One of the leaders of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group, the FARC, on Sunday said that they are not a drug trafficking organization and though they have entered into peace negotiations with the government, they have not relinquished their desire to “take power” and change Colombian politics.
Rodrigo Granda, considered the FARC’s foreign minister, told newspaper El Colombiano that the accusations that the FARC is nothing but a drug trafficking organization “is a shame.”
“We are not drug traffickers, we are an organization with clear political policy ideas and for this reason the government is obliged to sit down and talk with us. Colombia would not sit down with a group of drug traffickers, Cuba would not sit as a guarantor with a group of drug traffickers, Venezuela and Chile would not sit down with with a group of drug dealers, I don’t think Norway has recieved a group of drug traffickers,” said Granda, referring to the four countries who have observed the peace process thus far.
PROFILE: FARC
The rebel leader said that the FARC’s presence at the peace negotiation table did not mean the group had given up on its core demands.
“We have not given up on taking power. What happens is that our strategic plan takes various forms. From Marquetalia [where the FARC was founded], Marulanda [FARC founder] and his men saw that it was possible to develop non-violent, unarmed confrontation…
Working with the state, however, is something Granda said the guerrillas were weary and even distrustful of.
“This attorney is a strange man, like something out of the basements of the age of the Inquisition. He seems unaware that here [in Cuba, where the peace talks are taking place] are some eminent political dialogues, where the legal issue is not fundamental and decisive.
The so-called foreign minister was arrested in 2004 by Venezuelan police and taken to the Colombian border, where Colombian authorities awaited him. In 2007, he was released after the then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy asked the Colombian government for his liberation as a part of the “humanitarian exchange” between the rebels and the government.