This post is several days overdue because of travel—it covers the week of February 4-11.
Citing insecurity, FARC suspends election campaign
The Common Alternative Revolutionary Force, the political party formed by the former Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrilla group, announced on February 10 that it was suspending its campaigning for Colombia’s March 11 legislative elections and May 27 presidential elections. Party leaders cited a wave of threats and violence against its candidates, including its presidential nominee, former maximum FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño alias Timochenko.
The FARC clarified that it is not abandoning these candidacies: Londoño and 74 House and Senate candidates are still running, but they are staying off the campaign trail. “We’ve decided to suspend our campaign activities until we have enough [security] guarantees,” read a statement.
One of the promises of the November 2016 peace accords was that the FARC, or any other leftist opposition movement, would be able to participate in politics without fear of violence. The New York Times remarked that “their sudden departure from the campaign—on the grounds that it is not safe—casts doubt on whether the conflict is over yet.”
Days before the suspension, Colombia’s vice president, Oscar Naranjo, and vice-prosecutor general, María Paulina Riveros, reported that since the signing of the peace accord, 28 FARC ex-combatants have been murdered. Another 12 relatives of ex-combatants and 10 leaders of social organizations “associated with the FARC party,” they reported, have also been killed, bringing the total to 50. On February 6 assassins, apparently from the still-active National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group, killed ex-FARC member Kevin Andrés Lugo Jaramillo on the premises of the former guerrilla demobilization site (ETCR) in Montecristo, Bolívar.
Less lethal—so far—but still concerning has been a series of incidents in which angry mobs have descended on FARC campaign events. In most cases, ex-guerrilla candidates have been met with shouted epithets and chants of “murderer,” organized by victims of the guerrillas or, at times, local right-wing politicians.
In Armenia, the capital of Quindío department, a mob damaged the car in which Londoño was traveling. In Cali and nearby Yumbo, in Valle del Cauca, a crowd hurled vegetables and objects at Londoño and attacked his supporters and security guards, injuring several members of a local labor union. In Cali, Londoño had to be escorted from a neighborhood by members of the riot police (the ESMAD, a unit most often associated with heavy-handed repression of protests). In Pereira, Risaralda, protesters kept FARC organizers and candidates from leaving the cooperative where they were holding a campaign meeting. Senate candidate and former chief negotiator Iván Márquez had to cancel campaign events in Caquetá and Huila.
Activists from the Democratic Center, a right-wing political party led by former president Álvaro Uribe, were seen on video egging on some of the protests. Another protest organizer is Herbín Hoyos, who during the conflict hosted a radio show that allowed relatives to broadcast messages to kidnap victims whom the FARC were holding in remote jungle camps.
Suspending the campaign will further dampen the electoral prospects of the FARC party, which already appeared low, with Londoño consistently polling well below 5 percent. Regardless of outcome, however, the peace accord grants the FARC five automatic seats in each house of Colombia’s Congress for the next eight years.
Secretary of State Tillerson visit
On the afternoon of February 6, Bogotá was a stop on U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s five-country tour of Latin America. In his public remarks alongside President Juan Manuel Santos, Tillerson had nothing to say about Colombia’s peace process or about attacks on social leaders. He focused on coca cultivation and on Venezuela.
The Secretary’s visit came days after President Trump, in a meeting with Homeland Security officials, mused about cutting aid to drug-producing countries.
“And these countries are not our friends. You know, we think they’re our friends and we send them massive aid. And I won’t mention names right now, but I look at these countries, I look at the numbers we send them — we send them massive aid and they’re pouring drugs into our country and they’re laughing at us. So I’m not a believer in that. I want to stop the aid. I want to stop the aid. If they can’t stop drugs from coming in — because they could stop them a lot easier than us. They say, “Oh, we can’t control it.” Oh great, we’re supposed to control it.
“So we give them billions and billions of dollars and they don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing. And they know that. But we’re going to take a very harsh action.”
“I don’t think that President Trump was referring to Colombia because Colombia is not laughing at the U.S.,” President Santos said. “On the contrary, we think we’re working together in a problem and a challenge that needs cooperation from both countries.”
For his part, Secretary Tillerson took a much more conciliatory tone than his boss.
“We did discuss our concerns about the surge in coca cultivation and cocaine production in Colombia, but the president also gave me a very good report of the steps that are being taken, the progress that’s being made, and he just spoke to much of that. And we are quite encouraged by what we hear.”
Santos offered some statistics about Colombia’s post-conflict coca eradication and substitution effort.
“So far this year we have forcefully eradicated 54,000 hectares, which is more than the goal we had set, and by the end of this year we hope to have cleared 150,000 hectares.
“As far as voluntary substitution is concerned, for the very first time we have a greater likelihood of being successful, and that has led us to sign agreements with 124,000 families that say that they have over 105,000 hectares of illegal crops. This is almost 30,000 of these families today are currently substituting their illegal crops.”
In March 2017, the U.S. government estimated that 188,000 hectares of coca were growing in Colombia in 2016, more than double the 2013 figure.
Tillerson also praised Colombia for being “a key player in the hemisphere’s efforts to restore democracy in Venezuela,” adding, “we had a very extensive exchange on how we can work together, along with others in the region, through the Lima Group, ultimately through the OAS, to restore democracy.”
Venezuela migration crisis
Meanwhile, citizens from shortage and inflation-plagued Venezuela are pouring into Colombia in ever greater numbers. The official number of Venezuelans moving to Colombia just in the last half of 2017 was 550,000, a 62 percent increase over a year earlier. Colombian officials cited by The Guardian “believe more than 1 million Venezuelans have moved to Colombia since the economic crisis took hold in 2015.” With Red Cross and UN assistance, Colombia opened up a “Temporary Service Center” in the border city of Cúcuta that can care for 120 migrants at a time for up to 48 hours. President Santos also banned the entry of Venezuelans without passports or border-crossing permits, and ordered 2,000 military personnel to the Venezuelan border to clamp down on illicit crossings.
ELN could be distributing Venezuelan government food rations on the Venezuelan side of the border
Across the border in Táchira, Venezuela, the Venezuela Investigative Unit at InsightCrime reported that ELN guerrillas may have been given a role in distributing food to Venezuelan citizens.
“Javier Tarazona, director of the Venezuelan non-governmental organization Fundación Redes, reported on February 6 that the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), the largest active guerrilla group in Colombia, is distributing boxes of food in the Venezeulan border states of Táchira, Apure and Zulia by way of the government-run Local Storage and Production Committees (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción – CLAP).
Tarazona says that the boxes are delivered with propaganda for the ELN’s Carlos Germán Velasco Villamizar Front. They also promote one of their three radio stations broadcasting in that region of Venezuela.”
InsightCrime speculates that the Colombian guerrillas “may be seeking a rearrangement that lets continue to operate in Venezuelan territory, while consolidating its position in case the peace talks with the Colombian government collapse.”
With dialogues frozen, ELN calls an “armed blockade”
The ELN continued a wave of violent actions that began after January 9, when guerrilla and government negotiators in a slow-moving negotiation process could not agree on terms to renew a 100-day bilateral ceasefire.
On February 7 the group announced a three-day “armed blockade” around the country, warning Colombians to abstain from travel between February 10 to 13 because of increased attacks on social leaders and “the government’s refusal to continue the fifth cycle of conversations” at the negotiating table in Quito, Ecuador. While the 2,000-person ELN lacks the capacity to attack travelers in most of the country, incidents were reported on roads in areas under its longtime influence, like Cesar and Arauca.
The government negotiating team remains absent from Quito, pending a display of goodwill from the ELN. However, two politicians with a longtime history of playing a good offices role in guerrilla negotiations, Senator Iván Cepeda and former mining and energy minister Álvaro Leyva, continue to seek to broker a solution. Public calls on the ELN to restart the bilateral ceasefire, and the negotiations, came from a group of artists and intellectuals, and from the National Peace Council, a multi-sectoral government advisory body.
Demining plan in Putumayo
Putumayo department, in southern Colombia bordering Ecuador, will be the site of an ambitious plan to remove landmines, carried out by Colombia’s army, the Colombian Campaign Against Mines, and the HALO Trust. The goal is to clear mines from 2,757,000 square meters of territory—equal to Bogotá’s colonial La Candelaria neighborhood—across 10 of Putumayo’s 13 municipalities. During the conflict, landmines, mostly laid by guerrillas, have killed 110 Putumayans and wounded another 335.
Tribunal calls for investigating ex-president Uribe for paramilitary ties
The Superior Court of Medellín released a finding citing the existence of “sufficient elements” to investigate former president and current Senator Álvaro Uribe for supporting paramilitary groups during Uribe’s 1996-99 tenure as governor of Antioquia, the populous department of which Medellín is the capital. During Uribe’s term, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary organization expanded rapidly in Antioquia, carrying out emblematic massacres. The Medellín high court asked Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) to investigate the popular but controversial former president for possible responsibility for two of these massacres, in El Aro (1997) and La Granja (1996), and for the 1998 murder of human rights lawyer Jesús María Valle.
Three weeks before he was killed, Valle told a Medellín prosecutor:
“I always saw that there was something like a tacit agreement or an ostensible behavior of omission, cleverly plotted between the commander of the [Army’s] 4th Brigade, the Antioquia Police commander, Dr. Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Dr. Pedro Juan Moreno [Uribe’s chief of cabinet, who allegedly served as a go-between to the paramilitaries], and [paramount AUC leader] Carlos Castaño. The power of all of these ‘self-defense groups’ has been consolidated through the support they have had from people tied to the government, to the military class, the police class, and the wealthy cattlemen and bankers of Antioquia department and the country.”
The Medellín tribunal’s finding stated, “The military, police, and security forces, the Antioquia governor’s office, groups of cattlemen, businessmen, industrialists, and a good quantity of people who were victims of guerrilla actions, allied with these self-defense groups or paramilitaries.”
It’s not clear what the next judicial steps might be, as Colombia’s prosecutor-general’s office may be in no rush to order an investigation. Senator Uribe, for his part, rejected the court’s allegation as a campaign-season maneuver.
Social leaders: failure to follow up on an early warning
In Tibú, Norte de Santander, authorities found the body of rural community leader Sandra Yaneth Luna, who had disappeared after armed men took her from her house in September 2017. Investigators believe her killing was a response to non-payment of an extortion demand. Still, Luna’s murder is one of well over 100 killings of social leaders that took place around Colombia last year.
The country’s human rights ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo), Carlos Negret, called into question the government’s commitment to protecting social leaders. Negret alleged that, between March and July 2017, the Interior Ministry “held on to” a report demanding that it take early-warning measures to protect leaders in several parts of the country. The report, the ombudsman said, cited “up to 500 citizens under threat, among them Víctor Alfonso Castilla and Bernardo Cuero who were later killed.”
Interior Minister Guillermo Rivera rejected Negret’s accusation of inaction, tweeting a March 2017 email that he had sent to the government’s Early Warning System, which is meant to manage the deployment of protection measures. In turn, Negret, the ombudsman, said that the minister’s e-mail proved nothing. It “doesn’t constitute an early warning, not even the evaluation of one. It is a request that the corresponding authorities verify the information in order to proceed later to evaluation” of an early-warning operation.
“The Ombusdman’s Office,” Negret’s statement continued, “notes with concern that the Minister of Interior considers that a reaction and immediate response to a warning about a serious human rights situation would be the simple sending of an e-mail.”
In a column, Rodrigo Uprimny, a former Supreme Court auxiliary magistrate and founder of the DeJusticia think-tank, called the wave of attacks on the country’s social leaders “a historical anti-democratic pattern in Colombia, in which any democratic openings are violently closed by a jump in violence against social leaders, usually deployed by paramilitary groups.” Uprimny called for “massive rejection to those crimes, through a pact between all political forces without regard to their orientation, that condemn those crimes, without regard to whether or not the victims’ political sensibilities were the same as ours.”
In-Depth Reading
- Julia Symmes Cobb, “Glimmers of Hope for Families of Colombia’s Missing” (Reuters , February 9, 2018).
- “Informe Anual 2017: Un Estado Depredador de la Libertad de Prensa” (Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (Colombia), February 9, 2018).
- Leonardo Botero Fernandez, “La Mesa Con el Eln No Es Solo para el Cese al Fuego: Presidente del Consejo Nacional de Paz” (El Espectador (Colombia), February 8, 2018).
- “Disidencias de las Farc ¿Cuales Son, Donde Estan, Que Hacen?” (Fundacion Ideas por la Paz (Colombia), February 8, 2018).
- Maximo Anderson, “Choco, Epicentro de los Conflictos Sociales y Ambientales en Colombia” (Mongabay Latam, Semana (Colombia), February 8, 2018).
- Olga Patricia Rendon M., “Un Ano de Dialogos Oxigenó al Eln” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), February 7, 2018).
- Juanita León, “Las Cinco Cosas Que Revela el Abucheo a los de la Farc” (La Silla Vacía (Colombia), February 6, 2018).
- Ricardo L. Cruz, “La Guerra se Recicla en el Bajo Cauca Antioqueño” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), February 6, 2018).
- “Diez Años de los Falsos Positivos de Soacha” (RCN (Colombia), February 6, 2018).
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