Party made up of former FARC guerrillas presents candidates for Colombian legislative elections

The Comunes party, made up of former FARC guerrillas, presented its list of candidates to the Senate and Congress for the 2022 Colombian elections on Sunday, where they have ten seats secured, as stipulated by the peace agreement they signed with the Government. in 2016.

“This group of combatants for peace, for social justice in different trenches, has an important female, youth and experience component,” announced the president of Comunes (formerly known as FARC), Rodrigo Londoño, who made a paragraph : “I hope this release makes it clear that I’m not on the charts.”

Londoño, who is known as “Timochenko” and is still called “Comrade Timo”, is no longer among the candidates for Parliament, although it is not yet known if he will again aspire to the Presidency (as happened in 2018, although withdrew his candidacy before the elections due to medical problems) or if the party will introduce someone else or choose to support another party.

The Senate list is headed by Julián Gallo, also known as “Carlos Antonio Lozada”, and repeated by Pablo Catatumbo, also a member of the last leadership of the FARC, and Sandra Ramírez, widow of the FARC founder, Manuel Marulanda, who will go as number two.

In addition, new faces such as the economist Imelda Daza are joining, but there are casualties such as Victoria Sandino, who in recent weeks has publicly shown a distancing from the training, or Pastor Alape, who did participate in this X National Commons Plenary .

Lozada assured that those who make up the lists, which will be zip lists to guarantee gender parity and will include one for the Senate and five for the Chamber for five constituencies, are “ordinary men and women who have given their lives to the struggle for democracy. , for peace and for social justice “.

Secured seats

One of the points of the peace agreement reserved ten seats – five in the Senate and five in the House of Representatives – for the party that made up the old guerrilla for two electoral periods, that is, from 2018 to 2022 and from 2022 to 2026.

“We are aware of the historical responsibility that weighs on our men, you have the certainty that we are going to raise with pride, honor and dignity the flags of the heroic struggle that we have represented for more than five decades,” Lozada said today, at the event held at the Corferias de Bogotá fairgrounds.

The current senator influenced promises for a better distribution of land, one of the points of the agreement, because “Colombia cannot continue to be the country with the greatest inequality in land tenure.”

Comunes also recalled the 292 signatories of the peace agreement who have been assassinated since 2016 and promised to continue working to protect those who bet on peace.

Comunes, who participated in the previous elections with the same initials as the guerrillas but the name Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común, barely got 50,000 votes for the Senate and 30,000 for the House of Representatives. (I)