Colombia urges U.S. to remove FARC from U.S. terror watch list
Last week the UN Security Council unanimously endorsed sending a mission to monitor an eventual accord. The UN decision was an important victory for Santos, who is trying to raise funds from regional and international donors for a broad, 10- to 15-year effort to recover and develop vast swaths of Colombian territory – a territory the size of Switzerland – which had been under FARC control for five decades. The FARC-controlled areas did not benefit from the infrastructure and development programs of successive governments, and were the theater of on-going war between FARC, on the one hand, and the Colombian military and right-wing paramilitary militias, on the other hand.
Santos, when asked about how soon after the peace agreement is signed should FARC be removed from the U.S. terror list, said “the shorter the better.”
A coalition of Colombian paramilitary militias had to wait six years after it disarmed to be removed from the U.S. terror list.
Santos urged the United States to follow his lead in Colombia and suspend drug-related arrest warrants targeting the FARC’s top leadership. Many of these leaders are part of the FARC negotiating team in Havana.
In 2006, U.S. federal prosecutors obtained indictments against fifty FARC leaders for supplying more than half of the world’s cocaine. Santos said these charges were exaggerated, and that in any event, they would make it more difficult for the FARC leaders to carry out their commitments, which bare part of the peace agreement, to end the group’s involvement in the drug trade and join the government in the campaign to eradicate cocaine crops.
“Any effort by the United States to allow us to apply transitional justice, for example by suspending the arrest warrants, would help us tremendously,” he said.
Santos toldthe Guardian that FARC’s charging of a war tax on cocaine moving through FARC-controlled territory was not unlike tactics used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in its fight with Britain.
“The way the IRA was robbing banks, the guerrillas were financing themselves from drug trafficking,” he said.
He stressed, though, that if FARC members continue to enrich themselves through drugs, all bets are off.
“Let’s be very clear: if they don’t behave, they’ll be extradited [to the U.S.],” he said.
The State Department insists that only prosecutors can suspend the arrest warrants.
Santos noted that under Plan Colombia, launched by President Bill Clinton fifteen years ago, Colombia has evolved from a near-failed state into one of the world’s fastest-growing emerging markets, with ever-decreasing levels of conflict-linked violence.
As the country has stabilized, the United States has reduced its economic aid to the country – but Santos said he hoped the United States would now consider bringing funding for Plan Columbia to levels closer to those of fifteen years ago. He said this increased aid is necessary as Colombia turns to building roads, schools, and other infrastructure, and as the state tries to extend its reach to area which traditionally had been forsaken and to which, beginning in the early 1960s, the government has been denied access altogether.
Santos will also meet with GOP leaders in Congress – an important meeting, since some conservative Republicans have joined Colombian conservatives in criticizing what they see as Santos’s easing up on the war on drugs, and leniency toward rebels who committed grave atrocities.
“Colombia is at a tipping point,” Santos said. “If we receive the help that we need, because we are in a difficult situation financially as is all of Latin America, we can take advantage of this new situation.”
