In a rare interview, former president Juan Manuel Santos warned that gains from the peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) are quickly being undone as armed factions exploit negotiation efforts to recruit new combatants and seize control of new land.
Colombia risks sliding back into its violent past as armed groups exploit the stumbling peace strategy of President Gustavo Petro, the architect of its landmark 2016 peace deal has told the Guardian.
Santos said he warned Petro’s team that its ambitions to convince more than a dozen armed groups to disarm simultaneously were overly optimistic; it took four years to negotiate a deal with the Farc – which although it had more than 13,000 members had a clear top-down structure and hierarchy.
Exclusive: The bloody foundering of President Gustavo Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ strategy is a ‘national failure’, says Juan Manuel Santos, who ended war with Farc guerrillas in 2016.
When he was elected in 2022, Petro – Colombia’s first ever leftwing leader and a former urban guerrilla himself – pledged to launch talks with every major armed group as part of his “Total Peace” strategy.
