In the 1980s, peace talks to end Colombia’s long civil war instead triggered bloodshed. As the door was opening to greater leftist power, thousands of former guerrillas, communist militants and trade unionists were gunned down by paramilitary death squads, sometimes in collaboration with state security forces, derailing the peace process and entrenching arguments for armed struggle.
Today, the government is pursuing peace again, and is promising leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that it is set to protect them and their fighters once they have laid down their weapons.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is having a tough time persuading the rebels they would be safe. If negotiations end the 50-year-old Marxist uprising, the job of protecting the peace would likely fall to Colombia’s National Protection Unit (UNP), a three-year-old government agency that keeps watch over politicians, judges, high-profile activists and members of other historically threatened groups.
Photo: EPA
However, the unit’s reputation has been stained by the killing in August of a small-town journalist three weeks after the UNP withdrew its security detail.
Luis Carlos Cervantes was gunned down in Taraza, north of Medellin, as he went to pick up his son from school. Despite reports of death threats, the agency, which receives US$250,000 a year in US aid, had determined he was no longer at risk as a result of his past work denouncing local politicians for alleged ties to drug traffickers. Authorities have yet to make any arrests or determine a motive for the slaying.
The killing was followed days later by another setback: the exposure of a US$300,000 kickback scheme that prompted authorities to arrest the unit’s financial director and its No. 2 to flee the US.
“If the UNP is having all these problems now, imagine what awaits when thousands of guerrillas come out of the jungle,’’ said Carlos Guevara, coordinator of We Are Defenders, a Bogota-based group that stands up for human rights activists.
The promise of government-provided security for former combatants is part of a draft deal that has emerged from two years of peace talks underway in Cuba. The guarantee is important not only given the fallout of the 1980s peace effort, when as many as 3,000 leftists were killed, but because tensions are simmering again.
Since the start of the current talks, there has been a steady increase in reported attacks and threats against leftists, evidence of a dangerous rift between those who support the negotiations and those who fear that the president is ceding too much power to groups alleged to be responsible for hundreds of atrocities.
In the first nine months of this year, We Are Defenders recorded 380 instances in which human rights activists were targeted by threats, arbitrary arrests or violence. That is up 44 percent from the same period last year, even as overall rates of homicide and kidnapping across Colombia have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion