Colombia speaks of peace again.
In his first visit as president-elect to a high court, Gustavo Petro, who takes office next Sunday, attended the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) on Friday afternoon, considered the backbone of the agreements signed with the extinct guerrilla. of the FARC.
Although the discreet meeting with the magistrates of the transitional justice system took place behind closed doors, the symbolic weight was undeniable.
"Your purpose of ensuring total peace in Colombia is not only a laudable design, but a constitutional mandate and a basic budget of coexistence," the president of the JEP, Judge Eduardo Cifuentes, told him during the meeting.
After a parenthesis during the government of Iván Duque, the discussion about the peace negotiations, and the possibility of new dialogues,
Peace agreements require the commitment of several governments, as they tend to take time to settle.
Colombia is not an exception.
From the outset, Petro promises to give a new impetus to the fragile implementation of the historic pact with the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, today converted into a political party, and already intends to resume the frustrated dialogues with the ELN, the last active guerrilla in the country.
He also advances a policy of bringing other criminal groups to justice as part of his ambitious and incipient search for what he has called "total peace."
In particular the Clan del Golfo, the largest drug gang, heir to the paramilitaries.
If at the end of the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) there was talk of a "complete peace" to justify the need to maintain talks with the ELN, after having signed the agreement with the FARC, on the eve of the beginning of the Petro was his "total peace" and dominates the talks as one of the axes of his mandate.
"It is a complementary and much more ambitious development, since the negotiations between Santos and the FARC were restricted to the main armed actors at the time, but the subsequent period has shown us that it is not enough," says sociologist Gonzalo Sánchez, who directed for years the National Center for Historical Memory.
The theme of peace is conceptually extended, he explains, to encompass not only insurgency as a political form of war, but also criminal forms of war.
“The bet is to close the cycle of the whole group;
it is enormous, ambitious, but also very complicated”, he values.
“Peace in this government ceases to be an element of politics, to be the great articulator of all politics.
There is a totalizing vocation for peace”.
Petro's visit to the JEP marked a contrast with Duque, elected at the time with the support of the sectors that opposed the talks in Havana.
Although the outgoing president promised not to “tear up” the agreement, throughout his mandate he maintained friction with the Comprehensive System for Peace, which includes both the JEP and the Truth Commission.
He even tried to modify the court of peace, but crashed with the rejection of Congress and the Constitutional Court.
He only got to visit the JEP facilities last November, for the commemoration of the five years since the signing of the agreements.
The JEP received President-elect Gustavo Petro and the designated Foreign Minister, Álvaro Leyva, in Bogotá, on July 29, 2022. JEP
Except on that occasion, Duque was absent from the great events related to peace.
He did not go to the installation ceremony of the Truth Commission, in November 2018, nor to the inauguration of
Fragmentos,
the "counter-monument" by the artist Doris Salcedo, built with the molten metal of the FARC rifles.
Nor to the public delivery of the long-awaited final report of the Commission, a month ago, when a loud whistle was heard as soon as her name was mentioned.
That rejection contrasted with the cheers for Petro, who did attend the moving event in a theater in Bogotá.
"There are expectations of peace, of a great peace," acknowledged Petro himself upon receiving the Commission's recommendations on the platform –among others, negotiating with the ELN–.
For some time now, the president-elect – who in his youth belonged to the M-19 guerrillas – has the thesis of small peace and big peace.
“The big one I always conceived of as the great agreement between the whole of society, not exclusively between the State and a guerrilla group,” he wrote in his political biography
One life, many lives
(Planeta, 2021), a prelude to “total peace” that he glimpses since his victory at the polls.
That emphasis has also been evident in some of his early appointments.
In particular, that of Danilo Rueda as peace commissioner and that of Álvaro Leyva as foreign minister, who accompanied him on his visit to the JEP.
Leyva, a key man in the negotiations with the FARC, will be the head of a diplomacy at the service of peace.
"From the world we expect all the effort to overcome our endemic violence," Petro said when announcing it.
Among others, it has already taken firm steps to normalize relations with Nicolás Maduro's Venezuela –completely broken during the Duque period–, a key element to pave the way for a negotiation with the ELN, which several experts already consider a binational guerrilla. for their presence on the other side of the border.
Despite the renewed hopes with which the new political cycle begins, the obstacles are not negligible.
Several observers invite restraint, since Petro assumes a critical security situation.
In many regions the war that the agreements with the FARC sought to extinguish is still raging, humanitarian challenges persist and violence has intensified.
There are six internal armed conflicts between various actors, according to the balance of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which warned last week that in the first half of 2022 there has been a significant increase in violence, with the consequent increase in suffering for the civilian population.
Despite the disarmament of the FARC, a disorderly archipelago of groups with more fractured structures filled the void left by the guerrillas,
in the absence of a state response.
To phenomena such as the incessant murder of social leaders, environmentalists and ex-combatants is added the recent wave of attacks against the public force, attributed to the Clan del Golfo.
During the Santos government, although there was also an attempt to combine negotiation with the guerrillas with a policy of subjugation of criminal organizations, the two issues were "very clearly separated in terms of strategies," says Angelika Rettberg, a professor at the University of Los Andes is an expert in the resolution of armed conflicts who was part of the table with the ELN in 2018. “Until now, the announcements made by the elected government are putting many things in the same bag, generating expectations that may not be entirely realistic," he warns.
"Different organizations require different responses."
Born under the influence of the Cuban revolution, and inspired by liberation theology, the National Liberation Army, which for the first time would have a left-wing government as its counterpart, concentrates a good part of the expectations.
"The environment is favorable, but it is not exempt from the complexities that have accompanied the rapprochement with this guerrilla," which has been strengthened militarily, warns a recent analysis by the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP).
“We are at the moment when the pendulum is turning to peace”, says María Victoria Llorente, director of the FIP, although she stresses that the negotiation is not just around the corner.
"The relationship of the Maduro regime with the ELN, for example, is an open question," she points out.
For now, the deceptive feeling has prevailed that the talks with the ELN and the Clan del Golfo will pick up again where they left off.
“Clearly there is more will than in the Duque government, but that does not exempt any of these processes from the difficulties associated with very lucrative illicit economies, and with realities of relative strength that are very different from those that led the FARC to negotiate at the time”, warns Angelika Rettberg.
"One cannot ignore the events that have occurred in these four years, where some drug trafficking routes have been consolidated and armed groups have expanded beyond Colombian territory," she says.
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