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Bogota (AFP) – The Government of Colombia announced this Monday that it will negotiate with the rebels who departed from the peace pact signed by the extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, some 2,000 combatants who fuel the violence that persists after the historic pact.
President Gustavo Petro reported on the start of peace talks with the largest faction of dissidents of the once most powerful guerrilla in America.
“A table will be established between the Government and the Central General Staff,” the Colombian president wrote on Twitter this Monday, March 13, shortly after the Prosecutor’s Office lifted the arrest warrants against 19 leaders who will act as negotiators.
“A second peace process begins,” added the president, who has been negotiating since the end of last year with rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN).
With the beginning of talks with the Central General Staff, practically half of the people today in arms enter into negotiations with the government.
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) March 13, 2023
In the morning, Attorney General Francisco Barbosa agreed to a request from the Government to suspend the judicial requirements that weighed on the now guerrilla delegates.
Petro, the first leftist leader to rise to power in Colombia, is also seeking talks with the powerful Clan del Golfo cartel, other drug gangs and the Segunda Marquetalia, a faction of dissidents that signed and then abandoned the peace process.
“Practically half of the armed people today are entering into a peace process with the government. Half are still missing,” Petro told the media from the department of Cauca (southwest), without specifying the date or venue of the talks.
“Good President Petro! The commitment to a stable and lasting peace must be supported,” Sandra Ramírez, a former member of the FARC and today a senator for the Comunes party, which emerged from the 2016 peace agreement, wrote on Twitter.
“Political character”
Petro was torn between recognizing the dissidents as political actors –despite having rejected the historic agreement that turned the FARC into a party– or treating them as drug gangs.
“In this specific case, for the Prosecutor’s Office the foundation exists because the president gave the dissidents who did not sign the Havana peace agreement a political character,” said the prosecutor.
According to Barbosa, the president granted the same recognition to the members of the Segunda Marquetalia.
The prosecutor has not lifted the arrest warrants against members of that group.
The operation of the Central General Staff is concentrated especially in the Amazon, the Pacific and the borders with Venezuela and Ecuador.
The announcement by President Petro to start a second peace talks with the self-styled Central General Staff is very positive for the country.
There the accruals of the Peace Agreement will be fundamental and the experience we had in Havana should be the starting point. https://t.co/Htm0z7vBWB
— Rodrigo Londoño (@TimoComunes) March 13, 2023
In an interview given to the AFP on March 1, a guerrilla chief of the Central General Staff (EMC) from the department of Nariño (southwest), ‘Hernán Zapata’, assured that a suspension of arrest warrants against his comrades represented the beginning of the peace talks, in which they will seek to correct the “errors” of the 2016 pact.
The EMC “has been integrated to finalize (…) that past peace agreement and make it complete,” Petro conceded.
dissident violence
According to independent calculations, the EMC has more than 2,000 fighters and the number is growing. The bulk of the FARC (7,000 guerrillas) demobilized in 2017.
Although the agreement reduced the violence, the dissidents were gaining ground in remote regions where the State was slow to arrive after the signing of the pact.
In June 2021, an EMC command attacked the helicopter in which the then president, the conservative Iván Duque (2018-2022), was traveling near the border with Venezuela with rifle bursts. A few months later, they activated a bomb in a police station that killed two minors in a poor neighborhood of Bogotá.
Dozens of soldiers and civilians have died in recent years in ambushes by dissidents against the public forces and in combat with other armed groups.
With the so-called “Total Peace” policy, Petro seeks to extinguish the internal conflict of six decades. His delegates have been talking since November with the ELN guerrillas in rotating venues such as Caracas, Mexico City and soon in Havana.
fragile truce
The security forces and dissidents from all factions agreed to a six-month ceasefire on New Year’s Eve.
During the truce, several soldiers and combatants from other armed groups were detained and later released by dissidents.
The different dissident factions, the ELN rebels and drug trafficking groups heirs to paramilitaries continue to dispute in bloody confrontations the income from drug trafficking and illegal mining in the country that produces the most cocaine worldwide.
The conflict in Colombia leaves more than nine million victims, including displaced, disappeared and murdered.
