Santos denies Petro before the UN about the peace agreement, the constituent assembly and the JEP

Officials and former officials of Gustavo Petro’s Government have attributed to some paragraphs of the peace agreement signed with the extinct FARC guerrilla “a meaning that is contrary to its object, scope and purpose,” warns the former president of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos in a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres. That idea is “possibly incompatible with the principle of good faith,” warns the Nobel Peace Prize winner for that negotiation in the letter dated May 31, to which EL PAÍS has had access. The president who sealed peace with the extinct FARC considers it absurd to invoke that historic pact to promote a Constituent Assembly, as voices from the Government or close to it have proposed, and he intends to put an end to that theory, which has already been denied by practically all the negotiators. .

The UN has played a definitive role in consolidating peace in Colombia, and has a Verification Mission on the ground in the South American country. Santos begins by recalling in his letter that, in his capacity as head of State, he transmitted to Guterres – and through him, to the Security Council – the complete text of the peace agreement signed by the Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia at the end of 2016. “When transmitting the Final Agreement to you, I expressly referred to the principle of good faith, of enormous importance in the interpretation and application of the Agreement,” emphasizes the former president. “I highlight this because Colombian officials and former officials have attributed to some paragraphs of the Agreement a meaning that is contrary to its object, scope and purpose, which is possibly incompatible with the principle of good faith.”

A week ago, Santos had already described as “absurd” to use the peace agreement to convene a Constituent Assembly, in a frontal rejection of an idea that the Petro Government has mentioned on more than one occasion. This is what the president himself has hinted at, echoing the theses of his former chancellor Álvaro Leyva. “That was precisely one of the red lines that we maintained in the negotiation,” Santos stated then. A Constituent Assembly can only be convened using the procedures established by the Colombian political charter, and “any attempt to do so by any other means would confront the Legislative power, the Judicial power, the Armed Forces and the vast majority of Colombians.” , he stressed in that statement. The letter known this Monday goes one step further.

The peace agreement, Santos writes to Guterres, “far from providing for extra-institutional mechanisms or seeking to circumvent the procedures established in the Colombian Constitution,” was ratified at the time by the Senate and the House of Representatives, in accordance with what was agreed upon. by the parties. Furthermore, he points out, when implementation required constitutional changes, his Government followed the procedure established in the Constitution.

“Nothing in the Final Agreement proposes or insinuates that the rules established in the current Constitution may be ignored in the future,” emphasizes Santos in reference to the 1991 political letter. “The Constitutional Court reviewed the compatibility with the Constitution, not only of the laws that developed the Agreement, but also of the constitutional reforms, in accordance with the constitutional rules and doctrines commonly accepted on this matter in Colombia, a country that is proud of a more than century-old tradition of respect for the principle of constitutional supremacy.

Santos, who governed between 2010 and 2018, also refers specifically to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the transitional justice system charged with prosecuting the most serious crimes committed during the armed conflict. The JEP has been a target of criticism from President Petro, who does not consider it the closure court that he would like. The peace agreement, Santos recalls, “considered it essential that, in addition to giving truth to the victims, their right to justice was guaranteed, through the investigation and punishment of crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious crimes.” expressly enumerated.” He states that nothing in the text “can be distorted to open the possibility of granting amnesties, pardons, exonerations or pardons for such crimes of international connotation, much less to those most responsible.”

“There has been an attempt to ignore the letter and spirit of the Agreement, as well as the independence of the JEP created to avoid impunity, trying to impose a way of proceeding,” says Santos, citing a series of statements made by President Petro himself, in his own handwriting, in a letter addressed to Guterres on October 19, 2023. The UN Verification Mission is also in charge of verifying compliance and effective application of the sanctions imposed by the JEP, which is close to its first substantive decisions on the two most advanced macro cases, which involve the leadership of the extinct FARC for the crime of kidnapping and the military for the murders of civilians they passed off as guerrillas, the so-called “false positives.”

Former presidents Felipe González of Spain and José Pepe Mujica of Uruguay, who are guarantors of the international component of verification of the agreements, are “totally in agreement with the spirit and content of this communication,” Santos states at the end of the letter, which It comes at a time of high political tension in Colombia due to President Petro’s constant allusions to constituent power, never completely clarified.

Although Petro positioned himself as a defender of the peace agreement, since coming to power he has had several frictions with Santos and the other architects of that process, who in turn have criticized the course of the negotiations with the ELN guerrillas and the FARC dissidents within the framework of the total peace policy. The multiple negotiations for total peace in Petro should not overshadow the implementation, Santos himself had stressed in November during the seventh anniversary of the signing of the Teatro Colón agreement. Implementation, he then stressed when regretting the slowness of the current Government, is a fundamental condition for any other peace negotiation to prosper in Colombia.

Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter about Colombia and here to the channel on WhatsAppand receive all the information keys on current events in the country.