Within the framework of a protocol act at the Casa de Nariño, from where he greeted the diplomatic forum residing in Colombia, this Tuesday the President Gustavo Petro responded to the letter that former president Juan Manuel Santos sent to António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, in which he warns that the Peace Agreement signed with the extinct FARC does not contemplate a call for a constituent assembly.
Accepting the thesis of his former foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva – who said that Santos “still does not understand well what he signed” –, Petro assured that the former head of state is “a little” confused and it seems that “he did not understand a word that he himself put and signed the final phase of the entire process: the unilateral declaration of State before the United Nations.”
“There is a precedent: the peace of Santos, which is under discussion today. He himself has put it, confusing a little in his letter addressed to Antonio Gutérres in 2017 with the full text of the Agreement they reached with the FARC,” said the president, who stated that, although Santos managed to agree on peace with the extinct guerrilla, was not able to lead Colombia to an era of peace.
“Santos achieves an episodic agreement with the FARC, which also fails to lead us towards an era of peace. Something is wrong there, which must be analyzed to avoid repeating the error. It is an agreement between armed groups, the FARC on one side, the armed State on the other. A relatively militarily defeated FARC (…) Santos is going to go down in history as the builder of that process, but it seems that he did not understand a word that he himself put and signed in the final phase of the entire process: the unilateral declaration of State before the United Nations,” Petro explained.
On the other hand, faced with the constituent assembly and the possibility that he could be re-elected, the president insisted that he does not want another four years in power, although – in a confusing and ambiguous message that lends itself to various interpretations – he hinted at for the first time that “in the future” he could seek re-election.
“Those who criticize me were re-elected. I do not want to be re-elected, nor do I believe that a constituent is the appropriate instrument yet, but I do not deny that possibility in the future, because the constituent power has to express itself as it did when the liberals and conservatives made peace in order to make peace. We are in those intricacies,” he added.
In his statement, the head of state once again blamed the press for the confusion surrounding the constituent process, without admitting that its ambiguous messages have lent itself to all types of interpretations.
“The press has produced a confusion about this. (They say that) the unilateral declaration of peace necessarily leads to a constituent assembly and this necessarily to a re-election of the current president of the Republic, totally dwarfing the objective of peace due to a personal whim of power. That is a trap that is written in the newspapers and appears on the news, and they want to bring it to the mentality of the Colombian people as a general thought, but that is not what I want,” confirmed the president.
However, he did not outright reject a process to modify the 1991 Constitution, stating that it is “what the people need from time to time in history.” According to Petro, the basis of democracy is the power of the people: “That is what the word democracy means and to be scared by that, to say that Satan, demonic or terrible, is simply because they do not understand democracy,” he said. .
