Colombia Charges 10 Ex-FARC Leaders Over Crimes Against Amazon Indigenous Groups
Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has charged 10 former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) with alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between 1996 and 2016. Al Jazeera The tribunal issued the decision on October 13, 2026. Chicago Tribune
The charges center on the Amazon. According to the JEP, the accused carried out torture, murder and forced displacement against five Indigenous groups in southeast Colombia.
The alleged conduct went beyond direct violence. The JEP says FARC commanders ordered subordinates to plant landmines on Indigenous territory and to damage the ecosystems the communities relied on for survival. According to the JEP, that combination of anti-personnel weapons and environmental destruction is central to the case. It connects unsafe ground with loss of livelihood and control over territory.
Seven of the 10 people called to acknowledge responsibility were former commanders of FARC blocs, large regional units. La Silla Vacía Three were former members of the last FARC secretariat, the top leadership body that negotiated the 2016 peace deal with the Colombian government, including disarmament. One of them was Julian Gallo, who served eight years as a senator under the terms of that accord. The 2016 deal granted former FARC rebels 10 seats in Congress.
The JEP is the justice component of Colombia's Sistema Integral de Verdad, Justicia, Reparación y no Repetición, the system built for truth, justice, repair and guarantees of non-repetition. JEP It can impose only non-prison penalties, similar to probation tied to repair work. In an earlier kidnapping case, it sentenced seven former FARC members to eight years of reparations, including landmine clearing and help in locating missing persons. Leniency depends on full acknowledgment of responsibility and concrete reparative work.
Colombia's Truth Commission found in its 2022 report that 450,664 people were killed between 1985 and 2018 as a result of the conflict and 121,768 people were forcibly disappeared. The current Indigenous case is one track among several. In separate decisions, the JEP has attributed responsibility to five members of the FARC-EP Bloque Caribe for crimes against pueblos, to eight Fuerza Pública members, the state security forces, for crimes against ethnic peoples and communities, and to 15 former FARC-EP members for war crimes and crimes against humanity. JEP
The broader context here is a test of conditional justice, where lighter punishment is exchanged for truth and repair, when senior political figures are defendants. The indictment of secretariat-level figures, including a former senator seated through constitutionally allocated peace seats, places the credibility of acknowledgment-based sanctions under scrutiny from victims, from former combatants and from state institutions at the same time. For Indigenous authorities in the southeast, the legal question is narrow, whether command responsibility can be established for orders concerning mines and ecological harm, but the political question is wider, whether reparations can restore territorial use where contamination and displacement have compounded over two decades.
Looking at what this means for the process ahead, the next procedural step will shape what follows. Those indicted must decide whether to accept responsibility before the JEP and enter the reparative sanctions regime, or to contest the charges and risk referral to ordinary criminal jurisdiction with the possibility of custodial sentences. A contested proceeding involving bloc commanders and secretariat members would prolong adjudication and sharpen debate over the 2016 framework. Acceptance, by contrast, would shift attention to design and verification of sanctions in Amazon territory, where mine clearance, environmental remediation and guarantees of non-repetition are operationally complex and difficult to monitor.
