Colombia-The Way We Were

COLOMBIA

The Way We Were

The Colombian government’s 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was supposed to help the South American country end a 52-year-long insurgencythat claimed as many as 220,000 lives, and move beyond it.

Now it appears as if tensions over the peace accord could help deliver victory to right-wing presidential candidate Ivan Duque, who wants to reexamine the deal, potentially reigniting the FARC’s insurgency in the country’s remote interior.

“If the FARC read it in a certain way, we could see a lot of members, including mid-level commanders, going back to violence,” International Crisis Group senior analyst Kyle Johnson told NBC News.

With the support of 34 percent of the electorate, according to Reuters, Duque is now the front-runner in the race that begins May 27 to succeed President Juan Manuel Santos, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for the agreement but cannot serve another term due to term limits.

Duque is likely to wind up in a runoff against Gustavo Petro, a left-wing former Bogotá mayor who was a member of M-19, the second largest rebel movement in Colombia after FARC. Petro has the support of around 22.5 percent of voters.

As the Financial Times explained, Petro wants to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, redistribute land, make education free, and increase the government’s involvement in healthcare and banking.

It’s a vision that leftists in Venezuela and Cuba have also pursued with less-than-rosy results.

“He has all these lovely ideas, which would turn Colombia into some sort of beautiful Nordic idyll, but the truth is he would have to do it with the checkbook of a middle-income country,” University of the Andes economist Oskar Nupia said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Duque, meanwhile, has the luxury of criticizing a deal between the government and FARC that is full of holes.

Last month, authorities arrested a former FARC commander accused of conspiring to export tons of cocaine to the US. Notre Dame University’s Kroc Institute, which is monitoring the enforcement of the deal, recently issued a report finding that few of the peace pact’s more than 550 conditions are being followed. Many FARC fighters are also now saying they never agreed to the deal at all.

Other forces could also be conspiring against the agreement. Jacobin, a leftist online magazine, noted for example that many former Colombia military leaders who support Duque also face potential war-crimes prosecutions under the peace deal. That’s a reason to kill it, surely, from their point of view.

A perfect storm of competing interests could plunge Colombia back into turmoil. That’s even though few want to see a return to the way it was.

W