As Colombia peace accord unravels, ex-FARC leaders say they’ll return to armed conflict

BOGOTA, Colombia - Former senior leaders of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group announced a break with the 2016 peace accord that ended Latin America’s longest war, appearing in green fatigues, toting rifles and declaring a “new chapter” in the armed struggle against a government they said had betrayed the deal.

In a video posted online early Thursday, the former lead negotiator for the FARC - the leftist guerrilla group that became a political party in the aftermath of the deal - denounced the failure of the government, now led by conservative President Iván Duque, to live up to the promises of the accord.

Luciano Marín - known by the nom de guerre Iván Márquez - stood among a group of 20 heavily armed FARC members, including other prominent leaders, and condemned the killing in the past two years of more than 500 left-wing community leaders and 150 former fighters.

"The state has not fulfilled its most important obligations, which is to guarantee the life of its citizens and especially avoid assassinations for political reasons," Marín said. He said his group would fight for a government that upholds the peace process.

Rodrigo Londoño, the former FARC commander who now heads its political party, told Colombian news media he had "mixed feelings" about Marín's announcement, but insisted the main FARC faction would continue to back the accord.

"Despite the obstacles and difficulties, we are convinced that the path of peace is the right one," he said.

There was no immediate comment from Duque's government.

The move by Marín and other former FARC officials threatened to further fray a peace process that analysts say has been gradually unraveling. Other former FARC members, frustrated over a lack of promised training and re-insertion programs, have already returned to the jungles. But Marín's is the most significant break with the accord.

Analysts warned that it could unite the two dozen small groups of dissident fighters who have continued the armed conflict. Marín said he would seek to coordinate with the ELN, the armed group founded in the 1960s with the aid of radical Catholic priests that became Colombia's largest guerrilla group after FARC members laid down their arms.

Naryi Vargas, a researcher with the Bogota-based Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, suggested that Marín and other leaders in the video could bring together at least 1,500 fighters. The FARC had more than 13,000 members - about half of them armed combatants - before the peace accord.

The Marín faction has "the capacity to regroup the close to 24 dissident groups that are in the country, they have the capacity to give them energy, a solid organizational structure, to give them a long-term plan," Vargas said.

Marín disappeared from public view a year ago. Duque claimed he had fled to Venezuela, where the government of President Nicolás Maduro has been accused of cooperating with and aiding Colombian rebels.

Marín appeared in the video with other senior FARC officials in what appeared to be a jungle clearing. Appearing with him was Seuxis Pausias Hernández, known more widely as Jesús Santrich. Hernández was detained in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration raid in 2018, threatened with extradition, jailed, released, jailed again, then escaped.

Also present was Hernán Darío Velásquez, known as El Paisa, who once commanded an elite guerrilla unit of the FARC, and was later part of the negotiating team that struck the accord in Havana. And Walter Mendoza, a former commander of the FARC forces in Cauca, a Pacific department of Colombia that has been a center of FARC dissent. His appearance suggested that FARC groups in restive Cauca could heed the faction's call to arms.

In the years since the accord was signed, FARC officials and observers have criticized the Colombian government for not making good on ambitious promises of rural reform and economic development.

The government had pledged to build roads and schools in isolated communities, extend credit and land titles to small farmers, send personnel to help families that relied on the coca crop develop alternative agricultural projects to get by in a new, peaceful Colombia. But efforts to translate those pledges into reality never really got off the ground.

Some analysts said the faction being cobbled together by Marín and others remained in the minority.

"I don't think they have a real chance to tilt the balance of power," said Sergio Guzmán, founder of the consultant firm Colombia Risk Analysis. "They don't have the manpower, they don't have the weaponry."

Key to maintaining a semblance of peace, he said, is how the government responds. Some in Duque's party could seek to push the president to act quickly, and use force, to put the faction down.

“I think cooler heads from the United Nations and the international community, which hold the peace agreement very dearly, and believe that this is basically the country’s most important accomplishment in the last 50 years, are going to try to hold the government back from acting harshly,” Guzmán said.