In last Sunday’s elections in Colombia, all members of Congress were chosen, including 16 seats of the so-called Special Transitional Districts of Peace, which are part of the Peace Agreement signed between the State and the FARC in 2016.
Said agreement establishes these seats and the 10 of the FARC (5 representatives and 5 senators), but for ‘legal’ reasons in the past period only those of the guerrilla entered, now transformed into the Comunes party.
The Colombian political analyst Jairo Libreros explains that it was the Congress and a mess was created and they could not start with those seats, but then the Constitutional Court said that the Parliament had made a mistake, and told him that the law had already been approved and that it send the president to sanction it and the president Iván Duque did it reluctantly and that is why from this year they are elected, and in the period 2026-2030 they will also be.
“The objective is to give political representation to the victims of the conflict who are located in the 16 jurisdictions where the armed conflict with the FARC was experienced with greater intensity,” says Libreros, who adds that the requirement to participate for those seats is that the candidate is a victim accredited by the authorities in the Single Registry of Victims (RUV), which in total has 9,250,453, according to the list of the Victims Unit
“With this accreditation you can enter to receive special support from the State and in those jurisdictions the people vote for the Senate, vote for the consultations, vote for the territorial House of Representatives and have the right, if they want, to vote. for those 16 special seats.
Despite their objective, these seats are not exempt from controversy.
Political analyst Sergio Guzmán comments that there has been a lot of talk about these seats, but unfortunately one of the big problems is that most of the people elected to these positions are in doubt as to whether they are victims or not.
“It is doubtful whether these peace seats were captured by traditional parties or people belonging to them, so I think what is coming is that they are going to take office, but many of these individuals are going to be sued because they do not comply with the requirements or there is some type of interference… these seats are going to change”, says Guzmán, also director of the consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis.
For Booksellers, we will have to wait for what the Colombian Council of State decides, which is the institution that is in charge of the country’s contentious-administrative jurisdiction.
It is estimated that 10 of the 16 seats will end up in the hands of the traditional political class.
Criticism from European observers
Even the Electoral Observation Mission of the European Union (EU EOM) regretted this week that “controversial” people have been elected to the so-called “peace seats”, according to EFE.
In these votes, Rodrigo Tovar, son of the former paramilitary chief, was elected. George 40, and relatives and people with ties to traditional parties.
The head of the EU EOM, the Spanish MEP Javi López, when asked about Tovar, assured that “some names” chosen “are at least controversial for a good part of the country’s victims” and added that “it is an undeniable reality”. .
“In Colombia there are no blood crimes; responsibilities, in our system, are individual. For this reason, I do not have to assume charges or accusations that, in addition to being unjustified, lack veracity”, Tovar went on to say.
However, there are also cases that stand out, according to the Colombian newspaper The viewer, like those of Orlando Castillo, who won the seat of the Middle Pacific; Juan Pablo Salazar, representative of Alto Patía and Norte del Cauca, and Gerson Lisímaco Montaño, three people who have spent years working on social issues in their territories.
In general, the implementation of the voting in the Special Transitory Circumscriptions of Peace was “positive”, but the Mission detected “design flaws” in this vote, such as the “exclusion of municipal capitals” from the vote, since the Victims could only vote in the rural and isolated areas of these constituencies.
This fact excluded, according to the EU EOM, “many displaced people from the conflict zone” who live in the capitals.
They also detected failures in the financing of the victims’ candidacies, since by law all money spent on the campaign had to be public, but due to delays in payments, many had to use money out of their own pockets and others received from traditional parties or even from armed groups.
In this sense, the head of the European Parliament delegation in the Mission, Izaskun Bilbao, spoke of the “infiltration of political parties and armed groups” in the campaigns to the constituencies, and López pointed out that, despite “the efforts of the Government to build security schemes” for the candidates due to the violence in the territories, these were “still insufficient”.
European observers also found numerous signs of vote buying and even witnessed some cases, especially in the Atlantic region and the constituencies, López added, while Bilbao added reports of the same phenomenon in the Caribbean department of Bolívar. This phenomenon takes advantage of poverty and little observation in rural areas.
FARC seats
Regarding the seats held for the second and last time by the former FARC, now the Comunes party, the general opinion is that they arrived without first going through the sieve of the Special Justice for Peace, despite the fact that it is understandable that these people seek to play politics by lay down arms.
Now, they have no supports. In the last parliamentary election (2018) they did not get even 40,000 votes, in the 2019 territorial elections they only won one municipality and accumulated around 65,000 votes nationwide, and last Sunday they only got around 25,000 votes. Therefore, it is projected that in the next one, without the seats of the agreement, it is most likely that they will be left without representation in Congress, according to Libreros.
The analyst adds that the most knowledgeable in the matter of the JEP project that at the end of this year or in 2023 the first sentences of this jurisdiction would already be had. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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