Álvaro Leyva does not stay still. He claims that he has been involved in various peace efforts since 1984, he gestures with his hands, shuffles papers and shows documents of all kinds in front of the cameras. He says that he even keeps a radio telephone – “a kind of red telephone” – with which he communicated with Casa Verde, the camp that housed the leadership of the FARC guerrilla until it was bombed by the military in November 1990. His The interlocutor is the journalist Hollman Morris, the manager of the state-run RTVC, another of the closest squires of Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president of contemporary Colombia. “What better than to launch that little article,” says Leyva in that unusual interview of more than an hour on the public media system, broadcast last Monday, when defending his refuted thesis that a paragraph of the peace agreement that speaks of a “national political agreement” empowers Petro to convene a Constituent Assembly. “You don’t have to go through Congress,” he insists at some point in that relaxed chat between friends.
Leyva (Bogotá, 81 years old), a veteran politician of conservative origin, has been throughout Petro’s term, which is approaching the middle of his four-year term, a kind of peace commissioner in the shadows. The president has echoed on more than one occasion the statements of his former chancellor, who fell into disgrace due to the convoluted tender to produce passports that earned him a suspension from the Attorney General’s Office, and eventually his dismissal. But the idea that the peace agreement sealed at the end of 2016 opens the doors to a Constituent Assembly by decree has been widely considered nonsense, and denied by all the other negotiators who participated in the Havana dialogues.
“Using the Peace Agreement with the FARC to convene a Constituent Assembly is absurd, that was precisely one of the red lines that we maintained in the negotiation,” Juan Manuel Santos, the president who sealed that historic pact, came out lapidary. . The Nobel Peace Prize winner went one step further, and he sent a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, in which he warns that this interpretation is contrary to the spirit, object, scope and purpose of the agreements. .
A Constituent Assembly can only be convened using the procedures established by the 1991 political charter, practically all jurists have stated in chorus. The only exception is former prosecutor Eduardo Montealegre, who has agreed with Leyva in defending that Petro can summon her on behalf of the peace agreement, and even extend her term or seek re-election. An idea that has already been defeated in several rulings of the Constitutional Court, as one recalled analysis from the political portal The Empty Chair.
At the time, the FARC did want to include the Constituent Assembly in the agreement, but the Government’s negotiators always rejected that idea, as has been confirmed by everyone from Rodrigo Londoño, Timochenko, the top leader of the extinct guerrilla, to Senator Humberto de la Calle, who He was Santos’ chief negotiator in Havana, and former Peace Commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, the other great architect of that process. “It is an absolutely wrong thesis,” said De la Calle. “7 years after the signing of the agreement, Leyva invented a Constituent Assembly supposedly incorporated into its text, which Strangely, the staunch opponents of peace never saw or denounced in all this time”, the former Minister of the Interior Juan Fernando Cristo, another of the negotiators, has supported him in an exchange with Leyva in which he regretted that “his memory is failing him and confusing dates and episodes.” No other negotiator has supported the versions with which Petro’s first chancellor has defended his position, which date back to the drafting of the historic pact itself.
The role of Álvaro Leyva in Havana
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The thesis of the dismissed chancellor, who has been very active on his social networks since he was definitively relieved as head of diplomacy by Luis Gilberto Murillo last month, has dusted off the books on the difficult peace negotiation with the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which lasted four years. At one point, the Havana dialogues stalled around the thorny issue of justice. The discussions reached a stalemate. The parties then decided to create a group of jurists to overcome the impasse, three chosen by the Government and another three by the FARC.
Santos chose Manuel José Cepeda, Juan Carlos Henao – the rector of the Externado de Colombia who died in January – and, at the suggestion of the special envoy of the US government, Douglas Cassel, an expert in human rights and international humanitarian law. The guerrilla selected the human rights defender Diego Martínez, the Spanish lawyer and politician Enrique Santiago and Leyva himself. “A risky path, because a wisp of ambiguity remained in his mandate,” De la Calle recalls in his book Revelations at the end of a war (Debate, 2019). “On our side, we understood that it was a group in charge of providing advice, suggestions and initiatives so that they could be considered at the Negotiation Table. The FARC believed that, on the contrary, it was a full, autonomous negotiation scenario,” he says in his detailed testimony of the negotiations. Sergio Jaramillo and Álvaro Leyva ended up drafting a 10-point document that contained the central core of the justice formula, and which later ended up giving birth to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the transitional justice system.
Former commissioner Jaramillo remembers Leyva’s role as “an advisor to the FARC, very close to Iván Márquez,” the chief negotiator of the guerrilla who ended up breaking the agreements, taking up arms and is now preparing, as leader of the Second Marquetalia, to sit down and talk with the Petro Government within the framework of the total peace policy. He defines Leyva as a negotiator representing the FARC on the issues of the JEP and also the introduction of the agreement.
Lawyer Diego Martínez, who formed the group of jurists with Leyva, observes that his position on the Constituent Assembly has been becoming more nuanced. “I can say clearly that the agreement does not call for a National Constituent Assembly,” he says in dialogue with EL PAÍS. “Leyva has played a very important role, but I feel that this debate is undermining the legitimacy of a peace agreement that includes an entire national consensus, including the No sectors. It is no longer our place to discuss it, but rather to implement it.”
The disgraced chancellor of total peace
“The union of the past is not going to take away our future,” Leyva, who at 81 years old has been almost everything in Colombian politics, repeated this week. Since he was private secretary of President Misael Pastrana in 1970, he has been a councilor of Bogotá, representative to the Chamber, senator, Minister of Mines of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) and member of the National Constituent Assembly that drafted the 1991 political charter. , as part of the lists of the Democratic Alliance M-19.
During his time in the Foreign Ministry, Leyva used to present himself as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Peace of Colombia, a title that is not official. Since Petro came to power, he has put Colombian diplomacy at the service of his total peace project, with which he intends to dialogue simultaneously with multiple armed groups. “Colombia will contribute to the world all its efforts to overcome the climate crisis and we expect all efforts from the world to overcome our endemic violence,” he declared when he announced that Leyva would be his chancellor, before taking office.
Among its early achievements, Colombia very soon reestablished relations with the Chavista Government of Venezuela – broken since 2019 – and straightened them with Cuba – battered by the diplomatic hostility of the Iván Duque period. Both Caracas and Havana became guarantor countries of the negotiations with the ELN guerrilla and the FARC dissident groups. Leyva’s management, however, was highly criticized for privileging this negotiating agenda over Colombia’s other diplomatic interests, and also for the appointments of questioned politicians in diplomatic missions.
Long before his theory about the Constituent Assembly, Leyva had already caused confusion with his attacks on the JEP, while promoting that the court accept the former paramilitary leaders who had already had their own justice system. “We are concerned that the model institution for the entire world, the one designed to deliver justice after decades of horrible internal conflict, (…) is derailing from what was embodied with enormous effort,” he told the UN Security Council in October last year during the presentation of the quarterly report of the Verification Mission in Colombia. It was just one of several darts launched against the JEP. President Petro has returned to these objections on more than one occasion.
The peace court, which has had robust and sustained support from the international community, responded at the time with a statement in which it claimed its independence from other public powers. “The fact that the JEP has been created by virtue of the Final Peace Agreement does not confer any guardianship over its management to the signatory parties,” he said. “Respecting the Final Peace Agreement is also respecting the autonomy of the JEP,” he noted.
With Leyva, the Foreign Ministry organized two “meetings for truth and non-repetition” with former paramilitary leaders taking center stage. One in May 2023 in Juan Frío, the place on the border with Venezuela where the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia first installed crematorium ovens to disappear the bodies of their victims, in which Salvatore Mancuso participated with a video from the detention center when he was in the United States. And another in August of that year with Carlos Mario Jiménez, Macaco, in Bogotá. After extensive debate, the JEP accepted Mancuso at the end of 2023, who arrived in the country in February after almost 15 years in the United States.
Leyva also asked the UN, in April 2023, to investigate what both he and Petro described as “entrapment” of peace, which is to some extent the argument with which Iván Márquez speaks of the non-compliance that led him to rearm. Last March, UN expert Antonia Urrejola concluded that there were repeated obstacles to the agreements, although she did not characterize these episodes as an “entrapment.”
Constantly surrounded by controversy, beyond some diplomatic false starts, the million-dollar passport tender was the episode that put him on the ropes, to the point of ending up confronted in the hallways of the Casa de Nariño with the then director of the Agency. National Legal Defense of the State, Martha Lucía Zamora, who defended the convenience of conciliating with the firm Thomas Greg & Sons. “You don’t take care of the president,” Leyva rebuked her, according to the reconstruction made by journalist Daniel Coronell in W Radio. “What does it matter to me if they condemn the State. This delays a process in Colombia. Notify me in the grave, when the result of that lawsuit comes out “I’m going to be dead by now,” the chancellor shouted. On his day, Petro took sides with Leyva and dropped Zamora. The passport mess, in any case, caused the suspension that ended up removing him from the San Carlos Palace. That does not necessarily mean that President Petro has stopped listening to him.
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