For more than 50 years, Colombia has been suffering from a war that has killed nearly 450,000 civilians and displaced more than 8 million people from their territories. My father, Carlos Pizarro Leongómez – once the commander of the M-19 guerrilla movement – signed a peace agreement with the Colombian state after years of insurgency and ran as a presidential candidate in 1990. Forty-seven days after the agreement was signed, he was assassinated. This event changed my life, destroyed my family and devastated our country.
Now we may finally be nearing the end of our national nightmare. August 7th was Gustavo Petro sworn in as President of Colombia and co-headed the country’s first progressive government with Afro-Colombian land defender Francia Márquez. In his inaugural speech, Petro promised that his new government would bring “true and final peace” to Colombia. To this end, he has invited historical political opponents to the table to reach a joint agreement by which both guerrilla and paramilitary forces will lay down their arms.
Calls for peace rose across the country. After Petro’s election victory, the country’s last active guerrilla force, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional), called for new negotiations with the government to lay down their arms. Soon after, dozens of right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels and criminal gangs issued a joint letter calling for a ceasefire to negotiate peace terms. At Petro’s inauguration on August 7, the crowd could be heard chanting hundreds of meters away: ¡No más guerra! no more war
The quest for unity was at the heart of Petro’s presidential program. That’s why there are now so many progressive candidates like me in Congress. Over the course of many months of deliberation, we have assembled a broad coalition that includes workers, urban professionals, farmers, indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. This alliance, known in Colombia as the Historic Pact, won a landmark victory in March’s general election, becoming the largest single force in Congress.
What would it take to win this lasting peace? First, it would mean fulfilling the peace accords signed in 2016. At that time, the Colombian government and the guerrilla forces of the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) conducted extensive, internationally coordinated negotiations to end the violent conflict. But Colombia is former President Iván Duque canceled this agreement as soon as he took office. The consequences were devastating. More than 1,300 social leaders and peace accord signatories have been assassinated since 2016.
We want to keep the promise of the 2016 agreements. This includes making arrangements for the full reintegration of former guerrilla fighters into society and providing economic support to help them find work in their communities. It also means driving land reforms to address Colombia’s extremely concentrated land tenure, which is among the most unequal in the world. After all, it means ending the “war on drugs” that has led to the supply of arms to paramilitary organizations that commit crimes against our people in the name of “drug control.”
Peace does not begin with simply ending violence. We must create the social conditions for a peaceful society. First and foremost, this means reorienting the Colombian state away from war against internal enemies, real and imagined, towards the development of our communities. It means investing in our people through public schools and hospitals, not through riot police; use our planes and helicopters to build infrastructure, not kill our fellow citizens; Develop sustainable agriculture in the countryside, don’t rain down chemicals like glyphosate to destroy coca production. And it means protecting and empowering women to overcome violence on a daily basis and contribute to peace in our society.
During the election campaign, Gustavo Petro often presented the election as a simple choice: the old politics of death or a new politics of life. The people of Colombia have now made their choice. Our job is to bring them all together—from marginalized rural communities to political opponents in Congress—to begin this new peace process.