First modification:
Peace negotiations in Colombia advance. After receiving the green light in the Senate, the House of Representatives approved this week, by 125 votes in favor and 13 against, the Government’s project to extend and modify the Law of Public Order that allows dialogue with armed actors outside of the law, key to the search for “total peace” of the new Colombian Executive. For its part, the UN extended for another year the mission to verify compliance with the Peace Agreement signed in 2106 between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the then FARC guerrilla.
“It is the beginning to turn the page definitively, of the bloodbath in which we are still immersed,” said the Minister of the Interior, Alfonso Prada, after, after an intense debate, the House of Representatives gave the green light to the project of the Government that allows dialogues to be carried out with armed actors, outside the law, of all kinds and hair. One of the wheels on which Total Peace runs, the main flag of the presidential duo Gustavo Petro – Francia Márquez.
“Differentiated situation”
“I believe that in these two months important advances have already been seen in the new government, and what has been called ‘total peace’ has been proposed, given that the agreement made with the FARC demobilizes 61 fronts, some dissidents for course, but other insurgent groups remain, such as the National Liberation Army [ELN]and of course far-right armed groups that are narco-paramilitaries,” Reynaldo Villalba, Colombian human rights defense attorney, from the “José Alvear Restrepo” Lawyers’ Collective -CAJAR, and who has just been elected Vice President for the Americas of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).
“This government’s proposal is to demobilize them, submit them to justice, with a different situation between what would be negotiations with a group like the ELN, due to its conditions of political-military organization, in terms of the political crime of rebellion, and another form of negotiation with the far-right groups, the narco-paramilitaries”, details the lawyer.
“The project is not impunity”
Those who criticize these negotiations with the narco-paramilitary groups say that the danger is that impunity is negotiated. During Álvaro Uribe’s government, a peace agreement had already been negotiated with 30,000 paramilitaries, but paramilitarism did not end, they recall.
“The question is: in fear of it happening again, then nothing is done? Of course it will surely be a process with many difficulties. But the idea is that the country commits itself to the goal of demobilizing these groups. The project is not one of impunity, definitely”, reacts Villalba.
