Colombian President Gustavo Petro has named new army and police commanders and said he chose the culprits because they were not accused of corruption or human rights violations.
Colombia and the National Liberation Army (EJÉRCITO DE LIBERACIÓN – ELN) also took steps on Friday to restart peace talks.
Colombia’s security forces have a long history of corruption scandals and human rights violations committed in the country’s nearly six decades of conflict.
“The concept of human security means that good fortune lies in the number of deaths, but in the really extensive alleviation of deaths, massacres, and the really extensive construction of people’s freedoms and rights,” Petro said in a statement. press conference on Friday to call his new officials.
Petro said his criteria for deciding on the new commanders were “0 corruption, 0 violation of basic rights. “
The number of enemy deaths would no longer be an explanation for why to announce security personnel, he added.
Petro, a critic of the Colombian military’s status quo and a former member of the armed group M-19, promised in his electoral crusade sweeping adjustments to the country’s security forces and suggested new officials to safeguard lives.
General Helder Fernán Giraldo has been appointed Commander of the Armed Forces, General Luis Mauricio Ospina will head the Army and Vice Admiral Francisco Hernando Cubides will head the Navy. General Luis Carlos Córdoba will head the Air Force and General Henry Armando Sanabria the National Police.
Colombia’s armed confrontation has been raging for nearly 60 years, killing some 450,000 people between 1985 and 2018 alone.
Colombia’s national peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, said Friday that the government will take the mandatory “judicial and political measures” to engage in imaginable peace talks with the ELN after an assembly between representatives of both sides in Havana, Cuba.
Observers that these measures will most likely come with the lifting of arrest warrants against ELN negotiators who have recently been living in exile in Cuba.
“We who the ELN have the same preference for peace as the Colombian government,” Rueda said in a statement. “And I hope they will pay attention to the many voices in other territories seeking a non-violent way out of this armed conflict. “
Peace talks between the former Colombian and the ELN ended in 2019 after rebels detonated a car bomb at a police academy in Bogota and killed more than 20 cadets.
Following this incident, the Colombian government issued arrest warrants for ELN leaders who were in Cuba for peace negotiations. But Cuba refused to extradite them, arguing that it would jeopardize its impartiality as a country in the confrontation and break diplomatic protocols.
The United States responded through the Cuba directory as a sponsor of terrorism.
Petro said he sought to start peace talks with the country’s remaining armed teams to de-escalate violence in rural areas and bring lasting peace to the country of 50 million people.
A 2016 peace deal between the government and the country’s largest group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), helped decrease kidnappings, killings and forced displacement.
But violence has intensified in some parts of the country as FARC resistance fighters, drug trafficking teams and the ELN battle cocaine smuggling routes, illegal mines and other resources that have been abandoned by the FARC.
The ELN has some 2,500 fighters in Colombia. Il operates drug trafficking routes, extortion and illegal mines in neighboring Venezuela.
In July, teams of criminals carried out around 90 attacks on police and military personnel, killing thirteen police officers, according to CERAC, a think tank that monitors violence in Colombia. This has made it one of the most damaging months for the Colombian armed forces in the 20 years and beyond.