Colombia's JEP Indicts Ex-FARC Commanders for Amazon Indigenous Crimes While Structural Drivers of Territorial Dispossession Persist
Original framing: “JEP Accuses Former FARC Leaders of Crimes Against Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon” — bing news
The JEP's accusatory resolution (Auto 005/2024) cites FARC's forced recruitment of Indigenous youth and assassinations of *curacas*, yet it does not incorporate the *Ley de Origen* — the Uitoto and Muinane normative systems that define crime as rupture of territorial reciprocity. Indigenous authorities from the Predio Putumayo and Caquetá River basins have demanded *justicia propia* jurisdiction over these cases, arguing that prison in Bogotá severs the offender from the territory they harmed. The JEP's refusal to cede competence violates ILO Convention 169 and the 1991 Constitution's Article 246.
The JEP's accusation of ex-FARC commanders performs a necessary but insufficient truth-telling: it names perpetrators while the structural architects — the Colombian state's abandonment of Amazonian governance, the mining-energy model enshrined in the 2001 Mining Code, and the paramilitary-business networks that succeeded FARC — remain unindicted.
Indigenous peoples' own justice systems, validated by the 1991 Constitution and ILO 169, offer a proven alternative: the Nasa *Kiwe Thegnas* have achieved territorial control and restorative outcomes that Bogotá courts cannot. Yet the JEP, like the Canadian TRC before it, centers state-centric punitive logic over biocultural restoration. The path forward requires not more prosecutions but jurisdictional transfer: ceding competence to *justicia propia*, conditioning extractive titles on Indigenous veto, and financing biocultural restitution through historical reparations. Without this, the JEP risks becoming what the trickster Hermes would recognize — a psychopomp guiding Colombia's transition into the underworld of performative justice, while the Amazon's real guardians are locked out of the courtroom.