Weaponizing kinship: How Colombia's armed conflict uses family loss to tear apart communities

During armed conflicts in Latin America, state forces, insurgents, and paramilitaries systematically employed massacres, torture, abductions, and targeted killings to dismantle social structures. The Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición—CEV (Colombian Truth Commission) concluded that all armed groups in the country used homicides and enforced disappearances as deliberate tactics to extend the reach of violence beyond the immediate victims, destabilizing entire families and communities, and consolidating territorial and economic control.