FARC guerrillas in a camp in the Colombian mountains during the peace process on February 18, 2016. LUIS ACOSTA (AFP)
From the beginning, the integration of FARC dissidents has been one of the greatest challenges to the total peace that Gustavo Petro’s government is striving for. Dissidences in the plural, as more than one faction – at different times – withdrew from the Havana talks that led to the sealed peace deal in late 2016. Now the ceasefire with various armed groups has shown that the roads are between submission and negotiation for dissidents willing to join the Colombian President’s ambitious political banner.
After announcing on New Year’s Eve that he had reached a six-month bilateral ceasefire with five different organizations, Petro signed an equal number of decrees to set the terms of each of those ceasefires. Amid the controversy, the government suspended that of the National Liberation Army after the last guerrilla active in Colombia denied making the deal. The other four remain steadfast and include the two main dissidents of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia: the Central General Staff and the Second Marquetalia. The list is completed by the Clan del Golfo, the largest drug trafficking gang, heir to the paramilitaries, calling themselves the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, and the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Forces.
Although the respective decrees share similarities, their differences have drawn the most attention. While the wording for the ELN and the Central General Staff speaks of the “peace process”, for the Segunda Marquetalia, the Clan del Golfo and the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Forces it refers to “facilitating the installation of a dialogue table and obtaining submission to the judiciary and their dismantling.” This means that the last three organizations are fundamentally not given any political character.
The door is not closed and this language is not final, Interior Minister Alfonso Prada said. Along with the five decrees, the government issued another to create a high-level body responsible for classifying and characterizing armed groups. Its members are Defense Minister Iván Velásquez; the High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda; and National Intelligence Director Manuel Alberto Casanova. “Once we have the final decision of the instance, we will also decide on the part of the government on which way to proceed if political status is recognized or we remain on the level of talks with a view to subjugating and dismantling highly effective criminal organizations as legally defined,” Prada explained after acknowledging the complexity of these processes.
The episode and the language chosen certainly open up a thorny debate about the place that dissidence will take in total peace, a problematic subject for several reasons. Most of the FARC’s ex-combatants have moved towards legality. More than 90% of the signatories to the agreement, around 13,000 ex-guerrillas, have fulfilled their obligations. But dissidents have destabilized security conditions in many regions, sabotaged peace-building efforts and threatened security guarantees for ex-guerrillas and their families under the accords. It is an archipelago of more than 20 groups that are difficult to classify. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), six internal armed conflicts remain in Colombia, half of which involve dissenting factions.
The dissent began when, in mid-2016, in the final stretch of negotiations with the FARC, one of its most representative structures, Front 1 operating in the south-east of the country, released a statement distancing itself from the FARC process, which included a “treason” called. This announcement prompted the FARC leadership to expel five commanders, including Gentil Duarte.
Newsletter
Current affairs analysis and the best stories from Colombia, delivered to your inbox every week
GET THE
Since then, other factions have emerged in different regions, but the phenomenon took on a new dimension in August 2019 when Iván Márquez, the chief negotiator in talks with the government, announced that he would take up arms alongside other leaders who had signed the peace. Although the flight of signers that many feared did not materialize, a new dynamic of forced recruitment has fueled the fires of dissent.
The currents of Gentil Duarte – Central General Staff – and Iván Márquez – Segunda Marquetalia, due to the FARC’s birthplace – consolidated as the most notorious. Both were labeled terrorist organizations by the United States government when it delisted the FARC, which had already been disarmed and transformed into a political party. Duarte and Márquez also waged a war of life and death, in which the main leaders of both factions, including Duarte himself, were replaced by Iván Mordisco, who in turn reappeared to announce his willingness to join total peace after being presumed dead was explained. Márquez also suffered an attack but is still alive, according to the peace commissioner.
It makes some sense that the Segunda Marquetalia shouldn’t be dealt with politically and the General Staff would, says Luis Fernando Trejos, an analyst at the UNCaribe think tank. “That the General Staff are dissidents, that is, none of them entered the process, they were all commands and structures that broke away from the negotiations and continued their criminal activities while the Second Marquetalia were rearmed,” he argues. “It’s a difference that would serve to understand why some get political treatment and others don’t.” In the end, he emphasizes that “what they call dissidents is very dynamic.”
Jorge Mantilla of the Ideas for Peace Foundation believes everything remains in a “grey area”. Although the decrees differ on the words of peace and submission, the cessation of offensive operations by public authority and the verification mechanisms are in practice the same, he warns. How the new high-level body qualifies these groups will be crucial. “We return to the practical problem of total peace, namely how to have differentiated conversations but at the same time with different actors at war with each other,” he concludes.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the latest information about the country.