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. This is the focus of a new study on the Colombian Armed Conflict led by Enrique Acosta from the Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED), Diego Alburez-Gutierrez from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), María Garguilo of the London School of Hygiene, and Tropical Medicine, and Catalina Torres from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay. "We asked ourselves how many people have lost family members in war, and how long this pain will persist in society,” Diego Alburez-Gutierrez explains.
“Based on the understanding that bereavement has been employed as a mechanism of terror, we investigated the magnitude of harm and violence that perpetrators strategically inflicted on the Colombian population through more than 740,000 homicides and enforced disappearance during the most violent period of the conflict,” says Enrique Acosta. “Assessing the prevalence and demographic composition of the population bereaved due to conflict is critical, given the massive implications it has on the survivors’ mental health, their economic and emotional support, and the challenges for reconciliation and memory construction,” says the researcher.
The researchers present a new method for understanding the human cost of armed conflicts and violence. They shift the focus from counting the dead to counting the bereaved; that is, people who survived the conflict but lost one or more members of their family because of the war. This is the first time that demographic kinship models have been used to quantify the population-level burden of family loss of relatives due to armed conflict. For their study, the scientists examined deaths and enforced disappearances related to the armed conflict in Colombia. They used records of deaths and missing persons, combining them with long-term demographic data. This enabled them to estimate the number of people who lost relatives in the conflict. The data on mortality and enforced disappearances comes from a revised dataset of the Colombian Truth Commission and covers the period from 1985 to 2018. In the analysis, it is combined with demographic data from the United Nations World Population Prospects, the Latin American Mortality Database, and the Colombian National Statistics Office (DANE).
"The armed conflict in Colombia has caused enormous and long-lasting stress due to the loss of family members," explains Diego Alburez-Gutierrez. By 2018, approximately 7.5 percent of Colombians had lost a close relative (nuclear family), and nearly 40 percent had lost at least one family member to conflict-related homicides or disappearances. "Every violent death or disappearance causes grief for many relatives — on average, about five close relatives and more than thirty when the extended family is included. The social impact of violence is magnified many times over by kinship networks," says the researcher. Women are about 20 percent more likely than men to have been affected by bereavement. This reflects the gender-specific nature of mortality in times of war.
The researchers assume that their findings underestimate the actual burden of bereavement because they do not consider the loss of partners and spouses given data limitations.
Crucially, the study shows that violence casts a very long shadow over populations. According to Enrique Acosta: "Even in the most optimistic scenario, if we assume that no acts of violence were committed since 2018, our projections show that the demographic traces of bereavement will be visible until the year 2080. The effects of the war will be felt for generations. The results clearly demonstrate how violence destroys family structures, weakens social cohesion, and entrenches inequality." Rebuilding kinship and community relationships is an essential part of reconciliation and of preventing new conflicts. For this to happen, however, grief must be recognized as a consequence of war at the population level.
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (MPIDR) and Enrique Acosta (CED) have published several studies on the demography of armed conflicts and wars. They have investigated the impact of a growing number of mourners on communities and how long mourning lasts in war-torn societies, among other things. They were also involved in last year's study that calculated the loss of life and life expectancy in Gaza.
Population and Development Review
People
Weaponizing Kinship: A Demographic Analysis of Bereavement in the Colombian Conflict
5-Mar-2026