A coca laboratory burns during a police operation in the Magdaleno Medio region of Antioquia in late 2020.Piero Pomponi / Getty Images
Yesid Pereira is a peasant leader from La Carpa, in El Guaviare, in southern Colombia, an area that lived for decades drowned by the control of the FARC guerrillas and coca crops. For Pereira and other local families, the peace agreement signed five years ago between former President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC was more than the end of a war. It opened the first opportunity in more than 50 years to "stop being illegal and live in subjection." They did, he says, what was in their power. They cleaned the fields, received the United Nations and joined the National Program for the Substitution of Crops for Illicit Use (PNIS). They were also left without the only way of life they had ever known. “If I don't have resources, I have to burst somewhere. If the Government did not comply with me,I have to do anything to support my family. There are people who have already traveled to different places to continue planting. Cutting [forests] again to plant coca ”, explains Pereira to the journalist María Jimena Duzán in the docuserie
The patterns of war,
released in August.
This Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the first of the many historical days that the peace process in Colombia lived in just two months.
Shouting "no more war!", President Santos and Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias
Timochenko
, the top leader of the FARC, signed the agreement that they had negotiated in Havana for months on September 26, 2016 in Cartagena de Indias.
The euphoria unleashed by the pact that put an end to the oldest guerrilla in Latin America after five decades of war barely lasted a week.
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Seven days later, Colombians said no to the agreement, in a victory by the minimum in an unnecessary referendum, with which Santos intended to reaffirm his position in favor of peace in the face of the devastating campaign against led by former president Álvaro Uribe, his former mentor. The strategy turned out to be a mistake. With the country mired in uncertainty about the future of the process and with the echo of Santos's defeat still in the air, Colombia woke up on Friday, October 7 with the news that its president had been named the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize winner. "It was a gift from heaven," the winner said before the accolade from abroad after the blow received at home. A month and a half later, the same two protagonists of the first firm, Santos and Timochenko, sealed a second version of the agreement.In a ceremony much more sober than the first. In Bogotá and without airplanes doing stunts or painting the sky.
The agreement was difficult to sign, but five years later the feeling is that it is more difficult to put into practice. For Josefina Echavarría, director of the Kroc Institute's Peace Accords Matrix, it is the agreement with "the most varied and complex implementation agenda of all the peace agreements signed since 1989." According to the latest report by the Institute, in charge of monitoring its implementation, by the end of 2020 28% of the 578 points of the agreement had come true.
The achievements are real and tangible.
The guerrillas, except for a few dissidents, demobilized and handed over their arms, and became a political party, renamed Comunes at the beginning of this year and which already has an active participation in the political life of the country.
As a result of the agreement, institutions were created such as the Truth Commission, which in the coming months will publish its report, or the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the justice mechanism created to judge the crimes of the conflict and those responsible and who has great international support.
But the challenges are multiplying and tense the country, especially in the midst of a pandemic that forced to focus policies and resources.
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Colombia has experienced an upturn in violence in recent years. According to the Indepaz organization, 126 social leaders and human rights defenders have been assassinated so far this year in Colombia. Another 37 signatories of the agreement and ex-FARC combatants have been killed or have disappeared in the same period. The environmental organization Global Witness once again ranked Colombia in 2020, for the second year in a row, as the most dangerous country in the world for environmentalists. “Hundreds of communities across the country feel that peace has become an empty promise. We are facing very serious increases in forced displacement, confinement, homicides and massacres. Many areas of the country run the serious risk of returning to levels of violence that existed before the peace process ”, says José Manuel Vivanco,Director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch.
The total pacification of the country goes far beyond the disappearance of the oldest guerrilla in Latin America. The ELN, the dissidents and other armed groups have taken advantage of the power vacuum left by the FARC and continue to be in conflict in many territories of the country. Vivanco points to a "backward and inefficient" security policy, in addition to "the slowness and lack of coordination in the efforts to increase the state presence in remote areas of the country."
One of the great objectives of the agreement was to link the national territory to the territories always excluded, something that the High Commissioner for Peace during the Government of Juan Manuel Santos, Sergio Jaramillo, called "territorial peace." For peasants like Pereira, someone who lives in a place as remote as La Carpa, more than 600 kilometers from Bogotá, the State has always been a diffuse figure. The polarization that marks the country, and that floods everything, reaches its greatest expression in the deep scar that exists between the different regions of Colombia.
María Victoria Llorente, director of the Ideas for Peace Foundation, recalls that the agreement "had the logic of changing power relations" so that those territories involved in conflict, by involving the population and advancing in a broader agenda of integral rural development, could succeed.
For her, the current government of Iván Duque has worked on that agenda "and badly that a series of instruments have been developed at different levels to ensure that it is fulfilled in the 15 years that must be fulfilled."
But 15 years for Pereira are many.
Duzán, who visited several of these territories in recent months, assures that these regions are better than before, but in a "gray situation".
"They may improve if things are done well or they can go back to the past," he warns.
The Government that was born from no to agreement
The great peacemaker, Juan Manuel Santos, now retired from politics, in an interview with EL PAÍS last month, assured that the agreement "is going through its most difficult test, which is to have a hostile government," to which he already has less than a year to make way for the next. But beyond the fact that Iván Duque came to power from the hand of the main opponent of the process, Uribe, the president also clings to peace at the end of his term. This week, in his last speech to the UN, Duque described the agreement signed by Santos as "weak", but said that in the three years of his government there had been "more progress than in the first 20 months of implementation."
The greatest achievement of the agreement, the end of a war over which several generations of Colombians grew up, makes it necessary to recall some figures. The conflict caused between 1958 and 2018 more than 260,000 deaths and more than 80,000 disappeared, according to the National Center for Historical Memory. The Colombian government estimated the number of people displaced by violence from 1985 to 2019 at more than eight million.
In these data is the point of no return that the country, despite the many challenges that lie ahead and that the next government that leaves the polls in 2022 will have to lead. For Echavarría, the great challenge is to remember that “the efforts to end the internal armed conflict were the result of more than five decades in which a military victory was not possible ”. "We have a great opportunity to carry out far-reaching reforms, to cement respect for life and for divergent opinions in democracy," he adds. Llorente advocates "rescuing peace from polarization and thinking more than desirable peace, possible peace."
The polarization, however, continues five years later.
After Duque's words at the UN, Santos declared in an interview on Caracol Radio: "It makes me sad as a Colombian to hear that from my president and where he said it."
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