A FARC EP dissident walks as members of the Guardia Campesina during a meeting with local communities in San Vicente del Caguan, where guerrilla commanders will announce their peace negotiators with the government. Joaquin Sarmiento / AFP
Photo: AFP – JOAQUIN SARMIENTO
The group called by reading a political manifesto and appointing its delegates to the negotiating table with the government FARC-EP Central General Staff He will make his public presentation this Sunday in front of hundreds of people who have mobilized for a week to reach a place called Casa Roja in the savannahs of Yarí, Caquetá department.
This is the group of dissidents commanded by Iván Mordisco, bringing together nearly 3,000 combatants who have not taken advantage final agreement signed in 2016.
Before this presentation, Andrey Avendaño, head of the 33rd Front and one of the commanders of the Central Staff of the FARC EP, from the Yarí Savannahs, said that one of the proposals they will put to the government is that the Dialog table is installed in Norway. In addition, Avendaño confirmed that his idea is for the table to roam and go through the areas where they operate.
In Casa Roja, between Caquetania and El Diamante, the leadership summit of this armed group has been taking place for the past 15 days. The meeting started on April 3 and merged the commanders of the 23 fronts operating in 16 departments in the country. There they discussed their proposals for the negotiation agenda, which they will present to the government Gustav Petro and defined their delegates for the negotiating table and for the Oversight, Monitoring and Verification Mechanism (MVMV)of the bilateral ceasefire.
Also read: The FARC Central General Staff dissidence began its command summit on Monday
On the names of the delegates at the negotiating table, Colombia+20 was able to determine that Andrey Avendaño, a commander from the Catatumbo area, signed along with the High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, the agreement with the armistice protocols. There will also be Danilo Alvizú, from to Carolina Ramirez which operates in Putumayo. There is also talk of a woman named Ángela who was deprived of her freedom in Jamundí prison; another guerrilla using the pseudonym Sebastián, who is still imprisoned in Popayán, and another named Javier, who operates in the Tibú area.
For the verification mechanism, they will appoint five commanders representing each of the blocs and who They must arrive in Bogotá next week to install it on April 26thas Rueda announced last week.
At the public event, which gathered hundreds of representatives of peasant and ethnic organizations, arriving in buses and trucks from different parts of the country, the presence of Iván Mordisco is expected, who will present himself as the maximum leader of this group and he will be a read out a political manifesto in which he will announce the main conclusions of the meeting of heads of state and government that has just ended.
In connection: Government and Farc Ep dissidents sign ceasefire protocol
It was originally planned that Commissioner Danilo Rueda and delegates from the embassies of Norway, the European Union, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, etc. would take part in this event UN Verification Mission and the Catholic Church, but their presence was canceled last Thursday for various reasons, including the guerrillas’ refusal to be unarmed and in uniform during the event.
It was unacceptable to the government for the leaders of this group to appear in uniform and armed before a large gathering of civilians. Thus what was planned as a joint act to announce the start of the negotiation phase became an act organized and led by the group of dissidents.
As always, a big question remains whether the people who are doing this are doing it voluntarily or under pressure. The picture we’ll see this Sunday may be very similar to the one the country saw in May 2000, very close by, on the outskirts San Vicente del Caguan, when the former FARC Secretariat launched the Bolivarian Movement in the presence of hundreds of peasants who arrived in buses and trucks. They also did so armed and in uniform.
As for Mordisco’s intervention, he is expected to speak about his proposals for the agenda, for which he has already outlined some general guidelines and which he believes are issues left out of the agreement signed at the Colón Theater in November were 24/2016: closure of the agricultural border, limitation of large estates, commencement of environmental rehabilitation programs, handing over and ownership of land to his fighters and enabling political participation. As in Havana, during the secret phase, this group does not wish to include the expression surrender or surrender.
The guerrilla chief will also explain the command structure of this organization, which has 15 commanders. In addition, he will enumerate various actions of public violence that he considers to be in violation of the ceasefire, which include landings and fighting in Tibú (Norte de Santander), in Cauca, in Huila and in Uribe (Meta), as illustrated in a Statement last Friday. In it, they criticized the President’s speech Gustav Petro, in which he ordered the troops to take over the entire national territory. This decision violates the ceasefire they have had with the government since January 1st and will last until June 30th.
history repeats itself
The place where today’s meeting takes place is called Casa Roja and is considered one of the emblematic places for Jorge Briceño, Mono Jojoy, who commanded that east bloc the extinct FARC guerrillas. Near Caquetania and El Diamante there are places of strong historical importance for the group that signed the final agreement with the government of Juan Manuel Santos.
Caquetania is the farm where Jojoy and Manuel Marulanda Vélez received Víctor G. Ricardo, the presidential candidate’s special envoy Andrés Pastrana Arangoin May 1998. On that day, a photograph remained from the meeting, at which Jojoy wore a campaign watch, and which many saw as the Conservative candidate’s triumph.
A month later, Andrés Pastrana himself would arrive as President-elect at the same farm, which has its own airstrip. The winner of the presidential contest, dressed in a yellow polo shirt, agreed with the two guerrilla leaders who had a grip on the country on the terms of the negotiation: the eviction of five communities in Meta and Caquetá and that it included the area where they had gathered .
In connection: Yarí, the story of a historic area
Almost a year later, in May 1999, Pastrana returned to the same place. This time to sign the famous Caquetania agreement, with which the negotiations, which could not even begin, were broken after the table was installed on January 7 of the same year. The reflectors would return to this area 17 years later, this time to a place called El Diamante, which is several kilometers before Casa Roja. That was the spot chosen by the guerrilla secretariat at the time, which was about to sign it final agreementto hold the tenth and final guerrilla conference that would approve the 310-page text.
Today, with airstrips taken over by drug dealers in the 1980s and expropriated with blood and fire by the FARC years later, this area, dotted with large farms, is once again the epicenter of the beginning of peace negotiations.
The first group to deviate from the final agreement
The FARC’s first dissidence arose before the signing of the Final Peace Agreement on November 24, 2016 at the Teatro Colon. It was Néstor Gregorio Vera, known as Iván Mordisco during the war, who led the way front first Armando Ríos this guerrilla who was the first to announce his withdrawal from the negotiations. In a statement dated July 6 of the same year, he announced his decision.
At the tenth conference of the FARC – precisely in the Llanos del Yarí – almost 300 commanders met to approve the agreement, which was to be signed for the first time on September 26th in Cartagena. Everyone attended except Mordisco.
Also read: The story of the dissent of Mordisco, the first group to withdraw from the final agreement
The participants of this last conference left the Yarí in the places where they had left their troops. They had to inform them of the outcome of the meeting and move their units to the concentration zones where they would lay down their arms in 2017.
Exactly on this march Gentle Duarte, commander of the seventh front, diverted his way, collected about 100 guerrillas, weapons, money and gold bullion that were in the jungle. He joined Mordisco and they began the history of the FARC’s greatest dissidence.
*Special Envoy Llanos del Yarí.