 |
| Petro with paramilitary boss Salvatore Mancuso. |
Gustavo Petro as part of his misnamed policy of Total Peace has named 18 former mafia bosses in the AUC as Peace Promoters.[1] The list reads like a proper list of war criminals and murderers with the odd well-known paedophile. It reads like a who’s who of the worst criminals in the state paramilitary strategy of the war on popular movements. There is a logic to the nominations, but it is a perverse one due to what the act means as part of an attempt to rewrite the history of the armed conflict.
Under the Total Peace strategy, anyone who has and uses weapons in a more or less organised and coordinated fashion is placed on the same moral, historic and political plane, regardless of whether they are drug traffickers, people traffickers, paramilitaries or guerrillas. In that discourse, Colombia is simply a violent country besieged by violent groups. The dominant discourse of the Left and human rights groups in the 1980s and 1990s of a conflict with political and socio-economic roots is left far behind as is the discourse of paramilitarism as state response. If a paramilitary such as the sanguinary Jorge 40 could be a Promoter, why not another murderer like General Rito Alejo del Río? At the end of the day, they were both hired killers for the state, one of them more formally linked than the other to the state payroll, but both were state agents. That is how many of the current Congressmen and women of the Historic Pact used to describe them, though when they were not Congress members for the government of course.
In 2015, Iván Cepeda said, during the peace process with the FARC guerrillas, that paramilitarism should be banned.
Under the Total Peace policy, there is no difference drawn between a guerrilla, a drug trafficker or a paramilitary. The paramilitary boss Hernán Giraldo Serna, a paedophile and rapist more prolific than the infamous Garavito is now a respectable person who can be a Peace Promoter. He raped more than 200 females, most of them young girls.[3] In February of this year he was expelled from the Justice and Peace Law system because he continued to rape minors who he ordered to be brought to the prison.[4] Petro has obviously no standards and less still any decency.
So, the ELN can have four Promotors in their dialogues with the state and a supposedly disarmed and demobilised group will have 18 promotors. It is claimed they are going to facilitate the “surrender” of criminal groups and thus legitimate the state strategy of paramilitarism. They will no longer go down in history as the bloodthirsty types they are, the state’s and multinationals’ hired hands, those that reshaped the Colombian countryside, the social and trade union movements in the country. No. They will go down in history as Peace Promotors. “Good lads”, a legitimate group in an illegitimate war.
It shouldn’t surprise us. From the beginning of the peace process with the FARC, there was a notable creeping change in the discourse of many NGOs, politicians and conflict analysts. They began to relegate the paramilitaries to the past as just being just another group in the armed conflict. With the final demobilisation of the FARC and its rapid abandoning of any left principles or positions to become a group that doesn’t even deserve to be accused of being reformist, as reformists normally want reforms, the conflict was circumscribed to a fight between armed groups i.e. groups with weapons, but not proposals and in that world, those who scorched entire regions to displace millions of people to favour companies named by the paramilitaries themselves, such as Chiquita, Ecopetrol, Postobon,[5] amongst others, are now Peace Promotors. The list is long and there are many companies still to be named.
Amongst those who acknowledged they had financed the paramilitaries is the business association FEDEGAN (National Cattle Ranchers Association). Their top boss, José Felix Lafaurie publicly accepted they had done so[6] and now he is negotiator for the state in the dialogues with the ELN and at the same time a promotor of a paramilitary rearming, although he calls it Solidarity Security Fronts.
The nomination as Peace Promotors of the representatives of a state strategy that never ended, though it did undergo a transformation, is an insult to the victims. But it also rewrites the conflict, the Peace Promotors are “good lads” from various legal state strategies such as the Rural Security Coops (Convivir), the Peasant Soldiers, the Security Fronts, the Informants Network and of course the recent initiatives of FEDEGAN. The infamous phrase from Trump on the fascist marches in the USA that “there are good people on both sides” comes to mind.
The 18 Promotors will go down in history not as rapists, murderers, torturers and paedophiles, but rather as examples of “good people” on both sides of the Colombian conflict. The saddest part is that those who write this epithet of paramilitarism are the representatives of a “Left” that increasingly wants to ingratiate itself with the Right.
[1] El Espectador (12/11/2024) Estos son los 18 exjefes paramilitares de AUC que Petro nombró gestores de paz.
[2] El Ciudadano (12/03/2015) Iván Cepeda: Paramilitarismo debe quedar proscrito si queremos llegar a la paz en Colombia. Ángel Barraza.
[3] Infobae (13/11/2024) Este es el prontuario sexual de Hernán Giraldo: uno de los 18 exparamilitares designados gestores de paz por Gustavo Petro. Santiago Cifuentes Quintero.
[4] See Corte Suprema (06/02/2024) Corte confirma expulsión de Justicia y Paz del exjefe paramilitar Hernán Giraldo, por continuar actos de violencia sexual luego de haberse desmovilizado.
[5] El Cambio No 704 diciembre 2006/enero 2007 Diez Preguntas (Entrevista con José Félix Lafaurie) p.48
[6] El País (18/05/2023) De Ecopetrol a Postobón: las grandes empresas señaladas por Mancuso de financiar la guerra paramilitar. Camila Osorio.
Under the Total Peace strategy, anyone who has and uses weapons in a more or less organised and coordinated fashion is placed on the same moral, historic and political plane, regardless of whether they are drug traffickers, people traffickers, paramilitaries or guerrillas. In that discourse, Colombia is simply a violent country besieged by violent groups. The dominant discourse of the Left and human rights groups in the 1980s and 1990s of a conflict with political and socio-economic roots is left far behind as is the discourse of paramilitarism as state response. If a paramilitary such as the sanguinary Jorge 40 could be a Promoter, why not another murderer like General Rito Alejo del Río? At the end of the day, they were both hired killers for the state, one of them more formally linked than the other to the state payroll, but both were state agents. That is how many of the current Congressmen and women of the Historic Pact used to describe them, though when they were not Congress members for the government of course.
In 2015, Iván Cepeda said, during the peace process with the FARC guerrillas, that paramilitarism should be banned.
The paramilitaries arose as part of a state strategy in the midst of an armed conflict, so strictly speaking they are not one of the parts in the negotiation. In reality they should be subjected to a different type of treatment, of talks. Ideally those groups would disappear and be banned and proscribed forever…
The fact is that paramilitarism should be proscribed in the life of the country, if we ever want to achieve a Colombia in peace. It is unthinkable that a peace deal would be signed and the paramilitaries continued to exist and provoke violence…
In the first and second government of Álvaro Uribe people spoke of a peace process with the paramilitaries, but that is the wrong term to use. Peace would mean they have been in confrontation. There was no peace process between the state and the paramilitaries because they had never been in conflict. The Colombian state, as I stated previously had created the paramilitaries as a war strategy, and it was a strategy that was used to concentrate land and to attack the Colombian peasantry.[2]
Under the Total Peace policy, there is no difference drawn between a guerrilla, a drug trafficker or a paramilitary. The paramilitary boss Hernán Giraldo Serna, a paedophile and rapist more prolific than the infamous Garavito is now a respectable person who can be a Peace Promoter. He raped more than 200 females, most of them young girls.[3] In February of this year he was expelled from the Justice and Peace Law system because he continued to rape minors who he ordered to be brought to the prison.[4] Petro has obviously no standards and less still any decency.
So, the ELN can have four Promotors in their dialogues with the state and a supposedly disarmed and demobilised group will have 18 promotors. It is claimed they are going to facilitate the “surrender” of criminal groups and thus legitimate the state strategy of paramilitarism. They will no longer go down in history as the bloodthirsty types they are, the state’s and multinationals’ hired hands, those that reshaped the Colombian countryside, the social and trade union movements in the country. No. They will go down in history as Peace Promotors. “Good lads”, a legitimate group in an illegitimate war.
It shouldn’t surprise us. From the beginning of the peace process with the FARC, there was a notable creeping change in the discourse of many NGOs, politicians and conflict analysts. They began to relegate the paramilitaries to the past as just being just another group in the armed conflict. With the final demobilisation of the FARC and its rapid abandoning of any left principles or positions to become a group that doesn’t even deserve to be accused of being reformist, as reformists normally want reforms, the conflict was circumscribed to a fight between armed groups i.e. groups with weapons, but not proposals and in that world, those who scorched entire regions to displace millions of people to favour companies named by the paramilitaries themselves, such as Chiquita, Ecopetrol, Postobon,[5] amongst others, are now Peace Promotors. The list is long and there are many companies still to be named.
Amongst those who acknowledged they had financed the paramilitaries is the business association FEDEGAN (National Cattle Ranchers Association). Their top boss, José Felix Lafaurie publicly accepted they had done so[6] and now he is negotiator for the state in the dialogues with the ELN and at the same time a promotor of a paramilitary rearming, although he calls it Solidarity Security Fronts.
The nomination as Peace Promotors of the representatives of a state strategy that never ended, though it did undergo a transformation, is an insult to the victims. But it also rewrites the conflict, the Peace Promotors are “good lads” from various legal state strategies such as the Rural Security Coops (Convivir), the Peasant Soldiers, the Security Fronts, the Informants Network and of course the recent initiatives of FEDEGAN. The infamous phrase from Trump on the fascist marches in the USA that “there are good people on both sides” comes to mind.
The 18 Promotors will go down in history not as rapists, murderers, torturers and paedophiles, but rather as examples of “good people” on both sides of the Colombian conflict. The saddest part is that those who write this epithet of paramilitarism are the representatives of a “Left” that increasingly wants to ingratiate itself with the Right.
[1] El Espectador (12/11/2024) Estos son los 18 exjefes paramilitares de AUC que Petro nombró gestores de paz.
[2] El Ciudadano (12/03/2015) Iván Cepeda: Paramilitarismo debe quedar proscrito si queremos llegar a la paz en Colombia. Ángel Barraza.
[3] Infobae (13/11/2024) Este es el prontuario sexual de Hernán Giraldo: uno de los 18 exparamilitares designados gestores de paz por Gustavo Petro. Santiago Cifuentes Quintero.
[4] See Corte Suprema (06/02/2024) Corte confirma expulsión de Justicia y Paz del exjefe paramilitar Hernán Giraldo, por continuar actos de violencia sexual luego de haberse desmovilizado.
[5] El Cambio No 704 diciembre 2006/enero 2007 Diez Preguntas (Entrevista con José Félix Lafaurie) p.48
[6] El País (18/05/2023) De Ecopetrol a Postobón: las grandes empresas señaladas por Mancuso de financiar la guerra paramilitar. Camila Osorio.
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
No comments