Editor’s Letter: Peacebuilding

Peace is not just the absence of war. In this Winter 2025 ReVista issue on Peacebuilding, we focus on three countries—Haiti, El Salvador and Colombia—to examine the challenges on the road to peace.

Historically, wars have been fought in Latin America and the Caribbean over land and power, often in the name of ideology. They have been waged to overthrow tyrants and to put them in power. They have been fought by regular standing armies and by guerilla warfare. They have left men, women and children homeless, dead, maimed, forcibly disappeared, suffering. Until somehow, they come to an end through a negotiation or a peace process. And sometimes—with the seeds of violence planted—the wars start all over again.

I was going to call this issue “peace processes,” a reflection perhaps of my experiences in Colombia and Central America, where talks were held and peace or at least the absence of war was negotiated. But today’s lack of peace is more insidious.

As University of Peace rector Francisco Rojas points out in his introductory article, Latin American and Caribbean societies are experiencing high levels of transnational organized crime violence. The region, with only 8% of the world’s population, has more than a third of the world’s homicides. Organized crime is now the main threat to democracy, stability and peace. We chose the three countries because they are at different stages in the road toward peace.

Colombia, which signed a peace treaty with its principal guerrilla group in 2016, has struggled toward “total peace,” even as violence escalates with dissident groups on the Venezuelan borders. The authors in this section—many of them former members of Harvard’s Colombian Colloquium—reflect on peacebuilding among multiple transitions.

Haiti is a country at war, with gangs overrunning the state. Yet, its civil society is actively looking for solutions, not just to the end of violence, but to the true construction of peace.

El Salvador, which ended its long war with a peace agreement in 1992, would seem on the surface to be a success story. Homicide rates have plunged. Gangs have been controlled under the administration of President Nahib Bukele. Yet, our authors declare, another type of war is being waged, one that pits an authoritarian government against its civilians.  

These examples are important because of the determination—and passion—of the region’s peacemakers and thinkers. As Teresa Whitfield, the former director of the Policy and Mediating Division of the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, eloquently points out, “[T]he region has form, experience and a willingness to innovate in its peacemaking; from its experience it should be ready to extract lessons that can, in time, be shared with others seeking to respond to the fragmentation of violence that characterizes so many of today’s armed conflicts.”  

Amen.