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Challenges Facing a Colombia “World Power for Life”
CHALLENGES FACING A COLOMBIA
Gustavo Petro faces numerous challenges; of these, there are three related to peacebuilding we want to focus on: recovery, understanding, and contribution.
Colombia
Centro Regional de Derechos Humanos y Justicia de Género TEXT AND PHOTO: CORPORACIÓN HUMANAS
T
he Final Peace Accord (FPA) was a historic landmark for a country tired of war. Despite setbacks, the length of negotiations, the “No” response in the referendum, and the ill-intentioned campaigns of a right entranced by, or benefiting from, war, an accord was achieved that proposes a path to building peace in Colombia and includes more than 100 gender-based measures for women and LGBTIQ+ persons in its six chapters.
Recovering the FPA is the passport for the new administration to mend the tears in the peacebuilding process made by Iván Duque through his lack of political will and his focus on “Peace with Legality,” characterized by increased militarization of the territories, authorizing fumigations of crops considered illicit, and the misappropriation of funds earmarked for territorial peace.
The FPA must be recovered, its implementation corrected, and measures aimed at the historically excluded
peripheries of this country must be accelerated; among the administration’s priorities must be land, food, education, and labor rights for the rural population. Above all, the gender-based measures must be implemented since not a single hectare has been given to women, to name one example.
Generally speaking, the institutional architecture has already been created to implement many of the FPA’s measures, something which eases the path of implementation, as it does not require major legal transformations; it is about recovering the spirit of peace.
Reactivating peace through the work of women is urgently necessary, not as an additional aspect of the proThe Final Peace Accord cess but as a primary, driv(FPA) must be recovered and ing strategy to achieve it. The gender-based measures the measures addressing have not advanced owing to the historically excluded a lack of political will. peripheries of this country Women’s and feminist ormust be accelerated. ganizations have demanded and sustained peace when, in times of war and armed conflict, the government’s response has been a military one, with an abuse of force. Feminists are promoting a dynamic Women, Peace, and Security Agenda that considers the pressing issues of today: migration and exile; the impact
of COVID-19; social protest; protecting human rights and environmental defenders; and drug trafficking. All these issues must be read and addressed from a perspective of feminist, humane security.
Understanding the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, especially United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000, in order to include it the administration’s agenda, is not only a goal but an act of democracy and gender justice. It is vital to generate dialogues with women’s and feminists organizations throughout the country to advance toward the first National Resolution 1325 Action Plan for Colombia.
CONTRIBUTING TO TOTAL PEACE
This is perhaps the most important goal of the new president. It is necessary to contribute new viewpoints to identify the forms of war and the way they overlap; the variable character of its protagonists; and the perverse relations it has with the needs of the population and institutional vacuums both in urban and rural areas. This reality requires creating from scratch alternative ways of negotiating and reactivating the peace process, as well as methodologies that enable progress on an agenda with the ELN, propose a conclusive but nonviolent exit strategy
for dissidents, and capitalize on the concept of “multi-crime” that Petro introduced during his campaign to face the hydra of drug trafficking.
The challenge of contributing to total peace in Colombia requires innovation, intelligence, and magnanimity on the part of the new government. The peace process in Havana left issues out of the FPA that must be addressed if we wish to turn the country into a world power for life and contribute to the sustainability of a total peace: the right to water, food sovereignty, climate change, renewable energy, political equality, and the fight against institutional racism and classism.
This administration’s first 100 days will have to consider actions to recover the FPA, understand the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, and contribute to total peace. FM
