Identifying violence against members of the LGBTQIA+ community in violent and conflict-ridden contexts requires addressing the social, cultural, and legal barriers faced by victims seeking to exercise their rights to justice, truth, and reparation. In Colombia, the transitional justice framework offered by the Comprehensive System for Peace, included as part of the country’s 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People's Army (FARC-EP), identifies different types of violence perpetrated against LGBTQIA+ people and has led to the creation of specialized units and specific strategies to address the problem.
A transitional justice framework for social families
The Unit for the Search for Missing Persons (UBPD), one of three bodies created by the Comprehensive System for Peace, has played a central role in advancing the right to truth for victims of enforced disappearance. While UBPD does not possess a judicial mandate or the power to punish, its work is essential to restoring victims’ dignity, reconstructing historical memory and truth, and reweaving a social fabric fractured by violence. The consolidation of initiatives such as the Rainbow Search Network: Forensic Sciences and Equal Search has played an important role in advancing the search for missing persons, especially those who may have been disappeared due to their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
Testimonies submitted by civil society actors, in particular the editorial team of the Final Report of the Truth Commission and jurists from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace informed the design of the Comprehensive System for Peace. Some of the participating grassroots organizations, Mothers of the Soacha and Bogotá False Positives-MAFAPO, emerged from biological and social kinship structures. This collective of the mothers of those extrajudicially executed by state military agents in the case known as the 6,402 false positives has notably denounced enforced disappearances and other mass acts of violence. However, the legal frameworks provided by both ordinary and transitional justice systems fail to recognize social relatives, including queer and trans matronages, despite their central role within LGBTQIA+ communities. These forms of social kinship are especially significant given the frequent rejection of LGBTQIA+ individuals by their biological families and related experiences of marginalization, displacement, and familial rupture.
UBPD strategies for involving social families in the search for missing persons
The UBPD has developed specific strategies to identify LGBTQIA+ individuals in missing persons reports and accepts and processes search requests submitted by social relatives. Crucial to this work of identifying missing LGBTQIA+ individuals is the development of algorithms for cross-referencing variables within the large databases of approximately 135,369 people reported missing during the conflict in Colombia. In many cases, these databases do not have variables relating to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC).
Another major challenge is the underreporting of missing LGBTQIA+ people. The UBPD’s current register of 72 disappeared LGBTQIA+ persons draws solely from submitted search requests, leaving many individuals unaccounted for. In addition, the binary categories of gender and biological sex in the forensic registration system represent not only a procedural challenge but also institutional violence against the bodies and identities of trans victims. Projects and alliances such as Hasta encontrar todos los colores del Arcoiris in Medellín and the Magdalena Medio region (led by Caribe Afirmativo, Casa Diversa, and Voces Diversas) have been strategic in overcoming underreporting in areas particularly affected by armed conflict.
The underreporting of disappeared LGBTQIA+ persons in the databases on which the UBPD relies is linked to social, cultural, and institutional factors. These include the historical normalization of enforced disappearance in Colombia’s armed conflict and the persistent social acceptance of prejudice-based violence against nonnormative sexual orientations and gender identities. The erasure of these victims is compounded by perceptions of state inefficiency or indifference toward violence affecting LGBTQIA+ populations as well as fear of reporting cases to authorities, particularly in territories where violent control structures remain.
Towards inclusive transitional justice for LGBTQIA+ victims
Justice in Colombia largely depends on victims’ access to case files and active legal follow-up. Persistent judicial congestion and reluctance to punish government actors means that cases advance faster when families have legal representation or can exert public pressure. However, the law only recognizes blood relatives as victims, excluding LGBTQIA+ social families. In contrast, the UBPD recognizes not only families but also “persons close to the disappeared,” in line with guiding principles issued by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearance, enabling friends and chosen families to participate in the search.
Incorporating marginalized forms of kinship challenges not only traditional conceptions of family but also prevailing understandings of citizenship. Recognizing social families and queer and trans matronages as legitimate actors within peacebuilding and peacemaking processes enables the construction of an alternative framework for territorial justice. Such a framework is grounded in bottom-up approaches that center grassroots organizations as key sites for the production of social capital, democratic participation, and lasting peace.
The search for missing LGBTQIA+ persons goes beyond recovery or identification of human remains. It is a comprehensive process aimed at transforming forensic approaches and search methods. The lessons learned and the standards and mechanisms developed within the framework of transitional justice must also be transferred to the justice system more broadly, beginning at the local and regional levels. A key example of this process is the recognition of the LGBT Committee of Comuna 8 in Medellín as a subject of collective reparation in 2016. This was the first case of its kind in Colombia and established an important precedent for acknowledging differential forms of violence against nonnormative bodies and the collective harm experienced by LGBTQIA+ communities.
The central challenge here is the development of public policies capable of meaningfully integrating civil society demands and involving the most marginalized populations in transitional justice processes. Ensuring bottom-up participatory approaches, implemented in close collaboration with civil society, is essential for achieving sustainable and legitimate models of social justice and peace at the local, national, and international levels.
