The expansion of the renamed Gaitanista Army of Colombia, as the Clan del Golfo now calls itself, is one of the greatest challenges to achieving total peace, the flagship policy of President Gustavo Petro.
To pave any scenario for dialogue with the largest armed organization in the country, it is necessary to build and agree on a legal framework, warns the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP) in a new report on the lessons left by the last negotiation attempt with which It is also the largest drug trafficking gang.
The rapprochements with the Clan have not prospered.
Petro issued an ultimatum last month and even threatened for the first time to bomb them.
The president toughened his tone after the group, involved in all types of illegal income, murdered four soldiers in an ambush in Segovia, in the northeast of Antioquia.
“Their activity has focused on the illicit economies that we are hitting,” he said.
“If they are not able to dismantle themselves, as we have requested, they will be destroyed by the State,” he warned them.
The Government also announced that it plans to resume military bombings against camps of armed groups, and specifically against that organization.
The Clan, which used to be called Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, or AGC, responded by portraying itself as an “Army” – as defined since the end of 2023 – through a video in which a spokesperson read a statement in a mountainous and jungle area. accompanied by about twenty heavily armed men clad in brand new camouflage uniforms.
Despite airing objections to the Government's dialogues with the ELN guerrillas and with the dissidents of the Central General Staff, the Gulf Clan assures in that statement that it maintains its "will for peace."
It also mentions a “unilateral ceasefire” of which there are no further signs.
“Total peace has immersed us in the discussion about the difference between dialogue with political and non-political groups.
However, we are facing a dichotomy that the country has been facing for more than two decades: while the dialogues with the ELN, the Central General Staff and the Second Marquetalia already have certain achievements, the scenario with criminal groups is paralyzed. says María Victoria Llorente, executive director of the FIP.
The roundtables with the ELN and the EMC have led to bilateral ceasefires agreed upon until mid-year - although the Government has just partially suspended the second -, while with the Second Marquetalia a third roundtable was announced within the framework of the total peace.
The Clan del Golfo, emerged after the demobilization of paramilitary groups during the Álvaro Uribe Government (2002-2010), seems at times omnipresent.
It is responsible for about half of the drugs that have left Colombia in recent years, according to authorities.
Its tentacles extend to extortion, illegal mining and the capture of public resources through municipal administrations.
He is also involved in migrant smuggling through the Darien jungle that separates Colombia and Panama.
It has gone from having fewer than 4,000 men in 2018 to more than 6,000 today, with persistent attempts to portray itself as a “political-military organization.”
The gang also maintains open wars with the ELN and the EMC in several regions.
The report
The Clan's Last Negotiation
is the first in a series on the lessons of seeking negotiated solutions with criminal groups that are not considered rebels.
The process with the Gulf Clan that made the most progress, and of which few details are known, is the one that took place between the end of 2015 and August 2018, at the end of the second term of Juan Manuel Santos, who signed peace with the FARC and managed to launch a public phase with the ELN.
By 2016, he had also made the decision to establish secret conversations with spokespersons for the Gulf Clan in order to finalize his submission to justice, the process that FIP investigators have studied.
"We must find an adequate balance between the possibility of generating a new legal framework for submission, that has clear and effective incentives for this group and, on the other hand, that respects the autonomy and guidelines of the Prosecutor's Office and the National Government regarding to the possibilities of submission,” points out the think tank about the lessons derived from this experience of frustrated negotiation.
Among his recommendations he also remembers that the doors of submission are opened by a combination of factors, it is not just will.
The deployment of military operations Agamemnon I and II, as well as other actions by the Public Force and the Prosecutor's Office, largely explains the Clan's insistence on contacting the Government and the Prosecutor's Office at different times, the analysis points out.
“The capabilities of the State to collect good intelligence are definitive,” he adds.
It is important that the Government defines the place and importance of submission within its peace strategy, emphasizes the FIP, and for that "a negotiating team must be appointed and the arrival point defined."
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