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Total peace: not at any price

2023-03-20T10:46:22.859Z


Petro has placed limits on negotiations with armed groups by breaking the ceasefire with Clan del Golfo


Total peace is not going to be achieved at any cost.

Gustavo Petro had been receiving complaints about his security policy for weeks.

They accused him of being too lax when it came to fighting crime, all for reaching agreements with armed groups.

He had demoralized the military, they told him.

He humiliated the public force with his passivity, they accused him.

The president's patience, however, has run out.

Petro announced on Sunday afternoon that it was suspending the bilateral ceasefire with the Clan del Golfo.

No more.

The group, a legacy of paramilitarism, continued to impose terror in the territories in which it operates and gave no impression that it was prepared for a peace dialogue.

He demanded a negotiating table similar to that of the ELN or the one that the Central General Staff, one of the FARC dissidents, is going to have, but he was never close to achieving it.

The Government did not recognize his political status, it simply offered him to submit to justice with some prison benefits.

In the end, everything has blown up.

The president, yes, continues with three other open negotiations, with the ELN, the Central General Staff and the Second Marquetalia.

This is the status of the negotiations:

Soldiers try to move a burned-out vehicle during a protest by miners in Caucasia, Bajo Cauca region, Colombia, on March 12.HANDOUT (AFP)


The ELN,

piano piano if it arrives far away

Little by little you go far.

The peace process with the ELN is the most solid of all, behind it there is a history and a series of attempts that have led the way.

The Government and the guerrillas agreed in the second cycle of talks, which was held in Mexico City, on an agenda that will begin to be developed in Havana, Cuba.

There is reflected a future ceasefire, the elimination of the ELN as an organized armed group and the discussion about what the guerrilla should mutate into, surely in a political party with more regional than national interests.

The High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, and Senator Iván Cepeda, two political figures who have a lot at stake in this negotiation, have congratulated themselves on the progress and willingness of the guerrillas to understand each other and seek a way out of violence.

Of course, with their times.

Petro is an agile negotiator, with powerful blows, very much in the style of the guerrilla in which he was a member, the M-19.

The ELN's internal clock, however, is different.

He has been in the jungle for 60 years and many of his paintings have never been arrested.

They have plenty of patience.

The previous negotiators with the FARC who left another previous agenda to negotiate with the ELN, Sergio Jaramillo and Humberto de la Calle, have come out to criticize the new road map.

"The ELN scored all the goals" against the government of Gustavo Petro, which opens the door to "an endless negotiation," said Jaramillo.

De la Calle maintains that the language is vague when it comes to laying down weapons.

“It may happen that the ELN seeks to keep its weapons for a period after the final agreement, or even refuse to give it up,

when many of the agreements will have already been agreed upon”, says the now senator.

They have also been criticized.

They have been reminded that the left, which they question now, supported them without buts when they negotiated something as complex as a peace agreement with the FARC, a document that changed the history of the country and without which Petro would surely not have arrived. to the power.

The dissidences of the Central General Staff, the following dialogue

After the discussion with the ELN, this is the next peace process that the government of Gustavo Petro has announced.

The group, which calls itself the Central Staff, is the new name by which the extinct FARC dissidents are known, grouped under the figure of Gentil Duarte and Iván Mordisco, who reappeared after being presumed dead by the president. Ivan Duke.

Although he does not specify a date, Danilo Rueda has said that the table with this group will begin in the next few days.

He also does not confirm where the official talks will be held, or whether or not there will be a concentration zone for the armed forces.

"It is almost certain that it will be in Colombia," Rueda told the EFE news agency.

True to its style of announcing before specific events occur, the Government has said that the leaders of this group will meet in the coming days and there "they define who their table delegates are and the Government who their delegation is and will begin an agenda, a methodology and an architecture”, added the Peace Commissioner.

Dissident FARC guerrillas leave a camp in the Colombian department of Nariño, on March 1, 2023. JOAQUIN SARMIENTO (AFP)

However, the political negotiation with that armed group has caused fear and criticism from the signatories of the Havana Peace Agreement.

The more than 13,000 ex-guerrillas who disarmed in 2016 alert the Petro government that it is going to negotiate with dissidents who continue to attack the signatories that did comply with peace.

They complain about murders and displacements.

"The organizations with which they intend to negotiate 'Total Peace' have targeted us for their actions and their government does not heed our calls," wrote Rodrigo Londoño, Timochenko, former head

of

the former FARC to President Petro.

The Second Marquetalia, the great doubt

Here is the great unknown of total peace: Will this dissident group from the FARC receive political status or will it be treated as a simple criminal organization?

The technical discussion is complex.

The guerrillas of the General Staff never accepted the previous peace process, that of 2016, so now they can start a new one without the burden of the past.

However, the Second Marquetalia is made up of combatants who did, but deserted along the way.

The question is whether they are worthy of a second chance.

There are opinions for all tastes.

Timochenko, the one who culminated the peace process of that rural and bloody guerrilla, has come out to ask that the Second Marquetalia also have a negotiation and not stay in the lurch.

This group is led by a novel character, Iván Márquez, who is supposed to be hospitalized in Caracas.

In July of last year he suffered an attack on the Venezuelan side of the border in which he lost several fingers and part of his face, according to a security source.

Many left him for dead, but he actually survived.

A lover of Cuban tobacco, his attackers placed an explosive in a cigar that was lit that day.

Márquez himself is a deserter.

He was the FARC's chief negotiator in Havana and may have become a senator, but the courts persecuted him for drug trafficking crimes.

He later disappeared and reappeared in a video recorded in the middle of the jungle in which he announced that he was resuming his armed struggle.

After the attack, in some place that they have not disclosed, Márquez held a meeting with Danilo Rueda in October.

That was the start of the talks.

Since then there have been many ups and downs, it is not entirely clear what will be the way to negotiate with them.

“If the Second Marquetalia does not have a political status, it could benefit from this law (the one of submission) if it is their will, but other possibilities can be explored.

The possibility of giving it political status is not ruled out”, the Minister of Justice, Néstor Osuna, said this week.

La Segunda Marquetalia has made some goodwill gestures, such as the release these days of two hostages in Nariño.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-20

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