06/03/2024
Former president Juan Manuel Santos sent a harsh letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. The text is a direct alert about the proposal of President Gustavo Petro and former Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva in the direction of calling a Constituent Assembly using sections of the Final Agreement for the termination of the conflict that was signed between the Colombian State and the former FARC guerrilla in November 2016.
There, Santos says that the Agreement cannot be understood as a way for extra-constitutional mechanisms and asks that his document be sent to the UN Security Council to guarantee independence of the JEP as a court of transitional justice, and not for general amnesties or pardons.
”By transmitting the Final Agreement I expressly referred to the principle of good faithe, of enormous importance in the interpretation and application of the Agreement. I highlight this because Colombian officials and former officials have attributed to some paragraphs of the Agreement a meaning that is contrary to its object, scope and purpose, which is possibly incompatible with the principle of good faith,” says the former president and Nobel Peace Prize.
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This letter comes at a time of much political controversy since Leyva He said that the Peace Agreement called for a “great national agreement” that had to be fulfilled and that could be interpreted in the need to convene a National Constituent Assembly to guarantee implementation. This was confirmed by Leyva in an interview with Semana Magazine, where he also asserted that the Government’s former chief negotiator, Humberto de La Calle, supposedly knew that this possibility had been implicit in the Agreement. “I heard him say the word constituent to de La Calle. I’m witness“said the former chancellor.
Last week, President Gustavo Petro denied himself in a public speech when he said that he had not spoken of the National Constituent Assembly, although he did do so in March from Puerto Rellena using the exact term. “Colombia must move towards a National Constituent Assembly,” he stated in one of his most vehement speeches to date.
Read more: “We do want re-election and we say it upfront”: Senator Isabel Zuleta of the Historical Pact
This Sunday in an interview with Cambio Magazine, Petro spoke about the issue again and insisted that the Agreement must be fulfilled and that the section that refers to the “great national agreement was not invented by me,” he said.
The letter to the United Nations also warns of the possibility of improper use of the Special Justice for Peace (JEP). “Nothing in the Final Agreement can be distorted to open the possibility of granting amnesties, pardons, exonerations or pardons for such crimes of international connotation, much less to those most responsible,” says the former president, referring to the crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Finally, Santos asks Guterres to send that same letter to the United Nations Security Council, which approved a resolution to sign the agreement signed with the FARC in 2016 and which delegated the UN as verifier of what was agreed. He also ends the document by saying that the former presidents of Spain, Felipe González, and of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, agree with the content.
This is an alert that adds to those that the peace process negotiators have already been making in recent days, warning that nothing in the document signed between the State and the FARC can be interpreted as an express route and outside the mechanism regulated by the Constitution to convene a Constituent Assembly. For this to be feasible, the Government must present a project to Congress, which must have majorities in the House and Senate, formal review by the Constitutional Court, and then a vote that must get more than 13 million people accepting the call to the Constituent.
Once the letter was known, Leyva responded again through his X account. “I was right: Juan Manuel Santos wrote to the UN giving unsolicited explanations. So he went without wanting to? And she insinuates that Gustavo Petro acts in bad faith. Nothing of that! The President is respected. The head of the State is Gustavo Petro because the people decided it. That same people who are today the constituent power and whose voice the president will bring to the Security Council. Go ahead Gustavo! The union of the past is not going to take away our future,” the former official published.
It is still not clear what the former Foreign Minister’s next position will be, but it seems clear that it will be in peace issues. During the last two weeks there was a conversation generated by Pacho Historica tokens and close to the president’s political project around the idea of the Constituent Assembly and re-election. Senator Isabel Zuleta, for example, said on Cable Noticias that she does want reelection and is seeking it head on. Former prosecutor Eduardo Montealegre spoke of a mechanism by which the president could decree the Constituent Assembly without having to take it to Congress due to an alleged impact on the legitimacy of his mandate, and Leyva referred to the paragraph of the Agreement.
The messages have been largely confusing and within Congress there are fears that the president does have the idea of presenting the constituent assembly. Several congressmen are waiting to know what path Petro will choose, because it seems certain that before Congress it would be very difficult for a project of this type to succeed. Not only would that mean a total rethinking of the 1991 Constitution, which is described as one of the most guaranteed in the world, but the Government does not have a majority in the legislature at a time of much criticism due to the revelations of Olmedo López and Sneyder Pinilla. in the UNGRD corruption scandal.
The president of the Senate, Iván Name, the president of the Chamber, Andrés Calle, Wadith Manzur, president of the Commission of Accusations, and José Elías Chagui, congressman from Córdoba, were mentioned there.
