Colombia's peace negotiators turn their attention to gender equality.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
Now in the final leg of a historic negotiation process that began nearly four years ago, the Colombian government and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) guerrillas took the surprising step on July 24 of agreeing on a plan to address issues of gender equality and sexual identity once a final peace accord is signed and ratified in a national referendum.
Before the announcement, the Colombian public hadn't been aware that the issues were even on the table. But as representatives for the two sides explained, the importance of equal rights for women and sexual minorities became increasingly apparent as the talks progressed. "We gained awareness of this crucial matter as time went on and saw that it's more than just a problem of language--of putting 'los and las' [the Spanish articles used to indicate men and women] in all the documents, or an 'x' instead of a vowel; it's about establishing real parity," said Victoria Sandino, a FARC commander.
Colombian Foreign Affairs Minister Maria Angela Holguin offered a similar assessment. "As we got deeper into the negotiations, we came to the conclusion that everything agreed upon had to be integral, which also meant including people with different sexual identities, people who are referred to collectively by the acronym LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexual)," she said.
The government and the guerrillas are hoping to sign a final peace agreement before the end of the month and put it to a plebiscite at some point between late September and the middle of October. Before any of that happens, the FARC must first hold a summit to ratify everything its negotiating team signed in Havana, where the talks have taken place since November 2012 (NotiSur, Dec. 14, 2012). The sides reached a preliminary peace agreement and bilateral ceasefire in June (NotiSur, July 15, 2016).
"Once we've settled everything, the FARC will meet for its 10th conference since the negotiations began, this time to disband, because the peace accord, the end of the conflict, means nothing more and nothing less than the end of the FARC as an armed group," said Colombia's exultant president, Juan Manuel Santos.
Not everyone shares Santos' enthusiasm for the history-making attempt to end a war--Latin America's longest--that has dragged on for more than half a century. A significant segment of the population continues to takes its cues from former President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), an extreme right-winger...
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