ColombiaColombia, FARC to sign historic peace deal today, ending 52-year war

Published 24 August 2016

Colombia’s government and the leftist FARC rebel organization have reached a final and comprehensive peace agreement which puts an end to Latin America’s longest war. The FARC campaign against successive Colombian governments began in 1964, leaving more than 220,000 people dead and more than six-and-a-half million displaced. After four years of negotiations, the pace deal will be signed Wednesday evening in Havana, Cuba.

The front-page headline of this morning’s (Wednesday) El Tiempo says it all: “¡Histórico!: Gobierno y Farc llegan a acuerdo y cierran negociación.”

Indeed. Colombia’s government and the leftist FARC rebel organization have reached a final and comprehensive peace agreement which puts an end to Latin America’s longest war. The FARC campaign against successive Colombian governments began in 1964, leaving more than 220,000 people dead and more than six-and-a-half million displaced.

After four years of negotiations, the pace deal will be signed Wednesday evening in Havana, Cuba.

El Tiemponotes that the deal, after being signed by the Colombian government and FARC leaders, will be submitted to popular plebiscite scheduled for late September or early October.

A coalition of conservative politicians and parties, led by former president Alvaro Uribe, has been campaigning against peace deal, arguing that it offers an amnesty to people who committed large-scale atrocities and who, their Marxist proclamations notwithstanding, were actively collaborating with the dreaded drug cartels in the 1980s and 1990s.

The 7,000 or so remaining FARC fighters will hold a vote on whether to approve the deal, which calls for the disarming of FARC and turning it into a political movement.

The agreement calls for the FARC fighters to be initially concentrated in twenty-three areas across Colombia. After the FARC fighters are settled in these areas, they will, over a period of six months, hand over their weapons to UN observers.

The FARC has presented itself as the guardian of the neglected an exploited Colombian farmers, and the peace deal contains government guarantees to increase the funding going to rural development, the replacement of drug crops with legal crops, and a program to facilitate political participation for a demobilized FARC in Colombia’s political system.

The deal also establishes a transitional justice system for crimes committed by FARC followers. The system will allow FARC members who confess to committing crimes to avoid serving their sentences in jail.

It is this point which has galvanized the opposition to the deal. During their five decades of guerrilla war, FARC fighters have committed many abuses – murdering judges, politicians, and ordinary people; kidnapping children for ransom; indiscriminately shelling of villages and towns; forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of people; and colluding with the drug cartels in effort to destroy the Colombian state.

Uribe, who served as president from 2002 to 2010, led a tough military campaign against FARC, with open U.S. support, which significantly weakened the organization and drove it to the negotiation table. He said that FARC has been so weakened, that many of the concession given to FARC by the current Colombian government, led by Manuel Santos, were unnecessary. The anti-deal coalition he leads says that, at a minimum, the deal should be renegotiated to include jail time for crimes against humanity and a ban on those convicted of such crimes from holding public office.

The Santos government says, however, that if the deal is rejected in the coming referendum, it will mean an end of the negotiations and a return to war.

El Tiemponotes that the most recent round of public opinion polls show the Yes and No votes practically tied – each with a third of vote. A third of the voters say they intend to abstain.

FARC has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. Two months ago the Colombian government has officially asked the Department of State to remove FARC from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list.