Colombian President Gustavo Petro in an August 2022 photo at the inauguration of Defense Secretary Iván Velásquez.Chepa Beltran (Long Visual Press/Universal Imag)
The dialogue table with the FARC dissidence led by Iván Mordisco, left to die during a military operation by former President Iván Duque, will be set up shortly. Government sources assured that the announcement would be made during a public event on Sunday, but by the end of the day the day and date that negotiations would begin for this guerrilla-based armed group had been reassessed laid down their arms and went back to civilian life.
Gustavo Petro runs on two tracks at the same time. In the first he tries to convince the ELN guerrillas that this is the best time to reach an agreement, reinvent themselves and become a political party or a social organization after 60 years of armed struggle – it is last armed guerrilla uprising in Latin America. Negotiation is far from easy, as some experts in the field have ventured. The ELN manages some times and the government others. Petro is in a hurry to agree to a truce to reduce killings in the regions. The guerrillas, on the other hand, do not want a ceasefire for the time being, which could put them at a disadvantage compared to other criminal groups with which they dispute some Colombian territories.
In the second, the President sits at a table with a few men who are hiding in the jungle and dedicated to drug trafficking and extortion. The guerrillas who demobilized accused them of harassing them. Despite this, the government believes that this is the way to demobilize the self-proclaimed central general staff under the command of Mordisco, which brought together the organization’s absolute power after the death of Gentil Duarte, a very peculiar historical combatant who recorded Ranchera discs in secret
Petro gave the green light to this peace dialogue as they are guerrillas who never believed in the previous peace process sealed in late 2016 during the government of Juan Manuel Santos and continued their struggle. At the moment he has not considered that the other dissidence, the Second Marquetalia of Iván Márquez, should receive the same treatment in which combatants who have withdrawn from this process with the signed agreements are militants. Márquez himself was the FARC delegation’s chief negotiator at the Havana talks, but took up arms again when the then Attorney General opened a drug trafficking case against him.
Danilo Rueda, the peace commissioner, was the one who managed to establish dialogue with the central general staff. He had spent eight months convincing Biting that this was the best way. Petro announced a month ago that everything is ready to start talks, but so far this has not become a reality, which will be announced in the coming days. The president puts his trust in Rueda, a humanist who has toured Colombian prisons with a message of forgiveness and reconciliation. The President has great confidence in him.
It was he who met with the leaders of this armed group in the Sabanas del Yarí, in the Meta department, on Monday. He was accompanied by a delegation of witnesses and observers from various organizations, representatives of the accredited diplomatic corps in Colombia and “sectors of faith” intended to relate to the Church and other religious organizations. There, the Central General Staff named the names of five of its members who will integrate an oversight and control mechanism that will be officially installed on April 26. The date coincides with a world meeting of foreign ministers organized by Petro to try to resolve the political conflict in Venezuela.
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Rueda said in a statement that with these negotiations he intends to reduce the inequality gaps in areas affected by the armed conflict and called on the Central General Staff to uphold a commitment to respecting the lives of social leaders, communities and the environment. Stopping the insatiable deforestation in the south of the country as a goodwill gesture was precisely a first meeting point in the rapprochement between the government and the Mordisco dissidence.
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