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The Colombian government announced that it will negotiate with the rebels who departed from the peace pact signed by the FARC in 2016, some 2,000 combatants who fuel the violence that persists after the historic pact.
With information from Paula Carrillo, a correspondent in Bogotá, and the AFP.
The will be the second charm? This is the question that remains after Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced the opening of talks with dissidents of the FARC guerrilla, an armed group that had already signed peace in 2016.
“Political character”
For Petro, those who did not accept the negotiations at that time, “now they have joined to finalize that past peace agreement and make it complete.” “A table will be established between the government and the Central General Staff,” the president wrote on Twitter on Monday.
The news comes after the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office suspended the arrest warrants against 19 dissidents. In the morning, the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, agreed to a request from the government to suspend the judicial requirements that weighed on the now guerrilla delegates.
“With this possibility that begins after the attitude of the prosecutor to accept the names of the people who will act as spokespersons for that group, practically half of the armed people today enter into a peace process with the government,” stressed Petro.
Petro was torn between recognizing the dissidents as political actors, despite their rejection of 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.
dissident violence
According to independent calculations, the Central General Staff (EMC) has more than 2,000 combatants and the number is increasing. The bulk of the FARC (7,000 guerrillas) demobilized in 2017. Although the agreement reduced violence, the dissidents were gaining ground in remote regions where the State was slow to arrive after signing the pact.
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.
Petro, the first leftist to come 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. The so-called total peace or peace with all the armed groups in Colombia was one of the president’s campaign promises.
