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Is Santos rushing this deal because Trump won? Read the UPDATE below.
After the people of Colombia rejected the so-called peace agreement with the largest narco-terrorist Marxist organization in the world, Juan Manuel Santos went back to negotiating and announced a new accord last Saturday,
The new accord with the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, would include much of what had been agreed upon in the earlier pact, which was to be a pillar of Mr. Santos’s administration. The government and rebel commanders did make changes to several points in the original agreement, from requiring the rebels to surrender money and holdings from their criminal activities to providing safeguards for private owners as part of a modernization of the countryside.
What else is in the “new and improved” deal? (emphasis added)
The new accord will be presented to Congress for a vote and then be implemented, a process that would lead to the disarmament of about 6,000 FARC fighters. The deal also calls for infrastructure development for the countryside, provides the FARC with up to 10 seats in Congress and calls upon the rebels to work with the state to fight drug trafficking.
So we’re expected to believe that the new unelected congressmen will be working to fight against their own organizations’s largest source of funds?
Under the new agreement, foreign judges were eliminated from participating in the new judicial system for those accused of war-related crimes and there is explicit language laying out how the FARC chieftains would be confined as punishment for crimes. On the political front, the rebels made concessions, including receiving less state money for the political party that the accord allows them to form.
Rebel chieftains responsible for atrocities, though, would still be able to run for office.
The FARC will still receive state taxpayers’ money while criminals are holding office, in addition to having 10 members holding ten unelected congressional seats. What could possibly go wrong?
Santos, who at the start of the negotiations in 2012 had sworn up, down and sideways that 50% of the electorate would have to approve the deal in a referendum, changed that number last year, to least 13% of the electorate in a plebiscite.
The deal was rejected last month, but Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The “new and improved” agreement will not be subject to approval in a referendum. Santos will present it to Congress, bypassing voters altogether.
Why? (emphasis added)
What Mr. Santos has wanted to avoid is that the implementation of the deal run up against the political campaigning expected at the end of 2017, when candidates running for Congress and the presidency start looking for political banners, one of which could be an anti-FARC plank. The next presidential election is in 2018. Mr. Santos can’t run, but wants to ensure that a candidate supportive of the pact takes office, since implementation will run years.
Disgraceful.
Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.
UPDATE
Mary O’Grady posits that Santos is rushing his “new improved” accord because of Trump’s win:
Santos Panics With the Election of Trump. The Colombian president’s deal with FARC terrorists, six years in the making, is ‘fixed’ in six weeks.
He needs backing from someone. On Wednesday the former head of criminal investigations in Colombia gave credible testimony to the Supreme Court that he was part of a 2014 Santos re-election campaign effort to smear opposition candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga with allegations of illegal wiretapping, in a tight race that Mr. Zuluaga lost. The investigator’s claim rocked the nation and it casts doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Santos’s second term.
Mr. Santos has relied heavily on Mr. Obama to advance his “peace” agenda. That support has not been limited to the U.S. president’s decision to send an envoy to sit at the negotiating table in Havana. In the U.S. extradition case of former Colombian Agriculture Minister Andrés Felipe Arias, who will have a hearing in the Southern District of Florida federal court on Thursday, the Obama Justice Department is invoking a treaty that does not exist—in an attempt to help Mr. Santos put a political enemy behind bars. It’s hard to imagine a Trump government doing the same sort of favor for Mr. Santos.
Related: The Clinton Foundation’s toxic legacy in Colombia.
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