Colombia announces a ceasefire agreement with the main armed groups

First modification: 01/01/2023 – 15:37

“Total peace will be a reality,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro pronounced in a tweet posted shortly before 2022 officially ended.

The government reached a six-month ceasefire with the five main armed groups still active in the country: the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas, dissidents from the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and various groups of drug traffickers including the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC) and the paramilitaries of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

“The bilateral cessation obliges the armed organizations and the State to respect it. There will be a national and international verification mechanism. May peace be among us. Happy New Year,” said the Colombian head of state.

Gustavo Petro heads the first left-wing government in the country’s history, one that took office on August 7. In November, the president resumed peace talks with the ELN –suspended by the previous government of Iván Duque– to try to put an end to the internal armed conflict, the last on the continent.

Petro promised to enter into negotiations with all the armed groups present in the territory while his “total peace” policy became law in November, after the pro-government majority Congress backed his proposal to talk with guerrillas, drug traffickers and groups of paramilitary origin. with a view to defusing the conflict from all possible fronts.

The truce is the main objective of the “total peace” strategy, aimed at ending the armed conflict that persists in the country despite the dissolution of the FARC as a guerrilla in 2016.

Colombia has endured more than 50 years of conflict between the state and various armed groups, paramilitaries, and drug trafficking factions. Some 90 armed groups currently operate in the country, according to the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), an independent think-tank.

The main actors in the last internal armed conflict on the continent

The main groups are the ELN; the dissident groups of the dissolved Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC): the Second Marquetalia and the Central General Staff. According to Indepaz, these groups and dozens of others continue to be involved in conflicts over income from drug trafficking and other illegal companies. Indepaz recorded close to 100 massacres in 2022.

The ELN, the last recognized rebel group in the country, has been negotiating with the government since November. The group was founded in 1964 by unionists and students sympathetic to the Cuban revolution. The organization, classified as terrorist by Washington and Brussels, would have between 2,500 and 4,000 members.

Norway, Venezuela and Cuba are the guarantors of this new stage of negotiations with the ELN, which already had its first round of talks in Caracas. Mexico also plans to support them and is even expected to host a new round soon.

The Segunda Marquetalia and Estado Mayor Central groups – splinter factions of the FARC that broke the 2016 peace pact – have held separate talks with the government.

For their part, the AGC militias, made up of far-right paramilitaries demobilized in the early 2000s, are the armed wing of the Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s main drug-trafficking gang.

Iván Cepeda, a senator close to the government and a negotiator with the rebels, recently told the AFP news agency that the Petro Administration is offering “lenient treatment from a judicial point of view” to members of armed groups in exchange for their dismantling. .

“Peace processes, and I say this from experience, are construction processes, patient, slow, and in which there are difficult moments, of crisis, there are moments in which things do not turn out as desired. But in favor of the The process that is taking place now is that in 20 days we have made progress, which had not been made for years, between the Colombian State and the ELN,” added the senator.

with AFP