Transitional Justice

September 19, 2019 — 0

Colombia’s defense minister is a problem

Guillermo Botero is at it again. Colombia’s defense minister said that the security forces he oversees can’t capture a wanted criminal because, as a demobilized FARC member, that criminal is somehow protected by the peace accord.

Leider Johani Noscue, alias “Mayimbú,” is a rearmed FARC dissident in Cauca department whose group is believed to be behind the brutal September 1 assassination of mayoral candidate Karina García on a rural road in Suárez municipality. As a former guerrilla, “Mayimbú” faces trial in the post-conflict justice system, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), for war crimes committed during the conflict. The JEP, a deliberative judicial body, hasn’t yet formally expelled him from its list of defendants.

For that reason, Botero seems to think that “Mayimbú” is untouchable. On Tuesday he told Colombia’s Senate chamber, “We consider that he should be taken out of the JEP in order to be arrested. If not, we’ll have to confront him ‘enfusilao’ [on the battlefield, or in the act of committing a crime].” Botero then tweeted that he had sent a letter to JEP President Patricia Linares asking that Mayimbú be expelled “so that the security forces may act.”

But of course the security forces can act. Just because he’s still on the JEP’s list doesn’t mean that “Mayimbú” is exempt from arrest for any crimes committed after December 1, 2016, when the FARC peace accord was ratified. There is ample proof that he has taken up arms again, and indications that he was involved in the attack on Karina García. Of course Colombia’s police and military are free to arrest him without regard to the JEP, and an arrest order exists regardless of his JEP status.

Defense Minister Botero, who oversees both Colombia’s armed forces and police, must know that. So either he was badly confused, or cynically launching a false attack on the JEP, and by extension Colombia’s peace process. Neither case is good.

In a letter to Botero, the JEP responded yesterday that “The security forces have NO limitation to pursue or capture the accused parties who have rearmed or are committing crimes.” “Let the JEP work,” read a statement from Colombia’s increasingly active “Defendamos la Paz” movement. “It does damage to institutions and the peace process to keep promoting this discrediting campaign against the JEP, with inexact, imprecise statements or with lies, to seek to generate a perception in public opinion that transitional justice is promoting or tolerating impunity.”

Guillermo Botero is a problem. He is supposed to be managing military and police forces totaling nearly 450,000 people, including Latin America’s second-largest armed forces. His tenure of more than a year has seen human rights and corruption scandals within the military, signs of discontent among some officers, and some erosion in security gains.

He also makes frequent misstatements that reveal either an alarming lack of diligence about, or deliberate disregard for, critical security concerns. Botero has repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the past few years’ hundreds of threats and murders of human rights defenders and social leaders. He has demanded changes in the law that would allow the security forces to confront social protests. Earlier this year, opposition legislators sought to censure him for these and other missteps, including promoting a false narrative about soldiers’ April extrajudicial execution of a former FARC member in the Catatumbo region.

I have heard that Botero is in his position because he was the preferred choice of Álvaro Uribe, the former president and current senator who is the central figure in President Iván Duque’s ruling Centro Democrático party. During his eight years in the presidency, though, Uribe never had a defense minister who was quite this ideologically hidebound, gaffe-prone, or divorced from reality. Guillermo Botero is showing serious managerial shortcomings, he doesn’t appear to have a grip on the truth, and he keeps making egregious public misstatements. He’s out if his depth, and he’s making Colombia’s security apparatus less effective.

May 10, 2019 — 0

Duque Has Left Colombia’s Peace Process Rudderless

Here, posted to World Politics Review on Wednesday, is a look at where the ongoing drama over implementing Colombia’s peace accord stands right now. Consider it an update to this site’s April 29 “Big JEP vote in Colombia’s Senate” post.

The outcome of that vote was confusing and full of the procedural legalisms in which Colombia’s political class excels. But it appears to amount to a big victory for the transitional justice system at the heart of the peace accord. Still, the peace process remains in intensive care.

Senate proponents of the peace accord are jubilantly predicting that the court will rule in their favor, either deciding that 47 votes is enough to sink Duque’s veto, or simply upholding its 2018 ruling in favor of the tribunal statute. That would be the right outcome for transitional justice and the full implementation of the accord. Even so, Colombia’s peace process is losing precious time.

Read the whole thing here. It may be paywalled, but it often isn’t.

April 14, 2019 — 0

On Colombia’s peace process, the U.S. government has moved from “support” to “opposition”

On March 10, Colombian President Iván Duque sent a shock wave through the country’s delicate peace process with the former FARC guerrillas. He sent several objections to Congress—sort of a line-item veto—about the law underlying the transitional justice system at the heart of the accord, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).

All governments that have supported Colombia’s peace process, along with the United Nations, voiced concern—except for one: U.S. Ambassador Kevin Whitaker went on national radio in support of Duque’s objections, saying they were necessary for the U.S. government’s ability to extradite former combatants who may have committed crimes after the November 2016 peace accord signing.

This week, Colombia’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly rejected Duque’s objections, in a thunderous and embarrassing defeat for the president. Meanwhile, news began to leak out about Ambassador Whitaker’s quiet lobbying for the objections with members of Colombia’s Congress in early April.

Here is a full English translation of the most thorough account of the Ambassador’s meetings to appear so far in Colombian media, which was posted last night to the Bogotá daily El Espectador. It shows Kevin Whitaker, a career diplomat now completing his fifth year as ambassador, sounding unhinged, gone “full Trump.”

In the accounts of legislators who leaked the meetings’ contents, Whitaker hints that all U.S. aid to Colombia will be cut if Congress defeats the objections. He indicates that the Obama administration kept him distant from the 2012-2016 peace negotiations because of his personal distaste for them. He doesn’t rule out President Trump “decertifying” Colombia in September for being a poor partner in the drug war. And he is personally rude to those who disagree with him.

If even half of what is reported here is accurate, then April 2019 is the month when the U.S. government moved officially from support of Colombia’s peace process to open opposition. Read on:

Details of the Breakfast between Whitaker and Congress

By Lorena Arboleda Zárate and Alfredo Molano Jimeno

El Espectador (Colombia), April 13, 2019 (boldface items are from El Espectador)

This is an account of meetings the U.S. diplomat held with senators and representatives of the House, to seek to prevent the government’s defeat in the legislature on the objections to the Statutory Law of the JEP.

This week will go down in history as one of the most difficult for the government of Ivan Duque. To the defeat in the House of Representatives, which rejected, with a vote of 110 against 44, the presidential objections to the Statutory Law of the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP), is added the hard complaint from the president of the United States, Donald Trump, about the increase in drug trafficking from Colombia to their country. An episode that attracted attention, since in recent days the American ambassador in Bogota, Kevin Whitaker, has moved quietly to prevent Congress from definitively sinking Duque’s objections to the norm.

After the vote on Monday of this week in the plenary of the House, information emerged about the content of a series of meetings that ambassador Whitaker convened, with the presence of senators and representatives, in his diplomatic residence. Although confidentiality of the meetings was requested—and there was even a pact not to disclose details until after the objections had been voted—El Espectador was able to reconstruct the conversations Whitaker may have had with the legislators, and also with the former president and current director of the Liberal Party, César Gaviria, a group that has led the bloc in defense of the Peace Agreement.

On Monday, April 1, Whitaker invited the senators managing the objections legislation to a breakfast. At 7:00 in the morning, José David Name (Party of the U), Iván Marulanda (Green Alliance), Paloma Valencia (Centro Democrático), John Milton Rodríguez (Colombia Justa-Libres), Antonio Zabaraín (Cambio Radical), and David Barguil (Conservative Party) arrived at the ambassador’s house in the exclusive Rosales neighborhood, in the north of Bogotá. The appetizer was eggs with bacon and, to drink, Whitaker’s favorite: Don Pedro coffee. But the main dish was the objections [to the JEP law] and, particularly, his concern about the effects of the Peace Agreement on the extradition treaty between the two countries.

“The first thing to note is that the meetings with the Senate and the House were very different. In ours almost everyone was in favor of objections, except Senator Marulanda. Therefore, the atmosphere was not tense, as it was with the representatives, and the ambassador spoke with greater ease,” detailed one of the guests at breakfast. The meeting lasted for about an hour and a half, and according to five of the six attendees, the conversation revolved around three issues: the impact that the Santrich case might have on judicial cooperation between both countries; the reprisals that the United States could take; and the displeasure with the government of former President Juan Manuel Santos and with the management that the current one, Iván Duque’s, is giving to anti-drug policy.

“He said that Santos, Jaramillo (Sergio [Santos’s high commissioner for peace]) and (Humberto) De la Calle [Santos’s chief negotiator in Havana] were liars, who had deceived Barack Obama’s government with the Peace Agreement, that Santos always said that, with the Agreement, the FARC would turn over its drug trafficking routes and that it would be easier to fight narcotrafficking, but what happened was the opposite,” said another attendee. And although some guests said that the Cambio Radical senator, Antonio Zabaraín, suggested that the ambassador go to microphones and openly say that his country felt cheated, Whitaker said it was not appropriate, among other things, because in the Obama administration a special delegate, Bernard Aronson, had been sent to accompany the dialogue table. In fact, people close to the Havana dialogues commented that ambassador’s strong position is explained because Obama always kept him apart from the peace process, given his rejection of it.

Some members of the negotiating table in Cuba we consulted explained that one of the red lines of the Santos government was not to affect the extradition treaty, to such an extent that in the Peace Agreement it was very clear that the judicial cooperation mechanism remained intact . That is, the concerns of the United States today are the product of the modulations of the laws derived from the agreement in Havana, which included a series of requirements before accepting the sending of a former member of the Farc to that country. And that of everything that happened in Cuba, Aronson was a rigorous witness. In the opinion of one of the former government negotiators, it was precisely the Jesus Santrich entrapment operation, “with a vengeful spirit,” that raised the volume of the extradition issue and put the need to shield the process within the sights of the Constitutional Court.

Those consulted agreed that the ambassador gave a brief explanation of the issues that concerned them, which were reflected in the objections, and that then each of the senators intervened explaining their political interpretation. “He also said that if Congress didn’t approve the objections relating to extradition, the United States could take measures, such as stop sending the US$500 million in aid to the country, and he foresaw this week’s Trump onslaught against President Duque,” recounted another of the guests. However, he also narrated that Whitaker had clarified that he was aware that Duque “had received a complicated inheritance.”

They also say that although the atmosphere was one of detente, [uribista senator] Paloma Valencia was uncomfortable with Whitaker’s statements about the effects of the extradition and took the opportunity to complain about the support that the U.S. government had given to the Havana table and the Peace Agreement. They relate that she even said that in that same house [ambassadorial residence], during the renegotiation after the triumph of the no [in the October 2016 plebiscite], her side warned the United States that this was going to happen. “Paloma asked him directly about the possibility of a decertification and the ambassador did not answer, but he did say that the consequences could be those that have been applied in Central America, withdrawing aid resources. Regarding Trump’s first statement this week, he said that we shouldn’t take it personally,” said one of the witnesses.

The only dissonant voice of the Senate group invited to the ambassador’s residence was that of Iván Marulanda, of the Green Alliance, an opposition party. His companions say that his discomfort was visible, that unlike his colleagues he found the ambassador’s words intimidating and rude, even more so when the diplomat spoke ill of Santos and each senator contributed some comment criticizing the former president. “The ambassador said that his government was Colombia’s largest aid donor and that since 2016, when the Agreement was signed, they had contributed US$1 billion, which would be at risk if the main interest of the United States in Colombia was affected: extradition. Marulanda replied that Colombians care more about the peace of the country than American money.“

Regarding the Santrich case, Whitaker was insistent that his government was not going to give any evidence to the JEP, that U.S. authorities were going to demand him from Colombia and that this case was a “point of honor” for the United States. “Not so much for Santrich , but for the future of the extradition treaty. He also told us he had information that other members of the FARC were trafficking drugs, although he did not give us names,” a legislator said. He added that the diplomat warned them that if the country did not hand over Santrich, Colombia would be targeted by a possible intervention, specifically by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The senators’ meeting with the ambassador ended with a curious anecdote. Out in the parking lot, some told, Senator Zabaraín said that “the fault of all this is with (former president) Álvaro Uribe who, after winning the plebiscite, went to talk with Santos and accepted his invitation to the presidential palace.” Paloma Valencia immediately recalled that “I told him not to go.” In the end, they concluded that the presidential objections to the Statutory Law of the JEP will have the same fate in the Senate as in the House of Representatives, so for the objections’ supporters it is absolutely clear that “President Duque is going to file constitutional reforms around the special jurisdiction in the Congress of the Republic, “said one legislator.

The second meeting

Little of that encounter made it into the media, but what alerted about the ambassador’s movements in the Congress was the meeting that he maintained on Tuesday, April 2 (the following day), with the House representatives. Also at 7:00 in the morning, and with the same American breakfast, Whitaker received six of the seven legislators in charge of studying the objections in the lower house. Juanita Goebertus (Green Alliance), John Jairo Cárdenas (U), David Racero (Decentes), Carlos Ardila (Liberal Party), José Daniel López (Cambio Radical), and Álvaro Hernán Prada (Centro Democrático) attended. A composition very different from that of the pro-government majorities that visited the ambassador’s house the previous day.

El Espectador consulted five of the six attendees and, as in the Senate, they agreed on the purpose and the manner with which the meeting was held. For all, except the uribista representative, the ambassador’s exposition was intimidating, undiplomatic, and tense. They also agreed on the three positions presented by the ambassador. He told them, for example, that Congress should act as an autonomous power without attending to the decisions of the Constitutional Court, as it “could also be wrong.” He also repeated that the United States is not going to send any proof against Santrich [because the extradition agreement only requires probable cause], and will do everything possible to take him away. And, finally, he reiterated that the economic aid to Colombia could be at risk if the objections are defeated.

“Whitaker said that he expected total confidentiality of the meeting because he wanted to speak with total frankness. That his government was very worried, and he detailed his country’s central priorities. Then, Representative Cardenas explained the reasons why he opposed the objections, arguing legal and not political reasons. From that moment on, the atmosphere became tense and even, with a gesture of arrogance, he questioned Cárdenas saying: ‘I don’t understand those inanities.’ Then José Daniel (López) spoke and pointed to the principle of separation of powers and the ambassador went after him, saying: ‘Don’t come at me with legalisms’. Then he added the idea that the United States’ affection towards its friends expresses itself with money. ‘Love is money’, was the phrase he used [in English],” said a representative.

But Prada, who was representing uribismo, said that the phrase used by the ambassador should be contextualized. He noted that, from his perspective, that expression was not used in a blackmail tone but “to express to us that the United States has affection for Colombia, that bilateral relations are excellent and that they are willing to continue helping us,” he said. In addition, he criticized that the confidentiality the ambassador requested for the meeting has been broken, “taking advantage of the fact that this year we have [local] elections, making it look like the ambassador had been pressuring, and it wasn’t like that. And in addition, the ambassador has the right to know what is happening with a peace process that we are trying to remedy on some issues.”

In the second intervention the ambassador made, another lawmaker told, he said: “In my government we have invested US$1 billion since the agreement was signed, and it doesn’t seem fair if we can’t suggest anything and not be heard”; He added that Whitaker was especially rude in his treatment of representative Carlos Ardila. “He interrupted him when he was explaining his reasons and, as he was with his arms folded, he said ‘do something for your country instead of going around with your arms folded. That’s why they elected you.’ He said he did not understand how it was possible for the Court to be above Congress and spoke about the well-known Dred Scott decision.”

The representatives said that Juanita Goebertus at that time asked to speak, replied to the ambassador and told him that she knew that sentence very well, which was from 1857, and that it had cost the United States a civil war and two constitutional amendments. The ambassador looked at her haughtily and said: “I see you know a lot about us.” Juanita replied that she had studied in his country. “During the meeting, Whitaker repeated several times that he was not a lawyer, but that he did not doubt that the president’s objections were correctly presented. On extradition, he reiterated that the treaty was clear and that they were not going to provide evidence, period. He never asked for our vote, but he did say that Congress should accept the objections.” The Congresswoman of the Green Alliance concluded by telling the ambassador that, from her experience in the United States, she could say that she admired the separation of powers in that country and that she had never been in a meeting “so far out of diplomatic tone” as the one he had summoned.

The reading that some representatives gave to the meeting with Whitaker is that, according to what they said, it left in evidence a “flawed” relationship between the U.S. government and President Iván Duque: ” They do not see him with enough capacity to move his commitments forward. They see him as weak,” said one representative. Undoubtedly, the meeting with those of the House was highly tense, and that explains that why it leaked a few hours after it happened. That same day the bill rejecting Duque’s objections was filed in the chamber, and news also filtered of an ambassadorial dinner invitation to the magistrates of the Constitutional Court, which the justices rejected as highly inappropriate.

Whitaker closed the week by visiting former President Gaviria at his home to ask for a political concept on the objections. However, the government’s defeat in the House was inevitable, as was Trump’s scolding of President Duque. An epilogue of the week that shows that the United States is moving strongly in domestic politics, as in the times of Plan Colombia.

October 13, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(Week of September 30-October 6)

Prosecutor’s Office Raids Transitional Justice System Headquarters

On the afternoon of October 4 agents of Colombia’s Chief Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía, which investigates and prosecutes crimes in the regular criminal justice system) showed up at the offices of the new, separate transitional justice system created by the peace accords (Special Peace Jurisdiction or JEP, which investigates and prosecutes war crimes committed during the armed conflict). The agents, sent by the Fiscalía, demanded to be allowed to carry out a “judicial inspection” of the files in the new justice system’s first and largest case so far, numbered “case 001”: charges of mass kidnapping against 31 FARC leaders.

This action, which appeared to be a blatant interference in the new justice system’s workings, generated expressions of outrage against Prosecutor-General Néstor Humberto Martínez, a frequent critic of the JEP and other aspects of the FARC peace accord. Though Martínez quickly rescinded the order and called back the agents, JEP President Patricia Linares declared, “the Prosecutor’s Office obtained a digital copy of the casefile, due to the hasty manner in which the procedure was carried out.”

Linares “strongly and emphatically reject[ed]” what she called “the Fiscalía’s undue interference with the autonomy and judicial independence” of the JEP, adding that it was “openly violative of the judicial reserve that covers the investigations carried out by JEP judges.”

The UN Verification Mission and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia issued a joint declaration following the incident:

The rights of victims and the legal security of participants in the armed conflict depend on strict respect of all public powers for the independence and autonomy of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. We underline the importance that collaboration between jurisdictions be harmonious and fully respectful of their respective competences.

What Colombian media called a “train crash” between the old and new judicial bodies could have consequences for the peace process. It appeared to be a political move seeking to intimidate the JEP and demonstrate the Fiscalía’s relative power. It may have increased former FARC leaders’ fear of being arrested in a similar future show of political power, which risks causing more of them to abandon the process, either going into hiding or taking up arms again.

Missing FARC Leaders Send a Harshly Worded Letter

Two of the most prominent leaders who have already gone clandestine surfaced in a letter sent to the Peace Committee of Colombia’s Congress. Iván Márquez, the FARC’s chief negotiator during the Havana peace talks, and Óscar Montero alias “El Paisa,” once head of a powerful FARC mobile column, have been missing since June or July. Their letter, the first communication from them in months, had some very harsh words for a process they view as failing.

“The peace accord has been betrayed,” reads the letter, which laments having agreed to turn in weapons before reaching more specific agreement on the terms of ex-combatants’ reintegration. The letter outlines what, in the missing leaders’ view, are three “structural flaws” in the November 2016 accord.

First, they cite “judicial insecurity,” believing themselves vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and possible extradition. They allege that this is what happened to Jesús Santrich, a guerrilla negotiator close to Márquez who was arrested in April and faces an extradition request to the United States on charges of conspiring to transship cocaine. The two ex-guerrilla leaders write that these charges are a “judicial setup hatched by the Attorney General, the U.S. Ambassador, and the DEA.” Writing in La Silla Vacía, analyst Héctor Riveros notes that regardless of the truth behind the Santrich case, the “judicial insecurity” argument has served “hundreds of ex-guerrillas” as a pretext for exiting the process and joining armed dissident groups.

The second “flaw” noted in the letter are the changes made to the accord after it was narrowly rejected in an October 2016 plebiscite, which in their words “transfigured the Havana Accord into a horrific Frankenstein.” Third, they cite the Colombian Congress’s failure to pass all the legislation needed to implement the accord, especially reforms to the political system and the failure to create special temporary congressional districts to represent victims’ groups.

The FARC political party held a press conference in the Congress, with its legislators rejecting the arguments in Márquez and Montero’s letter. “They’re totally wrong,” said FARC Senator Carlos Antonio Lozada.

“I could hardly go and say that there are no conditions or guarantees while I’m sitting in the Senate press room leading a press conference. What we’re saying is that the process has difficulties, the implementation has not been consistent on the part of the state, but there are some spaces that have been won, we value them and they are very important to achieve progress in the implementation of the peace accords.”

Lozada called on the missing leaders to “understand” that the ex-guerrilla party has adopted a supportive but critical position on the accord’s implementation, and that they “reconsider their position.”

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Guillermo Botero told the Blu Radio network that “the police have intelligence reports” about Márquez and Montero’s current location. While refusing to reveal anything on the radio, Botero acknowledged that both are in Colombia.

US Ambassador Pushes for Santrich Extradition

The Jesús Santrich case remains a big test for Colombia’s new transitional justice system. The former guerrilla negotiator remains in prison awaiting a decision from the JEP about whether he may be extradited to face charges in a New York federal court of conspiring to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States in 2017, after the peace accord was ratified.

“Extradition is a very strong tool for Colombia, for the United States, for the victims and for the peace agreement,” U.S. ambassador Kevin Whitaker said this week. “Jesus Santrich is accused in a United States Court of having violated U.S. law, that is why we are seeking his extradition and we will continue in that.” The ambassador added, “Any person or institution that can stop the extraditions affects the interests of the United States, affects the interests of Colombia and of all those who long for peace.”

The FARC insists that Santrich, a FARC ideologist who has poor eyesight and little apparent prior involvement in the guerrillas’ narcotrafficking, is innocent. They doubt the evidence made public so far, which appears to show Santrich offering approval to a plan, hatched by a nephew of Iván Márquez, to send coca to Mexican narcotraffickers who are, in fact, DEA agents or informants.

Farc Senator Victoria Sandino said, “It’s been more than six months since they captured Jesus Santrich, with the argument that U.S. justice has the evidence,” but “the Prosecutor-General’s office then goes out and says it does not have it. And now the Embassy persists in the extradition. What we say is show the evidence and present it to the JEP. And Santrich’s legal defense demands freedom, because no evidence has been shown.”

Sandino is referring to this chain of events:

When another country requests the extradition of an individual facing trial in the JEP, the peace accord requires the JEP to determine whether the alleged crime took place before or after the December 2016 ratification of the FARC peace accord—the official end of the conflict. If the crime happened before that date, then extradition would be blocked.
This procedure left unclear whether the JEP was merely to perform the clerical task of certifying the date of the alleged crime, or whether it was also empowered to decide whether there was enough evidence to back up the allegation.
Colombia’s Constitutional Court settled this question in August, when it determined that the JEP does have the ability to evaluate the evidence backing an allegation.
On September 18, the JEP asked the Fiscalía to turn over all the evidence in its possession about the Santrich case.
On September 27, the Fiscalía sent a letter to the JEP stating that it had turned over everything it its Santrich file. La Silla Vacía commentator Héctor Riveros characterized this as “the ‘bureaucratic file,’ that is, some letters and little else.”
On October 1, the Fiscalía announced via Twitter that it had sent 12 more audio files to the JEP. But it also surprisingly announced that it “does not have audio or video evidence. …The elements being requested now are those that form part of a judicial process in the United States.” That the proof against Santrich is not available in Colombia drew much attention in Colombian media.
According to Riveros, the Chief Prosecutor then tried to do some damage control: “Prosecutor Néstor Humberto Martínez, aware of the seriousness of Santrich’s detention, invited the directors of the most influential media in the country to his office to show part of the evidence on the basis of which the former negotiator’s arrest was ordered. They were short videos and some photos that, although they did not reveal anything, hinted that Santrich may have been literally caught ‘with his hands in the cookie jar.’”

“If everything keeps going like this,” Riveros wrote, “that Jurisdiction [JEP] can not say anything other than that there is no proof that Santrich has committed crimes after the accord’s signing.”

New Security Council Report

The UN Verification Mission in Colombia issued its latest quarterly Secretary General’s report to the Security Council on the demobilization and reintegration process. It covers July 21 to September 26. Some of its key findings:

As of August 30, approximately 13,000 demobilized FARC members had been accredited by Colombia’s Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, and 12,773 of them had been provided with their accreditation, an increase of 150 since July. It’s hard to notify some of these ex-guerrillas of their accreditation because of their “increased dispersal.”
On August 10 the FARC gave the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace a list of about 1,000 additional former members, who were not on the “final” list of August 15, 2017, the date the FARC officially disarmed. Most of the new names, the Secretary-General’s report notes, “come from areas affected by continuing security challenges and where the integration of the individuals into the process could be beneficial. As such, I hope that this matter will be treated by the new Government as a priority.”
As of late August, 232 accredited ex-guerrillas were still in prison, even though the accord calls for amnesty for their crime of sedition, and then for their future appearance before the JEP for more serious crimes.
The UN Mission reiterated concerns about “the departures of several former FARC-EP commanders from the territorial areas for training and reintegration in the south-eastern region. Some of them have cited concerns about their physical and legal security as a motivating factor.” Ominously it adds, “this development has underlined the continued fragility of the peace process, owing in particular to the persistence of violence in the zones of conflict linked mainly to criminal groups.”
The Mission’s chief, UN diplomat Jean Arnault, said that about 4,000 ex-FARC members remain in the “territorial areas,” or demobilization sites, or their immediate vicinity. (Ex-guerrillas have been free to leave these sites since August 15, 2017.) More than 2,000 have moved to “several dozen new regrouping points and thousands are dispersed throughout all of the country, including in the main cities.”
“The process of economic reintegration is clearly lagging behind other dimensions of reintegration,” the report states. “[T]he fundamental goal of providing income-generating opportunities to some 14,000 former combatants is far from being realized, as illustrated by the fact that only 17 projects have been approved, of which only 2 are currently funded.” Former FARC members are carrying out dozens of productive projects, informally, on their own. Many could succeed, the UN report contends, “if provided with better access to technical and marketing advice, land and overall support from the Government, local authorities and the private sector, among others.”
Nine former FARC members were killed during the 90-day period, making a total of 71. The Fiscalía’s Special Investigation Unit, set up by the peace accord to investigate these killings, notes that three-quarters of these killings took place in five departments: Nariño (16), Antioquia (15), Cauca (12), Caquetá (8), and Norte de Santander (7). The UN report notes further, “In 34 cases, the Unit reported significant progress in its investigations, with 17 instigators or perpetrators arrested. Of these, 15 cases involved dissident groups, 7 involved private individuals, 6 were attributed to ELN, 4 cases were attributed to the Clan del Golfo criminal group, 1 involved local criminal organization and 1 case remains under investigation. According to the Investigation Unit, the principal motives behind the attacks are related to territorial control (21 cases) and revenge (3 cases).”
Even without direct negotiations, the UN report states that “continued direct communication between the Government and ELN is welcome.” The report finds that renewed peace talks are certainly possible: “The Government has made it clear that it expects a cessation of all violence; the ELN, for its part, has stated that it aims to bring about substantive change based on a broad social dialogue. The two goals are not incompatible.”

FIP Report Finds Deteriorating Security Conditions

The Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP), a Bogotá-based think-tank founded by members of the business community, released an extensive report on October 3 about deteriorating security guarantees for practicing peaceful politics in post-conflict Colombia. “From a feeling of tranquility and expectation for the returns that the implementation of what was agreed with the FARC would bring,” the report reads, post-conflict regions “have passed into distrust and fear for the reactivation of violence.” It zooms in on four conflictive regions: Arauca, Catatumbo, Cauca, and southern Bolívar.

Among the report’s findings:

In the 170 municipalities (counties, of which Colombia has about 1,100) that Colombia has prioritized for post-conflict Development Programs with a Territorial Focus (PDETs), homicides increased 28 percent in January-July 2018, compared to the same period in 2017.
In these municipalities, forced displacement tripled, from 5,248 people to 16,997.
In these municipalities, crimes against social leaders also nearly tripled, from 24 to 67.
Throughout the country, 93 social leaders were killed between January and August, compared to 50 during the same period in 2017.

In the four regions it looked at, the FIP found common patterns:

an unstable confluence of armed actors;
a reactivation of social conflicts;
vulnerability of social leaders;
delays in the implementation of the peace accord;
weaknesses in ex-combatants’ reincorporation process; and
difficulties in implementing security guarantees at the local level.

The FIP calls for urgent measures to prevent further deterioration of post-conflict zones’ security situation. “Under these conditions, the implementation of the peace accord is at a critical moment. We still have time to prevent and contain the manifestations of violence and intimidation in the territories affected by the presence of illegal armed groups and armed confrontation.”

Kidnapping of Mayor’s Son, Age Five, in Catatumbo

Two armed, motorcycle-mounted men kidnapped the five-year-old son of the mayor of El Carmen, a municipality in the violence-torn region of Catatumbo, in Norte de Santander department near the Venezuelan border. The mayor, Edwin Contreras, is part of a political dynasty in the 2,000-person municipality; his uncle had held the post before him. “Since he became mayor, he has received strong intimidations,” reports El Espectador.

The Catatumbo region, with 11 municipalities and a population of about 300,000, has suffered frequent fighting between the ELN and a local guerrilla group, the EPL, since March. The two groups previously had cordial relations, but the departure of the FARC from part of the zone, and a sharp rise in coca cultivation, undid the local power equilibrium. Violence has since shuttered schools at times and displaced thousands.

While the kidnappers’ identity is unknown, speculation points to the ELN. “In this municipality, even a needle can’t move without the ELN knowing about it,” local residents who asked to remain unnamed told El Espectador. “We’re so exposed that on any given day they can kidnap the mayor’s son,” the municipal ombudsman said. “There is no Army here. There is a police presence, but they can’t do their job. They can’t go out. We’ve reiterated this issue in all official security meetings. We are abandoned to our fate.”

In-Depth Reading

Adelaida Avila Cabrera, Juanita Velez, “La Sustitucion de la Coca Si Esta Llegando a Donde Es Pero Muy Lento” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), October 5, 2018).
“Las Garantias de Seguridad: Una Mirada Desde Lo Local” (Fundacion Ideas por la Paz (Colombia), October 4, 2018).
“Lideres Asesinados, ¿Cuantos se Quedan por Fuera de los Conteos?” (El Tiempo (Colombia), October 4, 2018).
Ariel Ávila, Diego Alejandro Restrepo, “La Guerra por el Bajo Cauca y Norte de Antioquia” (Fundacion Paz y Reconciliacion, El Espectador (Colombia), October 4, 2018).
Jim Mustian, Joshua Goodman, “Dea’s Colombia Post Roiled by Misconduct Probes” (Associated Press, The Washington Post, October 3, 2018).
Ricardo Monsalve Gaviria, “Van Mas de 150 Hechos Violentos de las Disidencias” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), October 2, 2018).
“Infographic: Agresiones y Homicidios de Lideres Sociales” (Fundacion Ideas por la Paz (Colombia), October 2, 2018).
“Zonas Cocaleras, las de Mayor Riesgo para la Vida de los Lideres Sociales” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), October 1, 2018).
Sara Castillejo Ditta, “La Implementacion de los PDET Amenaza Con Quedarse en Letra Muerta” (El Tiempo (Colombia), October 1, 2018).
“El Mapa de los 101 Accidentes por Minas Antipersona Ocurridos en 2018” (El Tiempo (Colombia), October 1, 2018).
Tatiana Duque, “La Guerra en Tumaco Despues de Guacho y David Sigue Igual” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), October 1, 2018).
Ricardo Monsalve Gaviria, “Los Grupos Ilegales No Dejan en Paz a Ituango” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), October 1, 2018).
Adam Isacson, “La Reunion de Duque Con Trump: Entretenida Pero Improductiva” (Washington Office on Latin America, Razon Publica (Colombia), October 1, 2018).

October 1, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(Week of September 16-22)

UNODC Publishes Its 2017 Coca Cultivation Estimate

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime published an executive summary of its 2017 estimate of coca cultivation and cocaine production in Colombia. The UN agency has usually produced this document, in complete form, in June or July of each year. Among the latest report’s most notable findings:

Coca cultivation increased by 17 percent in Colombia between 2016 and 2017, growing from 146,000 to 171,000 hectares. (A hectare is about two and a half acres.) In June, the U.S. government publicized its own estimate for 2017, finding an 11 percent increase to 209,000 hectares. According to Defense Minister Guillermo Botero, the UN figure is “the official statistic that the Colombian government works with.”
64% of the increase was concentrated in four departments: Antioquia, Putumayo, Norte de Santander and Cauca. Nearly all coca is grown in municipalities where coca was grown a decade ago.
The department with the most coca is still Nariño, as has been the case every year since 2006. Nariño makes up 27% of all Colombian coca cultivation, but the crop increased by only 7% there in 2017.
Tumaco, a giant municipality (county) in southwestern Nariño, remains the number-one coca-growing municipality in the country. However, coca cultivation declined by 16% in Tumaco last year.
The department of Guaviare saw the largest decrease, shrinking 28% from 6,800 to 4,900 hectares. Guaviare, along with Tumaco, has been a main focus of crop-substitution efforts within the framework of the peace accord. In Meta, another department that saw a lot of crop substitution, coca increased 2%.
The areas where the Colombian government has managed to get crop-substitution programs up and running comprise 14% of coca-growing territories. But in those territories, cultivation fell 11% in 2017.
33% of coca crops were detected in “isolated areas, 10 km away from any populated center.”
34% of coca crops were detected in areas that were covered by forests in 2014.
Probably due to increased supply, prices crashed in 2017. Coca leaf prices fell 28%; cocaine paste fell 14%, and cocaine fell 11% inside Colombia. This isn’t entirely supply and demand: local circumstances, like changes in armed-group control, may be more important factors in some areas.
Colombia’s cocaine exports were worth about US$2.7 billion in 2017. Colombia’s coffee exports totaled about US$2.5 billion. Only oil and coal produced more export revenue.
All cocaine base produced in the country was worth US$1.315 billion. All coca leaf was worth US$371 million.
In the ten municipalities (counties) with the most coca crops, the coca leaf market adds up to US$302 million. These counties’ combined municipal budgets were US$196 million.
5% of coca was planted within national parks, and another 27% within 20 kilometers of a national park.
10% was planted within indigenous reserves. 15% was planted in land belonging to Afro-Colombian communities.
16% of coca was planted within 10 kilometers of a border, mainly those with Venezuela and Ecuador.
The National Comprehensive Substitution Program (PNIS), the voluntary crop-substitution program set up by the FARC peace accord, had enrolled 54,027 families by the end of 2017. By June 2018, that had climbed to 77,659 families.
Mainly because the bushes have had time to grow taller than they used to be, their yield—the amount of cocaine that can be produced from a hectare of coca—has increased by one third since 2012. As a result, Colombia’s potential cocaine production grew from 1,053 tons in 2016 to 1,379 tons in 2017.
Processing that much cocaine required that 510 million liters of liquid precursor chemicals, and 98,000 tons of solid precursors, be smuggled in to very remote areas.
“When we talk about coca growers,” UNODC Colombia Director Bo Mathiasen told El Espectador, “we talk about there being today about 119,500 households that depend on that. If we estimate that each family has four members, we are talking about almost half a million Colombians, just those involved with crops.” That is 1% of Colombia’s population of about 50 million.

Asked whether the increase in coca-growing was “a failure of the peace agreement,” Mathiasen replied that Colombia’s government over-promised to coca-growing families.

It’s an agreement with promises that had no basis. They promised more than they could fulfill. The Government does not have the money to fulfill the prior commitments. There was a lack of realistic communication about the resources that were available and what could be delivered. This caused the campesinos to think that if they planted more coca, they could have subsidies and be part of the substitution program.

Mathiasen also criticized the simultaneous implementation of crop substitution and crop eradication, two strategies that “work with different timeframes.” He cautioned against relying too heavily on renewed fumigation of coca with the herbicide glyphosate.

The United Nations does not have an opinion either in favor or against the use of glyphosate, and I must add that it is widely used in agriculture in Colombia and in many countries. The effectiveness of forced eradication has limits. Yes, the plant is done away with, but replanting has historically been high in eradication zones where there is no program of social and economic intervention going hand-in-hand. If you want a more sustainable outcome over time you have to combine forced or voluntary eradication with investment programs to develop these territories.

President Iván Duque said that in coming days, “he would present a new plan to combat drugs that would ‘strengthen our air, sea and land interception capacity’ and ‘dismantle completely the supply chain, both precursors and product,’” the New York Times reported, adding that “so far, he has provided no details.”

Interviewed by El Tiempo, U.S. Ambassador Kevin Whitaker reiterated his support for glyphosate-spraying, despite a California jury’s August ruling that a gardener who contracted cancer was entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Monsanto, the company that produces most glyphosate herbicide sold in the United States.

I have always said, and I maintain, that the use of glyphosate is safe and effective. It can be a very important tool in the fight against narcotics as part of eradication, which is only one aspect of a comprehensive program. Evidently there was a jury decision in California, and you have to respect that. But that decision does not change the science at all, and the science is clear.

Government Won’t Name an ELN Negotiating Team Until Conditions Met

In a statement, the ELN’s negotiators in Havana called on the government to re-start frozen peace talks, citing its release of nine captives during the first half of September. The Duque government announced that it would not name a new negotiating team until the ELN releases all hostages. The government has a list of ten individuals who remain in ELN captivity. It is unclear whether all are alive, and the guerrillas have not addressed their cases.

This week the ELN released Mayerly Cortés Rodríguez, a 16-year-old whom guerrillas had kidnapped in Chocó. By holding a minor, government High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos said, the ELN “broke all the rules.” The ELN’s Chocó-based Western War Front stated that it was holding Cortés not as a hostage, but “to clear up her collaboration with the Marines,” accusing her of providing intelligence to the local unit. The commander of Colombia’s Pacific Naval Force (Marines are part of the Navy) insisted that it does not seek intelligence from minors.

The ELN talks remain stalled. “It’s evident that neither the government nor the ELN wants to be seen as the one slamming the door on the peace process, but neither of the two parties wants to be the one that gives up the most to restart the dialogues,” El Tiempo’s Marisol Gómez observed.

Elsewhere in Chocó, combat between the ELN and Army displaced about 80 indigenous people from the Murindó River reserve.

FARC Dissident Leader “Guacho” is Wounded, Military Says

A military offensive against FARC dissident groups has intensified in Nariño, along what may be Colombia’s busiest cocaine production and trafficking corridor. Last week, troops killed alias “David,” commander of the United Guerrillas of the Pacific dissident group. This week, special forces reported wounding his rival, Walter Arízala alias “Guacho,” commander of the Oliver Sinisterra Front dissident group.

Though born in Ecuador, Guacho rose through the FARC’s ranks in Narino over 15 years, becoming deeply involved in narcotrafficking. He refused to demobilize in 2017, then became one of the two or three most-wanted armed-group leaders in Colombia earlier this year, after he staged attacks on government forces in Nariño and across the border in Ecuador, and then kidnapped and killed two Ecuadorian reporters and their driver. The tragedy of the El Comercio journalists was front-page news in Ecuador for weeks.

On September 15, at a site in the northern part of Tumaco further from the border, a joint unit seeking to capture Guacho was closing in, but was detected by the dissident leader’s innermost security ring. During the resulting firefight, troops shot a fleeing Guacho twice in the back, but his men helped him to escape.

Though Colombian and Ecuadorian troops reportedly did not coordinate, Ecuador’s military and police strengthened security on their side of the border with the aim of preventing Guacho from crossing. There were no new reports about the guerrilla leader’s condition or whereabouts during the rest of the week.

Semana magazine, claiming that Guacho’s influence in Nariño had been declining, reported that the guerrilla leader “is fleeing with the last of his bodyguards, and the search continues.”

Three Mining Company Geologists Killed in Antioquia; Guerrilla Dissidents Blamed

A group of armed men burst into a mining company camp in the predawn hours of September 20 in Yarumal, Antioquia, opening fire and killing Laura Alejandra Flórez Aguirre, Henry Mauricio Martínez Gómez, and Camilo Andrés Tirado Farak. The three were geologists carrying out explorations for Continental Gold Mines, a Canadian company.

No group has claimed responsibility. Colombian authorities told the media that dissident members of the FARC’s 36th Front are very active in Yarumal. Precious-metals mining has been a principal income stream for organized crime groups here and in many parts of the country.

In the nearby municipality of Buriticá, Continental Gold is building what El Espectador calls “the first large-scale subterranean gold mine in Colombia,” which is to begin operation in 2020 and produce an average of 253,000 ounces of gold per year over 14 years.

Accord Implementation Budget Appears Insufficient

Colombia’s Comptroller-General’s Office (Contraloría) sent a new report to Congress on expenditures to implement the FARC peace accord. It concludes that, over the next 15 years, the government will need to come up with about US$25 billion to fulfill the commitments made in the accord. Most of the resources needed would go to the accord’s first chapter on rural development.

The Treasury Ministry has estimated a 15-year cost of accord implementation at 129.5 trillion pesos, or about US$43 billion. The Contraloría sees a need for an additional 76 trillion pesos, which

would represent 0.4% of annual GDP that would be added to the fiscal deficit projected for the coming years. These calculations could increase to up to 1.1% of GDP if we add the additional costs of covering all the municipalities with scattered rural territories as contemplated in the Final Agreement, and the reparation measures in the public policy of attention to victims.

The Contraloría report found that the government spent 6.9 trillion pesos (about US$2.3 billion) in 2017 on activities related to the FARC peace accord.

El Espectador meanwhile notes that Colombia’s defense budget has increased during the post-accord period, growing 8 percent from 2017 to 2018.

FARC Remains on U.S. Terrorist List

The U.S. Department of State released its annual report on international terrorism on September 19. This report includes and updates the Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. The FARC—recognized as a political party today in Colombia—remains on that list.

“Colombia experienced a continued decrease in terrorist activity in 2017, due in large part to the November 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),” the report reads, citing the disarmament, demobilization, and reincorporation process that the ex-guerrillas underwent last year. Still, a footnote in the report explains that the FARC remains on the terrorist list because the party’s ties to increasingly active guerrilla dissident groups are “unclear”:

The FARC remains a Foreign Terrorist Organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act. However, the Colombian government classifies FARC dissidents as criminals. While the ideological motivations of such groups and ongoing connections with demobilized FARC are unclear, we have included acts of violence by FARC dissidents in this report.

Although the UN verification mission and other observers fault both the Colombian government and the FARC for the slow pace of ex-guerrillas’ reintegration programs, the State Department report places all the blame on the FARC. It essentially faults the ex-guerrillas for insisting on collective reintegration, instead of accepting the government’s standard individual reintegration offer:

The Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN), formerly the Colombian Reintegration Agency (ACR), is the implementing arm of this process. Delays in implementing the program, caused by the refusal of FARC leadership to permit members to actively and effectively participate, increased the prospects that some ex-combatants would return to engaging in criminal activities.

Asked by a reporter why the FARC party remains on the list, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan Sales offered no specifics.

I’m not going to be in a position to comment on any internal deliberations that may or may not be taking place. What I can tell you is that the statutory standards for getting on the FTO list or getting off the FTO list are very clear, and it – we apply the standards that Congress has given us consistent with the evidence in front of us, and we do that regardless of the organization or country.

Interviewed by El Tiempo, U.S. Ambassador Kevin Whitaker insisted that Washington would push for the extradition of any wanted FARC members believed to have committed crimes after the peace accord’s December 2016 ratification. “Any effort, by any actor or institution, to limit extradition, affects U.S. interests.”

Whitaker criticized a Constitutional Court finding that appears to give the transitional justice system (JEP) the power to review evidence against those wanted in extradition for alleged post-accord crimes, like FARC negotiator Jesús Santrich. The way extradition works, he said, is that the requesting country evaluates the evidence.

The Ambassador also rejected the idea that wanted individuals should first remain in Colombia to provide victims with truth and reparations. “I don’t accept the mistaken idea that if there is extradition, then there can be no truth. In the case of the paramilitaries extradited a decade ago, we have set up 3,000 hearings, including victims, prosecutors, magistrates, etcetera. There has been every opportunity to clarify the truth. So both can be done.”

President Duque Meets UN Mission Chief

Jean Arnault, the chief of the UN verification mission that just had its mandate extended for another year, met with President Iván Duque. Arnault’s mission is overseeing the reintegration and security of FARC ex-combatants, which have moved forward but faced setbacks and obstacles over the past year.

Appearing publicly with the President, Arnault said, “I encourage you to continue with a difficult process, full of obstacles and still very fragile. We encourage you to continue not only for the sake of Colombia, but also for the sake of the international community.” Duque said that the government remains committed to “the people who have genuinely bet it all on demobilization, disarmament, reintegration and non-repetition, can make a transition to coexistence and a life of legality.”

Arnault said that Duque’s six-week-old government was in the midst of a “useful reflection” about its ex-combatant reincorporation policy. Duque and Arnault agreed that finding productive projects for ex-combatants was a priority. These projects, Duque said, “had to incorporate more than 10,000 people in the process, but today do not exceed 100 people.” The President and the mission chief agreed that future reintegration projects should benefit entire communities, not just the ex-guerrillas.

In response to a written request from FARC party leader Rodrigo Londoño, Duque’s government named its representatives to the Commission of Follow-up, Impulse and Verification (CSIVI), the government-FARC mechanism meant to oversee implementation of the peace accord. They are Emilio José Archila, the High Counselor for the Post-Conflict; High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos; and Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez.

Meanwhile, one of the highest-profile demobilized guerrilla leaders, Luciano Marín alias Iván Márquez—the guerrillas’ lead negotiator during the Havana peace process—remains missing. FARC leaders insist that Márquez has not abandoned the peace process, that he has “clandestinized” himself out of concern for his security.

Márquez is free to roam the country pending his eventual transitional-justice trial for war crimes. But he now faces calls to clarify his situation.

The Congressional Peace Committee, which recently traveled to the demobilization site in Caquetá that Márquez abandoned in June or July, published a letter calling on him to “unequivocally reiterate your commitment to this process very soon.”
During the week of September 9, the transitional-justice system (JEP) called on Márquez and 30 other former FARC commanders to submit a written statement that each remains committed to the process and intends to comply with the peace accord. The JEP demanded a response within ten business days. Márquez’s lawyer may have bought some additional time by submitting an official information request to the JEP about its demand.

In-Depth Reading

Christina Noriega, “Colombia False Positive Scandal: Families Demand ‘Greater Truth’” (Al Jazzeera, September 21, 2018).
Daniel Flynn, Nacho Doce, “In Colombia, Victims of Sexual Abuse Speak Out After Peace Deal” (Reuters , September 21, 2018).
“Documental Muestra la Dificil Relacion de Arauca Con el Eln” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 21, 2018).
Cecilia Orozco Tascón, “Autor de Falsos Positivos, Invitado de Lafaurie-Cabal” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 20, 2018).
Pedro Arenas, “La Sustitucion Voluntaria en Briceno Es Posible” (Observatorio de Cultivos y Cultivadores declarados Ílícitos, El Espectador (Colombia), September 19, 2018).
“Proyecto de Modificacion de Ley de Tierras Ataca la ‘Medula’ de la Restitucion” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), September 19, 2018).
Federico Rios Escobar, Nicholas Casey, “Colombia Struck a Peace Deal With Guerrillas, but Many Return to Arms” (The New York Times, September 18, 2018).
“Guacho y David, las Vidas Paralelas de los Dos Mayores Narcos del Pacifico” (Semana (Colombia), September 18, 2018).
“El Dosier de David Char Ante la Jep” (Semana (Colombia), September 18, 2018).
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), “Estados Unidos Debe Apoyar a Colombia” (EFE, Firmas de EFE, September 18, 2018).
Beatriz Valdes Correa, “Mineria, Glifosato y Guerra: La Historia Que No Quieren Repetir los Negros de Timbiqui” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
Nicolas Sanchez A., “El Desencanto de las Comunidades del Rio San Juan Tras su Retorno” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
María Jimena Duzán, “Sin Pudor” (Semana (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
Cecilia Orozco Tascón, “Presidenta de la Jep: ‘los Vinculados Han Tenido Conducta Intachable’” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 17, 2018).
“Mindefensa y Lideres Sociales: De Lios de Faldas a ‘Subvenciones’ de Narcos” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), September 17, 2018).

September 21, 2018 — 0

The Past Week in Colombia’s Peace Process

(Week of September 9-15)

ELN Talks Remain Suspended

In his August 7 inaugural speech, President Iván Duque said that he would take 30 days to decide whether to continue peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas. That period has expired, and Duque did not end the talks—but he has suspended them pending the ELN’s renunciation of kidnapping and release of all captives.

ELN fighters freed nine captives over two releases in September. On the 7th, guerrillas in Arauca released three soldiers whom they had taken on August 8. On September 11 in Chocó, they released three policemen, a soldier, and two civilians taken on August 3 from a boat on an Atrato River tributary. The Duque government did not negotiate these releases’ protocols; the ELN performed them unilaterally in coordination with the Catholic Church, the government’s independent Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría), and the International Committee of the Red Cross. “This did not imply any negotiation with the national government,” insisted the Duque government’s peace commissioner, Miguel Ceballos.

While Ceballos and President Duque recognized this gesture, they said there is more to do: they count 10 more individuals who remain in ELN custody. “There were 20 on the list,” Ceballos said, “later there was one liberation in Arauca, and later three more. If we take away the three in Chocó, 10 remain.” Of the ten, one has been a hostage since April 2002; two were taken in 2011, and one in 2012. The ELN has offered no responses about these captives, if they are even still alive.

“The door is not necessarily closed” to peace talks with the ELN, Ceballos told El Tiempo. But Duque’s demands for changed ELN behavior, including a cessation of kidnapping and all other hostilities, may be more than what some ELN commanders might agree to. “I want to be clear,” President Duque said this week. “If we want to build a peace with this organized armed group, they must start with the clearest show of goodwill, which is the suspension of all criminal activities.”

Still, Ceballos told El Espectador the ELN may be flexible. “I think the ELN is understanding things, because if not, this process of liberation of kidnapped people would not have begun. I believe that in these 30 days a space of understanding has been achieved beyond the need for the formal structure of a [negotiating] table. These have been 30 days in which no armed actions have been presented. There’s a dynamic here.”

The Peace Commissioner added that, should talks re-start, the Duque government may seek to alter the negotiating agenda agreed with the Santos government, which has been criticized for imprecise language that has made it difficult to implement. “President Duque said it in a very clear way in Amagá (Antioquia), last Saturday,” he said. “Any future scenario would need a credible agenda and specific timeframes; that necessarily implies the consideration of adjustments.”

Gen. Montoya, Former Army Chief, Appears Before the JEP

Gen. Mario Montoya, who headed Colombia’s army from 2006 to 2008, appeared before the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP), the transitional justice system set up by the peace accord. The retired general denied any guilt for human rights crimes. Montoya is the highest-ranking officer to appear before the JEP so far, though another retired general, Henry Torres Escalante, has already appeared in relation to a case of extrajudicial executions.

Montoya resigned in November 2008, amid revelations that members of the Army had killed thousands of civilians, then presented them falsely as combat kills in a criminal effort to boost body counts and earn rewards for battlefield performance. Montoya allegedly pressured subordinates to rack up body counts and produce “rivers of blood” in counter-guerrilla operations, thus creating an environment that rewarded extrajudicial executions, making him emblematic of what Colombians call the “false positives” scandal.

Montoya decided in July to submit to the JEP rather than the regular criminal justice system, where some cases against him had been stalled since 2016. The highly decorated, U.S.-trained general denies any wrongdoing, lawbreaking, or knowledge of his subordinates’ criminal behavior. Though most defendants enter the JEP to confess crimes in return for reduced non-prison sentences, Montoya intends to challenge any charges against him. Should the JEP find him guilty anyway, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in regular prison.

During his initial hearing in the JEP’s Definition of Legal Situations Chamber, Montoya and his lawyers heard a listing of accusations and investigations against him that had been filed in the regular justice system. Cases included a few dozen “false positives” victims, as well as the “Operation Orion” military offensive in Medellín’s western slums, in October 2002 when Montoya headed the local army brigade, which killed several civilians and benefited from open support of paramilitary groups. Relatives of “false positives” victims attended the hearing.

Montoya’s defense lawyer argued that the general cannot be held responsible for the “false positive” crimes committed when he headed the Army, since the murders took place in units several levels below his command. In the end, Montoya’s hearing had a disappointing outcome: as defense lawyers challenged the standing of some of the victims involved, Magistrate Pedro Díaz suspended the session and put it off for a later date.

FARC Party Holds Conference Marked By No-Shows

News coverage took stock of a “National Council of the Commons,” a meeting of the new FARC political party’s leadership, in Bogotá the week earlier. The “Council” sought to bring together 111 delegates whom the ex-guerrilla membership had elected a year ago, to make decisions about the party’s future.

In the end, 29 of the 111 did not appear. Five have resigned their posts. Seven offered excuses for being unable to attend. Another 17, though, gave no reason for their absence. That number includes:

Luciano Marín alias Iván Márquez, the FARC’s chief negotiator during the Havana peace talks. Márquez left Bogotá and abandoned the Senate seat that awaited him in April 2018, after the arrest of Jesús Santrich, a close Márquez associate and fellow negotiator. Santrich is wanted in extradition by a U.S. federal court in New York on charges of conspiring to send cocaine to the United States. Until June or July, Márquez—a hardliner on the FARC’s left flank who was the top vote-getter when the membership chose delegates last year—abandoned the demobilization site where he had been staying in the southern department of Caquetá. He blamed nearby “military operations” and concerns for his security. His whereabouts are now unknown. It is not clear at the moment whether he intends to continue participating in the peace process.
Hernán Darío Velásquez alias El Paisa, the former head of the FARC’s feared Teófilo Forero mobile column, disappeared around the same time as Márquez; he was managing the Caquetá demobilization site where Márquez had been staying.
Henry Castellanos alias Romaña, who led FARC units that kidnapped hundreds in a region just south of Bogotá, had been managing a demobilization site in Nariño but has also gone clandestine.
Fabián Ramírez, a former top leader of the FARC’s Southern Bloc.
“Zarco Aldinever” and “Enrique Marulanda,” who managed the demobilization site in Mesetas, Meta.
“Iván Alí,” who ran a site in Guaviare. (Peace Commissioner Miguel Ceballos said that he met with “Alí” days before his disappearance, and that the FARC leader had told him “he was going to [the remote eastern department of] Vichada and that communication would be difficult.”)
“Albeiro Córdoba,” who ran another site in Guaviare.
“Manuel Político,” who ran a site in Putumayo.

Most of the missing 17, points out La Silla Vacía, come from the former guerrilla group’s Eastern and Southern blocs, where were its strongest militarily at the time the peace accord was signed.

Most members of the Colombian Congress’s Peace Committee visited Caquetá September 10 to seek information about the missing leaders. Sen. Iván Cepeda, a close supporter of the FARC peace process, said that people “very close” to Márquez and “El Paisa” told them that the two men remain committed to the peace process, and in fact are still in Caquetá. Both, however, fear being extradited capriciously, Cepeda said, adding that both had heard spurious rumors about pending arrest warrants. The Colombian government, Cepeda said, needs to find a way to keep “extradition from becoming a sort of detonator for the end of the peace process.”

Some of the missing leaders sent messages insisting that they remain in the peace process. A letter from “Romaña” appeared in which he reiterated his will to honor his demobilization commitments. Fabián Ramírez also sent a letter affirming his continued participation, though he expressed deep mistrust as a result of Santrich’s arrest. Ramírez said that, along with 100 other ex-guerrillas, he was seeking to set up a new, safer demobilization space with the goal of preventing their defection to dissident groups.

The disappearances are a sign of deepening internal divisions within the FARC. These were laid bare in a strongly worded letter from former Southern Bloc leader Joaquín Gómez and high-ranking ex-commander Bertulfo Álvarez. It accuses maximum leader Timoleón Jiménez and other Bogotá-based FARC bosses—most of whom have turned out to be political moderates—of “spiteful and vengeful lack of leadership.” The letter accused Jiménez of “dedicating himself to defending the bourgeois order with surprising and unexpected zeal.” The letter’s authors, who run the demobilization site in La Guajira, cited health reasons for their absence from the Bogotá meeting.

FARC Senator Victoria Sandino blamed security concerns for many of the no-shows, and denied that the FARC is dividing.

“No, there is a debate. Many people make criticisms within the party, but none will make criticisms like ‘oh no, let’s go back to guns, let’s create another party.’ No. There are internal political debates, but those debates aren’t about separating. There are some comrades who are critical of [accord] implementation, but I guarantee that in these debates none, absolutely nobody, has expressed the idea that the way out of here is to return to arms. No one.”

In the end, the FARC “Council of the Commons” agreed to set up an executive committee to prepare for October 2019 local elections, with regional representatives including Joaquín Gómez. They decided that going clandestine for security concerns was acceptable behavior, but established procedures to kick out renegade members.

U.S. Officials Visit, Speculation Over a Return to Coca Fumigation Increases

On September 11 the White House issued an annual memo to the State Department identifying major illicit drug producing and transit countries, and highlighting which of these are “decertified”—subject to aid cuts and other penalties—for failing to cooperate with U.S. counter-drug strategies. As in past years, Venezuela and Bolivia were decertified.

Last years’s memo included controversial language stating that President Trump “seriously considered” adding Colombia to the decertified blacklist because of sharply increased coca and cocaine production. This year’s document did not repeat that threat, but called out Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan for “falling behind in the fight to eradicate illicit crops and reduce drug production and trafficking.” The U.S. government estimated that Colombia’s coca crop increased 11 percent in 2017, to a record 209,000 hectares.

The certification memo’s release coincided with a visit to Bogota from the deputy director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, James Carroll, and the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Adm. Karl Schultz. According to El Tiempo, in a meeting that lasted over an hour, the two officials told President Duque that, under normal circumstances, the White House would have decertified Colombia:

“During the meeting the White House’s envoys told Duque that the amount of coca planted in Colombia, more than 200,000 hectares, was enough for the country to be decertified.

“However, they clarified that they understand that this is an ‘inherited’ problem [for the recently inaugurated president], which comes from previous years. In that sense, they expressed the Washington government’s confidence in the policies that Colombia is going to implement to eradicate crops and counteract the cartels who carry the drug to their nation.”

Duque told the U.S. officials he plans to respond with a mix of strategies, referring to “a principle of integrality” (comprehensiveness), rather than putting all focus on forced coca eradication. That mix, however, may include a return to eradication through aircraft-based spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, reviving a U.S.-backed program that Colombia carried out on a massive scale between 1994 and 2015. The government of Juan Manuel Santos suspended aircraft-based spraying in 2015 after some studies pointed to a possible link between glyphosate and cancer; officials also argued that spraying had proved to be ineffective.

Duque, however, may bring it back. “Fumigation can happen if some protocols are complied with,” he said. “In the comprehensive policy that we want in the fight against illicit crops, these protocols should be reflected in such a way that any action is upheld by the Court’s guidelines.”

The president refers here to 2015 and 2017 decisions by Colombia’s Constitution Court, its highest judicial review authority, which placed significant restrictions on coca eradication via aerial glyphosate spraying. Any future fumigation must avoid nature reserves, indigenous reservations, and campesino reserve zones—sites that host a significant portion of current cultivation. Spraying can only proceed after an “objective and conclusive” scientific study showing a lack of health and environmental damage. Colombia’s National Drug Council (CNE), a decision-making body incorporating several ministries and agencies, must agree on a set of regulations to govern future spraying, in a process that includes ethnic communities’ participation, and these regulations must be passed as a law. An ethnic representative must be added to the CNE. Colombia must undergo prior consultation with ethnic communities in areas where it plans to spray, although the Court allows spraying in the absence of consent if the CNE issues a finding.

Duque’s government includes some aggressively enthusiastic backers of renewed glyphosate fumigation. “I don’t see any alternative to using herbicides,” Defense Minister Guillermo Botero said in August. “You have to use it because the world is not going to accept us swimming in coca. …Glyphosate is used in Colombia since time immemorial.” Added Francisco Santos, the new ambassador to the United States: “Fumigation is essential. The Constitutional Court must understand that it must return, because we are facing a social, economic and national security emergency. It has to come back, understanding the restrictions.”

Dissident Leader “David” Killed in Nariño

The Defense Ministry announced that a military-police operation killed Víctor David Segura Palacios, alias “David,” the chief of one of the two main FARC dissident groups operating in Nariño, Colombia’s largest coca and cocaine-producing department. Soldiers arrived at 2:00AM on September 8 at a house where “David” was staying; he and his sister, who allegedly handled his group’s finances, were killed in an ensuing shootout.

A former member of the FARC’s Nariño-based Daniel Aldana mobile column, David refused to demobilize, along with his brother Yeison Segura, alias “Don Y.” The dissident group they formed, the “United Guerrillas of the Pacific” (GUP), recruited former FARC militias along Nariño’s coast and took over cocaine trafficking routes. After “Don Y” was killed in a November 2016 firefight with former FARC comrades, “David” assumed command.

Defense Minister Guillermo Botero told reporters that the GUP had grown to control 4 percent of Colombia’s cocaine exports. The Nariño governor’s office said that the group has control or influence in at least 10 of the department’s 64 municipalities (counties).

For the past year, David had been the main rival of Walter Artízala alias “Guacho,” leader of the Oliver Sinisterra Front (FOS), a Nariño-based FARC dissident structure that gained region-wide notoriety after it kidnapped and killed three Ecuadorian journalists in early 2018. David blamed Guacho for his brother’s death, and the two groups had been battling for control of cocaine routes, and of urban neighborhoods in Tumaco, all year.

“According to various reports,” notes InsightCrime, the rival GUP and FOS are both “associated with Mexican drug trafficking organizations, who will have an interest in maintaining the steady passage of cocaine out of the country.” La Silla Vacía reports that, “According to the Police, during recent months David already had contacts with the [Mexican] Jalisco New Generation cartel (while Guacho, according to the Prosecutor-General’s Office, is one of the links of the Sinaloa cartel), and had an Interpol Blue Notice.”

David’s death is the largest battlefield result against guerrilla dissidents or organized crime so far in President Iván Duque’s 6-week-old government, but it is unlikely to reduce violence in Nariño. Citing sources in Colombia’s Navy and the Tumaco ombudsman’s office, La Silla counts 12 other major armed or criminal groups active in “post-conflict” Nariño besides the GUP, “like Guacho’s dissident group, the Gulf Clan [paramilitary successor group], the ELN which has tried to enter the south of Nariño, and other groups of lesser national impact like La Oficina [paramilitary successor], La Gente del Orden [ex-FARC militias], Los de Sábalo, and, more recently, the so-called ‘Stiven González’ front.”

In-Depth Reading

Alejandro Gaviria U., “El Fin del Glifosato: Una Historia Personal” (Universo Centro (Colombia), September 14, 2018).
“Colombia’s New President Calls Off Talks With a Leftist Insurgent Group” (The Economist (Uk), September 14, 2018).
“El Diario de los 180 Dias de la Guerra Que Aterroriza al Catatumbo” (El Tiempo (Colombia), September 14, 2018).
Ariel Ávila, “La Mafia Que Maneja la Sierra Nevada: Los Pachencas y la Oficina Caribe” (Semana (Colombia), September 14, 2018).
“Un Ano de Paz para No Olvidar 52 Anos de Guerra” (El Tiempo (Colombia), September 13, 2018).
“Cinco Razones de por Que la Farc Esta Contra las Cuerdas” (El Tiempo (Colombia), September 12, 2018).
Olga Patricia Rendon M., “Espejo Retrovisor en la Reincorporacion de Farc” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), September 12, 2018).
Matthew Bristow, Nicolas Bedoya, “The Mountains Where Colombia’s Former Farc Rebels Are Rearming” (Bloomberg, September 12, 2018).
Edinson Arley Bolanos, “El Fantasma Detras de las ‘Aguilas Negras’” (El Espectador (Colombia), September 12, 2018).
Alejandro Restrepo, Ariel Ávila, Carlos Montoya Cely, Naryi Vargas, “Del Naya al Mataje: El Repunte de la Guerra I” (Fundación Paz y Reconciliación (Colombia), September 12, 2018).
“¿Que Hacer Con las Drogas?” (Semana (Colombia), September 10, 2018).
Jineth Prieto, “El Fallido Posconflicto en el Piloto del Catatumbo” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), September 10, 2018).
“‘Estamos Quedando Atrapados en el Cruce de Disparos de unos y Otros’” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), September 10, 2018).

September 16, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(This covers the week of August 26-September 1; as I was traveling in Colombia during the week of September 2-8, there will be no update for that week.)

Peace Commissioner Lays Out Four “Adjustments” to FARC Accord

In an August 27 interview with El Tiempo columnist María Isabel Rueda, President Iván Duque’s new high commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos, laid out four modifications that Duque’s government will seek to make to the FARC peace accord. As WOLA noted on its Colombia Peace site, the four proposals “either barely affect the FARC accord, are already in the accord, or will only become law with difficulty.”

The modifications the Duque government will pursue are:

In future peace processes, kidnapping and drug trafficking to finance insurgents’ war effort may no longer be amnestied.
Those who continue to commit crimes after the peace accord lose their right to amnesty for past political crimes, reduced sentences for past war crimes, or protection from extradition to other countries.
Those who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity cannot hold political office.
While the Duque government will respect commitments to coca-growers who signed crop-substitution agreements, eradication will be mandatory from now on.

These adjustments, an analysis in La Silla Vacía contends, “are more symbolic than real.” Indeed, they may change little about the FARC process.

The first change, eliminating drug trafficking without personal gain as an amnesty-able “political” crime, cannot be done retroactively, so it will not impact demobilized FARC members. If implemented, however, it could be a stumbling block for a future accord with the ELN. And the FARC accord already doesn’t amnesty kidnapping: those who held civilians captive must make full confessions to the accords’ transitional justice system (Special Peace Jurisdiction or JEP), make reparations to victims, and serve reduced sentences of “restricted liberty.”

The second change simply repeats the existing terms of the peace accord. Any demobilized combatant guilty of committing crimes in the post-accord period already loses his or her benefits. “This doesn’t touch the accord even minimally,” La Silla Vacía notes.

If Duque gets enough votes in Congress to restrict ex-guerrilla war criminals from holding office—which is far from guaranteed and would involve a bitter fight—it could cause some former FARC leaders to abandon the process. The guerrillas’ leadership commanded a war effort that, over the course of decades, involved numerous crimes against humanity. Despite this, they demobilized with the expectation of practicing peaceful politics while paying the agreed-upon penalties. If their ability to serve as legislators or local officials is barred, some may drop out.

The decision to stop signing up coca-cultivating families for voluntary eradication is unfortunate, as many municipalities where the program hasn’t started up yet may be subjected to an “all stick and no carrot” approach of eradication without assistance, which has failed in the past. WOLA’s earlier post argues, “If by ‘mandatory eradication’ Ceballos means eradication without any governance or assistance, then as in the past, we can expect Colombia’s coca problem to remain severe and unsolved.”

Duque Meets With All Parties, Including FARC, To Discuss Anti-Corruption Measures

On August 26 Colombians voted in a referendum on seven anti-corruption measures, the result of an initiative launched by citizen groups and the opposition Green Party. It came closer to passing than any analysts predicted: 11.7 million Colombian voters participated, less than half a million fewer than the one-third voter participation threshold the measure needed to make it binding. Though it failed, the “Anti-Corruption Consultation” got about 3 million more votes than Iván Duque received in the June presidential elections.

President Duque showed up early on the 26th to cast a vote, marking distance from his political party’s de facto leader, Senator and former president Álvaro Uribe, who had taken to social media to attack the initiative.

Going still further, Duque held a meeting in the presidential palace the evening of the 29th with the Consultation’s organizers and the leaderships of all political parties represented in the Congress. Most notably, “all political parties” included the FARC, which as a result of the peace accord holds an automatic five seats in the Senate and five in the House until 2026. The meeting was only the second time that FARC party leader Rodrigo Londoño had ever been inside the Nariño Palace, and the first time for most other FARC legislators. Semana magazine described the scene:

When he arrived, they greeted him and a “welcome to Democracy” was heard. There was an ex-president, César Gaviria, congressmen from all political parties, including Gustavo Petro, the only senator who has no party. The promoters of the anti-corruption consultation. Prosecutor-General Néstor Humberto Martínez, Internal Affairs Chief [Procurador] Fernando Carrillo, and outgoing Comptroller-General Edgardo Maya Villazón were already seated.

President Duque congratulated Timochenko for having laid down his arms. The president of the FARC party thanked him for taking them into account and opening the doors to reconciliation. The atmosphere was cordial, although when Timo spoke, some congressmen from the Democratic Center [Uribe and Duque’s party] preferred to listen to him with their heads down.

FARC Conference Marked By No-Shows

At the end of the week, the FARC was to hold its first party-wide meeting in a year, its “National Council of the Commons” gathering 111 members of its political directorate. It did so amid speculation over whether all leaders of the increasingly divided group would actually attend.

They did not. The two most prominent missing leaders were Iván Márquez and Óscar Montero alias “El Paisa.” None of the guerrilla leaders in attendance, in fact, could say with certainty where either of them are currently located. Márquez, the guerrillas’ chief negotiator during the Havana peace talks, a hardliner who represents the party’s radical wing, was the number-one vote-getter when the party chose its 111 leaders. Montero had headed the FARC’s feared Teófilo Forero Column, a unit that carried out some of its most spectacular attacks on civilian targets during the conflict.

Márquez left Bogotá and abandoned his automatic Senate seat in April, when his close associate, FARC negotiator Jesús Santrich, was arrested pending extradition after a U.S. grand jury charged him with conspiring to send cocaine to the United States. He retreated to a FARC demobilization site in Caquetá, south-central Colombia, where Montero was already located. Sometime in June or July, both Márquez and Montero abandoned that site and have since been incomunicado.

FARC Senator Carlos Antonio Lozada told La Silla Vacía that the party’s leadership has tried and failed to locate Márquez, even after sending Senator Pablo Catatumbo to Caquetá. Both Márquez and Montero are awaiting war-crimes trials before the JEP; under the terms of the peace accord, neither may leave Colombia without permission. If it is revealed that they have crossed a border—into Venezuela, for instance—they could lose their benefits under the peace accord.

The situation reveals growing divisions within the FARC party. The main split appears be between the leadership in Bogotá and the rank-and-file, most of which remains in the countryside, at the former demobilization sites and dozens of unofficial gathering points around the country. The Bogotá contingent, represented most visibly by the ex-guerrillas’ ten legislators, who appear to be following a more moderate political line than the middle and lower ranks. The latter are angry about the slow pace of peace accord implementation, worried about facing the same fate as Jesús Santrich, concerned about the election of a president who opposed the accord, and feeling unrepresented by top leadership. Some are contemplating following the path of Iván Márquez and “El Paisa.”

La Silla Vacía reported an illustrative example:

A week ago, La Silla spoke with Iván Merchán, a mid-level commander from La Macarena and a member of the political leadership, who told us that his plan was to disappear.

“It’s not about joining the ‘dissidences,’ like everyone says. It’s about going to a small town, where one has friends, where there are no signs or ways to be located. So one is calmer and less afraid of falling victim to a setup like Santrich,” he told us.

When we tried to communicate with Merchán again for this story, he no longer received calls or messages. According to him, other middle managers in Meta department had already “clandestinized,” as he told us to refer to what Márquez did.

“They (the ex-combatants) feel that those in the FARC Secretariat are happy wearing a tie in Congress, while they continue to have a bad time due to money and security,” a source in Santander told La Silla.

Spain Offers To Accompany ELN Peace Talks

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, paid a visit to Colombia as part of a tour of the region. Meeting with President Duque, Sánchez offered Spain’s assistance to push forward the flagging peace talks with the ELN guerrillas. “Anything Colombia needs from Spain to consolidate and advance peace we will say yes to. We will be with our Colombian brothers so that this will be a reality sooner rather than later,” said Sánchez, a member of Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party.

President Duque, who announced at his August 7 inauguration that he was taking 30 days to review whether to continue the ELN talks, was circumspect. Duque is demanding that the 2,000-member guerrilla group cease all hostilities, including kidnapping and extortion, as a pre-condition for resuming talks that began officially in February 2017. “If there’s a suspension of criminal activities, a will for peace, we very much welcome the offer that has been made by our good friend President Pedro Sánchez,” the President said at a joint press conference with Sánchez.

Interviewed by El Tiempo, Peace Commissioner Miguel Ceballos reiterated the demand that the ELN state clearly that it will respect humanitarian standards and cease kidnapping, “which would be excellent news for Colombians and would facilitate the [peace] table’s continuity.” Ceballos said that he had opened up a confidential line of communication with chief ELN negotiator Pablo Beltrán, who is in Havana, but “unfortunately, this confidentiality wasn’t maintained, as several ELN spokespeople have made public my telephone contracts with Beltrán.”

JEP Takes on a “False Positive” Case

The transitional justice system (JEP) called 11 members of Colombia’s army to appear for the so-called “false positive” killings of 13 people in Casanare department in 2006 and 2007. The term “false positive” refers to soldiers’ grim practice of killing civilians and then presenting the bodies, falsely, as those of armed-group members killed in combat, in order to reap rewards for battlefield results. At least 3,000 Colombians may have fallen victim to such killings at the hands of the military between 2002 and 2008.

Major Gustavo Soto Bracamonte, former head of the Army’s GAULA anti-kidnapping unit in Casanare, appeared before the JEP’s Definition of Legal Situations Chamber, the first step for a case in the new system, with ten former subordinates, to answer for the killings they allegedly committed and falsified. All said they are prepared to contribute to clarifying the truth of what happened and to make reparations to their victims. In a dramatic moment, María Isabel Riascos, the mother of victim Darwin Esnin Riascos, demanded to know why the soldiers killed her son.

To date, 1,944 current and former security-force members have requested to have their human rights cases tried in the JEP. Of those, about 90 percent are false-positive cases. The inclusion of “false positive” cases in the transitional-justice system—where perpetrators can receive vastly reduced sentences—remains controversial. Some human rights organizations contend that they were criminal activities—murders for rewards—that had no relationship to the conflict. For now, the killings’ entry into the JEP is being determined on a case-by-case basis under unclear criteria.

The same is true for civilian officials who participated in human rights crimes by aiding paramilitary groups. In April, the JEP had refused to take the cases of Álvaro Ashton and David Char, two former congressmen from the Caribbean coast who had been convicted in the “para-politics” scandal for aiding and abetting paramilitary groups. The Definition of Legal Situations Chamber determined that the former legislators had aided the paramilitaries for political gain, making their crime irrelevant to the armed conflict. Ashton and Char appealed their case, and the JEP’s Appeals Section overturned the earlier decision, making them the first “para-politicians” to enter the transitional justice system.

Military Presents Report to Truth Commission

On August 27 Colombia’s armed forces presented a 50-volume, 18,380-page document to the new Truth Commission, detailing international humanitarian law and human rights violations committed by the FARC over the course of the conflict. Armed Forces commander Gen. Alberto Mejía said that the volumes resulted from an “inter-disciplinary study” involving the Prosecutor-General’s Office and intelligence services. “This isn’t meant to be a smokescreen, it doesn’t seek to hide the errors committed by soldiers in this war,” he added.

Father Francisco de Roux, the president of the Truth Commission, thanked the armed forces. “When you come to us with 50 volumes, this places in evidence what the FARC war was; this shows the meaning of the peace process.”

Asked about the report, FARC Senator Julian Gallo alias Carlos Antonio Lozada said:

We appreciate that all bodies want to contribute to the truth, and we invite not only the Armed Forces, but also businessmen, political parties, the church, the entire Colombian society to go to these bodies and contribute their version of what they consider conflict to have been, so that Colombia might have a complete version of what happened in the conflict and not just a biased version like the one that was told during the confrontation.

Gen. Mejía added a troubling bit of news: the new Duque government is “reviewing” the agreement that the prior administration of Juan Manuel Santos had signed with the Truth Commission regarding the handover of classified information in military policy and manuals. This, along with legislation introduced by members of Duque’s party in Congress, may throw up obstacles to the Truth Commission’s ability to access information in the military’s files that, unlike this week’s 50-volume submission, portrays the armed forces’ behavior in a less flattering light.

In-Depth Reading

“Choco, Martirizado por Expansion de ‘Elenos’ y ‘Gaitanistas’” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), August 31, 2018).
Andres Cajiao, Angela Maria Silva Aparicio, Irina Cuesta, Juan Carlos Garzon Vergara, Lorena Zarate Martinez, Paula Andrea Tobo, Tatiana Prada, “Inseguridad en las Fronteras, los Desafios del Nuevo Gobierno” (Fundacion Ideas por la Paz (Colombia), August 30, 2018).
Ricardo Monsalve Gaviria, “Fiebre del Oro Poco a Poco Acaba Con el Agua de 152 Municipios” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), August 30, 2018).
“La Guerra por la Frontera, Otra Amenaza a los Migrantes Venezolanos” (Semana (Colombia), August 30, 2018).
Geoff Ramsey, Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, “Venezuelan Refugees Are Miserable. Let’s Help Them Out.” (Washington Office on Latin America, The New York Times, August 30, 2018).
Dairo Sanchez-Mojica, “‘El Posconflicto No Debe Perpetuar la Impunidad’: Santiago Arboleda” (El Espectador (Colombia), August 29, 2018).
“‘Penas de la Jep para Violadores de Ninos No Traeran a la Cpi’: Directora del ICTJ” (Semana (Colombia), August 29, 2018).
“Arauca, Asediado por la Inseguridad y la Disidencia de las Farc” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), August 29, 2018).
Juan David Moreno Barreto, “Pistas para Encontrar a los Desaparecidos” (El Espectador (Colombia), August 28, 2018).
“De Heroe de Guerra de EE. UU. en Afganistan a Narco” (El Tiempo (Colombia), August 28, 2018).
Rafael Croda, “Viaje al Corazon de la Oficina, la Heredera del Cartel de Medellin” (Proceso (Mexico), El Tiempo (Colombia), August 28, 2018).

August 23, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(Week of August 12-18)

Constitutional Court Upholds, Modifies Law Governing Transitional Justice System

Colombia’s maximum judicial review body, the Constitutional Court, completed an 8½-month review of the law governing the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which is the body that the peace accords set up to put on trial, and punish, those who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the armed conflict. In Colombia’s system, the Court has the power to make alterations to laws, and it addressed some provisions that Colombia’s Congress had controversially added to the JEP Statutory Law’s text last November.

According to press coverage of the 800-page judicial decision, the Court’s changes include:

Allowing those accused of, or guilty of, war crimes to hold political office—as long as they are participating fully in the JEP. This largely upholds what the peace accord and the statutory law allow. War criminals may hold office as long as they have submitted to the JEP, are recognizing and confessing the full truth of their crimes, and are making reparations to victims. Those who do this serve sentences of “restricted liberty,” but not prison, lasting up to eight years. It is not yet clear whether these sentences—which are up to the judge in each case—might interfere with an individual’s ability to hold office.

The Court specifies, though, that those found to be withholding information from their confessions, or those who refuse to recognize crimes and are found guilty, may not hold political office. The accord and law dictate that people in this category must go to regular prison.

The JEP can look at the evidence when it makes extradition decisions. When an ex-combatant is wanted in another country for a crime, the JEP must certify whether the crime happened during the conflict or after it (that is, after December 2016, when the peace accord was ratified). If the crime occurred during the conflict and is covered by the JEP—including the crime of narcotrafficking, if it wasn’t for personal enrichment—Colombia will not extradite the individual.

In April, U.S. prosecutors began the process of asking Colombia to extradite top FARC negotiator Jesús Santrich on charges of conspiring to transship cocaine to the United States in 2017-18. The ensuing process raised confusion about whether the JEP’s role is simply to sign off on the date of the alleged crime, or whether it is able to consider the evidence backing up the allegation. In June, when it passed a law laying out the JEP’s internal procedures, Colombia’s Congress limited the JEP to certifying the date only. The Constitutional Court just reversed that: the JEP may now consider the proof underlying the extradition request.

Judges who’ve worked in human rights during the previous 5 years may remain. The Congress had added a provision to the statutory law banning the JEP from including any judges who, in the past five years, had brought cases against the government, participated in peace negotiations, or taken part in any case related to the armed conflict. This would have disqualified at least 15 of the JEP’s 53 already-chosen judges and alternates. As most observers expected, the Constitutional Court threw this provision out.

Sexual crimes against minors remain under JEP jurisdiction. In the statutory law, the Congress had excluded sexual crimes against minors from JEP jurisdiction, demanding that those accused of such heinous crimes be punished with prison sentences in the regular criminal-justice system. The Constitutional Court stripped out this exclusion.

Some legal and victims’ groups had argued that even though the penalties for child violators would be harsher in the regular justice system, trying such crimes through the JEP will allow victims to hear the truth and receive reparations much more quickly. “If the perpetrators know that they will receive high prison sentences instead of those contemplated in the peace agreement, it is very likely that they would have no reason to recognize sexual crimes against girls, with would force the state to go about proving the allegation, and the victims would have to wait a long time to obtain truth, justice and reparation,” read a statement from Dejusticia, Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, Women‘s Link WorldWide and Red de Mujeres Víctimas y Profesionales.

Third parties’ participation in the JEP remains voluntary, not obligatory. But prosecutors in the regular criminal justice system must prioritize their cases. The Congress—in an apparent move to protect landowners, narcotraffickers, local officials, and other politically influential individuals who sponsored armed groups or planned killings—had added language to the statutory law preventing the JEP from compelling private citizens to participate. The concern is that such powerful individuals have little to fear from an overburdened, institutionally deficient “regular” justice system that is unlikely to take up old cases. The Constitutional Court maintained the “voluntary” participation standard, but, as El Espectador puts it, “emphasized that the Prosecutor-General’s Office has the obligation to prioritize, in the criminal justice system, investigations against third parties and non-combatant government agencies who have not voluntarily submitted to the JEP.”

Though there might be language about these items in the very long text of the Constitutional Court’s opinion, it appears to have left untouched the following concerns about the JEP:

It remains up to the judges in individual cases how austere the conditions of “restricted liberty” will be for those who give full confessions and reparations.
A watered-down definition of “command responsibility” for war crimes committed by the military, which may exonerate commanders who should have known what their subordinates were doing, remains in place. This could set Colombia on a collision course with the International Criminal Court, whose founding statute uses a “should have known” standard to determine command responsibility.
It remains unclear under which circumstances “false positive” killings may or may not be tried within the JEP. It appears that most of these thousands of extrajudicial killings were committed by soldiers for personal gain, and thus unrelated to the armed conflict. It will be up to judges to decide on a case-by-case basis. Of 2,159 current or former security-force members participating in the JEP, at least 1,824 are accused of committing extrajudicial executions, most of them probably “false positives.”

Top FARC Leaders Have Gone Off the Grid

FARC Senator Victoria Sandino confirmed to reporters that two top FARC leaders have left the demobilization site where they had been staying, and that their current whereabouts are unknown. They are Iván Márquez, a former FARC Secretariat member who was the guerrilla group’s lead negotiator during the Havana peace talks, and Hernán Darío Velásquez, alias El Paisa, who headed the guerrillas’ Teófilo Forero Column, a notoriously lethal unit once active in southern Colombia.

Both had been in the Miravalle “reincorporation zone” in Caquetá department. Márquez had relocated there in April when his close associate, former negotiator Jesús Santrich, was arrested pending possible extradition to the United States for narcotrafficking. While they are not required to remain at the site, that their whereabouts have been unknown for about two weeks raises concerns that the two leaders, both considered hardliners, might have abandoned the peace process.

Sandino, the FARC senator, told Colombia’s Blu Radio that Márquez and Velásquez left the Miravalle site after “a situation that happened about a month ago, where there were several operations [nearby] with some pretty complicated aspects, in which people wearing face masks came to the dwelling where Iván Márquez was present. They left beforehand. At this moment, they’re not there, and in my personal case I don’t know where they are.”

In July, the two leaders had sent a letter to the chief of the UN verification mission, Jean Arnault, claiming that “since Friday, July 6, special Army counter-guerrilla troops, belonging to the 22nd and High Mountain Battalions, have deployed a land operation around the El Pato region, which we have no doubt aims to sabotage the progress of hope for peace.” Luis Carlos Villegas, the defense minister at the time, denied that military operations were occurring. He said that drone overflights that the leaders may have observed, which are not prohibited, were actually those of oil companies carrying out seismic explorations.

Sen. Sandino said that she has had no contact with Márquez and Velásquez, as there is no phone service where they are. Asked whether the two could be in Venezuela, according to El Espectador, “the senator said that is only speculation, and that they remain active members of the [FARC] political party.”

Personnel Changes

Newly inaugurated President Iván Duque has named the two officials who will be most responsible for implementing the FARC peace accord and for carrying out negotiations with the ELN, should they continue.

Miguel Ceballos will be the Presidency’s next high commissioner for peace, directing negotiations and some aspects of accord implementation. He replaces Rodrigo Rivera, who in 2017 replaced Sergio Jaramillo, a chief architect of the FARC accord and of the Santos government’s post-conflict territorial implementation strategy. The nomination of Ceballos, a former vice-minister of justice who taught at Georgetown University and Bogotá’s Conservative Party-tied Sergio Arboleda University, was well-received. Though he was a key advisor to the Conservative Party wing that supported a “no” vote in the October 2016 plebiscite on the peace accords, Ceballos is viewed as a pragmatist who would not seek to “tear up” the accords, as some in President Duque’s coalition have urged. He takes over the process of deciding whether to continue the Santos government’s peace talks in Havana with the ELN; in his inaugural speech, President Duque called for a 30-day review period to make this decision.

Emilio José Archila replaces Rafael Pardo as high counselor for the post-conflict, a position within the Presidency that manages implementation of the peace accord. Archila, too, is identified with the Conservative Party. A lawyer focused on economic issues, he served in the past as head legal officer in the Commerce and Industry Ministry. He will oversee the struggling coca crop-substitution program set up by the peace accord’s fourth chapter, and the ambitious Territorially Focused Development Plans (PDET) program foreseen in the first chapter, which seeks to build state presence and provide basic services in sixteen conflictive regions.

Ceballos and Archila will sit on the Committee for Follow-up, Stimulus, and Verification of Peace Accord Implementation (CSIVI), the main oversight mechanism to guarantee that accord implementation is on track, along with representatives of the FARC and the accord’s guarantor countries.

Ariel Ávila, an analyst at Bogotá’s Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, voiced concern about possible name changes for both officials’ agencies: the High Commissioner for Peace might become the High Commissioner for Legality, and the High Counselor for the Post-Conflict might become the High Counselor for Stabilization. “All state institutions must act under legality, there’s no need to create an office for that,” Ávila noted, adding that “stabilization” is just the first phase of a post-conflict period—it should be followed by “normalization,” which he defines as “the building of a new society, long-term reforms, and reconciliation.”

Meanwhile historian Gonzalo Sánchez, the longtime head of the government’s autonomous Center for Historical Memory, resigned this week. The Center has produced dozens of highly regarded reports and an extensive public archive documenting some of the most severe violations of human rights, committed by all sides, during the long conflict. El Tiempo reports that the two most likely candidates to head the Center are Eduardo Pizarro, who headed the Center’s precursor, the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation, during the government of Álvaro Uribe, and Alfredo Rangel, a onetime academic conflict analyst who later became a hardline senator in Uribe’s party.

ELN May Release Captives and Kidnap Victims

Colombia’s Defense Ministry announced that protocols have been activated for the release of nine people—seven security-force personnel and two civilians—whom the ELN had captured or kidnapped in Arauca and Chocó departments. The Ministry said it is awaiting the ELN’s provision of geographic coordinates for the handovers.

Pablo Beltrán, the guerrilla group’s chief negotiator in Havana, said on August 14 that the liberation should happen in eight days, although a guerrilla communiqué stated that nearby security-force operations could complicate logistics and put the victims’ lives “at high risk.” The guerrillas also provided a proof-of-life recording of three policemen and one soldier whom they had taken from a boat on a tributary of the Atrato River in Quibdó municipality, Chocó.

In his August 7 inauguration speech, President Iván Duque said that he would spend 30 days reviewing whether to continue peace talks with the ELN. Duque said that an end to ELN kidnappings, and the freeing of all guerrilla captives, is a precondition for any resumption of negotiations.

Meanwhile, after the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría) denounced that the ELN has recruited 24 minors so far this year, the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) issued arrest warrants for sixteen ELN leaders, including all five members of the group’s Central Command. Chief negotiator Beltrán, speaking from Havana, denied that the ELN had committed a war crime: “Here, nobody is recruited or kept against their will. Those who want to enter, enter; those who want to leave, leave.” Tacitly admitting that minors are recruited, Beltran said that the group does not recruit anyone under 15 years old. (The ELN’s maximum leader, Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista alias “Gabino,” joined the group in 1964 at age 14.)

The ELN negotiator said the group remains willing to engage in a bilateral ceasefire, like the one in place during a 100-day period that ended in January. President Duque was not warm to the idea: “I haven’t agreed with those who now seek to intimidate the country seeking bilateral ceasefires while they commit acts that are deplorable and despicable in the light of any eye.” Speaking before a military audience, he continued, “What we want is that anyone who wants to demobilize, disarm and reinsert does so on the basis of the immediate suspension of all criminal activities.”

A week before the end of Juan Manuel Santos’s administration, government and ELN negotiators closed a sixth round of talks in Havana without an agreement on either a ceasefire or a mechanism for involving civil society in the talks, as the ELN demands. Citing “two sources who have access to privileged information about the negotiations,” Ana León of La Silla Vacía noted that the ELN is now willing to consider a halt to kidnappings and extortion during a ceasefire. But she cited three issues on which the ELN talks are stuck:

How to monitor and verify a ceasefire. While the ELN would keep in place the mechanisms employed during the late-2017 ceasefire, the government wants more specificity. During the earlier ceasefire, a source told León, “There was no clear definition of what a hostility was, what a ceasefire violation was, and so the UN was not going to commit to verification.” That source said the ELN is unwilling to ease monitoring by providing more detail about its zones of geographic control, since many of these are in dispute with other illegal armed groups.
The ELN’s demand that the government commit to halting murders of social leaders. While virtually all analysts agree that the government should be doing more to protect social leaders, the government does not have the power to stop the killings completely, especially those that result from local dynamics.
The definition of “civil society participation” in the negotiations, a longtime ELN demand that is included, but poorly defined, in the talks’ agreed agenda.

Anticorruption bill, with a clause preventing ex-guerrillas in politics, is withdrawn

The new Duque government introduced a bill to fight corruption, but abruptly withdrew it after it was found to include language that would prevent former guerrillas from holding political office. Juanita Goebertus, a former government peace negotiator recently elected to Congress as a Green Party representative, denounced the presence of text deep within the bill stating, “those who have been convicted at any time for crimes related to membership, promotion, or financing of illegal armed groups, crimes against humanity, or drug trafficking cannot be registered as candidates for popular election.”

Colombian politics has a term for a snippet of unrelated and probably unpopular legislative language stuck into a larger bill: a “mico” or “monkey.” Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez withdrew the anti-corruption bill and pledged to re-submit it without the mico. (In Colombia, the Interior Minister manages the Presidency’s legislative agenda.)

Minister Gutiérrez also pulled back the nomination of Claudia Ortiz to head the Interior Ministry’s National Protection Unit (UNP), which provides bulletproof vests, bodyguards, vehicles, and other protection to threatened individuals, from politicians to opposition figures to ex-guerrillas to social leaders. An outcry followed the revelation of tweets from Ortiz, a longtime supporter of ex-president Álvaro Uribe, attacking opposition figures. The tweets’ vicious language called into question Ortiz’s will to protect those who disagree with and criticize the government. No new nominee to head the UNP has been named.

Visit from Defense Secretary Mattis

The U.S. secretary of defense, James Mattis, paid a brief visit to Colombia on August 17, the last stop of a South America tour that took him to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Mattis met with President Duque and with Defense Minister Guillermo Botero.

We know little about the subject matter of Mattis’s discussions. “The leaders discussed a broad range of defense issues, and the secretary thanked the minister for their country’s regional leadership role as a security exporter” was how a Pentagon spokesman vaguely put it. Mattis also thanked Duque for Colombia’s regional diplomacy to “denounce undemocratic actions” in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Earlier on his trip, Mattis criticized Venezuela’s authoritarian government, but made clear that the crisis in Venezuela is “not a military matter.” In Bogotá, he discussed the heavy flow of Venezuelan migrants into Colombia. “A subject [that] came up in both of my meetings this morning … was on what we’re working on in terms of the Venezuelan refugees and their destabilizing impact they have,” Mattis said.

He announced that sometime this fall, the Defense Department would dispatch the USNS Comfort, a giant Navy hospital ship, to Colombia’s Caribbean coast to attend to Venezuelans in Colombia. The Secretary added that President Duque and Colombian defense officials “not only agreed in principle” to the Comfort deployment, “they gave details on how we might best craft the cruise through the region,” Mattis said. The State Department and USAID have otherwise committed US$46 million in assistance to Colombia to help attend to Venezuelan refugees.

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry has announced that it will ask the United Nations to name a special envoy to coordinate humanitarian aid for Venezuelans in Colombia and elsewhere in the region.

In-Depth Reading

“Tras Investigacion de Semana, Procuraduria Llama a Juicio a General y Coroneles de Inteligencia Militar” (Semana (Colombia), August 17, 2018).
Naryi Vargas, “Naufraga la Sustitucion de Cultivos de Uso Ilicito” (Fundación Paz y Reconciliación (Colombia), August 16, 2018).
“Juez Redujo Crimen de Jaime Garzon a un Caso de Sicariato” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), August 15, 2018).
Édinson Bolaños, Juan Gomez, Laura Penuela, “Asi Estan Asesinando a los Exguerrilleros de las Farc” (El Espectador (Colombia), August 14, 2018).
Natalia Arbelaez Jaramillo, “Si No Protegen a los Lideres Comunales el Acuerdo de Paz Fracasa” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), August 14, 2018).
Juan Carlos Palou, “Las Encrucijadas del Acuerdo de Paz” (Razon Publica (Colombia), August 13, 2018).
Humberto de la Calle, “Narconexion” (El Espectador (Colombia), August 13, 2018).
Alejandro Jimenez, Lucia Baca, “In Colombia, Will Peace Continue Costing Lives?” (NACLA, August 13, 2018).
“Con Dudas de las Victimas, Empieza Proceso por ‘Falsos Positivos’ en la Jep” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), August 13, 2018).

July 24, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

Last Week in Colombia’s Peace Process

(Week of July 1-7)

Social Leader Killings Begin Getting Mass Attention

At least four local social movement leaders were killed during the week:

Felicinda Santamaría in Quibdó, Chocó
Luis Barrios in Palmar de Varela, Atlántico
Margarita Estupiñán in Tumaco, Nariño
Ana María Cortés in Cáceres, Antioquia

The latter two had worked on the presidential campaign of left-of-center candidate Gustavo Petro.

The fresh wave of murders turned intense media attention on the post-conflict vulnerability of independent civil-society leaders, especially in territories from which the FARC withdrew after the 2016 peace accord. Colombia’s human rights ombudsman’s office (Defensoría) counts 311 leaders and human rights defenders killed between January 2016 and June 2018, about one every three days. The think-tank INDEPAZ, working with the Marcha Patriótica and Cumbre Agraria civil-society groups, issued a report counting 123 murders between January 1 and July 5, 2018—that is, two every three days.

According to INDEPAZ, 80.5 percent of this year’s victims have been members of campesino organizations, Community Action Boards (local advisory committees set up by a 1960s law), or ethnic community organizations. The report estimates that 13 percent of murders had something to do with coca crops—either participation in crop substitution or opposition to forced eradication. It finds that 83.2 percent had something to do with disputes over land, territory, or natural resources.

Violence against social leaders and human rights defenders has reached the level of “a humanitarian crisis,” said Carlos Guevara, coordinator of Somos Defensores, an organization that seeks to protect social leaders. Guevara contended that the killings seek to close spaces for citizen participation that opened up after the peace accord. “The violent arms [brazos violentos] want to shut that up, to stop people from participating politically, on the Community Action Boards, demanding land restitution, defending labor rights.”

“We went to the Atlantic coast, the southwest, center-west, Arauca, Meta, Guaviare, and what human rights defenders tell us is that the security forces have a plan tortuga [a ‘turtle plan’ or deliberate work slowdown] that allows things like these to happen in the territories. The Early Warning System works to locate the Gulf Clan [the “Urabeños” or “Gaitanistas” neo-paramilitary group] in a place, but it seems that they [the security forces] are not then doing everything possible to confront them.”

Social leaders fear “a militarization of peace,” Guevara told Semana magazine, which interpreted that to mean “that the next government’s policies once again empower the security forces, placing them above mayors and thus diminishing participation spaces for social organizations.”

“We don’t have a state response,” Guevara said. “There is a massive violence situation, I can’t say that it’s generalized or that it’s systematic, because at the moment we can’t prove it, but it is certainly massive.”

On the evening of July 6, thousands of Colombians gathered in cities and town squares to demand a halt to the killings. The murder that seems to have inspired the most mobilization was that of Ana María Cortés, killed on July 4 by gunmen as she dined in a cafeteria in Cáceres, in Antioquia department’s conflictive Bajo Cauca region. Cortés had coordinated Gustavo Petro’s campaign in Cáceres, and the defeated candidate, now opposition senator, tweeted his outrage. Petro also tweeted that Cortés had been threatened by the police commander of Cáceres. Antioquia police said they opened an investigation.

Tensions were compounded by a tweet from Colombia’s Defense Ministry insinuating, without evidence, that Cortés had ties to the Urabeños. Those who knew her denied that immediately.

Colombia’s prosecutor-general, Néstor Humberto Martínez, claimed (but did not present) “irrefutable and categorical” proof pointing to the “Caparrapos,” a gang that has splintered off from the Gulf Clan, with about 100-150 members, as Cortés’s killers. The Caparrappos and Gulf Clan are violently contesting control of the Bajo Cauca, a strategic zone for coca cultivation and cocaine production and transshipment. Interior Minister Guillermo Rivera alleged that the Caparrapos are killing social leaders in order to draw the authorities’ attention and thus avoid direct confrontation with the much larger Gulf Clan.

Luis Eduardo Llinás, who worked with Cortés on the Petro campaign in Cáceres, told El Tiempo that she had been receiving threats and intimidation since March. She had denounced the threats before the municipal ombudsman and was “very concerned and tense.”

Guevara, of Somos Defensores, was among those criticizing the government’s sluggish reaction to the new wave of killings. “It would seem that the institutions became silent after the [June 17] elections, and they’e watching from the sidelines as these social leaders and human rights defenders are being killed.”

By July 5, President Santos tweeted that he would convene a July 10 meeting of the government’s National Security Guarantees Committee, adding, “The Fiscalia has important results. I repeat my instruction to act with full force against those who attack social leaders. We won’t let our guard down.” Santos called on the security forces to increase their presence in zones where killings have occurred.

Interior Minister Rivera said that those responsible for the killings “are clearly organizations dedicated to narcotrafficking, dedicated to illegal mining and to theft of land,” and recognized that more effective efforts are needed to protect people. He refused to say that the social-leader killings are “systematic,” which according to Colombia’s Supreme Court would mean that there is a carefully orchestrated national plan behind them. “If recognizing a systematic nature could avoid the killing of social leaders, we would have recognized it a long time ago,” Rivera said. Instead, he said the government should focus on how to improve physical protection of threatened leaders.

The official protective response to threats has been plagued by delays. The Constitutional Court ordered the Interior Ministry’s National Protection Unit (UNP) to resolve social leaders’ protection requests within 30 days, and noted that protection “should go beyond that offered by the UNP.”

The UN verification mission in Colombia issued a statement making clear that it “vehemently rejects and condemns the killings of human rights defenders and community and social leaders.” The new director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ field office in Colombia, Alberto Brunori, published a July 7 column in El Espectador, and an interview in El Tiempo, calling for urgent action to protect leaders and identify the killings’ masterminds.

The U.S. embassy made no public comment on the issue.

“Censurable discourse is becoming louder in the country,” reads an El Espectador editorial,

“stating, from social networks, that we need not lament the death of murdered social leaders, associating them with the guerrillas. Are we once again going to commit the historic error of stigmatizing those who work to give voice to the marginalized? It should be enough to look at the story of every victim to find that they are people committed to democracy and struggling, in clearly hostile environments, for their communities’ rights.”

Petro called on his erstwhile opponent, President-Elect Iván Duque, to denounce the killings. “Your silence allows the empowerment of the assassins.”

Tweeting from Washington, where he was on a several-day visit, Duque stated “I categorically reject the violent acts that have presented themselves in recent days in Colombia with social leaders and the violence seen against people who carry out political leadership.” From Spain later in the week, he tweeted, “We have to guarantee security for social leaders. No citizen should be intimidated by violence. We call on the authorities to advance investigations and bring to justice these crimes’ authors.”

Duque Finishes Washington Visit

The President-Elect spent the first several days of the week finishing a lengthy (June 27-July 5) visit to Washington, a city where he lived for many years. Before the July 4 holiday, Duque had a face-to-face meeting with Vice President Mike Pence.

In this and other official meetings (detailed in last week’s update), Duque reportedly heard a great deal of concern about Colombia’s increasing illicit coca crop and about the crisis in Venezuela. It is less evident that he heard many concerns about implementation of the 2016 peace accord.

Duque has been vocally critical of Venezuela’s regime. His messaging in Washington, though, was colored by an Associated Press report, published July 5, revealing that President Donald Trump had repeatedly brought up the possibility of military action in the neighboring country during conversations in August and September 2017. “I’ve never spoken of military interventions, or of encouraging military interventions,” Duque told reporters. “What must be done is to exercise diplomatic pressure against the dictatorship.”

Duque called for Latin American governments to support OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro’s hard line on Venezuela, including his finding, in a May report, that “a reasonable foundation” exists to accuse Maduro and ten other Venezuelan officials of crimes against humanity and to bring them before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

In July 2017, then-Senator Duque led an effort to denounce Venezuela’s regime before the ICC. If he persists in this claim as president, it will be the first time since the Court’s 2002 founding that one state has denounced another before the ICC.

Duque expressed to his reporters a desire that Almagro and the OAS become the main vector for Western Hemisphere diplomatic pressure on Venezuela. He called for Colombia’s exit from UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, a body dating back to the mid-2000s that today is moribund due to sharp ideological divisions across the continent. “UNASUR has really been an organization that has converted into an accomplice of the Venezuelan dictatorship,” Duque said. In April, six UNASUR member states (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru) suspended their participation.

Duque said he invited Vice-President Pence to attend his inauguration on August 7, and that he got no positive or negative response. “We want the United States to have the highest possible representation at our inauguration,” he added.

The President-Elect’s visit was also colored by the White House’s June 25 release of estimates showing yet another annual increase in Colombia’s coca crop in 2017. The topic of Colombian coca and cocaine production came up frequently in his meetings with U.S. officialdom.

In his remarks before reporters, Duque endorsed the outgoing Santos administration’s plan to increase forced eradication by employing low-altitude herbicide-spraying drones. He sought to make clear, though, that this would be one of a series of tools his government would employ. He referred specifically to financing productive projects for coca-growing families—but without referring to implementing Chapter 4 of the 2016 peace accord, which is already serving as a framework for financing such projects (although implementation of these projects is lagging badly behind).

While he did not offer specifics about all of the tools his strategy would use—or how that strategy might differ from what the peace accord foresees—Duque said he told U.S. officials that it would take about two years to begin showing concrete results. He said that the Americans were supportive: “Instead of talking about commitments in terms of numbers of hectares, what I received was a great show of support for our security agenda, and our agenda to confront illicit crops in Colombia.” He added that he would ask the U.S. government to increase its annual aid outlay, both for counternarcotics and for accord implementation.

Duque would not commit to re-establishing a program, suspended in 2015, to spray herbicides with aircraft. Doing so would require reversing a Constitutional Court sentence banning this practice, with the herbicide glyphosate, as too inaccurate and thus posing a potential health risk.

On July 5 Duque left for Spain, where he attended a conference about technological and economic innovation that also featured former U.S. president Barack Obama. Duque and Obama met, according to Duque’s Twitter account, and talked “about our country’s security and economic development challenges.”

Seven People Massacred in Southern Cauca

Unknown assailants dumped the bodies of seven men, roughly 25 to 35 years of age, on the side of a dirt road in the municipality of Argelia, Cauca, in the pre-dawn hours of July 3. They had apparently been killed in adjacent El Tambo municipality. Those responsible for the massacre are unknown, but its scale drew attention to Argelia, a troubled municipality of 12,000 people in south-central Cauca, along the border with Nariño department, that had been strongly under FARC influence during the armed conflict.

Cauca is the number-two department, after Antioquia, for killings of social leaders. A week earlier in Argelia, a group calling itself the “People’s Cleansing Command” circulated a pamphlet threatening to kill anyone who sells or uses drugs. This is the second large-scale killing in Argelia so far this year; masked men killed four people at a liquor store in January.

The commander of the Colombian Army’s 29th Brigade blamed the ELN for the massacre, which occurred in a zone of the guerrilla group’s influence. The ELN quickly issued a statement denying any role.

On July 4, Colombia’s National Police announced that two of the bodies had been identified as those of demobilized FARC members: one who had abandoned the FARC disarmament zone in Policarpa, Nariño, not far from Argelia; and one who had abandoned training to be a FARC bodyguard with the Interior Ministry’s National Protection Unit.

Argelia sits in a geographically strategic zone for organized crime, along a corridor between Cauca’s mountain highlands and Pacific-coast piedmont. About 3,500 hectares of coca are grown there, making it Cauca’s second most heavily planted municipality. Armed groups active there include the ELN, FARC dissidents, and the Gulf Clan or Urabeños neo-paramilitary network.

Transitional Justice System Calls on FARC to Appear in Kidnapping Hearing

The Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP), the body established by the peace accord to judge war crimes committed during the armed conflict, is beginning to work in earnest. With a preliminary hearing on July 13, it is to launch Case 001, covering kidnappings committed by the FARC between 1993 and 2012. The JEP’s Recognition of Truth Chamber has called on 31 former FARC leaders to appear.

The ex-guerrillas—or their legal representatives if they are unable to appear in person—are to be notified about the beginning of the case, and will be given copies of evidence against them, much of it in a report, “Illegal Retention of Persons by the FARC-EP,” that the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) compiled from case files. The information covers between 2,500 and 8,500 kidnappings or extortions that the FARC committed during these 20 years. The Fiscalía report includes 312 sentences for kidnappings that the regular judicial system has already handed out. Of these, 68 involve members of the ex-guerrillas’ Secretariat and General Staff. The JEP is also working off of reports from the Free Country Foundation, an NGO focused on anti-kidnapping, and the governmental but autonomous Center for Historical Memory.

Among the 31 guerrillas called to appear are 6 who are to be legislators in the congressional session that begins on July 20. Also among them will be maximum FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño alias Timochenko.

After the hearing, according to the chamber’s president, Julieta Lemaitre, “The accused will be given a prudent amount of time to prepare, and then we will call them to give voluntary confessions to provide a report on what they received. The chamber is also considering a hearing with victims.” In the case of kidnapping-disappearances, the JEP hopes that ex-combatants will help identify where remains are located.

Presumed Dissident Ex-FARC Leader “Rambo” Captured in Caquetá

Luis Eduardo Carvajal, alias “Rambo,” could be the second FARC leader subject to extradition to the United States for crimes allegedly committed after the peace accord went into effect. (The first is former top negotiator Jesús Santrich, currently imprisoned in Bogotá and wanted in New York for allegedly conspiring to ship 10 tons of cocaine.)

Police and Fiscalía personnel captured Carvajal in Puerto Rico municipality, in the southern department of Caquetá, sometime before July 4. He was wanted by U.S. authorities since before the peace accord went into effect, as he headed the powerful Daniel Aldana Mobile Column, which was particularly active in the southwestern department of Nariño. Nariño leads all Colombian departments in coca production and probably cocaine production.

Carvajal spent 35 years in the FARC, 15 of them commanding the Daniel Aldana. He controlled much, or most, illegal activity in the Pacific port of Tumaco and nearby zones along the Colombia-Ecuador border, which is the busiest cocaine transshipment corridor in the country. Authorities accuse his unit of shipping about 90 tons of cocaine per year, and of inviting Mexican narcotraffickers to operate in Tumaco. He and 300 other fighters disarmed and demobilized in Nariño during the first half of 2017. On January 18, 2018, he registered his case with the JEP, the transitional justice system.

It was widely suspected by 2018 that “Rambo” had gone rogue and joined FARC dissident groups active in the region’s cocaine trade. But his profile was very low, far lower than that of Walter Arizara alias “Guacho,” leader of the so-called Oliver Sinisterra Front FARC dissident group active in and around Tumaco. Guacho attracted enormous attention earlier this year when his men kidnapped and killed two Ecuadorian journalists and their driver. But Carvajal’s whereabouts and activities were a mystery.

His arrest reportedly owes to testimony given by Prado Álava, referred to as “the Pablo Escobar of Ecuador,” whom Colombia extradited to the United States in April.

“Rambo’s risk of criminalization was extremely high,” reports Insight Crime. “He allegedly returned quickly to criminal activities well-armed with strategic knowledge about contacts, modus operandi and drug trafficking routes. But this time he seems to have sought more benefits for himself.” The next step in his case is for the JEP to certify that the allegations against him cover a time period after the December 2016 ratification of the FARC peace accord. Upon that certification, Carvajal could be subject to extradition to the United States.

Framework Accord Implementation Plan Crosses Another Bureaucratic Hurdle

Eighteen months after the peace accord’s ratification, the Colombian Presidency’s National Planning Department has produced a document, called a CONPES, that is an essential step to commit the government to spending long-term resources on its implementation. Based on a Framework Implementation Plan issued in March, the CONPES divides responsibilities among government agencies for activities whose cost could add up to about 129.5 trillion Colombian pesos (US$44.5 billion) by 2031, 15 years after the peace accord’s ratification.

Another CONPES approved in late June covers the reintegration of former FARC members. It commits the government to 6.3 trillion pesos (US$2.2 billion) in spending on reintegration by 2026. According to El Tiempo, as of June 13 there were 4,082 former FARC members still residing in 24 “Territorial Training and Reconciliation Spaces (ETCRs),” the sites where they turned in their weapons and began their reintegration, plus about 1,000 family members. (This is out of 7,126 who entered these zones and disarmed there.) These individuals presumably seek to demobilize collectively, staying together. Another 6,044 former guerrillas, including militias and those released from prison, have shown an interest in demobilizing individually. The government was scheduled to stop providing food to residents of the ETCRs on June 30, but this has been extended until the end of August.

The CONPES on reintegration commits government agencies to report every six months on compliance with their assigned tasks. “Unlike the earlier reinsertion policy, this takes very much into account not just the strengthening of individual capacities, but also the collective aspect,” said Mauricio Restrepo, an advisor to Colombia’s Reincorporation and Normalization Agency (ARN), who helped draft the document. Another ARN advisor, Alfredo Gómez, told El Tiempo that the new policy “has a particular emphasis on rural areas, due to ex-guerrillas’ interest in carrying out agricultural tasks, since the majority are of campesino origin.”

The incoming government of Iván Duque can issue new CONPES documents altering these spending commitments. Unless it does so, however, Colombian law requires this and future governments to carry out the activities laid out in the CONPES that were published this week and in late June.

In-Depth Reading

Carolina Avila Cortes, “‘La Farc Ha Honrado su Palabra de Trabajar en la Sustitucion de la Coca’: Eduardo Diaz” (El Espectador (Colombia), July 5, 2018).
Carolina Mila, “Mujeres Cocaleras: La Historia No Contada de Este Cultivo en Colombia” (DeJusticia, El Espectador (Colombia), July 5, 2018).
Andrés Bermúdez Liévano, “¡Que Llegue la Luz!: El Pedido de Campesinos Que Salen de la Coca” (Pacifista (Colombia), July 5, 2018).
Olga Patricia Rendon Marulanda, “Las Guerras Vivas Que Enfrentara Ivan Duque” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), July 4, 2018).
Colette Rausch, Thomas Stevenson, “Colombia’s Problematic Peace Accord: Time to Swallow Some Frogs” (War on the Rocks, July 3, 2018).
Adelaida Avila Cabrera, Laura Soto, “Estas Son las Disidencias Que Recibe Duque en el Pacifico” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), July 3, 2018).
F. Manetto, S. Torrado, “‘Somos un Tribunal de Paz Con Vocacion de Reconciliacion’” (El Pais (Spain), July 3, 2018).
“La Crisis Hace Que Venezolanos Integren Grupos Ilegales en Colombia” (El Tiempo (Colombia), July 3, 2018).
Yamid Amat, “General Naranjo No Comulga Con Acabar la Dosis Minima” (El Tiempo (Colombia), July 2, 2018).
Daniela Amaya Rueda, “La Montanita Es de Mostrar en Sustitucion y Aun Asi Va Lento” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), July 2, 2018).
Cecilia Orozco Tascón, “‘No se Trata de Intercambiar Impunidades’: Gustavo Gallon” (El Espectador (Colombia), July 2, 2018).
“La Zozobra Sin Fin de los Indigenas Nasa” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), July 2, 2018).
“¿Quienes Son los Congresistas Condenados por Paramilitarismo?” (El Espectador (Colombia), July 1, 2018).

July 13, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(This covers the week of June 24-30—a very eventful period. Sorry this is so behind schedule, but there’s no way around it with the present workload. Last week’s update is coming soon.)

Congress Makes Big Changes To Transitional Justice System

On June 27 Colombia’s Congress passed a Procedural Law for the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP), the separate justice system that will confer lighter penalties (“restriction of liberty”) on those who committed war crimes during the conflict, in exchange for full confessions and reparations to victims. The new law is necessary for the JEP to function properly, and its long-awaited passage is an important step.

However, the congressional bloc supporting Iván Duque, the rightist president-elect who is a critic of the FARC peace accord, added some last-minute changes that—if ruled to be constitutional—would diverge from the accord’s vision and intent.

Before going into that, a quick overview of the JEP legislative process so far. The new system, enshrined in chapter 5 of the peace accord, requires three laws to function:

A constitutional amendment enshrining the JEP within Colombia’s legal system, which Congress passed as part of the post-accord “fast track” legislative process in March 2017, and which the Constitutional Court reviewed and approved, with minor modifications, in November 2017.
A statutory law (ley estatuaria) to implement the JEP, which Congress passed in November 2017, adding some controversial provisions contrary to the accord’s original intent. The Constitutional Court has not yet completed its review of this law.
An “ordinary law” (ley ordinaria) governing the JEP’s procedures, which Congress passed on June 27, 2018. This law is also certain to undergo a months-long Constitutional Court review.

Even without all of its laws in place, the JEP is starting to operate, though it is a long way from issuing its first verdict and sentence to a war criminal.

A five-member panel of Colombian and international jurists named 38 magistrates and 13 alternates in September 2017, as well as JEP director Patricia Linares, a legal expert who had most recently consulted with the government’s Historical Memory Commission.
The JEP officially opened its doors in March 2018. It has received a large initial volume of conflict-related case files from the “regular” criminal justice system (the criminal prosecutor’s office, or Fiscalía).
It has been required to rule on whether an ex-FARC leader’s potentially extraditable drug-trafficking offense occurred before or after the peace accord went into effect, which will be its first ruling—but it has not done so yet.
As of April, 6,094 former FARC members facing war crimes charges had agreed to appear before the JEP, as have 2,159 members of the armed forces (as of June) and 50 civilians accused of aiding and abetting armed groups’ war crimes: 44 who worked in government and 6 private citizens.

Congress passed the procedural law troublingly late, as the JEP has been working without clear regulations. Legislators from the party of President-Elect Duque, led in the Senate by Senator and former president Álvaro Uribe, had been holding up its consideration.

On June 26, with the legislative session nearing its end, the UN Mission in Colombia put out a statement voicing alarm about “obstacles” to the JEP’s functioning: “the victims are still awaiting the first hearings and appearances of those who were involved in serious human rights and international humanitarian law violations.” A harsh reply from Uribe and Duque’s rightist party, the “Democratic Center,” made clear that it “rejects and doesn’t accept their demands.” The party’s proposed modifications to the JEP, it said, “can’t be viewed as obstacles” but as a reflection of “the desire of the majority of Colombians” as reflected in the October 2016 plebiscite rejecting the peace accord’s first version, and by Duque’s June 2018 election.

The following day, though, Colombia’s Senate considered and approved the new procedural law. It passed, though, with two amendments introduced by the Democratic Center, which passed thanks to votes from several senators who until recently had been part of President Juan Manuel Santos’s pro-peace coalition. The uribistas’ (Uribe supporters’) changes are, in the words of La Silla Vacía analysts Juan Esteban Lewin and Julian Huertas, “a first indication that, while [Duque’s party] won’t destroy the accord, it will seek to remove its teeth and make it resemble FARC surrender terms.”

The FARC political party put it even more starkly:

The elites that have historically covered themselves in impunity and made the war into an immense business for corruption and land theft, took advantage of the delayed and chaotic consideration of the JEP’s procedural norms to render ineffective the basic pillars of the peace accord.

“Welcome to the Iván Duque government” is how uribista Senator Paloma Valencia, who led the legislative push for the two amendments changing the JEP, greeted their approval.

Changing the JEP’s role in extraditions of former combatants

The first amendment would restrict the JEP’s role in determining whether a former combatant can be extradited to another country. The JEP is currently required to determine, within 120 days, whether the crime triggering the extradition request happened before or after the November 2016 ratification of the peace accord (if it took place before, it is likely subject to amnesty and non-extradition). It wasn’t clear, though, whether the JEP could actually consider whether a criminal allegation is built on solid or flimsy evidence.

The uribistas’ amendment says that no, the JEP cannot consider the quality of the evidence, only the date on which the crime allegedly occurred. If the alleged crime took place after November 2016, it must send the ex-combatant’s case to Colombia’s Supreme Court, which rules on extraditions. If the Court green-lights an extradition, the President has discretion about whether or not to hand over the accused individual.

This issue has already come up. On April 9, following an indictment by a U.S. grand jury, Colombian authorities arrested Jesús Santrich, one of the FARC’s negotiators in Havana, on charges of conspiring to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States starting in 2017. Rather than simply rule on the date of this alleged conspiracy, the JEP had frozen Santrich’s extradition process and asked Colombian criminal prosecutors to provide more evidence. On June 12, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the regular justice system, “un-freezing” Santrich’s case and ruling that the JEP does not have the power to delay an extradition process.

The new amendment, according to Sen. Valencia, guarantees that “extradition requests won’t be unjustifiably delayed when the Supreme Court is empowered to investigate.” Sen. Roy Barreras, a Santos supporter who led the procedural law’s passage in the Senate, opposed the amendment on grounds that it places U.S. counter-drug interests above the stability of peace. “To extradite those who signed the peace sends a terrible message to those who did the work of breaking up a guerrilla group.” The response from super-hardline uribista Sen. José Obdulio Gaviria: “Don’t distinguish between Colombia’s peace and illicit crops, doctor Roy. You [peace supporters] filled Colombia with the damned manure of coca money. That’s the main result of the peace policy that you all pushed.”

Separating out members of the security forces, and freezing their trials for 18 months

The Democratic Center at first sought to change the procedural law so that members of the military and police could be tried in a new, separate chamber of the JEP. Its legislators argued that soldiers shouldn’t be tried on equal footing, in the same tribunals, as former guerrillas. Critics suspect that they are in fact seeking to protect the armed forces from accountability by delaying and weakening efforts to bring their war crimes to justice.

The uribista legislators didn’t quite get a new tribunal, which would be a change too fundamental to be made through the procedures of an “ordinary law.” Senator Valencia and her colleagues instead got an amendment stating that current and former members of the armed forces and police awaiting judgment before the JEP do not have to appear before the new system until a new “special and differentiated process” exists to judge them, a change that would probably require a constitutional reform. The text gives 18 months to do that, during which the military and police perpetrators’ cases are suspended.

Currently, 2,159 active or former members of Colombia’s security forces have signed up to have their cases tried before the JEP. (2,109 from the Army, 34 from the National Police, and 16 from the Navy.) 1,578 of them have been released from custody pending trial.

Sen. Barreras, the pro-peace legislator who managed the JEP bill in the Senate, called the amendment a “serious error,” as it weakens the “judicial certainty” the armed forces had achieved in negotiating the JEP’s design. The appearance of a “self-pardon,” he said, will attract the attention of the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile, the Senator added,

while the FARC submit now to the JEP and begin to tell the truth in favor of the victims, other victims, like the Mothers of Candelaria [a Medellín-based victims’ organization] for example, have to wait 18 months to be able to know the truth, and the families of the disappeared also have to sit and wait. This is called re-victimization, and it implies that there is an indifference and a lack of consideration for the victims. These 18 months of waiting are truly unacceptable.

The amendment favoring military and police personnel is probably unconstitutional, opponents said, predicting that it will not survive Constitutional Court review. “At the end of last year, the Court stated that the participation of ex-combatants from the FARC and members of the security forces had to be mandatory. On this issue it will be the Constitutional Court that has the last word,” said Interior Minister Guillermo Rivera.

Though it was purportedly designed to favor them, Colombia’s armed forces, in fact, opposed the uribistas’ amendment. On June 26, the Minister of Defense, the Director of the National Police, and the Commander of the Armed Forces sent a letter to Sen. Valencia asking her to allow the procedural law to pass without her proposed language. The officials are concerned that the Democratic Center’s changes prolong judicial uncertainty for more than 2,000 accused soldiers and police, and may cause the International Criminal Court to involve itself more deeply in their cases. “We need the Congress to advance in approving this regulation,” said armed-forces chief Gen. Alberto Mejía. “We need to mark out the playing field of the JEP, because if we don’t do it, we’ll end up being exposed.”

One major who was given conditional release from prison last November so that the JEP could consider his case, told El Colombiano that having to wait another 18 months complicates things for him. “This keeps us in a ‘sub judice’ situation [not yet judicially decided], which worries us, given that nobody is giving us job opportunities because we still have criminal records, which would only be lifted once we pay the penalty that the JEP procedures impose.”

Colombia’s BLU Radio reported that two active-duty generals, who asked that their identities not be revealed, had received pressure from uribista legislators to support the proposed changes to the JEP. “People from the Democratic Center are saying ‘you’re all pro-Santos generals, bought off, fond of the peace process, and you forget that there’s a new president now,’” the radio cited the generals as saying.

Retired officers, who tend to be harder-line and commanded the military during a time of more frequent human rights issues, were more favorable toward the uribista amendment. Retired Gen. Jaime Ruiz, president of the powerful association of retired officers ACORE, praised the Senate’s move:

Ever since the list of [JEP] magistrates was announced, we saw that they were no guarantee of justice because of their ideological leanings. The approval of this provision, to remain within the JEP but not to appear until a new reform is made, favors us. We hope there may not be any problem with the [International Criminal] Court.

The Court in The Hague (ICC) does have Colombia under preliminary investigation, and is alert for any sign that Colombia’s justice system may fail to hold accountable those who committed crimes against humanity during the armed conflict. The ICC’s prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, has shown particular interest in the “false positives,” thousands of military murders of civilians especially during the 2002-2008 period, who were then falsely presented as combat kills in order to claim high body counts. Delaying such cases for 18 months pending the uncertain creation of a new judicial chamber will certainly attract the prosecutor’s attention.

Interior Minister Rivera, as well as at least two Colombian human rights NGOs (the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyer’s Collective and the Colombia-Europe-U.S. Coordination), filed lawsuits before the Constitutional Court to challenge the constitutionality of the amendments that the uribistas inserted.

Duque Visits Washington

President-Elect Iván Duque visited Washington on June 27 through July 5. It is a city he knows well: he did coursework at both American and Georgetown Universities, and worked at the Inter-American Development Bank for 12 years. He was accompanied by veteran politician-diplomat Carlos Holmes, a longtime Álvaro Uribe supporter who is Duque’s likely choice for foreign minister. Senator and ex-president Uribe was not present.

The visit came two days after Duque received a telephone call from President Trump to congratulate him on his victory and to discuss unspecified “security challenges” that Duque’s government is likely to face. No details about that call have emerged, and Trump was outside of Washington for most of Duque’s visit.

According to media reports, Duque’s meetings included:

Vice-President Mike Pence
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
National Security Advisor John Bolton
CIA Director Gina Haspel
Acting Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Jim Carroll
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida)
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona)
Staff of relevant committees from both the House and Senate
OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro
Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno
International Monetary Fund (not clear with whom)

Support for peace accord implementation did not seem to be a frequent topic in these meetings. The State Department’s spokeswoman said that “Secretary Pompeo reaffirmed U.S. support for a just and lasting peace in Colombia.” Speaking to reporters while in Washington, Duque reiterated his call for the ELN to agree to a “suspension of all criminal activity” and “a prior concentration of forces with international supervision” as pre-conditions for continuing peace talks begun under the Santos government. The ELN are highly unlikely to agree to the second condition, a cantonment of forces.

The crisis in Venezuela was a frequent subject of Duque’s meetings. Sen. Rubio tweeted that they talked about “regional efforts to help the Venezuelan people put an end to their crisis and restore democracy.” After meeting with OAS Secretary-General Almagro, a vociferous critic of Venezuela’s authoritarian government, Duque recommended that Latin American presidents denounce the Maduro regime before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. (In July 2017, then-senator Duque led an effort to send the ICC a 56-page petition asking its prosecutor to “place Venezuela under observation and open a formal investigation.” The document bore the signatures of 76 Colombian and 70 Chilean senators.) Duque also recommended that South American governments permanently abandon the fading UNASUR political bloc, which he called an “accomplice of the Venezuelan dictatorship,” and strengthen the OAS.

Drug policy was perhaps the most frequent topic addressed at Duque’s meetings. The White House’s June 25 release of its 2017 estimate of Colombian coca cultivation—which showed a further 11 percent increase in the crop last year—guaranteed that this would be the top priority of the incoming president’s Washington discussions.

On June 28 Duque told reporters he had received expressions of support for his anti-drug strategy, which though lacking in specifics would rely more heavily on forced coca eradication than did the Santos government during its second term. “Obviously the backsliding has been very large in the last few years, and that’s why we have to seek effective and fast mechanisms,” he added. “They showed much confidence in the agenda we presented,” Duque said of the Americans, noting that his objective is to show measurable results against the coca crop within two years.

In an interview that El Tiempo published July 1, Duque said his government’s approach to coca would have a large alternative development component. He hinted, though, that unlike the model laid out in chapter 4 of the FARC peace accord, he sees oil palm—a capital-intensive crop favorable to large landholdings—as a promising legal alternative to coca.

In some places, coca is almost the only crop that offers opportunities. Nobody can deny it. But exactly what we want to do is alternative development and productive development. We should begin from this baseline: as it is going to be very hard for a licit crop to be more profitable than an illicit crop, substitution and eradication must be made obligatory, but while opening new opportunities leading to labor formalization and stable incomes. There are important substitutions of coca crops with palm crops.

Asked in Washington whether he would prefer to eradicate crops by spraying herbicides from aircraft or from drones (discussed in the next section), Duque said, “at this moment we have to look at all the options, and they have to be the options that guarantee greater precision, greater effectiveness, and that minimize damage to third-parties to the greatest extent possible.”

US Releases Coca Figure, and Colombian Government Approves Fumigation With Drones

On June 25, about three months later than usual, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released its estimate of Colombia’s coca crop during the previous year. The U.S. government reported finding 209,000 hectares of coca in Colombia in 2017, 11 percent more than the 188,000 measured in 2016. Both figures were the highest the United States has ever reported. The 2017 increase was the fifth annual uptick in a row. However, 11 percent is the smallest percentage increase of the five, which may at least indicate some leveling off in a year that saw forced manual eradication triple from 18,000 to 53,000 hectares, along with the launch of the peace accords’ crop substitution effort, which eradicated at least 7,000 more hectares.

The White House estimated a 19 percent increase in potential cocaine production, from 772 to 921 tons. Both are records, and the 2017 figure is quadruple the U.S. government’s 2013 estimate. This indicates U.S. estimators see a sharp increase in yield—the number of kilograms of cocaine being produced from each hectare—as plants grow taller and more mature.

“President Trump’s message to Colombia is clear: the record growth in cocaine production must be reversed,” the White House release cites ONDCP Deputy Director Jim Carroll. “Even though Colombian eradication efforts improved in 2017,

they were outstripped by the acceleration in production. The Government of Colombia must do more to address this increase. The steep upward trajectory is unacceptable.”

President Juan Manuel Santos argued that the increase owed to short-term factors and will be reversed by the government’s strategy, which includes the National Integral Crop Substitution Plan foreseen in chapter 4 of the peace accord (whose implementation, like so much of the accord, is underfunded and behind schedule). “It’s very easy to come and criticize Colombia because illicit crops increased,” Santos said. “But measure the other circumstances and the other indicators: the effectiveness of drug seizures, how many members of the mafias we have extradited, the immense effort that we have made and will continue making.”

In an interview, Vice-President Óscar Naranjo, a former National Police chief, pointed out that because Colombia’s cocaine seizures—much of them in coastal areas—have increased from 148 tons in 2014 to 432 tons in 2017, the amount of the drug actually making it into world markets has increased only somewhat and may still be less than it was during the early years of “Plan Colombia,” instead of the quadrupling of supply that the U.S. tonnage estimate might indicate. Increased interdiction may explain why data about cocaine abuse in the United States show an increase that is far less steep than data about cocaine supply. Another explanation is greater cocaine consumption outside the United States. In 2000, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report estimated that North America accounted for 50 percent of world cocaine consumption; its 2018 report, released in June, attributed only a 32 percent share to North America.

As past analyses from WOLA, the Ideas for Peace Foundation, InsightCrime and others have pointed out, Colombia’s coca boom owes to several factors. Proponents of vastly increased forced eradication point to the 2015 suspension of aerial herbicide spraying, and to the peace accord’s promise of cash for those who planted coca, as the main reasons for the increase. These undeniably contributed, but the Colombian government’s failure or inability to replace eradication with state presence and development assistance in rural areas—effectively leaving most coca-growing areas in a state of neglect—gets at least as much blame. So does a decline in gold prices, as many coca-growers had turned to artisanal mining in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, when sky-high prices caused the metal to be more profitable than the crop.

Last September, due to rising production statistics, President Trump sought to decertify Colombia for failing to cooperate fully in anti-drug efforts, a move that would cut some forms of aid and place Colombia in the same category as Venezuela or Burma. Top advisors talked him out of it, but the White House’s statement noted that decertification remains “an option.” Despite the unencouraging 2017 numbers, the White House is unlikely to greet Iván Duque with a decertification six weeks after his inauguration.

Two days after the White House announcement, Colombia’s National Drug Council, an advisory body of ministers and high officials, approved the use of drones to apply herbicides to coca plants. The move comes after several months of pilot testing of the remote-controlled craft. Each of the chosen models costs about US$10,000. It flies about one meter above the plants, and can spray about 1 liter of herbicide mixture at a time in 10 minutes of operation between recharges. Spraying began in the final days of June in Putumayo, Meta, Caquetá, Guaviare, and Nariño departments.

For now at least, the herbicide will continue to be glyphosate, marketed by the U.S. chemical giant Monsanto, but at a concentration about 50 percent weaker than that used by U.S.-funded, contractor-flown aircraft during the years of the now-suspended aerial eradication program (1994-2015). Since that program’s suspension, much manual eradication has been carried out by eradicators wearing backpack-mounted herbicide sprayers applying this weaker mixture. This is a dangerous practice, as hundreds of eradicators or their police escorts have been killed or injured in the past 15 years by landmines, booby traps, ambushes, and sniper attacks. The idea is that using drones would curtail that risk, while applying the herbicide more accurately than aircraft flying 50-150 meters above the ground.

The aircraft-spraying program was suspended in October 2015 after a World Health Organization literature review found that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Colombia’s Constitutional Court later ratified this suspension because of the possible risk. However, glyphosate has not been banned for agricultural use in Colombia, and officials expect that application by more accurate drones, which poses less risk of spraying residential areas or legal crops, gets around the Court’s restrictions.

While critics of the drone decision acknowledge a reduced risk to human health, they lament that this method of eradication will probably be carried out with no permanent state presence in abandoned rural areas, little face-to-face dialogue with coca-growing families, and perhaps with little coordination with food security and other assistance. “They’re making decisions from a desk without caring about the territory,” Nariño governor Camilo Romero tweeted in response to the drone decision. “I’ll say it clearly: any anti-drug policy that doesn’t involve the dozens of thousands of families that lack opportunities today, is condemned to failure. You can’t fumigate people only to have them plant again!”

A State Department spokesperson told EFE that the drone plan is up to Colombia: “The choice of eradication methods is a sovereign decision of the Colombian government. However, the United States believes that all tools should be used to turn back the sharp increase in cocaine production.”

In-Depth Reading

Natalia Arbelaez Jaramillo, “Santos No se Tomo en Serio el Punto Agrario del Acuerdo de Paz” (La Silla Vacia (Colombia), June 29, 2018).
“¿Y Fue el Congreso de la Paz?” (El Espectador (Colombia), June 29, 2018).
Renata Segura, Sabrina Stein, “The Colombian Peace Process With the Farc: A Mapping of Vulnerabilities” (Social Science Research Council, June 29, 2018).
David Hill, “‘The War Goes On’: One Tribe Caught Up in Colombia’s Armed Conflict” (The Guardian (Uk), June 27, 2018).
Javier Alexánder Macías, “Un Ano Sin Armas de las Farc” (El Colombiano (Medellin Colombia), June 27, 2018).
Kyle Johnson, “En Argelia, Temen por su Tranquilidad y Dudan de la Paz” (International Crisis Group, Verdad Abierta (Colombia), June 27, 2018).
Edinson Arley Bolanos, “ ‘Lideres Que Apoyan la Paz Estan Siendo Encarcelados y Asesinados’: Diana Sanchez” (El Espectador (Colombia), June 27, 2018).
Juan Carlos Garzon v., Maria Victoria Llorente, “¿Por Que Siguen Aumentando los Cultivos de Coca en Colombia?” (Fundacion Ideas por la Paz (Colombia), June 26, 2018).
“La Paradoja de la Paz: Cuatro Historias de Destruccion Ambiental Tras el Acuerdo Con las Farc” (Semana (Colombia), June 26, 2018).
“La Riqueza Maldita del Catatumbo” (Verdad Abierta (Colombia), June 25, 2018).
Carolina Avila Cortes, “Desplazamiento Forzado, un Drama Que No Cesa en el Bajo Cauca Antioqueno” (El Espectador (Colombia), June 25, 2018).

June 26, 2018 — 1

An early incident casts doubt on the incoming Colombian president’s independence—and the peace accord’s future

An incident late last week in Bogotá, getting reported as hearsay in Colombia’s media, raises serious concerns about the independence of President-Elect Iván Duque from his patron, the hardline former president and current Senator Álvaro Uribe. It also raises concerns that the peace accord with the FARC, which Duque and Uribe both criticize but Duque has promised not to “tear up,” is in grave trouble.

Here, writing in Spain’s El País, is analyst Ariel Avila of the Bogotá-based Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, a critic of Duque and Uribe:

The transition between the outgoing and incoming government has begun and, as expected, the peace issue has been the most decisive. Currently, the Congress is considering a bill that would become the procedural law for the JEP, or Special Peace Jurisdiction [the peace accords’ transitional justice mechanism for trying the most serious war crimes]. Though it is an ordinary law that only impacts timeframes and procedures, the Democratic Center Party [that of Iván Duque and ex-president Álvaro Uribe] opposed it and has blocked its advance through the Congress.

In their meeting last week, both President Juan Manuel Santos and the president-elect, Iván Duque, decided to call the president of the Constitutional Court, Colombia’s maximum judicial tribunal, in order to clear up some of the new government’s doubts about this law. Several sources said that Congresswoman Paloma Valencia, one of the most active in ex-president Álvaro Uribe’s party, upon hearing that Duque green-lighted a meeting of congressional blocs to move the bill forward, immediately took out her telephone and apparently called Uribe, not Iván Duque. And as would be expected, Uribe added conditions to President-Elect Duque’s decision.

El Espectador offers a bit more detail about this bizarre incident.

There is a final detail that El Espectador learned. Sources with seats in the Capitol confirmed that, while the Santos-Duque meeting was happening, another meeting was taking place in the Interior Ministry with a subcommittee of legislators who were delegated to review the JEP’s situation. …What drew attention was the phone call that the uribista congresswoman [Senator Paloma Valencia] made while the meeting was going on.

What happened? The first agreement that Santos and Duque arrived at, as the President himself said on Friday, was to call the president of the Constitutional Court, Alejandro Linares, to get him to clear up the president-elect’s doubts about whether or not procedure allowed the JEP’s law to be approved [before the Court has ruled on the constitutionality of the JEP’s larger statutory law, passed last November. The Constitutional Court ruling on that is due any day now].

Linares said that the Santos administration was right, and there was a green light to pass the law. With these doubts cleared up, the incoming chief of state asked for a meeting between his party’s congressional bloc and representatives of other parties to hear proposals about the bill that would become the procedural law.

The message—and this is what those present in the Interior Ministry say—arrived immediately. The government conveyed the message to Paloma Valencia who, surprised, apparently said, “Iván said that?”

She immediately grabbed her mobile phone: “Hola, pre [as in ‘presidente’].”

But she wasn’t talking to Duque, but to ex-president Álvaro Uribe, whom she consulted about the new president’s decision, asking him for instructions.

Uribe gave his approval to what was agreed between the outgoing and incoming presidents, but he asked the Senator [Valencia] to add three conditions: that FARC members responsible for the most serious crimes would be prohibited from participating in politics, to create a new separate chamber to judge military personnel within the JEP, and to establish a special procedure for third-party civilians involved in the conflict [for instance, landowners or politicians who aided paramilitaries. These three conditions radically alter what is in the peace accord and could be dealbreakers].

Without alluding directly to this episode, President Santos said, “Those issues would require a constitutional reform, but any modification on which there is consensus, that improves the accords, would be welcome.” …However, he alerted that “it’s not the right moment to block efforts to do our duty to the victims. I hope that you vote on the JEP procedural law. I’m leaving government and I leave peace in your hands.”

What happened behind the backdrop is a first bit of evidence about the independence of the president-elect, Iván Duque, and the leadership that he will exercise over his party’s bloc in the Congress, of which ex-president Uribe is also a part.

Ávila concludes:

For context, two considerations. On one hand, Iván Duque’s independence is going to be rather complicated, and the fear that he may look more like a puppet than a president is starting to circulate in the corridors of politics. It would be something like the relation between Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev in Russia. And on the other hand, everything seems to indicate that the idea of destroying all of President Santos’s legacy, and obviously the peace deal, is their first and most important objective.

May 15, 2018 — 0

The past week in Colombia’s peace process

(Week of May 6-12)

ELN Talks Restart in Havana

Government and ELN negotiators relaunched peace talks in Havana, Cuba on May 10, continuing a fifth round of negotiations that had begun in Quito, Ecuador on March 15. The process was interrupted on April 18 when Ecuador’s President, Lenin Moreno, suspended the country’s hosting of the negotiations. Moreno’s decision reflected a darkened national mood in Ecuador toward Colombian armed groups, after a FARC dissident group kidnapped and killed two journalists and their driver in March near the Colombia-Ecuador border.

This round of talks is covering three issues: the terms of a new bilateral cessation of hostilities, measures to shield communities in areas of combat between the ELN and other illegal armed groups, and a model for civil society participation in future rounds of talks, as envisioned in the negotiating agenda. “In the immediate term, this cycle will dedicate itself to agreeing on a new bilateral, temporary, and national ceasefire that is better than the last one,” said ELN chief negotiator Pablo Beltrán, referring to a 100-day bilateral ceasefire that was not renewed after it expired on January 9.

Negotiators are under pressure to come up with tangible results. In three months, Colombia will inaugurate a new president after electing a new one on May 27 (and probably after a runoff vote on June 17); most candidates have said they are unwilling to continue the peace talks in their current form. President Juan Manuel Santos and the Colombian Congress’s Peace Commission have both cited the need for a “framework accord” to lock in the talks before the next president takes office. While he realizes that he will not be the one to sign an accord with the ELN, Santos said his goal is to hand off to his successor “something that is on the right track.”

At a May 9 session of the congressional Peace Commission, diplomatic representatives from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, and Cuba expressed support for the ELN dialogues’ continuation. Most called on both sides to make swift progress. The European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, gave a statement of support and called on both sides to reach a ceasefire, “which would significantly improve the humanitarian situation in the areas most affected by the conflict.” At the congressional commission hearing, government negotiator José Noé Ríos declared a goal of May 25—two days before the presidential elections’ first round—for reaching agreement on a ceasefire.

In an apparent move to ease a ceasefire, President Santos signed a decree green-lighting a case-by-case review of people imprisoned on charges having to do with social protest. The idea is to identify individuals who could be amnestied, or have their sentences commuted. This would be a goodwill gesture responding to a longtime ELN demand that the government release people involved in protests.

In opening comments in Havana, ELN leader Beltrán said the government’s poor compliance with commitments in the FARC peace accord, along with an increase in killings of social leaders, have heightened the ELN’s distrust. He added the view, though, that “the only road for Colombia, for a political solution, is that this way of dialogue goes ahead.”

The Colombian government’s chief negotiator, former vice-president Gustavo Bell, voiced hope that this round of talks would bring not just a bilateral ceasefire but an ELN commitment to cease all hostilities, like “kidnappings, extortions, child recruitment, or attacks on infrastructure.” Obstacles to a cessation of hostilities include which illegal activity would be included; how to verify it without cantonment of fighters; how the ELN would confront other illegal armed groups; and how to guarantee that all ELN leaders agree to observe it.

Negotiators are also talking to social organizations from areas hit by conflict between the ELN and other groups, which wouldn’t so clearly feel the impact of an ELN-government ceasefire, to discuss commitments to observe international humanitarian law. Ethnic, victims’, and women’s organizations in Chocó, where fighting has raged between the ELN and the Urabeños organized crime group, have called for respecting ethnic territories, de-mining, stopping recruitment of minors, halting killings of social leaders, ending displacement and confinement, and curbs on illicit crops and illegal mining. In Nariño, where many small armed groups operate, civil-society organziations have been calling for more action on de-mining. In Catatumbo, groups are calling on the ELN to keep the civilian population out of its worsening conflict with the EPL (Popular Liberation Army, a small but regionally strong guerrilla group), which has displaced almost 9,000 people since fighting worsened on March 14.

Jesús Santrich Case

FARC leader Seusis Pausias Hernández alias Jesús Santrich was moved from Bogotá’s El Tunal hospital to the Fundación Caminos de Libertad, a facility run by the Episcopal Conference of Colombia’s Catholic church. Santrich, one of the FARC’s main negotiators in Havana who expected to assume a seat in Colombia’s Congress in July, has been on a hunger strike since his April 9 arrest. He was indicted by a U.S. court for allegedly conspiring to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States in 2017, after the FARC peace accord was signed, and faces possible extradition.

Santrich’s health is flagging after a month of consuming only water and epilepsy medication. Still, he has turned down entreaties to abandon his hunger strike, including an open letter from longtime informal mediators Sen. Iván Cepeda and former mining minster Álvaro Leyva. The ex-guerrilla, a political hardliner, has said he would rather die than go to a U.S. prison.

Some voices have called for Santrich to be tried in Colombia, where he would face his victims, rather than be extradited. These include former government negotiator and current presidential candidate Humberto de la Calle, Human Rights Watch Americas Director José Miguel Vivanco, and Colombian jurist Rodrigo Uprimny, co-founder of the DeJusticia think-tank. “To extradite FARC commanders before they are processed for their crimes could cause an irreparable harm to victims, to the extreme that they might evade responsibility for the atrocities they committed,” wrote Vivanco in an El Tiempo column. Both Vivanco and Uprimny, writing in El Espectador, cited the experience of 14 paramilitary leaders whom then-president Álvaro Uribe extradited en masse in May 2008. “The paramilitaries’ extraditions have made it almost impossible to know the truth about their crimes,” wrote Uprimny. “For these same reasons, I think Santrich should not be extradited.”

For their part, the two candidates leading polling for the May 27 presidential elections have both said that they would extradite. Rightist Iván Duque, the candidate of Uribe’s party, has said he would sign the extradition order immediately. Leftist Gustavo Petro, said that the transitional justice system agreed by the peace accord (Special Peace Jurisdiction, or JEP) should first consider all the evidence against Santrich. “If the JEP confirms the acts were committed after the accords’ signing and I am president,” Petro tweeted, “Mr. Santrich will be extradited.” Petro’s position is similar to that of President Santos.

Setback to Land Grants for Demobilized FARC Members

The Colombian government and the FARC have been casting about to find a way to reintegrate guerrilla ex-combatants by giving them land to cultivate. This, surprisingly, was not foreseen in the peace accord. The Santos administration had been close to issuing a decree allowing titling of lands for former fighters’ cooperative agricultural projects. The decree has run into trouble, though, over objections from the country’s principal federation of landholders.

A year ago, while demobilizing FARC fighters were concentrated in 26 village-sized disarmament sites around the country, Colombia’s National University surveyed them to gather information about their backgrounds and needs, as foreseen by the peace accords. It found that 66 percent of the 10,015 former FARC surveyed were from rural areas and another 15 were from rural/urban areas, such as towns within overwhelmingly rural municipalities. Sixty percent said they wanted to carry out collective reintegration through agricultural activities.

After meeting with his “peace cabinet” on April 30, President Santos said that “within the FARC there is a conflict: the leaders want everything to be collective, while the base, many of them, want it to be individual. As a result of this conflict, the FARC haven’t approved the individual reincorporation route, and resources for 5,000 ex-combatants’ productive projects are blocked by that dispute.” FARC leader Pastor Alape, a member of the National Reincorporation Council set up by the peace accord, responded, “Reincorporation is being slowed bye the lack of a public policy… and fundamentally, because there isn’t any land for the productive projects” that ex-guerrillas wish to pursue.

The Santos government’s draft decree sought to address this by making possible the delivery of some lands to ex-combatants. It had identified 11 plots of land in 9 departments, totaling about 492 hectares, that could be granted. The Center for Peace Studies (CESPAZ), which worked with the Presidency in drafting the accord, estimates that the amount of land needed to guarantee guerrillas’ reintegration would be 37,657 hectares, an amount smaller than many Colombian cattle ranches and industrial farms.

Nonetheless, the decree has been put on hold after the Society of Colombian Agricultural Producers (SAC), a national association of mostly large landowners, criticized it. “At no point does the accord mention giving land to the former members of this terrorist group,” said SAC President Jorge Enrique Bedoya, “and the draft decree that the government submitted for citizens’ consideration is giving prevalence to this specific group over landless farmers.”

The above information comes largely from a May 7 report from the investigative website Verdad Abierta. The site later posted this addendum to the report:

After this article’s publication, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP) communicated with VerdadAbierta.com to inform that the national government decided to resolve the need to adjudicate lands to ex-combatants through the promulgation of Decree 756 of May 4, 2018. The document contains one article, which opens the door for the National Land Agency (ANT) to adjudicate lands directly to “associations or to cooperative organizations.”
The text does not correspond to the draft decree described in this story, nor does it align with the terms that the government and FARC negotiated in the National Reincorporation Council (CNR) to guarantee economic reincorporation. With regard to that, the OACP source who communicated with this site responded that the executive branch made this unilateral decision in response to the received critiques.

Truth Commission Formally Launches

May 8 was the official first day of operation for the Truth Commission established by the FARC peace accord. As of that date, the eleven commissioners have three years and six months in which to produce a report about what happened in the armed conflict, to promote recognition of victims, and to help generate conditions for “a culture of respect and tolerance.”

President Santos swore in the commissioners, led by Commission President Father Francisco De Roux, before a room full of high court officials and government ministers. De Roux and his colleagues had been working to lay the groundwork for the commission’s functioning, thanks to a UNDP grant, since they were chosen in November.

Over those months, the Commission held 22 workshops with victims and human rights defenders, as well as dozens of meetings with other stakeholders. It will now establish teams to cover 10 regions from 26 different offices. They hope to finish their report well before the deadline in order to spend the rest of their period educating about its content and promoting social reconciliation.

El Espectador asked De Roux, a Jesuit priest with a long record of heading human rights efforts, “What was the most serious thing that happened” in the conflict? He replied,

Human dignity was profoundly damaged by this conflict. Society’s silences, and lack of reaction, against the barbarity that we were living through. We just saw all of Ecuador stirred up by three journalists [killed by a FARC dissident group near the border]. We saw barbarity after barbarity happen, without doing anything, which is evidence of a very deep humanitarian crisis. Not just for the people who died, but for the lack of understanding, as a society, that the death of an indigenous person or an Afro-Colombian is the death of all of us. It is the undermining of our value as human beings and Colombian citizens. That’s where the wound is deep.

JEP Excludes “Para-Politicians”

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional justice system set up by the peace accord to judge war crimes, rejected the applications of two politicians currently serving sentences for aiding paramilitary groups. Senator Álvaro Ashton and ex-senator David Char, the JEP’s “Chamber for Definition of Legal Situations” determined, did not commit crimes that could be considered “grave conduct related to the conflict.” As a result, they are not entitled to the maximum sentence of five to eight years of “restricted liberty” that the JEP would hand out in exchange for full confessions and reparations to victims.

Ashton and Char are among several dozen political figures who ended up before courts and in prison during the 2000s for aiding and abetting paramilitary groups that killed tens of thousands of Colombians. The scandal was known as “para-politics.” The JEP chamber’s decision, which can be appealed, reads, “The majority of members of Congress investigated and sentenced for conspiracy (the basic charge of ‘para-politics’) associated themselves with paramilitary structures neither to support them nor to win the war, but as a means to pursue their personal political interests.”

The chamber’s magistrates made clear that, in order to get a chance at a lighter penalty within the JEP, each crime’s relationship to the armed conflict must be clearly demonstrated. “It is not enough to say that something happened in the general context of violence,” El Espectador reported.

The JEP at some point will have to consider a petition from Jorge Luis Alfonso López, a para-politician who is the son of Enilse López, a Bolívar-based paramilitary sponsor named “La Gata” who has run the lottery gambling business in much of Colombia’s coast. Her son says “he has been directly and indirectly involved in the armed conflict” and wants to give information about politicians his family has financed, as well as military and police officers who worked with paramilitaries.

Universal Periodic Review in Geneva

It was Colombia’s turn this week for regular consideration of its human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Colombia’s Interior Minister, Foreign Minister, and some human rights defenders were on hand for a Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which occurs about every five years.

Representatives of 95 governments offered comments about Colombia’s human rights situation. Nearly all of them said something about the rising number of social leaders and human rights defenders being killed in the country. The last time Colombia was subject to UPR, in 2013, the country’s human rights ombudsman’s office (Defensoría) counted 35 such murders. Between 2016 and now, it has counted 261.

The U.S. representative’s message was helpful, expressing concern about low levels of accountability for these murders, and noting targeting of ethnic and labor leaders. Though recognizing that about half of these cases have seen some advance in investigations or prosecutions, the U.S. representative said that they needed to be brought fully to justice.

The Colombian government responded that many of the killings owe to criminal groups’ violent efforts to take control of territories so that they may dominate illegal businesses like drug trafficking, precious-metals mining, and extortion. Colombian officials told the Council that it was carrying out a protection plan, and that in some way this plan was covering 4,000 social leaders, 60 percent of them in rural areas.

Colombian human rights organizations presented a joint report in Geneva. While they praised the government for the FARC peace accord and for making commitments on human rights, they criticized its lack of follow-through. “The Colombian state ends up adopting the [human rights] norm, but later it doesn’t implement it, or doesn’t put up enough resources to put it into practice,” said Ana María Rodríguez of the Colombian Commission of Jurists. Organizations present noted that the Council’s deliberations paid little attention to the paramilitary phenomenon, the responsibility of some businesses for human rights abuses, and the violations of privacy committed by Colombian intelligence agencies.

Attacks on “Rios Vivos” Movement in Antioquia

Luis Alberto Torres was killed in rural Puerto Valdivia, Antioquia, while mining by a riverside on May 8. Just eight days earlier, in the same municipality, gunmen killed Hugo Albeiro George in a local shop. Both men were members of the “Ríos Vivos” movement, formed to protest HidroItuango, a massive hydroelectric dam project underway in northern Antioquia.

“We hope that, in response to these acts, the Antioquia Police do not focus on dismissing and ignoring the leadership and human rights and environmental defense work that all of us members of Rios Vivio carry out,” read a statement from the organization. “Instead, we expect decisive action.”

Meanwhile, the Hidroituango dam project is in crisis. Since April 28, one of the tunnels used to divert the Cauca river has been blocked, raising the river’s level and forcing families to evacuate.

Response to Killing of FARC Member in Arauca

Unknown assailants killed Juan Vicente Carvajal alias “Misael,” a former FARC leader in the conflictive department of Arauca, about 4 kilometers from the FARC demobilization site in the village of Filipinas, Arauquita. As of early April, 52 FARC members had been killed nationwide since 2017.

Carvajal was among FARC leaders whom the U.S. government wanted in extradition for past narcotrafficking, and he led a FARC column during a bloody 2008-2010 conflict that the FARC and ELN fought in Arauca. This makes the ELN, which remains dominant in much of rural Arauca, a prime suspect in the murder.

Carvajal had left the Filipinas demobilization site, and had used his own resources to start a farm and run a discotheque in Arauquita. The security forces stated that they did not believe he was involved in criminal activity. He was living at his farm when he was murdered.

In a missive to FARC members, the ex-guerrillas’ maximum leader, Rodrigo Londoño alias Timochenko, warned them about going off on their own, as Carvajal had. While the ex-guerrilla’s homicide was “truly alarming,” Londoño said that it doesn’t mean that all former combatants are “condemned to total extermination.” Leaving the other ex-combatants and living by himself put him “in a high risk situation. …Discipline was always necessary… for the war, and I don’t know why some think that they don’t need it during reincorporation.”

In-Depth Reading

“Bombas, Balaceras, Minas y Torturas: Tumaco Esta Ahogado por la Violencia” (Semana (Colombia), May 11, 2018).
Simon West, “Will Colombia’s Presidential Elections Derail the Country’s Historic Peace Process?” (NBC News, May 10, 2018).
Nelson Ardila Arias, “Tras 20 Anos de Exilio, Familia Regreso a Finca Arrebatada por ‘Paras’” (El Tiempo (Colombia), May 9, 2018).
“¿Que Propuestas Tienen los Candidatos Alrededor de Cada Punto del Acuerdo de Paz?” (El Espectador (Colombia), May 7, 2018).
“Casas de Pique: Asi Funciona el Regimen de Terror en Tumaco” (Semana (Colombia), May 7, 2018).

May 8, 2018 — 0

Records of paramilitary atrocities are “moth food” today

As many of you remember, in 2006 Colombia embarked on the so-called “Justice and Peace process” after 32,000 members of the paramilitaries (the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia or AUC) demobilized. (A top ex-paramilitary leader recently said that as many as 12,000 of those weren’t even paramilitaries, just people rounded up at the last minute.)

At their late-1990s and early-2000s height, the AUC was committing more human rights abuses than the guerrillas. While the FARC and ELN led in categories like kidnapping, landmine use, and child recruitment, paramilitaries—often working with the military’s acquiescence—were committing more murders, massacres, displacements, and torture.

Of the 32,000 demobilized “paras,” a subset believed to have committed war crimes was to undergo full judicial confessions, and then to pay a reduced sentence of up to eight years in prison.

So whatever happened? This paragraph, from an April 2017 report by Colombia’s Antonio Nariño Project (PAN), is devastating.

As of December 26, 2016, 7,531 applicants [for lighter penalties in exchange for full confessions in the Justice and Peace system] had given confessions, and 49 sentences had been handed down. According to the Prosecutor-General’s Office [Fiscalía], there are 76,981 technical records of these confessions. However, in accordance with the law [Law 975 of 2005, known as the Justice and Peace Law], only people directly involved in the events described may have access to these technical records. Journalists and media outlets are excluded. Sebastián Salamanca, the PAN’s coordinator, says that “the hearings’ video archives are rotting in offices and we citizens can’t access them; those documents, necessary to know the truth about what happened in the war, today are moth food.”

Hat tip to scholar Camilo Tamayo Gómez for pointing this out in a recent column in Medellín’s El Colombiano.

November 30, 2017 — 0

Rescuing Colombia’s Post-Conflict Transitional Justice System

Semana archive photo at Verdad Abierta (Colombia). Caption: “Aún no ha comenzado a operar el nuevo sistema de justicia transicional y diversos sectores ya encuentran reparos, principalmente en cuanto a la participación procesal de las víctimas se refiere.”

Remember back when Colombian officials said that the FARC peace negotiations sought to “put victims at the center” of the process?

Colombia’s Congress just finished work on the legislation that would implement transitional justice, the process of punishing the worst human rights violators and making them provide reparations to victims. They did serious damage, putting together a system that benefits the powerful and deforms the spirit of the peace accords. It will be up to Colombia’s top courts, or the International Criminal Court, to minimize the harm.

Here are seven flaws that I’ve identified in a piece that WOLA posted to its website this morning. Follow the link to read the whole thing: I tried to explain this in plain English, not human rights legalese.

The choices of judges and magistrates for the new justice system were excellent. But the law would undo these by disqualifying anybody who has done human rights work or accompanied victims during the past five years.
The law does not define how austere the conditions of “restricted liberty” will be for those sentenced for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The law includes a watered-down standard of “command responsibility,” which could allow dozens of top military commanders to avoid accountability. It may also make Colombia a top priority for the International Criminal Court.
The law stripped key language from the peace accord which would have compelled civilian third parties to appear and confess. There is now little hope of holding accountable landowners, narcotraffickers, local officials and other politically influential individuals who sponsored armed groups or even planned killings.
The law leaves unclear whether “false positive” killings will be tried within the JEP, even though most were unrelated to the armed conflict.
War criminals may still be able to hold office. Or maybe not.
The timeline for setting up the JEP is excruciatingly slow. In the meantime, thousands of guerrillas and soldiers are in a legal limbo.

Read the whole thing here.

April 18, 2017 — 0

Response to Álvaro Uribe’s whopper-filled “Message to U.S. Authorities”

(This was just posted to WOLA’s colombiapeace.org site and will go up at wola.org in a little while.)

Álvaro Uribe’s Questionable “Message to U.S. Authorities” About Colombia’s Peace Effort

By Adam Isacson and Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli

Inaccurate=pink. Debatable=orange.

On Easter Sunday Colombia’s former president, Álvaro Uribe, wrote a blistering attack on Colombia’s peace accords with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas. He sent it in English as a “message to the authorities and the Congress of the United States of America.” It went to every U.S. congressional office, as well as to Washington’s community of analysts, advocates and donors who work on Colombia.

Uribe, now Colombia’s most prominent opposition senator, is the most vocal critic of the peace process led by his successor, President Juan Manuel Santos. The ex-president’s missive leaves out the very encouraging fact that 7,000 members of the FARC, a leftist guerrilla group, are currently concentrated in 26 small zones around the country, where they are gradually turning all of their weapons over to a UN mission. One of the organizations most involved in the illicit drug business has agreed to stop using violent tactics for political purposes and to get out of the drug economy. The process currently underway is ending a bloody conflict that raged for 52 years, and holds at least the promise of making vast areas of Colombia better governed, and less favorable to illicit drug production.

Colombia’s peace accord implementation is going slowly, and faces daunting problems. There is a responsible, fact-based critique that a conservative analyst could make. Uribe’s document is not that critique. It suffers from numerous factual inaccuracies and statements that are easily rebutted. Its fixation on the FARC, a waning force, deliberately lacks important facts regarding other parties to the conflict and it does little to explain how the United States can help Colombia address post-conflict challenges.

Here is WOLA’s evaluation of several of the points made by Álvaro Uribe in this document, and evaluations of their accuracy. The vast majority of his claims are either inaccurate, or debatable.

Statement:

“Coca plantations were reduced from 170,000 ha to 42,000 ha, now there are 188,000 ha according to the lowest estimate.”

Inaccurate. Two sources estimate Colombian coca-growing: the U.S. government and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (working with the Colombian government). Their highest, lowest, and most current estimates of Colombian coca-cultivation are as follows.

Source	Highest before current	Lowest	Most current
U.S. government	170,000 (2001)	78,000 (2012)	188,000 (2016)
UNODC	163,300 (2000)	48,000 (2012-13)	96,000 (2015)

No estimate shows a drop from 170,000 to 42,000 hectares. Both show the lowest estimate in 2012, two years after Uribe left office. 188,000 hectares is not the “lowest” current estimate, it is the higher of the two. Using the 188,000 hectare (U.S.) figure yields an increase from a baseline of 78,000, not 42,000.

Nobody denies that Colombia’s post-2012 coca boom is a problem, but Uribe’s statement exaggerates its severity still further.

Statement:

“THE CAUSE OF THIS DANGEROUS TREND: The government has stopped spraying illicit crops to please the terrorist FARC.”

Inaccurate. First, the October 2015 suspension of “spraying illicit crops” with herbicides from aircraft is one of seven causes for the boom in coca cultivation, which WOLA explained in a March 13 report. (The other six are a decline in manual eradication, a failure to replace eradication with state presence and services, a drop in gold prices, a stronger dollar, a promise that people who planted coca would get aid under the FARC peace accords, and an increase in organized coca-grower resistance.) Giving all explanatory weight to the suspension of herbicide fumigation is misleading, as even the State Department recognized that the program’s effectiveness was “significantly reduced” by “counter-eradication tactics” like swift replanting and pruning sprayed plants.

Second, the suspension of aerial spraying had nothing to do with the FARC. Colombia’s Health Ministry pushed to end spraying with the herbicide glyphosate after a 2015 World Health Organization literature review concluded that the chemical is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” (In March 2017, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment came to a similar conclusion.)

Third, the FARC-government peace accord (PDF) does not prohibit aerial spraying. It reads, “If crop substitution does not prove possible, the government does not renounce the instruments it believes to be most effective, including spraying, to guarantee the eradication of crops of illicit use.” And today, government personnel continue to spray coca fields with glyphosate from the ground, even though this may “displease the FARC.”

Statement:

“Manual eradication was reduced and it moves forward preferably with communities’ consent, that is, with FARC’s consent.”

Debatable. The equation of rural “communities” with “the FARC” exaggerates the FARC’s power—many if not most of these communities’ members are not FARC supporters (PDF). By implicitly tying them to what until recently was a violent, radical group, this formulation also marginalizes and endangers these communities’ residents.

Statements:

“FARC has designed its own justice.”

“FARC’s kingpins and their aides have been granted impunity”

Inaccurate. If the FARC were allowed to design its own justice, its members who violated human rights would be amnestied, and their denials of their crimes’ severity would go unchallenged. Also the transitional justice system established by the accords, the “Special Jurisdiction for Peace,” would include the full participation of international judges. Instead, FARC members accused of war crimes must provide full confessions, a full accounting of their assets, and carry out reparations to victims. An independent tribunal will issue sentences of up to eight years of “restricted liberty,” to be served in spaces the size of a small village or hamlet. If FARC members do not abide by the conditions stated in the accord, then they will be subject to ordinary justice that includes longer sentences in regular prisons.

The judges will be Colombian. The negotiations between the two parties on the issue of justice were greatly influenced by international jurists, the International Criminal Court, and the current state of practice within international law. Most importantly, the agreed-upon justice system prioritizes the recommendations that truth, justice and reparations prevail over jail time made by the over 60 victims who traveled to Havana to demand that the process respect their rights.

This is not “prison,” as Uribe points out, and the austerity of conditions in the restricted-liberty zones remains to be determined by the sentencing judges in each case. But it is far from impunity, and far from what the FARC would “design” for its members. Given the sheer number of cases of abuses that took place during five decades of conflict, this special jurisdiction for peace will ensure that emblematic cases are tried. This greatly contrasts with the current justice system, which is unable to produce quick and effective sanctions.

Statement:

“Judges will be appointed by people permissive with terrorism and akin to FARC’s alleged ideology.”

Inaccurate. The judges are being selected by a committee made up of a representative of the UN Secretary General, the European Court of Human Rights, the Criminal Chamber of Colombia’s Supreme Court, the non-governmental International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), and the Permanent Commission of the Colombian State University System. (The list of appointing bodies, agreed in August 2016, also included the Vatican, which declined to participate.) None of these institutions, or their representatives, can seriously be considered “permissive with terrorism” or sharing the FARC’s political views. Not only is this statement inaccurate, it stigmatizes judges in a manner that can undermine their security.

Statement:

“These sanctions are inadequate, they lack incarceration, and are inapplicable because those who are guilty will enjoy simultaneous eligibility for Congress or any other political post.”

Debatable. These sanctions are only modestly less “inadequate” than the 5-8 years in prison given to pro-government paramilitary leaders under a process developed under Uribe’s presidency. (The paramilitaries didn’t kidnap, recruit children, or lay landmines as often as the FARC did, but during their years of greatest activity they killed and displaced far more civilians.) It remains to be seen how austere conditions will be in the village-sized zones where FARC members will serve sentences for war crimes. It also remains to be seen whether sentencing judges will even allow FARC members to hold political office in locations outside their zones of confinement.

Statement:

“Narco trafficking is accepted as a political related crime for funding rebellion, with full impunity, eligibility and no extradition.”

Debatable. Narcotrafficking will be amnestied if it can be shown that the demobilizing guerrilla channeled all profits into the FARC’s war effort and did not profit personally. Demobilizing paramilitary group members were held to the same standard during Uribe’s presidency. Each demobilizing guerrilla must declare his or her assets, and if found to be lying, will be kicked out of the transitional justice system and face regular, criminal justice instead.

Statement:

“Simon Trinidad serves a sentence in the United States because of narco trafficking and the kidnapping of three American citizens, however, his accomplices enjoy impunity in Colombia.”

Inaccurate. FARC leader Simón Trinidad, who was captured in 2004, is in a U.S. prison for his indirect role in kidnapping three U.S. citizen defense contractors. He was not found guilty of narcotrafficking. FARC members who participated in kidnapping will not be amnestied, they will serve sentences in the transitional justice system.

Statement:

“Our Constitution has been substituted by the agreement with FARC. This amendment will be in place during 12 years.”

Inaccurate. The peace accord does not substitute for anything, as nothing in it suppresses or substitutes anything in Colombia’s constitution. For 12 years, the accord has a legal standing that prevents Colombia’s Congress from passing laws that might violate or undermine its commitments. That is a sound mechanism, and it’s hard to imagine any peace accord going forward without a similar protection, even if it may resemble a temporary constitutional amendment.

Statement:

“The NO VOTE won the Plebiscite.”

True with a caveat. Uribe’s U.S. audience should be aware that the “NO” victory was not overwhelming: the margin was 50.2 to 49.8 percent. More troubling was the remarkably low level of voter participation: 63 percent of eligible Colombians failed to vote on October 2, 2016. The majority of Colombians in regions currently impacted by the conflict voted in favor of the accord. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, who are disproportionate victims of displacement, violence and conflict, resoundingly voted in favor of peace.

Statement:

“The Government did not include substantial changes, and, with the non-understandable support from the Constitutional Court, did ratify the agreement through a proposition in Congress, in clear contradiction to the Plebiscite outcome.”

Debatable. After the original August 2016 accord was defeated by the October 2 plebiscite, Colombia’s government heard proposals from leading opponents, which it took to the FARC for several weeks of re-negotiation. The resulting November 2016 accord included over 500 changes. Substantial adjustments included severely restricting the size of zones to which FARC war criminals would be confined, requiring FARC members to declare all of their assets and provide “exhaustive and detailed” information about links to the drug trade, and requiring case-by-case consideration instead of blanket amnesty for drug trafficking. One change that Uribe and other accord opponents did not get was a revocation of the 10 automatic seats in Congress (5 in the 166-person House and 5 in the 102-person Senate) that FARC members will occupy between 2018 and 2026.

Uribe’s complaint that the government, the Constitutional Court, and the Congress overruled the Plebiscite outcome is, in fact, a recognition that three branches of government unanimously approved an accord that was significantly amended after losing the October 2 vote by a hair-thin margin.

Statement:

“the current Government has not gone as far as Maduro in Venezuela, but the inheritance will allow the possible weak or pro FARC Governments of the future to adopt the same path”

Inaccurate. The government of Juan Manuel Santos, which will be in office for one more year, has weakened neither free speech nor judicial independence: in fact, the Constitutional Court already struck down one of its first decrees for implementing the peace accords. It is not clear why Uribe thinks that Colombians might suddenly opt for a pro-FARC, pro-Venezuela political path. The latest bi-monthly Gallup poll (February, PDF) gave the FARC a 19 percent approval rating and 2 percent for Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. (It also showed Uribe’s own rating at 49 percent with +3-point net favorability, down from consistent measures over +40 during his presidency.) This statement is completely unfounded.

Statement:

“Colombia has poverty and unequal income distribution not because of the private sector, but because the lack of many more and robust private enterprises.”

Inaccurate. It is frankly odd to assert that Colombia’s poverty and inequality have a single cause. It is further bizarre not to include corruption and a weak rule of law among the causes. Meanwhile, the World Bank places Colombia in 53rd place, out of 190, among the world’s most business-friendly countries: not a stellar ranking, but not low enough to be the single explanation for poverty and one of the world’s worst rates of inequality (PDF). If anything, peace in conflictive regions would do much to improve security and opportunities for international investment in Colombia.

Statement:

“Only a few children have returned to their families out of more than 11,000 that were kidnapped.”

Debatable/Inaccurate. The statistic refers to all FARC recruitment of minors between 1975 and 2014. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of these children have long since grown up. Many deserted, were captured, or were killed by government forces. Some became guerrilla leaders. As of January, according to Colombia’s Defense Ministry, there were about 170 child combatants still in the ranks of demobilizing FARC; though turnovers to the Red Cross have begun, the process has been too slow.

Statement:

“Our secret services, some years ago, estimated at 40,000 the number of guns in the hands of FARC. The President of Colombia expressed recently that the organization was going to give up 14,000, however, FARC ́s members have announced that 7,000 guns will be let down.”

Debatable. There is no way to verify a statistic that comes from “our secret services,” but since the FARC are demobilizing about 7,000 fighters, a statistic of more than five guns per combatant seems laughably high.

Uribe’s statement doesn’t refer to FARC “militia” members: part-time, non-uniformed guerrilla supporters who operate mainly in urban areas. About 6,000 militia members—nobody knows the true amount—are expected to report to disarmament sites, where they are required to spend a few days registering and handing over whatever weapons they possess. This may increase the final weapons count beyond the 7,000 of which the UN mission is currently aware.

Statement:

“Nothing has been informed about the missiles and other dangerous weapons owned by FARC.”

Debatable. If the FARC have, or had, missiles, they did not use them during the conflict. The only evidence we’ve seen is in a 2012 video of a single unsuccessful use of a SAM-7 shoulder-fired missile.

Statement:

“Chavez and Maduro have been the supporters of terrorism in our country.”

Debatable. The Venezuelan government has done very little about the freedom with which Colombian guerrilla groups operate on the Venezuelan side of the common border. However, Colombian organized crime and paramilitary groups have also operated with great freedom in these poorly governed territories. Captured guerrilla communications indicate that FARC leaders discussed financial support with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, especially during a 2007 period when Uribe authorized Chávez to serve as a go-between in a failed effort to free guerrilla hostages. We don’t know whether any financial support was actually delivered.

In their contacts with guerrillas, Venezuelan leaders encouraged them to negotiate peace and to win power, as they did, through non-violent electoral politics. Venezuelan diplomatic and logistical support, too, contributed importantly to the success of Colombia’s peace talks with the FARC. If Venezuela was trying to promote “terrorism” in Colombia, why did it so robustly support peace negotiations?

March 22, 2017 — 0

Colombia’s New Transitional Justice Law Violates the Spirit of the Peace Accords

I just co-wrote, and WOLA just posted, a statement about a wrong turn for post-conflict Colombia.

The hardest part of Colombia’s peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas—it took 19 months to get there—was “transitional justice.” How do you hold human rights abusers accountable to their victims while still convincing them to turn in their weapons?

The peace accords came up with a formula that got more concessions out of the guerrillas than I expected, but left some things vague or to be defined later. We at WOLA had concerns about those vague areas, but didn’t oppose the accord, like some of our colleagues in the human rights community. We have taken a “wait and see” attitude, since so much was put off until later.

Well, “later” is now, as Colombia’s Congress is passing a law to establish the transitional justice system that the peace accord laid out. To our alarm, legislators, likely acting on behalf of powerful ex-military and wealthy allies, made two changes that undermine the accords’ intent.

First, they watered down the definition of “command responsibility” so that former military commanders can avoid justice by claiming there was nothing they could do to stop their subordinates. Second, they made it harder for the new justice system to punish civilians—landowners, political bosses, corporations—who may have aided and abetted serious human rights crimes.

This isn’t the final word. Colombia’s Constitutional Court will have a chance to make changes, and the International Criminal Court may weigh in at some point. But we can’t take a “wait and see” attitude toward this bill, which is a big step in the wrong direction.

Read our statement here.