Displaced, Not Disengaged: Colombia’s Unfinished Promise of Victim Representation
Colombia’s special peace districts have widened political participation in conflict-affected regions, but their territorial design leaves millions of internally displaced Colombians outside this dedicated channel of representation.
By Joshua Marsh
In March 2026, roughly half of Colombia’s more than 41 million registered voters participated in legislative elections that renewed a Congress composed of 103 senators and 183 representatives. Within the Special Transitional Peace Constituencies (Circunscripciones Transitorias Especiales de Paz, or CITREP), 663,387 citizens voted – 46.1 percent of the 1,438,986 people registered in these special rural districts. That was about 130,000 more voters than in 2022, a meaningful gain in participation but still an incomplete one.
The limits become clearer when these figures are placed beside Colombia’s displacement crisis. UNHCR reports that nearly seven million Colombians remain internally displaced and approximately 475,700 Colombians are refugees or asylum-seekers worldwide. These populations are not equivalent to the CITREP electorate. By law, CITREP voting is territorial: it is limited to adult Colombians registered at rural polling stations in 168 designated municipalities. Yet that distinction also exposes the mechanism’s central limitation. Many victims who were forced into cities or exile cannot vote for the representatives created specifically to amplify the voices of conflict-affected communities. CITREP is genuine institutional progress, but its promise of meaningful representation remains unfinished.
What CITREP Is: Peace and Political Participation
For generations, Colombians have endured cycles of conflict-related violence that have disrupted nearly every aspect of daily life. Cartel violence, insurgent campaigns, and struggles for territorial control have all contributed to an internal displacement crisis affecting millions. A major milestone came in 2016, when the government of President Juan Manuel Santos signed a historic peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest guerrilla movement, which had fought the state for decades. The accord led to the laying down of arms by the main FARC organization and included provisions for reintegration, political participation, and representation for communities and victims affected by the conflict. Whether those measures have translated into an effective voice for victims, however, remains contested.
The peace agreement envisioned special electoral districts for areas most affected by conflict and institutional abandonment. After years of institutional dispute following the measure’s contested 2017 legislative process, a Constitutional Court ruling led to the promulgation of Acto Legislativo 02 of 2021. The reform created 16 temporary seats in the Chamber of Representatives for the 2022-2026 and 2026-2030 legislative periods. Each district elects one representative, and together the districts cover 168 predominantly rural municipalities.
This rural focus is both CITREP’s strength and its limitation. It brings dedicated representation to communities long excluded from national political life. But displacement, by definition, uproots people from those communities, often pushing them into urban centers or beyond Colombia’s borders. Their experience of victimization does not disappear when they leave, but their access to the CITREP ballot generally does. The result is a structural tension between a territorial mechanism for representation and a displaced population that no longer lives in the territory where its political voice is formally recognized.
The scale of the wider victim population underscores that tension. Colombia’s Single Registry of Victims (Registro Único de Víctimas, or RUV) recorded more than 10.2 million conflict victims across multiple categories as of February 2026. For forced displacement specifically, the government reported that 8,947,758 people had been included in the cumulative registry as of December 31, 2025, while the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimated that 7,210,702 people were still living in internal displacement at that time. The figures measure different things – cumulative registration and current displacement – but both show how much larger the affected population is than the electorate reached by CITREP.
CITREP in Practice: Participation and Violence
CITREP’s first election took place in 2022, when 533,664 of 1,246,634 registered voters participated, a turnout of 42.8 percent. In 2026, turnout increased to 663,387 voters, or 46.1 percent. Participation was also sharply uneven: District 8, covering parts of Bolívar and Sucre, reached about 65 percent, while District 3 in Antioquia drew only about 32 percent. These results suggest a gradual expansion of civic participation among communities historically excluded from the political sphere. They also show how far CITREP remains from realizing its full potential.
For many vulnerable communities, reaching the ballot box remains dangerous. In its 2022 election observation report, the European Union identified poor physical access to polling stations and severe insecurity affecting voters and candidates. Ahead of the 2026 election, Colombia’s Electoral Observation Mission found that 103 of the 168 CITREP municipalities faced some combined risk of electoral fraud and violence. Armed strikes by the National Liberation Army (ELN), threats from groups such as the Clan del Golfo, and the broader persistence of armed-group control continued to constrain public life in conflict-affected regions.
The national climate was further darkened by the assassination of Senator and presidential pre-candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay in 2025, an attack that echoed the 1991 killing of his mother, journalist Diana Turbay. The danger extended beyond the election itself. Weeks after the March 2026 vote, a bus bombing in Cajibío – a municipality in CITREP District 1 – killed 20 people. Such violence does not by itself prove that CITREP has failed. It demonstrates that formal representation cannot be meaningful unless citizens can campaign, vote, organize, and speak without coercion or fear.
A Family Memory of Displacement
About fifty years ago, my grandfather, Manuel Osman Tello – a retired chemical engineer and native Bogotano – became a U.S. citizen after arriving in 1970 to pursue higher education at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His decision to emigrate was driven by academic ambition rather than active conflict. His family’s earlier experience, however, bears witness to Colombia’s longer history of forced displacement.
Born the youngest of ten children in Bogotá two years before the 1948 assassination of Liberal statesman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, my grandfather grew up in a politically divided household. His father contributed to a Conservative-aligned newspaper, his mother helped organize Gaitán’s campaign, and his brother’s godfather was the son of Conservative President Laureano Gómez. Following Gaitán’s death, Bogotá descended into the partisan bloodshed of La Violencia. His mother’s connections helped shield the family from Liberal militias, but her death when my grandfather was four years old prompted the family to flee the capital’s violence for Florencia, Caquetá.
The family received no state support for that forced relocation. Colombia’s current victims framework also treats harms that occurred before January 1, 1985, differently. Under Law 1448, people victimized before that date retain rights to truth, symbolic reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition, but they fall outside the main system of individualized recognition and assistance available for later harms. Experiences such as my grandfather’s therefore remain outside the principal individual registration framework through which the state counts and supports conflict victims.
At 80 years old, he nevertheless maintains cautious optimism about his homeland’s future. He worries about his 96-year-old sister and other relatives still living in Colombia, particularly about health care access, inflation, and the socioeconomic inequalities that weigh most heavily on displaced communities. Yet he believes Colombians today are more politically conscious and better prepared for constructive civic dialogue than the generation whose rigid partisan divisions once tore the country apart. His perspective is a reminder that representation is not only a matter of institutional design. It is also about whether people who have endured displacement can recognize themselves, their histories, and their priorities in the country’s political life.
Beyond Numbers, Beyond Laws
The 16 CITREP seats account for just under nine percent of Colombia’s 183-member Chamber of Representatives, while approximately 14 percent of the country’s population remains internally displaced. These figures are not directly comparable: CITREP is a territorial mechanism, not a proportional quota for all internally displaced people. Even so, the contrast illustrates the gap between the scale of displacement and the formal reach of the peace districts.
Expanding the peace districts could broaden their formal reach, but more seats alone cannot dismantle the informal barriers that suppress the political self-determination of victims. For millions of internally displaced people, civic participation understandably falls behind the daily struggle to meet basic needs and remain safe. Political inclusion therefore requires more than a place on the ballot. It requires secure access to polling stations, credible protection for candidates and community leaders, and sustained opportunities for displaced people to shape decisions between elections.
The international community can support that work through robust electoral monitoring in high-risk areas, funding for local peacebuilding initiatives, and sustained pressure on the Colombian state to guarantee voter safety. Ultimately, displaced and marginalized voices cannot remain a secondary item on a legislative checklist. Representation becomes meaningful only when displaced Colombians can participate safely, influence public decisions, and see their priorities reflected in law and policy. Until then, CITREP will remain both a democratic achievement and an unfinished promise.
The writer is a research and advocacy intern, covering South America and Europe at Displaced International.
