Alchemy of Peace: Lessons from Colombia for Venezuela

This blog post was translated from the original Spanish version by using AI tools.
If you encounter any errors, please contact us.

In April 2024, in Dabeiba, a town in northwestern Colombia, seven former military personnel who had publicly acknowledged war crimes and crimes against humanity welcomed eleven former guerrilla fighters—who were also responsible for international crimes—with a breakfast they had prepared themselves. Few images better encapsulate the paradox of restorative transitional justice: the very same table where violence once reigned has now become a starting point for reparations—though operating within the realm of the personal, it is difficult to scale up to a national level. Be that as it may, that breakfast was not improvised. It was the result of three years of preparatory work under the supervision of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP), a process led not only by judges but also by anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and engineers.

Colombia is a revealing case: a living laboratory of possibilities, limits, and tensions that offers valuable lessons for other contexts, and in particular for Venezuela, where the question of the architecture of a potential transitional justice system is beginning to take on greater urgency.

The Restorative Clause: When Justice Mobilizes the State

The 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement did not explicitly provide for a binding restorative framework. However, the design of the SJP’s first rulings generated what could be described as a restorative clause: a socio-legal mechanism that operates in three simultaneous dimensions. Contractually, it establishes obligations among perpetrators, victims, citizens, and the state. Procedurally, it activates broad, territorially-based dialogic processes. In terms of its provisions, it aims for genuine transformations in attitudes.

What is striking is the scale of what this clause sets in motion: more than fifty state entities mobilized to enforce sanctions against just a handful of defendants. The mechanism for such a deployment—which the SJP termed the Restorative System—articulates a two-pronged architecture: specialized units within the tribunal itself and protocols for inter-institutional dialogue to transform each sanction into a public policy initiative for peace and development.

The clause entails a reimagining of how the state functions: the possibility of providing reparations by empowering communities, generating public policy based on acknowledged harm, and making tangible progress toward guarantees of non-repetition. But it requires an unprecedented state-led effort which, in the Venezuelan case—where the state is partially collapsed and captured—must be progressive, multilateral, and gradually transferred to national authorities.

DRAGON: Dialogues for Contentious Coexistence

The Dabeiba breakfast was a specific outcome of a much longer process. On the conceptual horizon that underpins it lies what might be called Agonistic Restorative Dialogue (DRAGON): territorialized, progressive, participatory, and forward-looking spaces in which harm is addressed and a nonviolent, contentious coexistence takes shape. Not forced reconciliation, but conflict navigated through dialogue, honesty, and dignity, revealing our shared humanity without demanding emotional unanimity, yet working toward a restored future for all.

Associated with this practice is a three-stage logic of accountability: taking responsibility for the transgression committed in the past (T1), facing the victims, society, and judges in the present (T2), and committing to what must be done in the future to contribute to reparation (T3). This three-phase, forward-looking orientation is what most clearly distinguishes restorative transitional justice from merely retributive justice. Thus, the path toward an encounter where truth, responsibility, and pain are collaboratively addressed is not a symbolic addition: it is the core of the process.

Four Tensions That Venezuela Radicalizes

The Colombian experience highlights structural tensions that, when viewed as a mirror image, reveal their most acute manifestation in the Venezuelan case.

The first is the tension of scale: the transformative power of restorative justice depends on a personalized approach that cannot be mass-produced. In Venezuela, with its massive and systematic crimes, more than eight million people in the diaspora, and a co-opted state, this tension takes on a particular intensity. The only possible response points toward localized processes—multiple yet intimate—sprung up in a decentralized manner, not prefabricated from a central hub.

The second is the integrational paradox: the more entities are mobilized to carry out a sanction, the greater the complexity of coordination required as an alternative to the prison system. In Venezuela, the question is how to coordinate previously ineffective entities, who will make up for the missing capacity, and how to do so without reproducing dynamics of dependency that erode the process’s legitimacy and national sovereignty.

The third is the ontological dispute over justice: what for some is reimagined justice is, for others, impunity in disguise. In Venezuela, any mechanism will be interpreted by Chavismo as an instrument of regime change, and by sectors of the opposition as Bolivarian consolidation. Managing this dual asymmetry is not a side effect of the design—it is its central problem.

The fourth tension concerns the transition as an intervention in the criminal ecosystem. Part of the state apparatus has its own incentives to resist the transition, so that when the state umbrella that coordinates illegal networks is removed, some networks fragment, while others reinvent themselves. The corruption-crime-drug trafficking continuum is therefore not a later chapter on the transitional agenda: it is a constitutive variable of its design.

Five Lessons with Concrete Actions

Five guidelines for designing a potential Venezuelan transitional architecture emerge from the Colombian experience.

Invest in pre-transitional planning. Leverage multilateral forums such as the well-known Contadora Group (now perhaps the Bonaire Group, which would make Europe an engaged neighbor) and regulatory frameworks such as the ICCAL to prepare the institutional architecture in advance.

Coordinate judicial and extrajudicial phases so that, unlike in Colombia, a Truth Commission is established after the tribunal’s mandate has ended, allowing the extrajudicial process to fill in the gaps; all under a robust conditionality regime that promotes early acknowledgments as a prerequisite for political participation.

Territorialize justice. If the violence was partly the result of the state’s absence, its presence in the affected territories is a first form of reparation, especially given that Venezuela is a federal state.

Engage academia, the diaspora, children, and the private sector. Venezuelan academia offers the reflection, dialogue, and innovation that a transition requires; the private sector must contribute without privatizing the transition to serve its own interests; the diaspora—both those returning and those who have not—can, from the perspective of uprooting, shed light on what was broken and must be repaired; and children, with their rich and fresh perspective, provide essential insights for making the transition an exercise in forward-looking, intergenerational justice.

Frame the transition as a vindication, not as a threat. The transitional architecture can and must uphold multilateralism and international law without this being perceived as unilateral prosecution. This requires a reinvention of the principle of complementarity toward a collaborative and horizontal model, articulating the Venezuelan Constitution, the ICCAL, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the ICC, and the Bonaire Group as a co-designed—not imposed—framework.

The Alchemical Equation

Justice is not a predetermined outcome; rather, it emerges from an alchemy of recognition, reparations, the restoration of dignity, and citizen empowerment. Colombia has demonstrated that this equation is possible—albeit incomplete, costly, and slow. For Venezuela, the ICCAL would not merely be a theoretical framework. It would serve as the normative grammar from which to write—in its own terms, yet accompanied by—the equation for its peace.