Author: Adam Isacson

February 6, 2020

  • The Constitutional Court conditions the government’s plan to implement a rapid increase in state presence in five “Strategic Comprehensive Intervention Zones” (ZEII, or “Zonas Futuro”). It requires the Zones to take into account the mandates of the peace accord and to include, explicitly, the participation of communities.
  • The five small zones, just getting underway with the December emission of a decree, overlap with the peace accord’s Territorially Focused Development Plans (PDETs) in five regions: Catatumbo; the Pacific zone of Nariño; the Bajo Cauca region of Antioquia and Córdoba; Arauca; and the zone around the Chiribiquete National Park in Caquetá.
  • The law and decree had placed the zones under the purview of the government’s National Security Council, which is made up entirely of government bodies. The modification is the result of a suit brought by several human rights groups.

Tags: Constitutional Court, Stabilization, Zonas Futuro

February 6, 2020

February 6, 2020

  • A Bogotá judge sends to preventive detention six people with alleged ties to FARC dissident groups, who stand accused of infiltrating Colombia’s massive November 21 protests and committing acts of violence and vandalism. They are allegedly tied to the dissident organizations of Gentil Duarte in Guaviare and “Jerónimo” in Arauca.

Tags: Dissident Groups

February 6, 2020

February 5, 2020

Photo source: Efraín Herrera, Colombian Presidency

President Duque lays the ceremonial first brick in what will be a “Museum of Memory” honoring conflict victims. Some victims’ groups protest outside against Duque’s appointed director of the governmental Center for Historical Memory, Dario Acevedo (left), who in the past held the common right-wing view of denying the existence of an armed conflict.

Tags: Human Rights, Victims

February 5, 2020

February 5, 2020

  • Alias “Pablito,” the commander of the ELN’s powerful Eastern War Front, issues a communiqué offering to cease the group’s attacks on Colombia’s energy infrastructure if the country meets seven conditions. The conditions are unlikely to receive the Duque government’s serious consideration: they include a 50 percent cut in fuel prices, the elimination of tolls, a sharp increase in social investment using oil revenues, and a suspension of fracking.

Tags: ELN, Energy

February 5, 2020

Informe No. 19 Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos Ilícitos – PNIS

Publicado por la Oficina de las Naciones Unidas Contra la Droga y el Delito el 4 de febrero de 2020.

A detailed update, as of October 31, 2019, on the state of the Colombian government’s illicit crop substitution program within the framework of chapter 4 of the 2016 peace accord. (Link at unodc.org)

Tags: Coca, Crop Substitution, Directorate for Illicit Crop Substitution, Illicit Crop Eradication

February 4, 2020

February 3, 2020

  • Colombian Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo pays a visit to the United States. He visits the U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force-North in Key West, Florida, which monitors suspicious aerial and maritime trafficking. He meets with top officials at Southern Command headquarters in Doral, Miami. And he travels to Washington for a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Photo source: Juan Chiari, U.S. Army Garrison-Miami, U.S. Southern Command

Tags: Defense Ministry, U.S. Policy

February 3, 2020

February 3, 2020

  • The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network of historic sites, museums and memory initiatives, sends a letter notifying Colombia’s National Center for Historical Memory that it has been expelled from the organization.
  • The Coalition’s director, Elizabeth Silkes, had sent a letter in September 2019 to the National Center’s director, Darío Acevedo, asking him to reconfirm the Center’s commitment to the conflict’s victims and to recognize the existence of the armed conflict, among other issues. Acevedo did not respond to that letter.
  • Acevedo, a very conservative intellectual, took office in February 2019 as a very controversial choice for a government body dedicated to preserving the memory of conflict victims. In a 2017 interview with Medellín’s El Colombiano, he had said, “Some people believe that what Colombia lived through was an armed conflict, something like a confrontation between the state and some organizations that rose up against it. Others think that it was the state defending itself against a terrorist threat and from some organizations that had degenerated in their political perspective by mixing themselves in with kidnapping, narcotrafficking, and crimes against humanity. Though the Victims’ Law says that what was lived was an armed conflict, that can’t become an official truth.”
  • On February 5, President Duque and Director Acevedo preside over a ceremony commemorating the laying of the first stone at the construction site where the Historical Memory Center will build a Museum of Memory, a project begun during the Santos government. Some victims’ groups, most notably the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes, which wasn’t invited to attend, protest outside the event.
Photo source: Efraín Herrera, Colombian Presidency
  • A February 11 letter from 63 prominent international scholars voices concern “for the ostensible loss of credibility” that the National Center for Historical Memory has suffered under Acevedo’s leadership.

Tags: National Center for Historical Memory, Victims

February 3, 2020

February 3, 2020

  • The Electoral Observation Mission (MOE, a non-governmental organization) reports that 19 political killings took place in Colombia in January 2020: 14 social leaders, a community action board leader, and four political leaders.

Tags: Attacks on social leaders

February 3, 2020

February 2, 2020

  • Maximum FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño alias “Timochenko” publishes an open letter alleging that the government is failing to honor its peace accord commitments and that the process is approaching a “precipice.” Demobilized guerrillas, the FARC leader writes, “now find no other solution other than to abandon the ETCR [former demobilization zones] and seek another place to settle and continue their reincorporation process. They are forcibly displaced.… In the Havana peace accords the Colombian state committed itself to provide the reincorporated guerrillas with [security] guarantees. And to social leaders and opposition leaders, all who participate in politics. It’s absolutely clear that none of that has been complied with.”
  • On February 3 the government’s high counselor for stabilization and consolidation, Emilio Archila, dismisses the FARC leader’s communication as “a political letter.” Archila says that Londoño “is mistaken surely in good faith, ignorant, but in good faith,” about the Prosecutor’s Office’s alleged failure to prosecute killings of FARC members. He tells reporters, “The FARC director is wrong to believe that he can impose the way in which the accords should be implemented. The Constitutional Court has been clear that the accords should be implemented during three presidential terms… according to each President’s vision.”
  • On January 27, Archila had announced a package of ten protection measures for ex-combatants. These include an attention plan for the majority of ex-fighters who no longer live in the ETCR; increased training in self-protection; more resources for the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía); and monthly meetings of agencies responsible for protection to review new threats and response measures.

Tags: Compliance with Commitments, Politics of Peace, Protection of Excombatants

February 2, 2020

February 1, 2020

  • In Bogotá, police arrest former FARC leader Ely Mejía Morales, alias “Martín Sombra.” Though he has been reportedly cooperating with the demobilization and transitional justice process, “Sombra” stands accused of playing a role in the ransom kidnapping of a rancher in Caquetá in 2017, after the peace accord went into effect. Martín Sombra is also known as the “jailer of the FARC” for his role in managing camps where the group kept kidnap victims for months or years at a time.

Tags: Justice System, Kidnapping

February 1, 2020

February 1, 2020

  • Police carrying out manual coca eradication in the Rio Mexicano sector of Tumaco, Nariño, enter into a confrontation with residents. A farmer named Segundo Girón is killed by a bullet; three police are reported wounded. About half of the coca-growing families in the Rio Mexicano area have signed on to the peace accord’s crop substitution program, the rest did not.

Tags: Coca, Crop Substitution, Illicit Crop Eradication, Narino

February 1, 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