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Historic law to financially redress up to four million victims of decades-long internal conflict including those of the state Nearly four million victims of Colombia’s long-running internal conflict could receive compensation and see their stolen lands returned under a new law. Government and opposition figures as well as human rights activists have all hailed the legislation, which passed in the Senate last week, as “historic” and “transcendental”. The law aims to give financial compensation – equivalent to about £6,600 – for every victim reported murdered or forcibly disappeared. Colombia has one of the highest numbers of disappearances in Latin America, with more than 57,200 people still missing, at least 15,600 of which were forcibly disappeared, according to the UN high commissioner for human rights. More than 100,000 murders during the last three decades are attributed to rightwing paramilitary groups. Days after passage of the victims’ law, the government announced it had identified the remains of nearly 10,000 people buried in unmarked graves over the past 40 years by matching morgue reports with fingerprint records. Another 12,000 people, whose records were incomplete, remain unidentified. Many are presumed to be victims of the conflict although only 445 were on the official list of the disappeared. The law specifies that those who qualify for compensation are the victims of “armed conflict” to distinguish them from victims of common criminals. President Juan Manuel Santos’ predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, refused to recognise the existence of an armed conflict in Colombia, saying instead that the country faced a “terrorist threat”. Though Santos was Uribe’s defence minister, the reference to the internal armed conflict in the government-sponsored bill showed he has distanced himself from Uribe’s stance. “There has been an armed conflict in this country for some time,” Santos said. The law also recognises victims of the state, a move which Uribe opposed. Under the law, 6m hectares (15m acres) of land that was either stolen or abandoned will be returned through an abbreviated legal process in which the burden will be on the current landholders to prove they acquired the land legally. Juan Camilo Restrepo, the agriculture minister, recognised that application of the law will not be easy. “There will be some who will be merciless in trying to defend what they took with violence,” he said. However, the Colombian conflict, though far less intense than 10 years ago, continues. The leftwing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) has 8,000 fighters and is still capable of exerting control and launching attacks on the military and civilians in many parts of the country. Aliria, a 36-year-old woman who was forced to flee with her family from a Farc-controlled area after the rebels killed her brother and cousin, was hopeful that the law “will change things in Colombia”. But she said that she still cannot return to the family farm. “The guerrillas are still there, they run the place and they are the ones who ran us out so what the hell are we going to go back for? To get killed?” said Aliria, who now lives in a sprawling slum just outside the capital, Bogota. Much of the recent violence, however, is blamed on neoparamilitary groups called bacrim , short for criminal bands in Spanish. Considered the heirs to the now demobilised militias of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the bacrim are dedicated mostly to drug trafficking, though they are considered to be behind most new displacements. The Interior minister, Germán Vargas Lleras, said as many as 40% of all murders in Colombia – there were 17,717 homicides last year – can be linked to the bacrim . At least 12 leaders of organisations fighting to reclaim lost land have been murdered. Recognising the continued threats, the compensation law will accept new victims until 2021. The defence minister, Rodrigo Rivera, is counting on the conflict being long over by then: on the same day the law was passed, he unveiled an ambitious security plan to break up criminal gangs, finish off leftist rebels and minimise drug trafficking by the end of Santos’ term in 2014. Colombia Farc Drugs trade Sibylla Brodzinsky guardian.co.uk