Abstract The armed conflict in Colombia has been a scourge that has disrupted all social dimensions of the country, provoking a humanitarian drama and a high economic cost that has been lived for decades. The purpose of this article is to estimate the effects of the armed conflict on economic growth in Norte de Santander, Colombia in the period 1990-2012; the conceptual framework is the solow-swan model of economic growth and the methodology is to determine the impact of the armed conflict on the growth behavior of the gross domestic product of the Nation and the department of Norte de Santander. Using the synthetic pairing methodology method, it is possible to estimate the impact in contexts in which an aggregate unit (such as a country or department) is being treated or exposed to an intervention. The results show that if there had been no armed conflict, Norte de Santander department would have had a better economic performance. The present article has a sequence after this brief introduction, a state of the art, followed by a methodological explanation, the results and finally some general conclusions.