Andean Group - October 2022

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has made significant early efforts to achieve peace with the country’s guerrilla groups since he took office on 7 August. But with a string of grisly killings sparking nationwide concern over urban crime, is Petro taking a political gamble by prioritising peace in the countryside over insecurity in Colombia’s largely guerrilla-free cities? In the absence of a national counter-crime strategy from the new government, some municipal authorities are taking matters into their own hands.

President Petro frequently attacks his predecessor, Iván Duque (2018-2022), for the previous government’s seemingly lukewarm feelings about the 2016 peace agreement with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrilla group. Duque certainly slow-walked the implementation of key pillars of the peace accords, and openly criticised central tenets of the agreement. Yet, as Duque was always keen to point out in the final stretch of his presidency, homicides dropped sharply in 2020, falling to their lowest level since 1974. Admittedly, these rebounded hard once restrictions imposed during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic had been lifted. Nevertheless, the selective touting of statistics saw the Duque administration leave office claiming to have delivered a turnaround in urban security, however ephemeral that might have been.

In contrast, Petro is now presiding over a population that appears increasingly concerned over violent crime, little of which seems to be connected to the armed groups with which his government is seeking peace – currently the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla group and dissident Farc factions. A string of high-profile mass killings and shootouts in recent months has only heightened perceptions of insecurity that were already sky high before Petro took office (one study, published in late July by the pollster Bogotá Cómo Vamos, found that 88% of residents felt unsafe in the capital).

Incidents that have particularly captured the media’s attention include the massacre of four members of the same family in their home in Landázuri municipality, Santander department, on 11 September; the discovery of four bodies in a vehicle in Bogotá on 19 August; a two-hour roaming shootout between a criminal group and police in the western port city of Buenaventura (Valle del Cauca) on 31 August; and the massacre of six people outside a pool hall in the northern city of Barranquilla (Atlántico) on 12 September. In the Landázuri incident, three suspected killers were subsequently lynched by the victims’ neighbours.

Such incidents pose a direct challenge to Petro’s plans for ‘total peace’ – wide-ranging settlements not only with guerrilla groups, but also with major drug trafficking organisations (DTOs) including Colombia’s largest, the Clan del Golfo. Whilst the ELN, and to a lesser extent the Farc dissidents, remain at least rhetorically grounded in the notion of revolutionary struggle, and might therefore be drawn into political dialogue, the DTOs and smaller urban gangs remain purely criminal enterprises. As Fernando Rojas Parra, professor of public policy at Bogotá’s Universidad del Rosario, noted on 12 September, rising urban violence “is an entirely criminal and economic matter… the problem is much deeper than they [the government] want to believe.”

The risk for Petro is that he is seen to be putting all his eggs in the ‘total peace’ basket, while failing to come up with a detailed strategy to tackle urban crime. The lofty goal of striking peace deals with all of Colombia’s main armed groups appears perhaps implausibly ambitious – agreements might be reached with some of these organisations, but Colombian history shows that when one armed group demobilises, another quickly takes its place. Furthermore, much urban crime is not perpetrated by national DTOs, but by localised youth gangs that operate on a vastly smaller scale than the groups Petro has targeted for dialogue. If he appears to ignore common criminals in his pursuit of talks with the more established armed groups based in the countryside, Petro may quickly find himself losing support from the broad coalition of voters who voted him into power – many of whom are urban with no personal experience of Colombia’s armed conflict, but with a very real perception of insecurity in the city.

Bogotá taskforce

In the capital, municipal authorities are pursuing their own strategy against the mounting crime wave. Following the discovery of four bagged and dismembered bodies on 6 September, which brought to 23 the number of corpses found to have been disposed of in this way since March, Bogotá’s mayor Claudia López announced the creation of a new anti-crime taskforce, the ‘Grupo contra el Multicrimen’. This, she said, would be formed of 34 criminal investigators, ten intelligence specialists, and ten counterintelligence specialists. Working alongside this taskforce will be two special teams from the attorney general’s office, which will focus on money laundering in the capital.

López said that security forces believe the dismembered victims were killed by the Venezuelan DTO Tren de Aragua, which has been gaining an increasingly transnational presence in Latin America [SSR-22-07]. López expressed hope that the restoration of diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela on 29 August might lead to cooperation against the DTO from the Venezuelan authorities. “The Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan criminal structure directed by the so-called ‘Niño Guerrero’ and ‘Giovany’,” she said. “I urge the Colombian ambassador in Venezuela [Armando Benedetti] and the Venezuelan ambassador in Colombia [Félix Plasencia] to ensure that these two criminals are effectively isolated as soon as possible.”

Regional consultations

Petro announced on 14 September that the government would carry out citizen consultations in 48 towns, cities and rural areas around the country, from which it will draw up a national development plan based on the goal of ‘total peace’. He promised that cabinet ministers would “begin to travel the country, going where governments have never been, opening our ears to all sectors – from the poorest citizens, to the regional authorities, to businesspeople.” Petro added that “transforming Colombia into a country of total peace isn’t a task restricted to government or a select few… all citizens must play an active role in the construction of a different country.”

Iván Márquez still alive

On 15 September Colombia’s peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, said that Luciano Marín Arango (‘Iván Márquez’), a commander of the dissident Farc faction ‘Segunda Marquetalia’ whose suspected death was reported in July, is alive and seeking peace talks with the government. Márquez’s suspected death was reported in July by national daily El Tiempo, which, citing anonymous intelligence sources, stated that he had been killed by a rival guerrilla group in Venezuela. Rueda said that Márquez is “alive and sick – recovering, from what we’ve been told.” He said that Segunda Marquetalia had contacted the government regarding possible peace talks, and that “we can confirm that he [Márquez] is among those who have sent messages and that there is a group of them [dissidents] who are taking a direct interest in these exploratory dialogues.”