By Luis Jaime Acosta
BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia’s Congress on Wednesday accredited a legislation to permit President Gustavo Petro to hunt peace offers with leftist rebels and legal teams tied to drug trafficking by way of negotiations and processes of give up.
Petro, the nation’s first leftist president, has proposed a strategy of “whole peace” to convey Colombia’s inner armed battle of virtually six many years to an finish.
Preventing within the Andean nation has left not less than 450,000 useless and hundreds of thousands displaced.
The brand new legislation will allow Petro to start peace talks with guerrilla group the Nationwide Liberation Military (ELN) and dissident teams from the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who reject a 2016 peace deal.
Petro additionally has the inexperienced mild to start talks with legal teams accused of drug trafficking such because the Clan del Golfo.
“This is step one in the direction of the deepening of democracy, solidarity, inclusion, however above all the beginning of definitively turning the web page on the massacre wherein we’re nonetheless immersed, of the delay to which the armed battle topics us, which ought to lead us in the direction of whole peace, the place life is dignified,” Inside Minister Alfonso Prada (OTC:) instructed reporters.
Colombia’s Senate and the Home of Representatives will nonetheless need to agree on whether or not younger individuals can keep away from navy service in alternate for performing actions that additional peace.
The Senate voted to dam the proposal, whereas the Home of Representatives accredited it.
The federal government and the ELN stated this month they’ll reestablish peace talks in November, although they’ve but to announce a begin date or a location.
Petro in August proposed a multilateral ceasefire between armed teams and Colombia’s navy whereas peace efforts transfer ahead.
The brand new legislation will permit unlawful armed teams to maneuver to momentary places the place orders for his or her seize and potential extraditions can be suspended till talks are concluded.
It can additionally embody a provision for a brand new peace fund to ensure social investments in areas affected by violence and the presence of unlawful armed teams.
Each leftist insurgent teams and legal gangs, which collectively rely some 6,000 fighters, are concerned in extortion, homicides, drug trafficking and unlawful gold mining, in response to safety sources.
