Effects of negative peace on homicides, labor market and agriculture - case of peace agreement negotiations in Colombia

The ongoing armed conflict in Colombia has persisted as a prolonged war since the 1960s. The conflict records nearly 500,000 deaths (1944-2018), approximately ten million victims most of them civilians- (1958-2020) and incalculable costs. The underlying reasons are economic inequality, political participation, access to land, drug trafficking, among others. Several armed groups have been involved in the conflict, including the Colombian army, paramilitary groups, criminal groups, drug traffickers and extreme left-wing subversive guerrillas, including the FARC guerrillas. The FARC guerrillas were the oldest and largest insurgent group on the continent, and had military, political and economic influence in a large part of the Colombian regions. Therefore, the negotiations and the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla were a fact that seeks to solve part of the country's violence problems. In the framework of the peace process in Colombia, this paper seeks to identify the effects that the negotiation and the ceasefire -both known as negative peace- had on sensitive variables such as the homicide rate, employment in agriculture and the national unemployment rate. Aiming to claim causality, Synthetic Control Methods and differences-in-differences models were performed. It was found that the Negative Peace contributed to the reduction of the homicide rate by at least 6.55 deaths (per 100,000 inhabitants), increased employment in agriculture by 2.88 percentage points, and reduced the unemployment rate by at least 1.42 percentage points. These estimations are statistically significant. The results support an underlying hypothesis: (Negative) Peace with its limitations and problems is still better than any war scenario.