Colombia Peace Agreement: Biden Plans to Remove FARC from List of Foreign Terrorist Groups | International

The Joe Biden Administration has decided to remove the defunct Colombian guerrilla FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) from the list of foreign terrorist groups, as advanced The Wall Street Journal citing legislative sources, in a measure with which it intends to give a boost to the peace agreement between the armed group and the Government of José Manuel Santos, which is five years old this Wednesday. The historic pact, after 52 years of conflict, went ahead with little popular support (it was rejected in the plebiscite) and has been developing with difficulties.

The end of the designation as a terrorist group is more than a declaration of intent, it has practical effects such as allowing the US government to finance programs in which former guerrillas participate. The group’s leaders had already requested this exclusion from the moment of the peace signing, but for the Barack Obama Administration it was premature and for Donald Trump’s, such a decision had no signs of success: the Republican had shown his support for Álvaro Uribe, scourge of the agreement and the Government of Santos.

The news, confirmed by sources from the State Department and Congress to Reuters, may encourage Republican criticism of the Democratic president, who has maintained Trump’s hard-line policy on issues such as Venezuela and Cuba but still receives accusations of sympathizing. with socialist regimes.

The increase in violence calls into question the implementation of the peace agreement signed in 2016, which is very uneven. According to the latest report from the Kroc Institute, in charge of evaluating the implementation of this framework, by the end of 2020 only 28% of the 578 points of the agreement had crystallized. The guerrillas did demobilize, surrender their weapons and became a political party, which supports the decision of the Joe Biden Administration, and institutions such as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) were born, a mechanism that judges the crimes of the conflict. , but groups of dissidents from the guerrillas and the National Liberation Army (ELN) have gained ground.

Subscribe here to the newsletter from EL PAÍS América and receive all the informative keys of the current situation of the region