- 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.
A chronology of events related to peace, security, and human rights in Colombia.
February 5, 2020
- Fighting between the ELN and EPL displaces at least 236 people in the rural zone of Ábrego municipality, in Norte de Santander’s conflictive Catatumbo region.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
January 29, 2020
- President Duque travels to the embattled Catatumbo region, promising to accelerate investment in the Territorially Focused Development Plans (PDET) foreseen in the peace accord’s first chapter (Rural Reform).
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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”).
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.
January 15, 2020
- The CEO of the International Development Finance Corporation, a U.S. government body that issues loans and loan guarantees, visits Tumaco, the Pacific coast municipality that leads all Colombian municipalities in land area planted with coca. Adam Boehler promises US$5 billion in financing for private development projects, and witnesses a coca eradication operation.
January 15, 2020
- High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos says that Colombia will ask for a delay of its commitment to the Ottawa Landmine Treaty, extending the original goal of demining the country by 2021. This is in part due to an increase in use of landmines by armed groups, with more victims in 2019 than 2018.