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Are We Going Back to Square One in Colombia?
Are We Going Back to Square One in Colombia?
October 14, 2016
by Cecilia Zarate-Laun
“We will see each other after the next 10,000 deaths.”
— Alfonso Cano, head of a FARC delegation for peace talks in 1992, to members of the Colombian government’s delegation when peace conversations were broken in Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Last Sunday October 2nd there was a plebiscite in Colombia in order to obtain the people’s approval of the Agreements for ending the war between the FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government, with the hope of closing the last war in existence in the Western Hemisphere and starting a new form of making politics in Colombia without recourse to guns. The plebiscite was not necessary, as the Colombian Constitutional Court indicated. Advisers told the President not to do it, given the fact that the Constitution considers peace as a right of the citizens and seeking it a duty for whoever becomes President.
After 52 years of war, the results are 1906 villages destroyed by massacres; 7 million campesinos displaced; 280,000 civilian deaths by the three armed actors (paramilitaries, guerrillas and the Colombian Army); 45,000 disappeared; thousands of victims of kidnappings; thousands of false positives, that is, assassinated civilians by the Colombian Army with the goal of increasing their body count; and thousands of women raped and humiliated. Then, we ask ourselves, why did the voters in a country destroyed by war and pain, with millions of victims, reject this peace offer?
The Agreement was signed after 4 long years of intense negotiations in Havana. Cuba and Norway played a very important role as guarantors of this process. The Agreement had the support of the international community and shows a complex system of multinational verification. Besides, it has been considered as an example for conflict resolution. It was born from the valiant and risky challenge by President Juan Manuel Santos, who certainly played all his political capital with this initiative to achieve a durable peace in Colombia.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/14/are-we-going-back-to-square-one-in-colombia/