By Mercedes López San Miguel on August 7, 2022
Gustavo Petro, photo: Europa Press
The unprecedented progressive turn that Colombia is experiencing today is due, on the one hand, to the long road traveled to converge in the Historical Pact and, on the other hand, to the Peace Agreement signed between the guerrillas of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the State, in 2016. From then on, the leftist parties, besieged for decades, ceased to be stigmatized as actors of the armed conflict. From the signing in Havana to the present, the obstacles were not few, given that the outgoing government of Iván Duque (2018-2022) failed to implement key aspects of the pact reached by his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos. These failures were accompanied by an increase in violence, mainly against social leaders and demobilized guerrilla fighters.
The Truth Commission delivered its final report to Gustavo Petro, which includes recommendations on crucial issues to achieve a comprehensive peace and the elected president pledged to include them in his government program. To end the violence of six decades, says the commission, the dialogue must be with all armed actors: the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas, the Clan del Golfo criminal gang and FARC dissidents.
Dialogue with ELN
Petro announced that he will initiate a dialogue with the ELN in which the Church will also participate. Saúl Franco, one of the 11 members of the Truth Commission, told PáginaI12 that he had a meeting with the incoming president. “Petro is willing to talk with the ELN and knows that it is difficult, because it is a complicated group for negotiation, there are initiatives that were truncated; it is a guerrilla organization very different from the FARC, it is not so hierarchical, so vertical. It is clear, but it is willing to risk its capital, because if there is no negotiation with them there is no peace”.
The commissioner also said that they highlighted other priority issues. “We put our finger on the problem of national security. There was a security designed to protect certain sectors, the big national and transnational capital, the national elites; a security designed to point out the internal enemy and persecute it. It is part of a framework that has to be dismantled for a possible solution”.
Likewise, Franco said that they pointed out the core points such as impunity and the narco-paramilitary alliance. “If the drug trafficking problem is not solved, there will be no peace in Colombia. With drug trafficking we propose that it is not the solution to persecute the farmer who grows coca, or the one who scrapes it, nor to make his life impossible, nor to fumigate his crop. No. It is necessary to untangle the skein of big transnational financial capital. The snake is killed by the head”.
The Havana Agreement created an integral system of Truth, Justice and Reparation with three independent and complementary parts: the aforementioned Truth Commission, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which is in charge of justice, and the Unit for the Search of Missing Persons. It is estimated that there are 121,000 missing persons and that the paramilitaries were the main perpetrators of forced disappearances. It is estimated that 50,000 people have been kidnapped, mostly by the guerrillas. Historically, drug trafficking has randomly allied itself with one armed group or another according to its convenience.
Between the mid-nineties and 2005 was the hardest war: 70 or 75% of the atrocities, kidnappings, massacres, forced disappearances were there, according to the Truth Commission report. In 2002 there were more than 2,000 displaced people per day. That decade is considered the hard war. And it was fundamentally against the civilian population: the peasants were the cannon fodder of the long conflict.
However, the war persists today in parts of Colombia. In the northeastern border where the ELN has great influence, it extends to the northern region called Catatumbo, where coca crops and the coca business are concentrated; in the north of Cauca, where there is a very strong indigenous population and where there is also the presence and dispute of armed actors and also a part in the Pacific, which has to do with drug trafficking. When asked about the paramilitary presence, Dr. Franco explained: “The paramilitaries are demobilized, but there are remnants of them, there are diffuse identities, together with drug traffickers. There are paramilitary strongholds that are still active. The Gulf Clan, for example, are undoubtedly a new form of paramilitarism.
All in all, the Duque administration’s lack of political will in implementing the Peace Accord has led to an exponential increase in violence. According to the Institute for Peace Development Studies (Indepaz), during the last four years 957 leaders and human rights defenders were murdered, as well as 261 signatories of the pact. There were also 131 massacres with 1,192 victims, 220 cases of forced disappearance and 545 cases of displacement, data that set off the alarms of international organizations. A burden for the incoming government.
Source: Pagina 12 translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US