future violence.
Building peace from lived experience
Colombia’s transitional justice process remains fragile and contested. Political polarisation, institutional constraints and ongoing insecurity continue to threaten its legitimacy. Yet within macro-case 01, a quieter transformation is unfolding. Former hostages, once silenced by chains and fear, are helping to redefine what peace means in practice. By insisting on recognition, by turning pain into public testimony, and by demanding justice that speaks to lived experience, they are building peace in ways no agreement or court ruling could achieve alone.
Their message is clear: peace is not only signed at negotiating tables. It is built when those who suffered the most are finally heard, and when their voices help shape the society that emerges after war.
Keywords: Colombia, kidnapping, FARC, peace, peace process, conflict, conflict resolution, abduction, justice, human rights, victims, survivors
