First modification:
The Peace Accords in Colombia, which put an end to 50 years of direct armed conflict between the former FARC guerrillas and the different governments of the day, have been signed for five years. A milestone in the history of this South American country. But, how did this conflict that tormented Colombians so much and that caused more than 262,000 deaths and close to 6 million internally displaced persons emerged and developed?
To answer this question we must go back to the middle of the 20th century, when in Colombia there was a time known as “La Violencia” a bipartisan confrontation between two political currents, the liberals and the conservatives, which resulted in the creation of peasant self-defense groups. . In this context, in 1964, an enclave founded by two men was born in the mountains of central Colombia, including Pedro Antonio Marín, alias ‘Tirofijo’, who until his death in 2008 was the most emblematic figure of the then nascent FARC guerrilla.
From its founding in the 1960s and almost until the late 1970s, the FARC remained marginal, not very combative, almost silent. But a key episode arrived, ‘The Seventh Conference’ in May 1982 that brought together about 30 battle fronts. It was the turning point for the FARC to leave the underground and become the protagonists of the press headlines. The seventh conference was the moment when the FARC renamed itself FARC-EP, the People’s Army, and decided to expand its influence and force throughout the country.
In the 1980s and 1990s, several attempts to achieve peace with the FARC were frustrated.
Seeing the insurgent advance, the then president Belisario Betancur promoted the first peace agreements with the guerrillas in 1984, in which he offered guarantees so that the guerrillas could do military service in politics by joining the left-wing UP party, Unión Patriótica. Stigmatized as the FARC’s political wing, the UP was the target of what the Justice later recognized as a political genocide, perpetrated by paramilitary self-defense groups, an alliance of extreme right-wing sectors, landowners, ranchers and members of the Public Force. It is estimated that over 20 years, more than 3,000 people were killed.
The FARC having once again taken refuge in the mountains of central and eastern Colombia, by the 1990s they expanded their military muscle through a large-scale incursion into drug trafficking. They were the worst years of the conflict, with bloody confrontations, attacks, the taking of military bases, and the bleeding of all the actors involved: guerrillas, armed forces, paramilitary groups and the civilian population.
In 1998, a new attempt at a Peace Agreement with the government of President Andrés Pastrana was again frustrated by the FARC’s failure to comply, and revealed the ineffectiveness of the Executive to contain the advance of the insurgents. The international efforts to reengineer the military forces took shape mainly with Plan Colombia, a pact conceived in 1999, aimed at strengthening the Armed Forces and fighting drug trafficking. The United States invested more than $ 10 billion in military aid between 2001 and 2016, the second largest US budget for an ally, after Israel.
The strengthening of the Armed Forces put the guerrilla leadership in check
In 2002 Álvaro Uribe won the presidential elections being an open enemy of the FARC. His policy of “democratic security” joined forces to fight the guerrillas with an Armed Forces revitalized by the injection of foreign capital. In 2008, at the end of Uribe’s mandate, he died of a heart attack at the age of 77, alias ‘Tirofijo’, the then oldest guerrilla in the world, and co-founder of the FARC.
The operations against the Uribe government’s guerrillas had been led by Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos. The success obtained, plus the support of Uribe himself, earned him being elected as the new president of the Colombians. In his first term, Santos continued with the military offensive against the guerrillas, to the point of killing alias ‘Alfonso Cano’, the commander who had succeeded ‘Tirofijo’ as leader of the guerrilla. President Santos himself revealed that it was this commander with whom the first contacts were made for an approach with a view to peace talks.
The Havana Peace Accords, for the end of 50 years of conflict
Precisely, with the possibility of reelection, President Santos promised that his second term would bring peace for Colombians. His campaign was a success and he defeated Uribe’s candidate who was against dialogue with the FARC. In this context, the Oslo and Havana Agreements were born in 2012, in which the negotiating team of the Government and the ‘Secretariat’ of the FARC discussed agrarian issues, participation in politics through a party with seats in the Congress, the laying down of arms, the reparation and recognition of the victims of the conflict, the reincorporation of the guerrillas to civil life and all covered under a transitional justice system to judge the actors of the conflict, known as the JEP, Justice Special for Peace.
In 2016, and after 4 years of dialogues with the guerrilla leadership, the Colombian armed conflict with the FARC guerrillas came to an end. Santos had promised that the Colombians would have the last word, so he submitted the pact with the guerrillas to a referendum in which, surprisingly, the option of “No” was imposed by the slightest difference, less than one percentage point. Even so, Santos approved the agreements through the presidential decree and they were signed on November 24 of the same year.
Today, 5 years later, Colombia is plunged into a deep polarization, between those who denounce an agreement rejected by the majority that supposedly opens the door to impunity and those who assure that the promises of the agreements have not been fulfilled and that thousands victims of violence remain unrecognized or repaired.
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