Colombia: The Ticking Clock

COLOMBIA

The Ticking Clock

After some five decades of war and years of bitter negotiations, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos managed to secure a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in November 2016 – promising an end to a brutal conflict that killed over 200,000 people and displaced nearly seven million, the Washington Post reported.

President Santos won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. But more than a year later, he’s still struggling to put the deal into effect as the end of his presidency approaches.

Strides have been made to realize many measures in the accord, wrote University of Birmingham research fellow Sanne Weber for the Conversation.

Members of Colombia’s Truth Commission have been elected, charged with developing a common narrative for the conflict. The nation’s Constitutional Court has approved a special judicial body for trying war-crime cases, and the FARC has disarmed and demobilized.

Even so, Weber writes, those efforts took months to accomplish, begging the question, “What will these peace and justice measures actually achieve?”

“Survivors’ experiences suggest that their key concerns are security and access to basic public services,” she added.

Such infrastructural development has been painfully slow – especially for those living in rural areas once controlled by the FARC.

Violence is rampant in the jungle enclaves abandoned by the FARC, with new guerrilla groups and criminal gangs sprouting up to fill the vacuum.

Some estimates count 55,000 forced displacements in 2017 alone, Euronews reported, while more than 100 human-rights activists were killed in Colombia in 2017.

“People here say they are going to kill everyone,” said Diomedes Isarama, from the remote town of Quibdo, referring to the National Liberation Army. Members of the leftist group killed his son, an indigenous leader, in October, forcing the family into exile.

“We survive, we have accommodation but sometimes we eat only once a day,” Isarama added.

The National Liberation Army (ELN) is now negotiating its own peace accord with the Colombian government, Reuters reported.

The group, which has about 2,000 members, has somewhat abided by the ceasefire that’s in place during the talks, being held in Quito, Ecuador. But it continues to spar with drug gangs and regularly engages in kidnappings and extortion, Bloomberg reported.

“We have to keep fighting, we have to keep shooting, to be able to build a more just Colombia,” a commander in the group toldBloomberg. “I don’t see enough common ground for the ELN to leave more than 50 years of its history on a negotiating table in Quito.”

If persistent fringe groups and an isolated population weren’t enough, President Santos is also being tripped up by members of Colombia’s Congress. Many of them are using the confusing details of the 2016 peace accord as a campaign stump for the 2018 presidential election, wrote Fabio Andres Diaz, of the International Institute of Social Studies, for the Conversation.

“If Colombia’s Congress keeps up its stall tactics, its country’s peace process may soon become just another statistic.”