Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

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ELN Peace Talks

Last week in Colombia’s peace process

I’d like to post these all year without missing a week. Travel plans may complicate that, but I’m going to try.

ELN ceasefire breaks off

For 102 days, while peace talks proceeded in Quito, the Colombian government and ELN guerrillas mostly honored a cessation of hostilities. That period saw 33 possible ceasefire violations committed by the ELN—of which 12 were verified—killing 26 noncombatants and involving the kidnapping of 13 people and forced recruitment of 14. Still, this was a much lower tempo of violence than normal. And there were zero incidents of combat between the ELN and Colombia’s security forces.

The cessation of hostilities ended on January 9, when the parties failed to agree to extend it. Overall analysis of the non-renewal placed most blame on the ELN, which appeared to lack internal consensus, or even unity of command, about whether to continue the truce.

The ELN’s standing in public opinion plummeted further as the group immediately launched a series of attacks on security forces and infrastructure, mostly in the northeast of the country. The week saw approximately 13 attacks, leading to the deaths of at least two police and at least three bombings of the 485-mile-long Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline.

The Colombian government pulled its negotiating team from Quito, and appeared to suspend talks until the ELN agrees to a new ceasefire. This is a reversal of the 2012-16 FARC negotiations, when the guerrillas repeatedly demanded a bilateral ceasefire but the government preferred to keep fighting while talks proceeded.

France, the European Union, the “guarantor countries” of the ELN talks (Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Norway, and Venezuela), and FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño all called on the parties to return to the table and agree on a new cessation of hostilities. The UN noted that it cannot keep its monitoring and verification structure in place very long with no ceasefire to monitor.

The U.S. government issued a travel warning for four departments where the ELN is most active: Arauca, Cauca, Chocó, and Norte de Santander.

Other coverage: Washington Post, New York Times, El Tiempo

Visit of UN Secretary-General

The need to restart the ELN talks and ceasefire was a main message of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during a January 13 visit to Colombia. Guterres visited Bogotá and Meta to get a sense of how implementation of the FARC accord is going, to give political support to the ELN process, and to support the work of the UN verification mission in Colombia.

That mission’s latest 90-day report to the Secretary-General, made public on January 5, voiced concern about the government’s implementation of the FARC accord: “Overall, the implementation of the peace-related legislative agenda has progressed unevenly, compounded by events relating to the presidential and parliamentary elections, to be held in the first semester of 2018.”

Military sets up giant task force in Nariño

Colombia’s Defense Ministry has set up a joint task force, “Hercules,” with about 9,800 soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen, and police stationed in Nariño, on the Pacific coast in the southwestern corner of the country. Nariño is Colombia’s number-one coca-growing department and a heavily used corridor for cocaine shipments into the eastern Pacific. It has very active FARC ex-militia dissident groups and a growing presence of the ELN. Not all of the 9,800 personnel are new: many are already stationed in Nariño but now form part of this joint command structure.

“This plan has had a big media deployment in the region and in Bogotá,” writes Laura Soto in La Silla Vacía. “But four sources who know the zone (members of the Tumaco mayor’s office, two human rights defenders who have worked closely with Caritas, and a social leader) aren’t hopeful that the panorama will approve, at least not in the short term.”

Lowest homicide rate in 40 years

President Juan Manuel Santos celebrated that Colombia’s 2017 homicide rate reached the lowest point in 42 years: 24 violent deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants (about the same as Washington DC). Security analyst Hugo Acero cast some doubt on the statistics, though the overall trend points to declining homicides.

Nastiness between Santos and Maduro

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro told his countrymen that “thousands of Colombian patients cross the border to get operated on here, to treat a flu, to clear up a cataract, to seek medicines in Venezuela” where the health system is “free.” (Venezuela in fact suffers from severe shortages of most medicines, while Colombia’s healthcare system is also theoretically free.) President Santos called this comment “cynical,” pointing out that the reverse phenomenon is happening with Venezuelans recurring to Colombia’s border-zone hospitals. “President Maduro, don’t try to use the Colombian people to hide the enormous shortcomings of your failed revolution,” he said. Maduro responded that Santos “has his country in chaos” and isn’t complying with the FARC peace accord.

In-Depth Reading

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

Pedro Portal / Miami Herald photo at WLRN. Caption: “A member of the FARC in Colombia’s Tolima province watches over guerrilla rifles turned over as part of the country’s peace agreement.”

  • By now, the UN mission in Colombia has inventoried more than 7,000 weapons that over 6,900 FARC members have brought to 26 disarmament sites around the country. The FARC is handing these arms over to the UN in phases.
  • FARC members concentrated at the disarmament site outside Puerto Asís, Putumayo, have offered to help with rescue and rebuilding efforts after mudslides and flooding destroyed much of the departmental capital, Mocoa, which is about two hours’ drive away.
  • Two former presidents, José Mujica of Uruguay and Felipe González of Spain, visited Colombia in their role as international representatives of a government-FARC commission to monitor compliance with the peace accords’ commitments.
  • The investigative journalism website Verdad Abierta finds some truth to FARC allegations that elements of Colombia’s military have been trying to coax guerrillas away from the sites where they are to disarm collectively, so that they might enter the Defense Ministry’s program for individual deserters.
  • The new administration in the United States has said almost nothing about future U.S. support for peace implementation in Colombia. So every statement that does come out is important, like this one from April 3:

“Right now as the United States works through its budget process both for the current budget here that we’re in right now, Fiscal Year 2017, as well as the next budget year, we are evaluating how our assistance funds can be best utilized to support the highest U.S. priorities. Supporting the peace process in Colombia has traditionally been a high priority for the United States. We look forward to working with the Colombian Government in order to make sure that our assistance dollars are utilized as effectively as possible.”

  • On the evening of March 28, Colombia’s Congress approved the transitional-justice system envisioned in the peace accords. This system, the “Special Peace Jurisdiction,” will try and punish war crimes that were ordered, planned, or committed by the FARC, the Colombian government, or private citizens. WOLA, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and others have criticized some of the changes to the original accord that Colombia’s Congress added, and that we hope Colombia’s Constitutional Court will correct.
  • Two prominent generals imprisoned for their role in human rights crimes have signed up to have their cases considered by the new Special Peace Jurisdiction. This holds out the possibility of reducing their sentences in exchange for full confessions and reparations. As many as 2,000 convicted or accused military personnel may choose the transitional justice route.
  • “The discourse rejecting indulgence for the eternal enemy—the FARC—helps avoid speaking of what is truly feared: that economic, military, and political elites’ ties to atrocities might be placed in evidence,” reads a tough analysis of transitional justice by human rights lawyer Michael Reed Hurtado at Razón Pública.
  • A coalition of Colombian human rights groups voiced strong concern that the country’s new transitional justice law does not give “high level entity status” to a new Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons in the attorney-general’s office, as envisioned in the peace accord.
  • As peace talks with the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas continue to struggle, violence continues. An ELN ambush in the northeastern department of Arauca, where the guerrilla group is at its most activekilled two soldiers on March 27. A Colombian armed forces aerial bombardment killed 10 ELN guerrillas at an encampment in the Catatumbo region, also in northeastern Colombia, on April 1. Meanwhile the La Silla Vacía investigative journalism website denounced an intimidating message from one of the ELN’s most powerful leaders, and Jesuit peace activist Francisco de Roux, in his regular El Tiempo column, criticized arrests of civil-society leaders charged with ELN ties, and called for an immediate bilateral ceasefire.
  • A potentially fatal flaw in the FARC peace accords is their failure to address the “partial collapse” of Colombia’s state, argues the University of Chicago’s James Robinson in a speech at Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes.
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