For the first time a woman leads a peace process in Colombia. As part of the new impetus he wants to give to the Government, President Gustavo Petro appointed Vera Grabe as the new chief negotiator with the National Liberation Army (ELN) a week ago, who landed on Wednesday in Mexico City to immediately join the fifth dialogue cycle and was in charge of announcing on Sunday that the last guerrilla in arms has committed to suspending the practice of kidnapping for ransom. At 72 years old, Grabe returns to public life to relieve Otty Patiño, 78, who the previous week had already been appointed as high commissioner for Peace. Both, like Petro himself in his youth, belonged to the M-19 guerrilla, which after signing the peace was one of the main forces of the National Constituent Assembly that drafted the celebrated political charter of 1991.
The Government bears the imprint of 'El Eme', as everyone knows the April 19 Movement, which emerged after the electoral fraud in the 1970 presidential elections. The first left-wing president of contemporary Colombia has left total peace, his flagship policy, in the hands of historical figures of the former guerrilla, signatory of one of the most successful peace agreements in Latin America. Former militants also occupy positions in the Presidency of the Republic itself, in the intelligence sector and in some diplomatic positions.
The latest appointments accentuate a prominence that was insinuated from the possession itself, preceded by the friction around the exhibition of the sword of the liberator Simón Bolívar. Petro's first order as president of Colombia, already sworn in in the Plaza de Bolívar itself, was to bring the famous sword that the M-19 stole from the Quinta de Bolívar at the beginning of 1974 to turn it into a symbol of his movement and which he returned after sealing peace. Carlos Pizarro, the M-19 leader murdered in the bloody 1990 presidential campaign, a month and a half after handing over his weapons, was also present in one of the most symbolic moments of the ceremony. His image, embroidered on the back of the jacket of his daughter, Senator María José Pizarro, one of the most visible figures of the Historical Pact, was observed when she was in charge of putting the presidential sash on the president.
María José herself, today a negotiator at the table with the ELN, I compared them in an interview with this newspaper in the middle of that campaign. “Gustavo is much more rational, he is a man of proposals already built in the maturity of all these years. It reflects a lot of the identity of the M-19 (…) There is a desire for the political proposals to reflect the diversity of the nation,” he observed then, granting that Petro has something of a redeemer: “That whole generation of men and women are quite messianic. The luck that Gustavo has is that he has survived.”
Very early in his government, Petro appointed other former M-19 militants who have worked at his side during his long political career as a congressman and mayor of Bogotá to key positions related in one way or another to intelligence. Manuel Casanova, a philosopher by profession, assumed the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) after having been part of the splicing team. Augusto Rodríguez, a close advisor to the current president and himself under constant threats, is the director of the National Protection Unit (UNP), the organization that must take care of the lives of more than 7,000 threatened people in Colombia. Rodríguez has been described many times as one of the filters to reach Petro, which is usually hermetic and impenetrable.
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Adding to that group is the political scientist Fernando García, another trusted man who also lived in exile in Europe. He was left in charge of Migración Colombia, the entity that, among others, serves the diaspora from neighboring Venezuela in what is by far the main host country. The three entities are heirs of the former Administrative Department of Security (DAS), dismantled after it was proven that it had illegally spied on judges, politicians and journalists, or that it gave information to paramilitaries to commit murders of union members. Abuses that Petro tirelessly denounced when he was a congressman.
The presence of 'El Eme' militants in the Government it acquired another dimension last April, when Carlos Ramón González, until then leader of the Green Alliance, arrived at the Administrative Department of the Presidency, the DAPRE, to also serve as Chief of Staff in an office neighboring the presidential office. His position is one of the reasons he has so far prevented the Greens from jumping to independence. Another historical figure also ended up in the Green Alliance, Antonio Navarro Wolff, the commander who honored his word despite the murder of Pizarro and later was one of the three presidents of the Constituent Assembly representing the Democratic Alliance M-19. Petro offered him a position in the Cabinet, but he has chosen to remain removed from the front line of politics.
“What Petro is doing is governing with his own, with his people, with those who accompanied him on that political journey, on the main issues and in the closest circles,” says analyst León Valencia, director of the Peace and Peace Foundation. Reconciliation (Peers). Since he dissolved the alliance he attempted with different sectors, the president has appointed trusted people. “They are governing as the M-19 was,” a guerrilla that highly valued public opinion, unlike the ELN or the FARC, and always thought about producing political events with a high dose of audacity, points out the author of The left in power in Colombia. They didn't care much about strategy or organization. “The Government is like that, I see a spirit of the M-19,” he says.
It is the first time that armed groups in general, and the ELN in particular, have a left-wing president as their counterpart. For many observers it is an unrepeatable opportunity. Petro intends to dialogue simultaneously with this amalgam of armed actors, but his project has become stuck. The new push for total peace depends on Otty Patiño and Vera Grabe.
“Otty is a calm, calm, very analytical person, who understands the political moment,” the writer and political scientist Darío Villamizar, who also belonged to M-19 and has known him since 1984, described him in an interview with this newspaper a year ago. He is a man who has a great breadth of thought, as he also demonstrated when he was part of the National Constituent Assembly, valued then. “He is absolutely respectful of the ideas of others,” concluded Villamizar, who was later appointed as Colombia's ambassador to the Dominican Republic – another M-19 militant, María Antonia Velasco, is the ambassador in Ecuador.
The arrival as chief negotiator of Vera Grabe, an anthropologist and former congresswoman for the AD M-19, is a success, says León Valencia, who belonged to a current of the ELN in his youth. “Vera dedicated herself to working on the issue of peace from many perspectives, and she wrote Peace as a Revolution; “That is precisely what the ELN needs to know, that at this moment its greatest contribution to the revolution is to sign peace.”
The three great guerrillas
The ELN that is now negotiating with the Government is the last guerrilla in arms, after the agreement with the extinct FARC, sealed at the end of 2016. Both were born in 1964. While the FARC had a peasant origin, the ELN was born under the influence of the Cuban revolution, closely linked to liberation theology. The M-19 emerged at another time, in 1974, in a more urbanized country. Some studies consider it a second-generation guerrilla, which initially focuses its efforts in the cities, with nationalist and Bolivarian conceptions. He was distinguished, among others, by the spectacular nature of his military actions, which included the theft of thousands of weapons from a military canton, the seizure of the embassy of the Dominican Republic, the theft of Bolívar's sword or the assault on the Palace of Justice. .
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