Gustavo Petro agrees to a ceasefire with the 5 main armed groups in Colombia

The government of Colombia agreed to a six-month ceasefire with the five main armed groups operating in the country, the president announced, Gustavo Petroon New Year’s Eve.

“We have agreed to a bilateral cessation with the THE Nthe Second Marquetaliathe Central Staffthe AGC (Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and the Self-defense groups of the Sierra Nevada from January 1 to June 30, 2023, extendable depending on the progress in the negotiations,” the leftist president said in a tweet.

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The bilateral truce was the main objective set by the government as part of its “total peace” policywith which to try to extinguish through dialogue the armed conflict that persists in Colombia despite the dissolution of the powerful guerrilla of the FARC in 2017.

The country’s last recognized insurgency, the National Liberation Army (ELN) has been negotiating with the government since November.

On their side, the groups Second Marquetalia and Central General Staff -that they departed from the peace pact signed by the FARC-held separate “exploratory dialogues” with delegates from Petro.

Led in the past by the boss Othnielextradited to the United States, The AGC are the largest drug gang in the country. Like the self-defense groups of the Sierra Nevada, are made up of remnants of far-right paramilitaries who demobilized in the early 2000s.

All these groups add up to more than 10,000 armed menfaced in disputes over income from drug trafficking and other illegal businesses in the world’s largest cocaine producer, according to the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz).

The government offers a “benevolent treatment from the judicial point of view” for the armed actors “in exchange for a delivery of goods, a dismantling of these organizations and the possibility that they stop exercising these illicit economies,” said the pro-government senator recently. Iván Cepeda to AFP.

Despite the rapprochement with the different armed groups, until now Petro it has not been able to contain the spiral of violence that engulfs the country. The independent study center Indepaz registered almost a hundred massacres in 2022.

Source: Elcomercio

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