Thank you to colombiapeace.org for the article
On January 21, a coalition of Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and Campesino communities represented by the Inter-Ecclesial Commission for Justice and Peace (Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, CIJP) published a statement addressed to the Biden-Harris administration outlining recommendations for peacebuilding priorities in Colombia.
The recommendations include: a full commitment to the agreed terms of the 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), resume peace dialogues with the National Liberation Army (ELN) and advance humanitarian minimums, dismantle illegal armed groups following community input, enforce agrarian reform, implement illicit crop substitution programs, and strengthen rural judicial institutions.
Below is the full English translation of the statement. The original Spanish statement is here.
January 21, 2021
Dear President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris,
We send a respectful greeting and our best wishes that the exercise of your mandate during these four years will be the beginning of a process of new horizons for humanity and planet earth in brotherhood, solidarity, and justice.
We write to you a day after your possession in the hope that our concerns can be received by you and taken into account in the political, economic, environmental, and labor decisions you are going to make in relations with our country.
Our Black, Indigenous, and Campesino communities live in remote parts of Colombia, that for more than 40 years, have lived in the midst of armed confrontation for political and social reasons. Today, we continue to suffer old and new violence. Persecution, torture, murder, enforced disappearance, displacement and violent dispossession of land, sexual violence, stigmatization, and forced to remain silent or we will be killed. New slavery.
More than 900 social, peace, and environmental leaders have been killed, and more than 200 peace signers have been killed. The Peace Agreement signed by President Santos in 2016 is today in crisis due to the series of breaches to what was agreed
We believe that peace is built on dialogue and compliance with agreements on social inclusion, on the cessation of discrimination and on respect for sources of life such as water and forests.
Neither investment nor development in the world nor in Colombia can be based on misery, exclusion, environmental devastation and armed violence, yes in respect for human rights, in the peace agreed, in reconciliation and respect for the land and all its wealth and a neat and respectful public force of rights.
In the midst of the pandemic, the undersigned wrote to President Duque to ask him for a cease-fire, in the face of what was to come, that illegality would consolidate his armed control, sadly protected by sectors of the Military Forces. We never received a precise answer. Today everything is more serious. We also sent this message to the ELN guerrillas and other new guerrillas. Also to the groups inherited from the paramilitaries such as the AGC, Comandos de Frontera, Los Caparrapps, La Local and Los Bustamante to a Global Humanitarian Agreement. The president ignored us, as well as United Nations Security Council resolution 2356 and Pope Francis’ call for peace.
We respectfully invite you to take into account in your agenda of cooperation with Colombia the following aspects:
- Invitation to the government of President Duque to complete compliance with what was agreed with the FARC signatories.
- A resumption of rapprochement with the ELN guerrillas on humanitarian agreements and the development of the six-point agenda for dialogue towards peace.
- A public policy built from the territories and with the communities for the gradual and comprehensive dismantling of all armed structures inherited from paramilitarism.
- An agrarian reform that makes it possible, with the provision of land, to clean up property, to create guarantees for the inhabitants of the territories and, in particular, for women, for those investors who wish to approach these territories in accordance with respect for human rights, democratic principles and principles of respect for the environment. Avoiding the implementation of any model of development that excludes direct dialogue with the legitimate owner inhabitants, which destroys vital sources of life such as water and forests necessary for the survival of humanity.
- Implementation of an illicit crop substitution policy agreed with communities with international oversight.
- Institutional inclusion in territories with civil State presence in our remote areas through justice houses with the presence of the Office of the Comptroller, the Office of the Attorney General’s Office and socio-environmental care units with a focus on human security and restorative law.
Without social and environmental inclusion, without respect for human rights, it will be difficult for the military solutions and investments to generate well-being and authentic contributions to new international relations at a time when global warming is accelerating, when COVID-19 continues, of cocaine trafficking.
Thanking you for your attention, with hope, from all consideration.
