A high ranking commander of Colombia’s largest left wing guerrilla group FARC, has hit out against the brother of Colombia’s president for releasing information on the peace talks between the FARC and the Colombian government.
Mauricio Jaramillo, alias “El Medico,” has claimed in an open letter to Enrique Santos, brother to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, that the article he wrote for a Colombian newspaper is a breach of the confidentiality agreement that he agreed to and thus “relieves the FARC of [any obligation to] the agreed commitment to confidentiality.”
That “he [Enrique Santos], a member of the government delegation, brother to the President and renowned national journalist, has exposed to the public their version of events…[makes] it obvious that we can do it,” wrote Jaramillo.
What follows in the FARC leader’s open letter is a refutation of many aspects of the version of events Enrique recounted in his original article.
While Jaramillo agreed with Enrique that the preliminary talks were beset with difficulties, he placed the blame for such problems squarely on the shoulders of the government’s negotiation team, claiming that from the beginning “the only thing expected from the dialogue with the FARC was our rapid and submissive demobilization.”
This is not the first time both sides have traded words over conflicting accounts of events; the government in November accused the FARC of breaking a unilateral ceasefire, which was in turn refuted by the FARC.
Official peace talks between FARC and the Colombian government began in November 2012 in Cuba’s capital of Havana, and are set to resume on the 14th of January 2013, where both parties hope to find a solution to Colombia’s ongoing internal conflict.
The full text of Jaramillo Gomez’s open letter “Clarification for Mr Enrique Santos Calderon” can be found here, while the article that sparked the war of words, Enrique Santos’ “Negotiating with the FARC in Cuba”, can be viewed here.