Gustavo Petro and Danilo Rueda, on December 7, 2022 in Buenaventura (Colombia). VANNESSA JIMENEZ
This Wednesday, the High Commissioner for Peace announced in a statement a meeting with delegates from the Central General Staff, the main dissident of the extinct FARC guerrillas, which includes more than 3,000 fighters. The office headed by Danilo Rueda explains that until September 3, “a meeting between the peace delegation of the national government and the group of members representing the FARC Central General Staff will take place in the rural area of Suárez, Cauca.” “ He clarifies that the meeting takes place as part of the so-called preparatory phase for a discussion table with this armed structure.
Relations with the so-called General Staff under the leadership of Iván Mordisco went through ups and downs. A six-month bilateral ceasefire was reached in January this year, but was prematurely suspended by President Gustavo Petro in four departments after four indigenous children were recruited and murdered in Putumayo. Although relations were restored on July 8 and a “peace agenda” was resumed, progress in the following weeks was marred by a resurgence of violence in Cauca and skepticism from civil society.
The meeting “will be closed and confidential and international witnesses, the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches will be present,” the official statement said. Although it is not clear who the representatives of both sides will be, on July 11 the President had issued a resolution appointing Camilo González Posso, head of the prestigious NGO Indepaz, as the government’s representative in this preliminary phase in “finding solutions to the armed conflict, the effective application of international humanitarian law, respect for human rights, the cessation of hostilities and the pact of peace agreements intended to facilitate the disarmament and demobilization of the self-proclaimed central government.” General Staff of the FARC -EP.”
For the dissidents, the delegation consists, among others, of Andrey Avendaño, a commander from the Catatumbo area, and the speaker known as Ángela Izquierdo, who rose to prominence when, in April, in a kind of conclave of guerrilla leaders announced that they were going to a dialogue table be ready. Before nearly 5,000 farmers gathered in the Yarí plains of southern Colombia, they suggested setting up the table in Norway. On this occasion, Iván Mordisco, whom Iván Duque’s government had presumed dead in July 2022, resurfaced.
Mordisco seemed more willing to start peace talks on this occasion, even though he was showing off his shiny rifle. This experienced guerrilla of the extinct FARC, whose name is Néstor Gregorio Vera Fernández, commands the group called the Central General Staff. This group, the largest of the structures that did not sign the peace agreement in 2016, has since been collecting new combatants and has been linked to drug trafficking activities. The other sector is the so-called Second Marquetalia, founded by Iván Márquez, who was the FARC’s chief negotiator with the government of Juan Manuel Santos and who decided to take up arms in 2019.
The Central General Staff is a type of collective decision-making body whose internal functioning is not entirely clear; It is known that it tends towards centralization but at the same time seeks the participation of the regional units that compose it. This organization with a visible head and many weapons operates on 23 fronts in 16 of the country’s 32 departments, with particular strength in the Catatumbo and Arauca region, the border areas with Venezuela, in the northeast of the country and in the Putumayo and Cauca departments in the south.
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In the statement, the government clarifies that this meeting is not the start of a peace process, but rather a preliminary and exploratory approach: “Currently, the national government supports only one peace dialogue table, which is being developed with the ELN, and three social justice spaces Talks for urban peace in Buenaventura, Quibdó and Medellín.” He adds that the prerequisite for the further development of the dissidence will be “the lasting demand for respect for life” and that “all dialogues aim to establish guarantees of non-recurrence with protection of the Victims’ rights and territorial change.” He concludes by saying that the Petro government will continue to seek peaceful solutions to armed violence, “including those that have been recycled over the last 20 years.”
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