Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Thursday night rejected a proposal by the country’s main leftist rebel movement to observe a ceasefire during peace talks that are to begin next month in Norway.
Leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said hours earlier during a news conference in Cuba that their first item on the negotiations’ agenda would be to propose a truce in the half-century of fighting that has killed tens of thousands.
Santos said that would not happen. He said the Colombian military and police had been instructed to intensify offensive actions against the rebels.
“There’s not going to be any ceasefire. We will not give anything until we get the final agreement and I want to make that very clear,” the president told reporters at a military base in central Colombia.
Santos, who spoke after meeting with more than 100 generals and colonels, did not respond to questions. There was no immediate comment from FARC officials.
Earlier in the day, rebel officials raised the idea of a ceasefire during a meeting with journalists in Havana to discuss FARC’s plans for the peace talks.
“We will propose a ceasefire the moment we sit down at the table,” said Mauricio Jaramillo, a spokesman and top FARC leader. “We are going to discuss it.”
Before Santos rejected that idea, he said during an interview with Colombia’s W Radio on Thursday that a lasting peace could be achieved if both sides truly have the will.
FARC said the talks are scheduled to begin on Oct. 8 in Oslo and it named three of its negotiators for the negotiations, including a high-ranking guerrilla now imprisoned in the US.
Jaramillo said two of the negotiators will be Ivan Marquez, a participant in past peace talks and a member of the FARC’s six-person ruling secretariat and Jose Santrich, a second-tier leader. The rebels said they want the third to be Ricardo Palmera, alias “Simon Trinidad,” a high-ranking FARC member and former peace negotiator who was extradited to the US in 2005. He is serving a 60-year prison term on hostage-taking conspiracy charges for the kidnapping of three US citizens in Colombia.
Asked whether the FARC is seeking Palmera’s release or the rebels envision him participating by videoconference, Andres Paris, another spokesman, responded that Colombia’s president would be learning of their request from Thursday’s announcement and they would await a response from his government.
A decade ago, talks fell through after Colombia had ceded a Switzerland-sized swath of terrain as a safe haven for the FARC, which used it as a base to continue waging war elsewhere, extorting, kidnapping and expanding its cocaine trafficking activities.
In Havana, the FARC representatives played a roughly edited video in which rebel chief Timoleon Jimenez, known by the nom de guerre Timochenko, denied that the group had been weakened by defections and the deaths of several top leaders in recent years.
“We have never been stronger or more united,” Jimenez said. “They are completely mistaken, those who try to see weakness in our tireless efforts for peace.”
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
RSS