NewsLatin AmericaThe president of the ranchers, the most radical right in Colombia, will be a negotiator with the ELN at the request of Petro

The president of the ranchers, the most radical right in Colombia, will be a negotiator with the ELN at the request of Petro

Gustavo Petro had saved a surprise for the final stretch of the formation of the negotiating table with the ELN. In an absolutely unexpected twist, the president of Colombia has asked the representative of the country’s ranchers, a conservative and anti-Petrista man to the core, to be part of the government delegation that will negotiate in Caracas with the guerrillas. He represents the most right wing of the country. Jose Felix Lafaurie will face Gabino or Pablo Beltran, insurgents who have been fighting people like him, large landowners, since they were teenagers.

Lafaurie has accepted the assignment. “The livestock sector cannot refuse such a request from the president. Those who have been hit hard by violence are the ranchers. They want to make the ranchers victimizers, when in reality we are victims, ”he said shortly after the offer.

For the guerrillas and more extremist sectors, Lafaurie represents in a certain way paramilitarism, the irregular armies that the landowners created to defend themselves against the guerrillas or to dispossess peasants of their lands. In this tension, that of land tenure, the war in Colombia has been fought in the last half century. That conflict has claimed more than 300,000 lives. Lafaurie’s choice is also surprising for another matter: he never believed in Juan Manuel Santos’ peace process with the FARC. What’s more, he tried to sabotage it.

Now, with Petro, whom in the electoral campaign he considered a dangerous communist, a danger to democracy whose objective was to expropriate the rich and impose a kind of Chavismo, he will act as a negotiator. The head of that delegation, according to EL PAIS, will be Otty Patino, a former M-19 guerrilla, the same group that Petro was a member of. Next to him will be Ivan Cepeda, a trusted senator of the president who is very much to blame for this turn of events by Lafaurie. When the mandate began, Cepeda agreed that the rancher, in some forums in which they had coincided, had said that it was necessary to carry out an agrarian reform in Colombia. Cepeda called him and told him it was time to get down to business.

Between the two of them and the Minister of Agriculture, they prepared an ambitious plan: the Government would buy three million hectares from the ranchers. That land would end up in the hands of coca farmers. Petro immediately accepted, and in a very few days that agreement was announced. Many people were astonished at him, they did not understand how two parties so distant —the left and the more recalcitrant right— had managed to understand each other. Petro and Cepeda, who have been pigeonholed as radical leftists for many years, have shown surprising pragmatism in these first three months of government.

Seating Lafaurie in Caracas is the latest twist. The list of negotiators revealed by this newspaper had a clear progressive bias. The irruption of the rancher changes everything. With announcements like this, Petro has managed to attract attention to a negotiating table that initially did not have as much interest as that of the FARC, which in its day was the most powerful guerrilla in Latin America.

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Before Petro took the podium at the livestock convention, where he made the announcement on Thursday, Lafaurie spoke. “We believe that Total Peace is not possible without the economic and social recovery of the countryside,” she said. No one in the public imagined that Monday would be the protagonist when it comes to trying to achieve that total peace, which consists of disarming the ELN, but also the multiple armed actors scattered throughout the country.

The rancher did not overlook some of the contradictions in his relationship with the president. “On this occasion, with one that defines itself, politically and programmatically, as the ‘Government of Change’; that is to say, that today we find ourselves facing a new opportunity…, or facing the beginning of another frustration; and believe us, Mr. President, that regardless of ideological differences, which we have, without any calculation and without the pettiness of those who bet on your failure, without caring that it is the country that pays the cost of your pyrrhic victory, we hope that your government represents that packed opportunity for the countryside, because, simply, we believe that change is possible and necessary”.

Lafaurie, as if that were not enough, is the husband of one of the most important politicians in Colombia, Maria Fernanda Cabal, a senator from the Democratic Center, the party of Alvaro Uribe, another of Petro’s bitter enemies. However, the president has also approached him, knowing that Uribe continues to be very important in certain sectors that he needs to approach to achieve peace in Colombia. Lafaurie has also boarded that boat, in another bold stroke of the president. The results remain to be seen.

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