With the signing of the “Final Agreement for Ending Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace,” Colombia enters a new phase. If the agreement between the national government and the FARC puts an end to a 52-year war and closes the negotiation stage, we will face the – even more complex – challenges of peacebuilding.

Through the Ideas for Peacebuilding collection, Dejusticia seeks to contribute to this task through thematic documents that offer diagnoses and proposals on some of the central institutional challenges of this new stage. In this text, we intend to provide alternatives so that transitional justice mechanisms and society in general have access to the intelligence and counterintelligence archives used in the context of the Colombian armed conflict.

This access will contribute, on the one hand, to make effective the rights of the victims to truth, justice and reparation; On the other, it will provide citizens with general evidence of the use of power by intelligence agencies, which will let them know if there has been an unlawful conduct that requires accountability measures and whose repetition we must avoid. At the same time, transparency about these behaviors will give reasons to the State to undertake institutional reforms that guarantee non-repetition. If the FARC disappears in the post-agreement stage, our intelligence community will have a key opportunity to stop harassing political opponents, journalists and activists, and instead, devote itself to collecting, systematizing and analyzing information about the real threats to the security of our democracy.

Any of the alternatives proposed in this book favors access to intelligence and counterintelligence archives, which, in turn, contributes to the truth of individual facts and serves as a tool of trust, dignity, and transformation. However, we should aspire to a combination of all the proposed ways in order to ensure maximum openness.

This book is part of the Dejusticia’s collection “Ideas to Build the Peace.” Through this collection, Dejusticia seeks to contribute to the task of building peace through thematic documents that diagnose and offer proposals to address the central institutional challenges of this period. 

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