Former FARC guerrillas move to southern Colombia due to threats

Bogotá. Dozens of former guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who signed a peace agreement with the state in 2016 were forcibly displaced on Tuesday with their families from Caquetá, in the south of the country, after receiving threats in June from dissidents of the extinct guerrilla group who took up arms again.

In what the government called a “humanitarian caravan,” the former guerrillas and their families left Miravalle, the threatened area; the group of 86 people, including 24 children, transported their furniture, appliances, pets and animals, such as cattle, by truck, according to the state Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN).

“We are going to leave the place, but always with the focus on continuing to build peace,” said former combatant Carlos Zamudio, who has lived in Miravalle for seven years. “There is a huge, emotional void,” he lamented in a video released by ARN.

Those who had returned to civilian life were transferred by the government from Miravalle, one of the spaces established in the peace agreement to serve as safe places, located in the department of Caquetá, to El Doncello, a town more than 200 kilometers south of the same department.

The peace signatories in that area claim to have received threats from the dissident group Estado Mayor Central, which allegedly ordered them to abandon Miravalle, accusing them of being “instrumentalized” by the Segunda Marquetalia —another FARC dissident group—, with which they are disputing control of the territory.

Faced with the threat, the former guerrillas asked the government to relocate them due to the lack of guarantees for their safety in the area, after years of building their homes and productive projects such as a bakery, seven beef cattle ranching projects, a tourist and rafting operator — called Rowing for Peace — which had been highlighted as a success story of reincorporation into legality.

El Doncello will be a transitional site where displaced ex-combatants will remain until the national government buys the land where they can settle, said ARN, without specifying how long the transition would take or where the new land would be located.

“The property we rented in El Doncello has several houses where some of the families will stay, but we are also in the process of building 16 emergency shelters,” said Tania Rodríguez, ARN’s program director.

The Comunes Party — created by former guerrillas who complied with the peace agreement — lamented the most recent displacement in Caquetá. “With deep pain today we say goodbye to “El Filo,” our home in Miravalle. Those who today profit from the perpetuation of the war insist on persecuting the signatories of peace,” they said on Tuesday from X, formerly Twitter.

Since 2016, when the peace agreement was signed that put an end to the FARC guerrilla group, considered at that time the oldest in Latin America, five groups of former guerrillas who remained in the spaces established by the government for their reintegration have been relocated due to security problems.