A call surprised them in the middle of a women’s integration at the House of Reintegration and Reconciliation in Medellín. They were informed that Juntas: café en paz, the business they had opened eleven months earlier near the University of Antioquia, had been robbed. That night, unknown men emptied the premises: they took machines, tables, and cups. “We started crying. It was horrible. They took everything,” one of them recalls. Days before, they had also received threats and extortion messages. For these women peace signatories, after almost a decade since the Havana Agreement, that robbery not only meant losing their café but also confirmed that the projects with which they seek to restart their lives remain fragile.
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Women Building Peace Market
The house is neither big nor small. It goes unnoticed at first glance. Discreet, it has no particular distinguishing feature, and no one arrives there by chance. The ceiling is high. The walls are light-colored, the entrance very narrow, and the windows always remain closed. It is located in the Belén neighborhood. For almost ten years, the House of Reintegration and Reconciliation has become a meeting and shelter space for male and female peace signatories in Antioquia, “in the heart of reintegration”; that is how Danny Luz describes it.
She, Danny Luz González, is the first to arrive and the last to leave. It is Tuesday, April 7, 2026, and she is a bit late opening the house to the public: since eight in the morning, they welcome visitors, tourists, researchers, and students. She takes a bunch of keys and quickly opens the door to each of the rooms that function as offices. She opens the lock of the door leading to the Women Building Peace Market. A small room lit with warm lights, with four large shelves and a coat rack; then she opens the others. Behind each of them are long tables and office chairs, boards describing their activities and projects. Meanwhile, at the back of the house, a large mural rises summarizing the history of the extinct FARC.
Danny Luz’s voice is soft and firm. She has brown skin and small eyes. She wears jeans and a white blouse. Since 2024, she has led the Multi-Active Cooperative Weaving Peace (Cotepaz) and has taken on much of the administrative functions, which led her to study Territorial Public Administration at the Higher School of Public Administration. “We knew nothing about accounting and administrative matters. We had never opened a bank account or written a project,” she says.
The Women Peace Builders Market was born months before the pandemic, after winning a call from the cooperation organization International Action For Peace (IAP). The project provided them with several basic basket products for commercialization, such as rice, panela, pasta, and oil. During the lockdown, that food ended up in their own and their companions’ homes. So, as soon as the health crisis passed, they decided to turn the business around and started marketing the products their male and female companions produce in the department, mainly in Ituango and Dabeiba.
According to the quarterly report of the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia, as of October 31, 2025, 11,152 ex-combatants — including 2,869 women — had benefited from 6,104 productive initiatives both individual and collective.
At the house, organizations such as Cotepaz, the cooperative that supports several productive projects of signatories in Medellín; the Common Memories Association (Asomecos), dedicated to tourism and the management of a hotel under a loan agreement in the municipality of Marinilla; the Women Building Peace Association, which leads the Women’s Market; and the Efraín Guzmán Federation, which coordinates and manages resources for associations and cooperatives in Antioquia, converge.
However, the house does not belong to them. The Antioquia Government handed it over to Cotepaz under a loan agreement for five years, from August 2, 2018, to August 2, 2023. That year, “to avoid being left on the street,” according to Jhon López, the organization’s legal representative, they requested an extension.
Jhon is short and walks with some difficulty. He is in charge of “the legal troubles,” as he describes his role. According to him, during Luis Pérez Gutiérrez’s governorship, the organization obtained the extension that lasts until now, August 2026. Under the current administration of the Uribista Andrés Julián Rendón, the situation has been the opposite: six months before the deadline expired, on February 24, 2026, Jhon sent a similar request and it was denied.
The situation has been deteriorating. Danny Luz says that in recent months they have been victims of threats and a robbery. In December 2025, unknown men looted Juntas: café en paz, located near the University of Antioquia, and several of them have suffered intimidation.
For Jhon, losing the house would mean losing the only meeting space for signatories in Antioquia. “Several male and female companions had to leave the reintegration areas because they were not safe. So, it is from here that we continue building collectively.” He also assures that no productive project has prospered in Medellín and the Aburrá Valley due to “lack of capital, institutional support, and administrative knowledge.”
Since the signing of the Peace Agreement and until December 26, 2025, the United Nations Verification Mission (UN) has documented 487 murders of ex-combatants — including 12 women, 64 indigenous people, and 58 Afro-Colombians — as well as 168 attempted homicides, 17 of them against women, and 58 disappearances, including one woman.
Meanwhile, other women signatories have found a new opportunity in the profession of bodyguard. This is the case of Ana Ríos (name changed for security), who says this job came at the most difficult moment of her life. Mother of two children, she had just been released from prison after being accused of rebellion. So, the chances of finding work were slim.
But in that profession, she found job stability and the fair salary she was looking for. “Many believe this is not a job for us, but I think it is; women are capable of that and much more, as long as it is dignified work,” she states. That is why she insists that women signatories need real opportunities to rebuild their lives: “Many of us are heads of households and single mothers; many had their partners killed and have two or three children to support.”
Lands for reintegration in Mutatá
“We are like anyone else, flesh and blood,” says María Soleny Higuita, while watching the rain fall through her house window. Ten years ago, she laid down arms and now leads the Multi-Active Agricultural Cooperative La Fortuna de Mutatá (Cofortuna), while caring for her daughter and twenty chicks with the hope they become laying hens.
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After the peace signing, she stayed at the Transitional Training and Reintegration Space or ETCR Llano Grande in Dabeiba until January 2026. After receiving several threats, she moved to the La Fortuna hamlet, in the municipality of Mutatá. There, a space was forged from September 2017, when 36 signatories left the ETCR of Tierralta, Córdoba, due to lack of security and overcrowding. “The situation was inhuman,” recalls Rubén Cano, then leader of the extinct FARC in Urabá.
They left at dawn, in trucks and buses, accompanied by the Ombudsman’s Office, the National Army, and the UN. Their final destination was a few meters from the Mar 2 Highway, the corridor connecting Antioquia’s Urabá with Medellín.
In its most recent report, the UN Verification Mission reported that, by December 26, 2025, about 68% of the signatories no longer lived in the ETCRs, a scenario that poses new challenges to guarantee access to land, the sustainability of their initiatives, and institutional support in the territories.
Days after the signatories arrived in Mutatá, the then mayor, Jairo Enrique Ortiz Palacios, visited the place after receiving community alerts about an alleged land invasion. “We explained why we were there and that we would not give up the process,” Rubén recalls. The mayor immediately informed the then governor of Antioquia, Luis Pérez Gutiérrez, who asked Rubén to come to his office the following week.
According to him, he attended the meeting accompanied by Isaías Trujillo, former commander of the Northwestern Bloc of the extinct FARC, and Pastor Alape, former commander of the Middle Magdalena Bloc. He received them formally and was direct, he says: “[Rubén] don’t let me disperse the people, bet on peace.” He says his response was equally clear: “That’s what we’re doing, what we need is land.” At the end of the meeting, the then governor committed to buying a property in the same area, but the promise was not fulfilled. “The hope lasted a month. Purchases with the State take time, and we were living in shacks, in the middle of a swamp,” Rubén recalls. Weeks later, an unexpected alternative appeared. A local woman offered them a plot a few meters from where they were.
With the seed capital of eight million that the State gave each signatory for their reintegration process, they bought the land and divided it into plots of one and a half hectares per family. There they built their homes, planted food, raised animals, and built fish ponds. Eight years later, that inhospitable land has become the San José de León hamlet, where 58 families live. Rubén explains that the project had the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and that they seek to make it a sustainable source of income.
Every day, except weekends, there is movement from five in the morning. At that hour, the air is thick, warm; humidity clings to the skin like an invisible layer. María Soleny wakes up and runs her first marathon of the day. She lights the stove, prepares breakfast, wakes her daughter, bathes her, dresses her, combs her hair. At eight, she takes her to school. She returns to clean the house, makes lunch, and sits at the computer.
While her daughter is at school, she assumes her duties as manager of Cofortuna. She studied a technical degree in accounting and finance at the Educational Institute for Work and Human Development (ICENF), knowledge that has allowed her to support other cooperatives in the region. At ten in the morning, she sits to answer emails, call meetings, fill out documents, and manage resources for the cooperative. “I am a very active woman, I like to learn everything and lead,” she says proudly.
She also travels constantly to national and international events representing her community or the signatories, along with her daughter. “I don’t like to leave her alone. I like her to go where I go so she knows everything I do,” she shares.
At one in the afternoon, she picks up her daughter and starts the second marathon. She serves lunch, helps with homework, and then they go together to their plot at the La Vitrina or La Bufalera farm, a property the state SAE gave them in February 2024 for five years. Located at the entrance of the La Fortuna hamlet, it has 118 hectares — 18 are conservation areas — that were divided equally among the families. Recently, María Soleny planted passion fruit and hopes that in the coming months, the crop will start to bear fruit. “It’s little, but I’m happy, my goal this year is to expand the crop and have 200 hens,” she says.
The UN Verification Mission reported at the end of 2025 that the State delivered around 18,600 hectares destined for reintegration. Some families cultivate cocoa, passion fruit, plantain, corn, and yam; others dedicate themselves to dairy and fattening cattle. Also, to sustain their community organization, María Soleny explains, they created seven committees: administration, marketing, technical, gender, collective work, fish farming, and La Vitrina. However, she says it has not been enough. They now need support for marketing and to be paid fairly when they bring their products to market.
But the challenges of their reintegration do not end there: they only have two years left on the loan contract that allows them to use the farm. They point out that it is an insufficient term, as some crops will take longer to bear fruit. María Soleny recently consulted the Agency for Reintegration and Normalization (ARN) about the procedures that allow them to stay indefinitely. Andrés Felipe Salazar Charry, vice president of Movable and Immovable Assets of the SAE of the previous Government, assured that the property is still in the process of extinction but that they are working to transfer the farm to them as soon as possible. With the change of Executive, that possibility seems remote.
María Soleny looks optimistically at her future and that of her companions. She is currently studying Social and Popular Economy in Medellín, in an alliance between the Minuto de Dios University Corporation and the ARN, as she considers that this training will allow her to make family and community projects sustainable in Mutatá.
Rubén Cano, meanwhile, says that peace has been an unfulfilled promise and that he struggles to remain optimistic. He assures that presidents Juan Manuel Santos and Iván Duque were little committed to its fulfillment. The first, he says, focused on disarming the insurgency; the second, on dismantling what was agreed. “I say it because I lived it.” He recalls that the reintegration spaces were not ready on time and that for months they lived in inhuman conditions, without infrastructure or real possibilities of sustaining themselves amid stigmatization, non-compliance, and violence. He also questions Gustavo Petro’s government for promoting its own negotiations with other groups, the so-called “total peace,” without prioritizing the implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement.
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