Paz Total? How Ceasefires Backfire

Ceasefires are often designed to reduce violence while facilitating peace negotiations or humanitarian access. But poorly designed truces can backfire. This paper examines the 2023 ceasefires decreed by Colombia’s government with several organized criminal groups simultaneously under the Paz Total (Total Peace) policy. Using difference-in-differences on a municipality-month panel, we find that while more visible and salient forms of violence such as homicides, terrorist attacks and massacres were unaffected, less visible forms of violence against civilians, such as extortion, forced recruitment of minors, and threats, increased substantially in municipalities with ceasefire group presence. These patterns are consistent with strategic substitution: armed groups shifted from more visible to less visible forms of violence when political constraints changed. We formalize this mechanism in a structural model of strategic violence allocation, calibrate its parameters to the reduced-form estimates, and simulate policy counterfactuals. The calibration implies that roughly a 50% increase in the detectability of less visible forms of violence, through independent verification missions or community reporting systems, would be needed to fully offset the ceasefire’s perverse effects, restoring total violence to approximately its pre-ceasefire level. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of inadequately designed ceasefire agreements and underscore the need for credible monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.