After a week of speculation, this Sunday the Second Marquetalia, as the FARC guerrilla dissidents call themselves, sent a statement to the magazine Change in which they assure that their commander Iván Márquez is still alive. In the same statement they confirm that on June 30, Márquez was “the victim of a criminal attack, directed from the army barracks and the police commands.” “Fortunately, he was unharmed, he only suffered minor injuries. He is enjoying good health, and from his combat trench he will continue the fight of ideas for a new Colombia”. he holds.
In one video, a uniformed man surrounded by 20 armed men reads a statement from a computer. Iván Márquez does not appear in the recording. Although several of the guerrilla dissidents are in Venezuelan territory, in the statement, filmed in a rural area, it is ensured that the armed group is located in the east of the country, “in the mountains and savannahs of the Colombian Arauca.” Arauca is a border department whose territory is disputed by the FARC dissidents and another guerrilla group, the ELN.
The Government of Colombia has been trying to confirm for more than a week whether the guerrilla leader Iván Márquez, who was part of the 2016 peace negotiations but later took up arms, had been killed or not. “We are working with intelligence to verify that information,” President Iván Duque said when some local media reported the attack. It was speculated that some sources in Venezuela had anonymously confirmed Márquez’s death, but the Colombian government never confirmed it. The Second Marquetalia statement seeks to be the first to clear up any doubts.
The news about the death of Márquez generated national interest because it would be the fourth leader of the Second Marquetalia assassinated, after the death of other commanders in strange circumstances (it is not yet clear if there were clashes between dissidents or military operations). “It is the same modus operandi that they used to assassinate El Paisa, Edilson Romaña, Gentil Duarte and Jesús Santrich,” says the statement, which accuses the DEA, the CIA and the government of Iván Duque of carrying out the operation. El Paisa, Romaña and Santrich were close to Márquez and, with these attacks, the commander of the Second Marquetalia has been left alone.
When Iván Márquez resumed the armed struggle, in 2019, he published a video surrounded by several of them, with Jesús Santrich on his left side, despite the fact that the two had been negotiators in the peace process in Havana. In that founding manifesto, the Second Marquetalia said that they had decided to rearm “in response to the State’s betrayal of the Havana peace accords.” In the statement published this Sunday, the armed forces return to the same argument, saying that the government of Iván Duque destroyed the peace agreements, and since then more than 300 demobilized members of the former FARC have been killed. They also accuse Uribism, the army, and the media of the war. But they do not mention the new government of President-elect Gustavo Petro, who has repeatedly insisted that he wants “total peace” with all the armed actors.
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