‘Total peace’ is one of the main objectives of Gustavo Petro’s government in Colombia, even from his first days in office. In a dialogue with Sputnik, four analysts give their perspectives on the new negotiations with the National Liberation Army (ELN) in Havana and the chances of success of Colombia’s first progressive president.
Since his inauguration on August 7, the Historical Pact formula, headed by the first leftist president, Gustavo Petro, and the first Afro-descendant vice-president, Francia Márquez, has the challenge of turning their campaign promises, the most important of which is “total peace”, into reality.
Less than a week later, Colombian President Gustavo Petro launched his “total peace” agenda. On August 12, from Havana, the representation of the new government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) made official the resumption of negotiations, interrupted in 2019 during the mandate of Iván Duque (2018-2022), and the willingness to seek ‘total peace’, “stable, lasting and sustainable”.
The state delegation – made up of the High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Álvaro Leyva, and Senator Iván Cepeda – acknowledged that it listens to the social clamor for a dialogued solution to the armed conflict, even though the date for the formal start of the talks and the mechanisms are still unknown.
A LONG-AWAITED PEACE
For Luis Suárez Salazar, Ph.D., professor at the Raúl Roa García Institute of International Relations in Havana, peace has had a very significant connotation in that nation since the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, and the so-called ‘Bogotazo’, the riots that took place after the assassination of the leader of the Liberal Party.
From those events and until the Peace Agreements signed on November 24, 2016, between the top leadership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) and the government presided by Juan Manuel Santos (2010- 2018), “the political representatives of the most reactionary factions of the Colombian ruling classes have deployed a violent and criminal war”.
“The preservation – often with blood and fire – of that system of domination has had the support of the military-bureaucratic machinery and successive temporary Republican and Democratic mandates in the United States, from the presidency of Harry Truman (1945-1953) to that of Donald Trump (2016-2020),” he told Sputnik.
Hence, the 2016 agreements “were denaturalized, unfulfilled or boycotted” under Duque’s government, something that had already happened on previous occasions, such as the pacts signed in 1984 between the FARC-EP and the Executive of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) and between the M-19 and other guerrilla organizations in the late 1980s under Virgilio Barco (1986-1990).
“Hundreds of social leaders and former FARC-EP combatants were killed by the Colombian military or paramilitary forces from 2018 to the present; the brutal repression unleashed against the legitimate popular protests developed in different places of that country in 2021,” Suárez Salazar pointed out.
The analyst recalled that to the negative impact of the non-compliance with those agreements was added the impact of the multimillionaire Plan Colombia, constituted in 1999 between the Administrations of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) and the then president of the United States, Democrat Bill Clinton (1993-2001), continued by his successor George W. Busch (2001-2009).
“Also, by the Executive of Democrat Barack Obama (2009-2017), who impudently declared that the peace agreements signed in 2016 by the Colombian government had been the fruit of the successful bipartisan policies against narco-terrorism deployed towards Colombia by the US mandates mentioned above,” Suárez Salazar noted.
PETRO’S AGENDA
The recently inaugurated Colombian government has within its agenda an acceptable agreement with ELN, after the numerous pretexts used by his predecessor to suspend the talks promoted by Ecuador and Cuba, said Suárez Salazar.
For the expert, the guerrilla organization intends to contribute to the conformation and implementation of some agreement, as was evident in the recent visit of the Colombian Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva, who, two decades ago, played a relevant role at the beginning of the “frustrated dialogues and peace agreements between the FARC-EP and the government of Andres Pastrana, between 1998 and 2002”.
According to the Cuban academic, it would be a contradiction if the first progressive president of Colombia, characterized by a republican history, did not begin his administration with these negotiated solutions to the objective and subjective causes of the “bloody civil war” that has been going on for nearly six decades.
“That contradiction would be greater because, as it is known, Petro was a prominent militant in the ranks of the April 19 Movement (M-19), the first Colombian political-military organization that accepted the challenge of reaching a peace agreement with the government presided between 1986 and 1990 by the liberal Virgilio Barco,” he said.
The importance of resuming peace negotiations is that, at present, the ELN is the leading organization that continues in an armed uprising against the State, Jairo Estrada Álvarez, professor of the Department of Political Science, academic coordinator of the Masters in Latin American Political Studies at the National University of Colombia and director of Izquierda magazine, told Sputnik.
“That circumstance and the beginning of a dialogue during the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos (2012-2018) are the compelling reasons that led Gustavo Petro to resume the path in the search for total peace, one of the promises of his electoral campaign that granted him the top post in the Casa de Nariño,” he argued.
WHAT IS THE CONNOTATION OF PEACE?
“Peace represented, for several decades, an unrealizable dream and the remote possibility of perceiving a country where death would not be the way to resolve political and social conflicts,” Jaime Cedano Roldan, journalist, political analyst, and member of the Colombian Communist Party (PCC), told Sputnik.
Peace would then be an alternative for “not resorting to revolutionary violence in their attempt to break the wall of bipartisanship, to be heard or to save their lives,” he acknowledged.
In the view of Cedano – based in Seville (Spain) and author of the book “Paz en Colombia, chronicles of illusions, disenchantment, and vice-versa,” – peace symbolizes, for some, utopia, dream, freedom, equality and humanism and, for others, force, domination, and control, that is, “a word demonized and criminalized at different historical moments”.
Cedano Roldan considered that the arrival of a leftist government makes dialogue with the ELN more feasible. It is that his coalition, the Historical Pact (PH), assumed in its program the issue of peace as its identity and central aspect, given the confluence of all political and social forces immersed for years in that struggle.
“If you look at the map of the regions where PH mostly won, we see that they are the same ones where in the 2016 plebiscite the ‘Yes to peace’ won. So that is a mandate that came out of the ballot box. It does not mean that it will be an easy process since it is assumed that the ELN will try to win political spaces in the negotiation”, acknowledged the writer.
For Jorge Capelán, an Uruguayan political analyst living in Managua, one of the problems is that, in Colombia, “the US keeps extremely corrupt and criminal elites in power for too long”. On the other hand, “peace today means the establishment of a national agreement with the recognition of the popular spheres, native communities, and peasantry”.
In the expert’s opinion, in the conditions of emerging multipolarity in today’s world and the face of the evident decline of Western power, this agreement can materialize in practice, together with initiatives such as agrarian reform, the transformation of the state institutionalized by former President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) and of the economic model based on the most extreme neoliberalism.
WHAT DOES COLOMBIA GAIN?
The project of social, economic, and political transformations of the Historical Pact in a nation with a high death toll from political violence and internally displaced people can only advance from the achievement of total peace, said Cedano Roldan.
“Changing from an era of war and hatred to one of peace will not be an easy task, but it is a little easier today than yesterday,” said the analyst.
The Cuban Suárez Salazar also alluded to Foreign Minister Leyva’s commitment to the immediate execution of the agreement, both with the ELN and with the neo-insurgencies of the former FARC-EP, the so-called Nueva Marquetalia, and the various existing social movements.
THE CHALLENGES OF TOTAL PEACE
For Estrada Álvarez, it is not correct “to place in the same concept the whole spectrum of organizations related to the continuity of violence in its different modalities” since, in addition to the ELN and the FARC-EP dissidences, there are “paramilitary and drug trafficking groups, which respond to complex structures mostly of a counterinsurgent nature, against which the government launched the thesis of the acceptance of state justice.
Other challenges are the implementation of a “peace pedagogy” to achieve the greatest possible legitimacy, citizen support, and due social apprehension, and overcoming the “systemic resistances” from the dominant classes politically and economically benefited by violence and war, he added.
“The fourth responds to the agreements that Petro’s government will have to make with the United States; total peace is not conceivable without the assistance of that country, given Colombia’s unique condition in the region as a ‘strategic ally’ of the United States and a ‘global partner’ of NATO,” the expert pointed out.
With information from Sputnik