Month: January 2020

Disidencias de las Farc y ‘gaitanistas’: la nueva guerra que se cocina en Ituango

Publicado por Verdad Abierta el 30 de enero de 2020.

The 18th Front FARC dissident group and the Gulf Clan paramilitaries are increasing their presence in the historically conflictive municipality of Ituango, Antioquia, where demobilized FARC members are especially vulnerable.

Tags: Antioquia, Armed Groups, Demobilization Disarmament and Reintegration, Dissident Groups, Gulf Clan, Protection of Excombatants

January 30, 2020

January 30, 2020

  • Colombia’s Supreme Court announces its choice of Francisco Barbosa, a lawyer who had been President Duque’s human rights advisor, to be the country’s next prosecutor-general (Fiscal-General).

Tags: Justice System

January 30, 2020

January 28, 2020

  • Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez criticizes the peace process, which she opposed, in a forum hosted by Semana magazine. “There’s pressure for implementation of the accord with the FARC,” she says. “An accord, that I would personally say, is semi-failed, even though the government has respected the accord’s institutionally. But the FARC as such, they didn’t keep their commitments to those who believed in them.”
  • President Duque contradicts Minister Gutierrez, assuring that implementation advances “a little more” every day, and that “peace with legality is going well, it is being executed.”
  • Stabilization Advisor Emilio Archila says that the government does have concerns about “the pace with which some of the FARC’s obligations are being fulfilled, like information about child combatants and landmines.”
  • FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño tells El Tiempo that Gutiérrez’s comments are “unfortunate, very unfortunate. I could practically tell you that she is putting a tombstone over us when she says that we haven’t complied.”

Tags: Compliance with Commitments, Politics of Peace

January 28, 2020

January 27, 2020

  • A civilian judge sends to preventive prison, pending trial, an Army colonel who allegedly green-lighted the April 22 murder of former FARC combatant Dimar Torres in Catatumbo. “This man should be killed,” Col. Jorge Armando Pérez Amézquita reportedly said of Torres, whose murder by soldiers caused a national outcry. “We can’t stand to see him captured only to get fat in jail.” The corporal who carried out the deed was sentenced to 20 years in prison in late 2019.

Tags: Army, Civil-Military Relations, Justice System, Protection of Excombatants

January 27, 2020

January 27, 2020

  • Senate President Lidio García raises the possibility that the body might re-visit legislation, foreseen in the peace accord, that would create 16 temporary congressional districts for conflict victims, not political parties. Though legislation to create these districts won a majority of Senate votes in late 2017, the absence of senators from the chamber raised questions about whether a quorum existed. A quorum did exist if one excluded the seats of senators who had been suspended, for corruption or similar reasons, but the legislation was ruled as failing to pass, and the special districts were not created for the 2018 legislative elections. In light of a 2019 Constitutional Court decision on the quorum question, Senator García signals an intention to send the 2017 bill to President Duque as approved legislation. If Duque signs it, the temporary seats for victims, representing 16 conflict zones, would be created.
  • High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos casts doubt on the temporary congressional districts, contending that the Constitutional Court’s 2019 decision cannot be applied retroactively to a vote that took place in 2017.

Tags: Congress of Colombia, Constitutional Court, High Commissioner for Peace, Politics of Peace, Special Congressional Districts, Victims

January 27, 2020

January 27, 2020

  • The Colombian government sends to the UN Human Rights Council a strongly worded, 20-page statement taking issue with the work of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michael Forst. On December 26, 2019, Forst had published a report that was quite critical of the government’s response to the crisis of killings of social leaders, relying significantly on data from non-governmental sources. The Colombian government had refused to allow Forst to revisit the country for a follow-up visit.

Tags: Attacks on social leaders, Human Rights, Human Rights Defenders, UN

January 27, 2020

January 27, 2020

  • Truth Commission President Francisco De Roux says that the Defense Ministry has gone a year without honoring requests for classified files necessary for the elaboration of the Commission’s report. De Roux says he has spent more than a month seeking a meeting with Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo, whose order could probably produce the needed files.

Tags: Civil-Military Relations, Defense Ministry, Transitional Justice, Truth Commission

January 27, 2020

January 26, 2020

About 75 paratroopers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division carry out a paratrooper exercise at the Tolemaida base in Tolima. They were joined by 40 more personnel from U.S. Army South, the Southern Command’s Texas-based army component. “This gives us a repetition at projecting power through joint forcible entry,” 82nd Airborne spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Burns told Army Times.

Photo source: Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett at DVIDS
Photo source: Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett at DVIDS
Photo source: Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett at DVIDS
Photo source: Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett at DVIDS
Photo source: Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett at DVIDS

Tags: U.S. Policy

January 26, 2020

January 26, 2020

  • The FARC political party suffers some high-profile defections. Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dutch citizen who joined the guerrillas in 2002 and was part of the negotiating team in Cuba, left the party “because I’ve had years without feeling in sync with what is decided, discussed, or planned.” Also leaving for political reasons was Martín Batalla, who ran one of the most successful ex-combatant reintegration processes. Neither defector appeared to be taking up arms—just leaving the ex-guerrilla political party.

Tags: FARC Political Future, Politics of Peace

January 26, 2020

January 24, 2020

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) refuses to admit Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias “Jorge 40,” the former head of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)’s northern bloc, currently imprisoned in the United States for narcotrafficking. The JEP notes that Tovar should have submitted to the Justice and Peace process set up for paramilitary leaders after 2006, but that he did not.

Tags: JEP, Paramilitarism, Transitional Justice

January 24, 2020

January 24, 2020

  • Hernando Londoño, director of the program implementing the peace accords’ crop substitution commitments (Comprehensive National Program for Illicit Crops, or PNIS), causes a stir by alleging that no leaders of coca substitution efforts have been killed. While dozens of people involved in coca substitution efforts have been murdered, Londoño tells El Espectador, they have not been leaders of coca farmer associations. He goes on to allege that “one or two last year” were killed because they were demanding kickbacks from the payments that coca growers were receiving from the PNIS program. “Those who have been killed were obviously involved in the program,” Londoño went on, “which is regrettable and should not happen, but many cases have to do with the same coca leaf business.”

Tags: Attacks on social leaders, Crop Substitution, Directorate for Illicit Crop Substitution

January 24, 2020

January 23, 2020

  • The U.S. Department of Justice communicates that top former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, who headed the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), will be returned to Colombia on March 27, twelve years after his extradition to the United States. A Colombian judge has determined that Mancuso has already served his required jail time under the “Justice and Peace” process that governed the AUC’s 2003-06 demobilization, though he must continue to cooperate with that process. Mancuso intends to collaborate with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) because, as a landowner, he supported paramilitary groups for several years before becoming a paramilitary leader.

Tags: Extradition, Paramilitarism, Transitional Justice, U.S. Policy

January 23, 2020

January 23, 2020

  • A delegation from the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor’s Office completes a four-day visit to Colombia. In a statement, the Office “reiterates the importance of the SJP [Special Jurisdiction for Peace, or JEP] and the necessity to maintain its integrity and independence, as well as the need to provide it with the necessary resources and support to carry out its important mandate.”

Tags: International Criminal Court, JEP, Transitional Justice

January 23, 2020

‘The Guerrillas Are the Police’: Social Control and Abuses by Armed Groups in Colombia’s Arauca Province and Venezuela’s Apure State

Published by Human Rights Watch, January 22, 2020.

Abuses including murder, forced labor, child recruitment, and rape are often committed as part of the groups’ strategy to control the social, political, and economic life of Arauca and Apure. Impunity for such abuses is the rule.

Tags: Arauca, Armed Groups, Borders, Child Combatants, Dissident Groups, ELN, Human Rights, Venezuela Crisis

January 22, 2020

January 20, 2020

  • More than 10 days of fighting between FARC dissident factions and paramilitaries displaces over 3,000 people in Tumaco, Nariño. The dissident factions are the Oliver Sinisterra Front and the Comandante Alfonso Cano Western Bloc, the paramilitary group is called “Los Contadores” (“The Bookkeepers”).

Tags: Armed Groups, Displacement, Dissident Groups, Paramilitarism

January 20, 2020

January 19, 2020

  • Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognized by dozens of countries including the United States and Colombia as the country’s legitimate president, pays a visit to President Duque in Bogotá.

Tags: Venezuela

January 19, 2020