President Juan Manuel Santos has been true to his promise, revealing details about the upcoming peace talks with the Fuerzas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) little by little. This week, during various public appearances in the US as part of a short visit to attend the 67th UN General Assembly debate, he made two particularly interesting ones: a) ‘Alfonso Cano’ (Guillermo León Sáenz) contacted his administration as soon as he took office in August 2010 to begin discussing the possibility of an agreement; and b) he is certain the peace process will be completed within the next calendar year.
In a presentation at his Alma Mater, Kansas University, Santos said the contact initiated by the Farc’s top commander put him between a rock and a hard place. “I ordered that we had to chase the leaders of the guerrillas. And I had to make a very difficult decision; we had surrounded this leader [Cano]. What do we do? I said: the rules are the rules; if we want to be successful we have to be clear about the rules of the game and persevere...these decisions were very difficult, but I am sure this [Cano’s killing in a bombing raid in November 2011] is one of the reasons why we are negotiating now”. The revelation, just like other recent developments, once again indicates that the two sides clearly understood that negotiations must continue outside Colombia and despite what happens on the battlefield [WR-12-36].
However, that has not stopped the Farc and some civil society groups in Colombia from calling on the government to accept declaring a ceasefire before negotiations conclude. This week, Colombianos y Colombianas por la Paz sent a public letter to President Santos, ‘Timochenko’ (Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, the Farc’s top commander) and ‘Gabino’ (Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, the leader of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional [ELN]), asking them to sign a ‘special agreement’ which, based on international humanitarian law precepts, enables them to establish a tripartite ceasefire while negotiations continue. Neither side has formally responded yet, but Colombian legislation restrains the Santos administration from doing so without meeting certain criteria [RA-12-09].
At the UN, President Santos also hinted that the peace negotiations would be completed quickly, saying that he hoped to return to the UN’s headquarters in New York to “give the assembly a positive report next year” and not simply express his optimism about the end of the conflict. Since announcing that peace negotiations would take place, Santos has repeated that these would be completed within months, a pledge he has now made at the highest level of inter-governmental organisations. However, a successful resolution to the internal conflict will not necessarily translate into an end of violence in Colombia, which is largely fuelled by the income generated through the illicit drugs trade. In this regard, Santos reiterated his call for a comprehensive, global analysis of the current counter-narcotics efforts to decide whether to stay the course, make some adjustments to the present interdiction strategy or consider other alternatives.
In that sense, he delivered on the promise he had made in Kansas a few days earlier, when he said he would ask the UN to undertake a similar study to that currently being carried out by experts on behalf of the Organization of American States (OAS) to assess the feasibility of implementing alternative strategies to the current war on drugs. “I think Colombia has the moral authority to propose the following: Let’s study, evaluate and analyse what the world is doing against drugs and drug-trafficking. The United Nations declared the war on drugs 40 years ago. Let’s consider if what we are doing is the best that we can do,” Santos stated in Kansas. “This is something Colombia cannot do on its own. No country can do this on its own. It must be a joint effort, an international decision”.
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President Santos was not alone; Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina and Mexico’s Felipe Calderón also called for a similar evaluation of the war on drugs. Pérez Molina said his government “would like to establish an international group of countries that are well disposed to reforming global policies on drugs” and would consider “new creative and innovative alternatives”. Calderón made a similar call at the UN and earlier this week at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, in which he said “The best way to do this would be to reduce demand for illicit drugs in the US, but frankly, if this is not possible, alternative solutions to reduce the massive profits of criminal organisations must be considered, and that includes market alternatives”.
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