The Human Rights Task Force will be providing comments on current human rights issues in the Forum .
Articles represent the author's opinion only.
The guerrilla war in Colombia is more widespread and more violent now than at any point in the last thirty years. Today the conflict is no longer fought principally between guerrillas and the armed forces. The most striking transformation of political violence in the last decade is the rapid expansion of local private armies or paramilitary forces, many with only loose ties to the state. For fifteen years, government negotiators have attempted to reach a negotiated settlement to the decades-long insurgency. Failure to reach peace in the 1980s has led to a more atomized society, a weaker state and several new armed challengers, all of which make the goal of reaching a durable peace immensely more complicated.