While the military are focused on containing Covid-19 in the cities, guerrilla forces have free rein in Colombia's rural areas. The peace agreement looks increasingly fragile.
The president of Colombia, Iván Duque, has extended the lockdown for the population until 11 May, and the latest data for the country report a total of 5,597 coronavirus cases and 253 deaths linked to it. While, precisely thanks to the quarantine, police are recording a dramatic drop in crime and murders on city streets, the worst is feared in rural areas: military forces have been deployed to the major urban centres and, as soon as a vacuum forms, drug traffickers and guerrillas move in to fill it.
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The murders are difficult to count; according to analysis by the NGO Front Line Defenders, in 2019 Colombia ranked first for violence against activists, with 103 killings, but the overall picture is even more dire and complex. With the right in power, doubts about progress on the peace agreement with the guerrillas are now widespread, and to this is now added the concern that the government, engaged in the fight against the virus, may suspend the measures provided for under the treaty.
The latest to lose his life was environmentalist Alejandro Llinás Suárez, 70, killed on 24 April. He had been involved in defending the Tayrona National Park in the north of the country and was shot dead just days after denouncing the presence of paramilitary groups in the Calabrazo area who, controlling the roads with illegal tolls, were blocking regular traffic.
Floro Samboní Gómez, 56, was a farmer and activist from the department of Cauca in the south. In the same region, leader Hugo de Jesus Giraldo, 62, was assassinated on 22 April. He was a peasant farmer, teacher and human rights defender. He worked for a local association engaged in protecting small-scale agricultural producers, whose president, Mario Chilueso, had been killed just three days earlier.
Former combatants of the Farc (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) are also forcefully calling on Duque to act, both on personal security and on the health emergency. The risk is that, seeing the promises made in the peace programme go unfulfilled, they may decide to abandon it and take up arms again.
The armed group of the National Liberation Army (Eln), following a truce imposed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, has declared that there will be no extension and that it will take up arms again.
With regard to protective measures against Covid-19, the Farc National Reintegration Council (Cnr-Farc), a body established under the peace agreement, in an official document calls for access to drinking water to be provided — currently guaranteed to only 38 per cent of those involved in the programme — and for the creation of a permanent healthcare system, with the presence of medical staff and not just nursing staff, and a guarantee of access to medicines. The former Farc community of Tierra Grata, in the Cesar region, mobilised independently and brought water and electricity to their own homes, no longer expecting anything from the national government.
"The majority of former combatants who entered the programme have kept their commitment: we are talking about 13,000 people who need to be supported so that they remain living in civil society and do not return to war," Camilo Rueda, journalist at Cnr-Farc, explains to us over the phone. "The Havana agreement includes a chapter on security guarantees for former combatants, for social leaders and for human rights defenders, but the government's party, Centro Democrático, which has explicitly spoken out against the peace process, has delayed its implementation."
Since the agreement was signed in November 2016, 194 former Farc members have lost their lives in ambushes. Six of them during the initial period of the quarantine alone, from late March to mid-April.
"In fact, after the agreement the Farc demobilised in a compact manner," explains Vittorio Rinaldi, an expert in international cooperation with long experience in Latin America, an anthropologist and former president of Altromercato. "As well as their weapons, they clearly relinquished control of the territory, which the paramilitaries immediately occupied. A very strong signal of the fragility of the peace process was the declaration by the leader of the armed group, Ivan Marquez, who, after having been one of the chief negotiators in the talks with the government, announced on 29 August last year that he had returned to the guerrilla as a response to the betrayal of the agreements signed in Havana."