White boots: former FARC combatants protest at killings of greater than 300 for the reason that signing of the peace accords, Bogotá, 24 November 2016
Juancho Torres · Anadolu · Getty
On 7 March this yr, 200 former members of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) marched in Bogotá for ‘life and peace’. They wore white T-shirts and footwear as a substitute of fight fatigues and their normal rubber boots, which some carried crammed with flowers as a substitute; at present’s FARC are all about authorized protest and pacifism.
They carried placards with black-and-white images of murdered comrades. One learn, ‘Manuel Antonio González Buelva, 1988-2019’. After 12 years within the FARC, Buelva had been working as a bike taxi driver and had simply change into the daddy of a child woman. His father, who was carrying the placard, had devoted 27 years to armed wrestle; he’s now a regional consultant of Comunes (Commons), the political get together fashioned by the FARC after the 2016 peace accords.
Since President Juan Manuel Santos’s authorities (2010-18) made peace with the FARC, some 320 former guerrillas have been killed, 2.5% of the 13,000 signatories to the peace accords. Thus far, nobody has been delivered to justice and in January Colombia’s Constitutional Court docket took the weird step of declaring an ‘unconstitutional state of affairs’, citing fixed, large-scale violation of the elemental rights of former FARC combatants and the federal government’s failure to take remedial motion.
The federal government has recruited 1,800 bodyguards, primarily former FARC guerrillas, to the Nationwide Safety Unit (UNP). However Julio César Orjuela, aka Federico Nariño, as soon as a FARC commander and member of the peace accord negotiating group, mentioned, ‘Assigning a bodyguard to each comrade isn’t the reply. We wouldn’t want them if the federal government revered the peace settlement: they haven’t disbanded the paramilitary teams suspected of involvement within the killings and there’s been no progress on discovering alternate options to coca-growing.’
Colombian society would possibly appear to be rising extra progressive. In 2021 the Nationwide Strike motion opposed tax reforms that threatened to worsen social inequality. (…)
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