The multiple negotiations for total peace that Gustavo Petro proposes for Colombia should not overshadow the implementation of the peace agreement with the extinct FARC guerrilla, former president Juan Manuel Santos insisted this Friday, on the seventh anniversary of the signing of that agreement. historic pact. The Nobel Peace Prize winner has also taken advantage of the opportunity to point out that it is the current president’s “worst strategic mistake” to have granted political status as heirs of the rebels to the dissidents who deviated from the peace process, in a ceremony in which Petro left planted for the second time in Santos.
“The worst strategic mistake that this Government has made was giving a license to the intention of the so-called dissidents to present themselves as the FARC-EP, as the General Staff of the FARC-EP,” Santos said from the stage during the commemoration in the National Center of Historical Memory (CNMH), in Bogotá, to which Petro was invited but only Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva arrived on his behalf. The agreement was signed “so that the FARC would cease to exist as an armed group,” the former president noted. “And they ceased to exist. So no one understands how the FARC-EP appears again and the Government gives them a license. “That is a very serious strategic error, and I don’t know how they are going to solve it with the international community,” he stressed.
It is not the first time that the architects of peace with the FARC criticize the way in which total peace is negotiated with an archipelago of armed groups, and especially the approaches with the structures that departed from that negotiation, now commanded by Ivan Mordisco. The accommodation of dissidents has been problematic for the Petro Government from the beginning. Recognizing the self-proclaimed Central General Staff as an armed actor with political status is “the worst strategic error that has been committed in Colombia in the last 25 years and the greatest damage that has been done to the peace process,” Sergio said in August. Jaramillo, the commissioner who sealed the 2016 agreement, before the Constitutional Court. These structures are, among others, those most responsible for the murders of signatories, which already number more than 400.
“We told him with great respect: that total peace should not overshadow the implementation of the peace agreement with the FARC,” Santos (who governed between 2010 and 2018) recalled about his suggestions to Petro. That is a fundamental, necessary condition for any other negotiation to prosper in Colombia, he stressed. “If the agreement we signed with the FARC is not implemented, any other attempt at peace is stillborn. Please understand that,” he said before showing himself in favor of the national agreement that the Government promises as an opening gesture to listen to other political sectors. Petro held two meetings this week that exhibited a more conciliatory mood, with big businessmen and with former president Álvaro Uribe – a fierce critic of the peace negotiations.
Former President Santos has vehemently defended the signed peace against total peace by regretting the “slowness in implementation.” Petro’s flagship policy is going through a double crisis at the dialogue tables both with the ELN, the last guerrilla in arms, and with the so-called EMC. This week, the president dismissed his former Peace Commissioner, Danilo Rueda, who has not managed to vigorously implement the 2016 agreement nor has he made significant progress in the difficult dialogues with dissidents. His place will be taken by Otty Patiño, until now chief negotiator with the ELN, who like Petro belonged to the M-19 and has the full confidence of the president.
“Unfortunately he had promised us that he would come today, but he just announced that he is not coming,” Santos said about Petro’s absence. In March, the president had already snubbed the Nobel Prize when he decided not to attend a summit in Cartagena to iron out acrimony between the team that sealed peace with the FARC and the one that is now in dialogue with the ELN, as he had originally planned. Despite this absence, the meeting then ended with an official statement in which the Government reaffirmed its commitment to more decisively implement the Teatro Colón agreement, which is now seven years old.
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In the 320 pages of the peace agreement are all the issues that concern the country, and Petro himself, from the backwardness of rural Colombia to the fight against drugs, Santos reiterated. “Just by implementing it, this Government would go down in history. And there is still time,” he proclaimed. With a dose of optimism, he hoped that the rectification would come with the new Peace Commissioner and with a new person responsible for implementation who has autonomy, power and budget. “That would be a great solution, which I thought President Petro brought us today,” he lamented. “But we ask it from here.”
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