Former President Juan Manuel Santos and Comunes Party leader Rodrigo Londoño applaud with the Choir of Daughters and Sons for Peace during the commemoration of the seven years since the signing of the peace agreement with the extinct FARC. Mauricio Dueñas Castañeda (EFE)
The numerous negotiations for total peace that Gustavo Petro proposes for Colombia should not overshadow the implementation of the peace agreement with the extinct FARC guerrillas, emphasized former President Juan Manuel Santos this Friday, the seventh anniversary of the signing of this historic pact. The Nobel Peace Prize winner also took the opportunity to point out that it was the current president’s “worst strategic mistake” to grant political status as heirs to the rebels to the dissidents who had deviated from the peace process in a ceremony that Petro had planted in Santos for the second time .
“The worst strategic mistake this government made was to give permission to the so-called dissidents to present themselves as FARC-EP, as the General Staff of the FARC-EP,” Santos said on stage during the event commemoration at the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH) in Bogotá, to which Petro was invited, but only Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva appeared on his behalf. The agreement was signed “so that the FARC ceases to exist as an armed group,” the former president noted. “And they ceased to exist. So no one understands how the FARC-EP reemerges and the government gives them a license. “This is a very serious strategic mistake and I don’t know how to solve it with the international community,” he stressed.
It is not the first time that the FARC peace architects have criticized the way in which complete peace is negotiated with an archipelago of armed groups, and in particular the approach to the structures that deviate from these negotiations and are now commanded by Iván Mordisco. Accommodating dissidents was problematic for the Petro government from the start. Recognizing the self-proclaimed Central General Staff as an armed actor with political status is “the worst strategic mistake made in Colombia in the last 25 years and the greatest damage done to the peace process,” Sergio said in August. Jaramillo, the commissioner who sealed the 2016 agreement, before the Constitutional Court. These structures are, among other things, the main ones responsible for the murder of signatories, of which there are already over 400.
“We told him with great respect: total peace must not overshadow the implementation of the peace agreement with the FARC,” Santos (who ruled between 2010 and 2018) recalled his suggestions to Petro. This is a fundamental and necessary prerequisite for the success of all other negotiations in Colombia, he emphasized. “If the agreement we signed with the FARC is not implemented, any other attempt at peace is dead.” “Please understand this,” he said, before arguing for the national unity that the government promises as an opening gesture to others listening to political sectors. Petro held two meetings this week in a more conciliatory mood, with major businessmen and with former President Álvaro Uribe – a strong critic of the peace negotiations.
Former President Santos vehemently defended the signed peace against total peace, deploring its “slow implementation.” Petro’s flagship policy is experiencing a double crisis at the dialogue tables, both with the ELN, the last armed guerrilla fighter, and with the so-called EMC. This week the president fired his former peace envoy Danilo Rueda, who failed to vigorously implement the 2016 agreement or make significant progress in difficult dialogues with dissidents. He will be replaced by Otty Patiño, the ELN’s previous chief negotiator, who, like Petro, belonged to the M-19 and enjoys the president’s full trust.
“Unfortunately he promised us he would come today, but he just announced he wasn’t coming,” Santos said of Petro’s absence. In March, the president had already rejected the Nobel Prize when he decided not to attend a summit in Cartagena to resolve the dispute between the team that sealed peace with the FARC and the team now in dialogue with the FARC as originally planned ELN stands to be ironed out. Despite this absence, the meeting ended with an official statement in which the government reiterated its commitment to a more decisive implementation of the now seven-year-old Teatro-Colón agreement.
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The 320 pages of the peace agreement list all issues affecting the country and Petro itself, from backwardness in rural Colombia to the fight against drugs, Santos reiterated. “This government would go down in history just by implementing it. And there is still time,” he announced. With a dose of optimism, he hoped that the correction would come with the new peace commissioner and a new person in charge of implementation with autonomy, power and budget. “This would be a great solution that President Petro presented to us today,” he lamented. “But we ask it from here.”
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