Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto made the creation of a large national gendarmerie one of his flagship campaign proposals in 2012 but the proposal was progressively diluted to become a much smaller rural force along the lines of what President Santos seemed to be proposing during a visit to France this week. The proposed gendarmerie, or militarised police, would operate in rural areas where the Colombian military is currently fighting the Farc and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN).
Just as Santos was raising the possibility of a future gendarmerie in Paris, the defence minister, Juan Carlos Pinzón, was meeting the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York, where he signed a framework agreement for the Colombian armed forces to participate in future peacekeeping operations. Pinzón noted, “This is an important step towards consolidating the future of the armed forces,” which will need a new role in post-conflict Colombia.
The conservative political opposition Centro Democrático (CD) led by Senator Alvaro Uribe (president, 2002-2010) pounced on the proposal. Uribe hastily tweeted that “if the rural police is to be made up of demobilised Farc guerrillas, Colombians must say NO,” after Santos pointedly refused to rule out the possibility. CD Senator Alfredo Rangel went further, conflating the foreign trips of both Santos and Pinzón, and tweeting “Postconflict Santos: Army outside Colombia on peacekeeping missions, and in Colombia the armed Farc converted into military police… unacceptable”.
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