High Commissioner for Peace Danilo Rueda meets with four members of the FARC dissident GOVERNMENT OF COLOMBIA
Gustavo Petro’s government’s rapprochement with the extinct FARC guerrilla dissidents as part of its ambitious quest for total peace has sparked a thorny debate in Colombia. Peace Commissioner Danilo Rueda met in Caquetá on Saturday with a faction code-named Calarcá, a sort of heir to some of the structures headed by Gentil Duarte. Accompanied by international observers, both parties expressed their readiness for a “bilateral ceasefire” in a statement made by the FARC-EP’s “Central General Staff,” the former name of what was once the largest guerrilla in Latin America. Both the message and the chosen language sparked discussion about the dissidents’ difficult adjustment to the new peace policy.
The war that the peace deal sought to extinguish still burns in different corners of Colombia. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has warned of a significant increase in armed conflicts in the first half of 2022, six internal armed conflicts remain in the country, half of which are divergent factions involved violence. Despite the FARC’s disarmament, various groups have filled the void they left. Among them are the dissidents, who distanced themselves from talks in Havana, which are credited with, among other things, the massacre of seven police officers near the city of Neiva earlier this month. “These events are an expression of a clear sabotage of total peace,” said President Petro himself at the time.
Since taking office, the President has stuck to the thesis of small and large peaces. “I have always imagined the big as the big agreement between all of society, not just between the state and a guerrilla group,” he wrote in his book One life, many lives (Planeta, 2021). His nascent mandate is intended not only to give new impetus to the implementation of the agreement with the FARC, but also to resume dialogue with the ELN and promote a policy of subjugation towards other criminal groups. Among them the Clan del Golfo, the country’s largest drug gang, heir to the paramilitaries. It is not yet clear what place the dissidents would take in total peace, which is problematic for a number of reasons.
The majority of ex-FARC combatants have moved towards legality. More than 90% of the signatories to the agreement, around 13,000 former guerrillas, have fulfilled their obligations. But the plural dissidents are armed structures that have managed to destabilize security conditions in many regions, in addition to sabotaging peace-building efforts and threatening the security guarantees provided by the accords for former guerrillas and their families. Iván Duque’s government used to associate them mainly with drug trafficking and illegal mining, although their motivations were not always linked solely to the illegal economy. There are more than twenty groups.
The phenomenon began when, in the final stretch of negotiations in Havana, one of the FARC’s most representative structures, Front 1, which operated in the south-east of the country, released a statement in mid-2016 distancing itself from the operation, which he called a “treason”. . This announcement prompted the FARC leadership to expel five commanders who questioned the insurgency’s verticality, including Gentil Duarte, who had previously been sent to the area to try to establish order. Since then, other factions have sprung up in different regions.
The issue of dissidence took on another dimension when Iván Márquez, who was chief negotiator in talks with the government, announced in August 2019 that he, along with other heads of Colombia’s former Revolutionary Armed Forces who had split from her, would join the Commitments to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional justice system. His attempts to unite with Gentil Duarte and his allies met opposition from structures that already had significant influence in southeastern Colombia and across the border with Venezuela. Although there was no resolution, as initially feared, the dissident fire was fueled by a new dynamic of forced recruitment, often from underage people.
The currents of Gentil Duarte and Iván Márquez, who called themselves the Second Marquetalia (after the place where the FARC was founded more than half a century ago), soon established themselves as the most notorious. Both were designated terrorist organizations by the United States government about a year ago, when Washington removed the FARC from that blacklist, which had already been disarmed and transformed into a political party with representation in Congress. The dissidents of Duarte and Márquez also waged a life-or-death war, mainly on the other side of the border. Thus the main leaders of both factions, including Duarte, got into confused confrontations. For his part, Márquez suffered an attack but is still alive, as the peace commissioner himself confirmed.
Against this background, several voices have raised objections, including those from the architects of the historic pact with the FARC. “I do not agree to resuming negotiations with Iván Márquez, they had their chance,” said Senator Humberto de la Calle, the government’s chief negotiator in Havana, pointing out that the only way left to them is the submission is. Former peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, who warned of the risks of politicizing organized crime, expressed the same sentiment. “Treating it as an insurgency in the sense of a political negotiation is a major strategic mistake,” Jaramillo told W radio.
The current government will “under no circumstances” negotiate or renegotiate the agreement with the FARC, which is “unchangeable,” reiterated Senator Iván Cepeda, who is campaigning for total peace from Congress to calm the waves. “In the future, the only thing that counts is to implement it to the letter and in full,” and that is President Petro’s commitment, Cepeda reiterated in a public response to De la Calle.
However, several observers agree that giving dissidents a voice on behalf of the FARC is uncomfortable, to say the least. Aside from the fact that the Central Joint Staff designation flouted the agreement signed with the former FARC, “it is still not certain to what extent this group has that unified leadership and ability to coordinate negotiations at the national level, all dissidents with the state,” warns Jorge Mantilla of the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP).
“The FARC were demobilized under the peace agreement and no longer exist in Colombia. Compliance with the agreement, and compliance with the vast majority of ex-combatants who have adhered to the agreement, also requires being firm and forceful towards the dissidents. It’s very good that the government is trying to implement a policy of “total peace,” but for that policy to be successful, careful consideration must be given to who and in what form it negotiates,” says Juan Pappier, Senior Researcher at Human observe rights. “When the agreement was negotiated it was clear that those who failed to comply would be subject to the full weight of the law. Today, at best, we can open the doors for them to submit to the judiciary with certain advantages, but Colombia cannot open the doors to new political negotiations with those who betrayed the peace agreement,” he stresses.
“For now, total peace is a proposal that sounds very good, but requires different strategies and a lot of coordination for each organization. The ELN doesn’t even like five that they put them in a sack with the Clan del Golfo,” says Angelika Rettberg, a professor at the Universidad de Los Andes and an expert in resolving armed conflicts who sees no way the dissidents fit in. The new peace policy, of which many details are still known, is encountering the first stumbling blocks.
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