President of Colombian Congress questions meeting between Government and FARC dissidents

The president of the Colombian Congress, Roy Barreras, has criticized the recent joint declaration signed between the Government and the dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla and has questioned the fact that the Executive has agreed to recognize the dissidents as FARC-EP.

“And then, who were those who made the enormous effort to lay down their weapons in the Teatro Colón Agreement? Didn’t they distort the legitimacy of the Peace Agreement with a single stroke of a pen in the exploratory and now public dialogues?”, he said, according to Colombian radio station W Radio.

Barreras has recognized that these contacts represent an “advance” and an “enormous effort” to achieve “total peace”, but has warned that “the forms and the messages matter when the Colombian State is compromised”.

Barrera has expressed these opinions in a message sent to the Defend La Paz collective dedicated to the implementation of the 2016 Peace Accord agreed between the guerrillas and the government. Barrera comes from the U Party, one of the most conservative formations in Colombian politics, but had joined the Historical Pact led by the current president, Gustavo Petro.

Representatives of the Colombian government and FARC dissidents held last Saturday an exploratory meeting with the presence of the UN and Norway with a view to opening a peace process with the declared objective of achieving “total peace”.

The meeting took place in Caquetá and seeks to “assess the possibility of initiating dialogues in the framework of what has been defined as Total Peace”, according to the document published after the meeting.