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Total peace is also between the communities and the State

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, on August 4.rrss

In Colombia we are used to giving debates on submission to justice, amnesty, transitional justice and peace negotiations in all governments. With differences of four or eight years, similar debates can be found in Congress and in public opinion on the need to negotiate with armed groups, political or not, include the rights of victims and guarantee at least minimum levels of justice. and truth. Presidents Andres Pastrana, Alvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos, to name a few, have each proposed their own negotiating model.

The bet that the government of Gustavo Petro has called “Total Peace” is based on the hypothesis that it is feasible and necessary to try to solve everything at once so as not to continue talking about the same thing for many years. Although many questions remain about how to do this that no one has achieved before, the maximalist expectation hopes that this vision will extend to the interior of the State and over time in the face of future governments, as explained last Thursday by Congressman Alvaro Prada in Caracol and the bill currently says.

Neither concern is new. In the peace process with the FARC, it was precisely the current Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva who proposed the shielding of the agreements through the declaration of it as a special agreement of international humanitarian law. Although that was not feasible, in the end what was achieved in this matter allowed many aspects of that Agreement to continue in force during the “Peace with Legality”, as Ivan Duque’s policy was called. And in that same process, President Juan Manuel Santos always had the idea of ​​linking his ministers to his peace policy through a “peace cabinet” seeking precisely that the decisions and actions were aligned with that purpose. What is different in this case is that the same expectation hopes to be fulfilled at a time when the relationship between social movements and organizations, the communities historically most affected by the conflict, and the current government have changed.

The Peace proposed by the Petro government hopes to be based on and nurtured by the experiences of communities that have non-violently resisted attacks and the presence of armed actors in their areas, humanitarian agreements and the vision of communities as power takers. decisions rather than as third parties that contribute to agreements between elites. It is a peace that must come from below, which represents a paradigm shift and an important variation in the way these policies have been approached before, in the vision of the origin of violence, the way in which the participation of civil society and the preparation and design of peace negotiation processes on which we have collected so many lessons in Colombia and the world.

As always, much of the burden of making that peace work falls on the state, which is challenging at a time when civil society organizations are in the process of making the transition to government. The total peace bill mandates the State to strive for “a just social order that ensures peaceful coexistence, the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals, with a differential approach (…) aimed at achieving conditions of real equality and providing everyone the same opportunities for their proper development, that of their family and their social group”. But organizations deeply distrust institutions.

During our armed conflict, for many of the communities that have had to face violence, the victimizer has been largely the State. In the 170 municipalities of the country considered in the Peace Agreement with the FARC as more vulnerable to the repetition of cycles of violence, there is always one or many stories of a Mayor, a Governor or a member of the Public Force who have been associated with armed groups, have participated in illicit businesses, have taken the resources of schools or aqueducts and have participated by action and omission in acts of violence. This is well known by many sectors of this government that have taken it upon themselves to exercise a counterweight to power and denounce by all means their participation in the conflict.

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But this work of denunciation, so many times without response, added to the numerous breaches of the different agreements that have been reached with multiple governments, have left a deep mistrust and a permanent rupture between the social base that supported this government and the idea of state power and its institutions. At least 15 of the 32 departments of the country have more than 20% of their population with unsatisfied basic needs in terms of decent living conditions, access to public services or education and although they demand compliance from the State, that does not mean that trust or want to hand over the power and resources to take care of it. In fact, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2021, the institution that Colombians least trust is the Government. And in the populations most affected by the conflict, we could say that prevention is even greater when faced with the Public Force.

At IFIT, the Institute for Comprehensive Transitions, we have worked on practical recommendations on how to address structural inequalities of a political, economic, cultural and social nature in societies in conflict to facilitate transitions; and how to build social contracts that are more inclusive in these contexts. In either case, the role of the community and the State and the relationship between them is decisive.

That is why one more challenge, and a big one, that is added to the idea that this peace be with all the armed groups, address the causes of violence and be fulfilled by all sectors of the State now and in the governments to come, is to weave that relationship and rebuild trust. It is not an easy task if you think that both the State and the institutions are cold and distant concepts from the common citizen and even more from rural communities, and that in many cases it will be actors who previously represented civil society who will have to speak as State. That is why it will be decisive that the narratives of transformation and change used by this government have in common the idea of ​​joint work between communities and entities, and the clear message of the role that institutions play in this entire process.

The implementation of the Havana Peace Agreement has already started down this path with the broad participation of civil society and with the implementation of development programs with a territorial approach that will be decisive in what is to come. Now total peace will have to include among its tasks that of making peace between the community and the State, closing the distance between these two sectors and achieving the appropriation of an institutional vision that was lost between the wounds of the conflict and the frustrations of abandonment. state.

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