The verbal clash between the army commander, General Eduardo Zapateiro, and the leftist candidate and leader in the polls Gustavo Petro, 62, has been showing an unusual meddling by the Armed Forces in the presidential elections in Colombia, whose first round takes place next Sunday ( 29).
To a criticism by Petro of the Army, stating that there was corruption in the institution and that the promotion system was based on “internal politics and bribes by the drug traffickers”, Zapateiro responded through social networks: “I have never seen any general receiving money improperly as you have already been accused”.
Zapateiro mentioned a video that circulated in 2005 and which showed Petro, at the time a congressman, receiving a grant with money. The case went to court, but Petro was eventually acquitted. The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation to assess whether Zapateiro exceeded his limits of constitutional action.
Another who showed discontent on the part of the Armed Forces with the candidacy of the former M-19 guerrilla was José Marulanda, president of the Colombian Association of Retired Officers. “We feel that there is a very clear resentment of Petro against the military and police, because they were the ones who fought and killed many of his fellow guerrillas.”
The M-19 was a nationalist urban guerrilla that operated from 1974 to 1990, when it signed a peace agreement with the Colombian state. Under the terms of this agreement, its members formed the Democratic Alliance, a political party that participated in the drafting of the 1991 Constitution, currently in force in the country. Several of its former members continued in politics, such as former senator Antonio Navarro Wolff and Petro himself, who was mayor of Bogotá between 2012 and 2015.
For retired colonel Carlos Alfonso Velázquez, “among the military, there are those who believe they have won the war on the battlefield, but are losing it in the political field.” “They consider that the political class that has always ruled and supported them this time is losing, and that brings insecurity for many.” Something that became clearer when the current president, Iván Duque, faced with the controversy between Petro and Zapateiro, went public to defend the general.
Active-duty officials also criticized Petro, but without disclosing their names, in a report in Semana magazine. The publication heard members of different ranks and showed that there are those who feel uncomfortable with the possible arrival of a former guerrilla to power and those who understand that their place in society is not to have an opinion or to interfere in the political debate, as established by the Constitution.
The most recent electoral poll, released last Tuesday (10), shows Gustavo Petro in the lead, with 40% of voting intentions, against 21% for the right-wing Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, former mayor of Medellín. Both would thus dispute a second round, on June 19. In this election, according to the poll, Petro would win by 47%, against 34% for Fico.
A possible arrival of Petro to power would be an immense transformation in the country, accustomed to a certain turnover of a small group of elite families. In recent decades, Colombia has swung too far to the right. And the more than 60 years of clashes between left-wing guerrillas against the army have made left-wing democratic political forces unpopular in society.
After the peace agreement between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2016, dissidents from this guerrilla continued to act outside the law, bringing insecurity, especially to the rural sector, and fueling rejection of the left. The balance of clashes from 1964 (when the FARC emerged) to 2016 is 220,000 dead. Among the guerrilla’s methods were extortion, the recruitment of minors and attacks on military and civilian targets.
If Petro comes to power, it will be the first time that a former leftist guerrilla will command the second largest army in Latin America (after the Brazilian), with 228,000 soldiers and 172,000 police officers.
The methods found by the right to fight guerrillas are not popular today either, especially when the truth about the “false positives” scandal has come to light. According to the work of the Special Justice for Peace (known as the JEP), more and more officers are admitting that there were targets, for soldiers, of guerrillas who had to be killed each month. When they were not hit, they dressed civilians as guerrillas, assassinated them and set up supposed combat scenarios, saying that the killings had been in battles with guerrillas such as the FARC or the ELN (National Liberation Army).
The most recent collective confession about the “false positives” took place in Ocaña, in the troubled region of Catatumbo, on April 26 and 27, when, in a JEP court, 10 soldiers told in detail, and in front of the victims’ families, how 120 people from that village had been murdered during the conflict, and that they were not related to any guerrillas. According to the peace agreement, the JEP does not sentence to prison sentences, but to reparation sentences, which can range from community work or requests for collective forgiveness.
The case of “false positives” also involves former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), appointed by JEP as the intellectual author of the procedure. In all, 6,402 victims of this type of crime are documented across the country.
The procedure has not stopped being used until today, when the country is governed by a patron of Uribe, Iván Duque. The current president is being accused by the opposition of having authorized an attack by the army on a village in Putumayo where there were allegedly criminal groups (the Bacrim, a mixture of ex-guerrillas and common criminals).
The attack killed 11 civilians, including a minor. There was pressure for the resignation of Defense Minister Diego Molano. Faced with Duque’s refusal to remove the official, the opposition asked the Prosecutor’s Office to launch an investigation and sent a letter to the UN, stating that the murders followed the pattern of “false positives”.
The sector to the right of politics, which supports the military, represented by former presidents Uribe and Andrés Pastrana, says that the JEP is taking a revanchist tone, and that the court should only serve to judge the guerrillas, with any abuses by the military destined to military courts.
This hypothesis was left out of the agreement, which has been in force since 2016 and cannot be changed by a single representative, because it was integrated into the Constitution. The current president, Iván Duque, tried to change aspects of how the JEP works, to take the focus away from the military, but he did not get support in Congress and in the courts to go ahead.
The military’s discomfort with Petro’s candidacy, which defends an intense application of all the points of the peace agreement, which went in slow motion with Duque, was also demonstrated by the resignation of Major Carlos Guillermo Ospina Galvis from the Truth Commission.
The body, also created by the 2016 peace agreement, aims to create a comprehensive document that sheds light on as many abuses as possible by the guerrillas and paramilitary organizations as well as by the army. Its statute establishes that it must be made up of members from different sectors of society who participated in some way in the conflict and the victims. Ospina was the representative of the Armed Forces.
He left the post last week, eight weeks before the end of writing the document, criticizing the way it worked and the conclusions the report was reaching. “I do not agree with the chapters that are being presented, I do not agree with the military, businessmen and the State being presented more as villains than the guerrillas themselves. My comments and observations on this were not taken into account. So I had no other option, and I left.”
He also stated that the Truth Commission was receiving political interference from the left, “leading the narrative to the idea that the origin of the conflict had several factors and culprits, and not that it was the guerrillas who started the violence.”
