As of 2026. The Registro Único de Víctimas is updated continuously and the registered displaced total continues to rise; the figure here reflects the register as reported in 2026.
Colombia has experienced one of the world's longest-running internal armed conflicts, involving Marxist guerrilla groups (principally FARC and ELN), right-wing paramilitary organizations (the AUC and its successors), state security forces, and drug-trafficking armed groups, with civilians repeatedly displaced through massacres, land seizures and forced recruitment. Colombia's Victims' Unit has registered more than 9 million people as displacement victims since 1985, and despite the 2016 peace accord with the FARC, violence by ELN, FARC dissident factions and other armed groups has continued to generate large-scale new displacement in regions such as Chocó, Catatumbo and Nariño. Colombia consistently ranks among the countries with the largest internally displaced populations globally.
Leftist guerrillas (FARC, ELN), right-wing paramilitaries (AUC and successors), the Colombian state, and drug-trafficking armed groups have all displaced civilians over six decades of conflict
The 1964 DANE census counted 17,484,508 inhabitants. Colombia's population has since risen to roughly 52 million, so the denominator is a snapshot at the start of a conflict that has run for more than sixty years.
Colombia's Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad, final report 2022), working with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on 112 integrated databases, documented 450,664 conflict homicides for 1985-2018 and estimated a true universe of roughly 800,000 once under-registration is corrected; about 80% of the documented dead were civilians. The Commission attributed 45% of homicides to paramilitaries, 27% to guerrillas and 12% to state agents, an apportionment that former military and state actors have publicly contested, while victims' organisations argue even the 800,000 estimate is low because the count begins only in 1985 and the conflict dates from 1964.
Documented by the Colombian Truth Commission's 2022 final report (massacres, sexual violence, 121,768 forced disappearances, 16,238 cases of recruitment of children, and dispossession and destruction of homes and land) and by the JEP in Macro-case 03 (6,402 extrajudicial executions by state agents).
Colombia