The role of economic actors in Colombia’s armed conflict: How much do we know?

One of the most recurrent violations was the implementation of blacklists with names of workers fired for political reasons and who, as a result, were not supposed to be hired by other companies. A former employee of a multinational company based in Switzerland and operating in Brazil testified on this, informing the commission: “I worked in an entity called AAPSA, Association of Personnel Administrators of Santo Amaro. There, I shared knowledge from the human resources office and received information about lists of people who we should be careful in hiring, because they were labeled as “activists”, people who organize themselves inside factories.” This, according to the same report, implied the existence of a complex apparatus of monitoring and repression of union activity.

Meanwhile, in Colombia, as shown by Laura Bernal and Daniel Marín in the chapter they wrote for Increasing Accountability, there has not been an explicit take on the role that all actors played in the armed conflict. When analyzing the Colombian cases under the CATJ, they found that the Justice and Peace process presented the best opportunity to unveil the role of economic actors in armed violence in the country. The Justice and Peace framework was designed to investigate, prosecute and punish members of the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia and other armed groups operating outside the law. The process relied on ex-combatants own statements, for which they were granted a substantial reduction in the penalty they would otherwise receive for the same crimes under ordinary courts.

Between 2005 and 2015, the CATJ mentioned 439 cases of corporate complicity in the trial court decision stage of Justice and Peace. All of these cases were mentioned in the background section of the decisions, where judges reconstructed the social, historical and cultural contexts in which the paramilitary phenomenon developed in Colombia. However, since the Justice and Peace judges only have jurisdiction to try members of armed groups operating outside the law, all this information has to be sent to the Attorney General’s Office and other competent bodies to investigate economic actors. Therefore, these mentions have not actually implied advances in the investigation, judgment and punishment of economic actors.