From Democracy Digest.
Colombia will increase protection for political candidates running in October’s local and regional elections after the murders of seven aspirants, said President Ivan Duque. The killings have sparked renewed calls for more to be done to prevent political violence in the country, where hundreds of community leaders and human rights activists have also been murdered, Reuters reports.
The hard-won 2016 peace accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is fragile. Implementation has been slow and in late August a sector of the FARC announced they had rearmed. Yet throughout the country, popular support for peace persists – people yearn for a different future. El Testigo (above) helps its viewers understand why, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission notes.
It’s doubtful there was ever a FARC commitment to peace. A better read is that the guerrillas took a deal that included amnesty and 10 unelected FARC seats in Congress, but that they had no intention of giving up the lucrative cocaine business or their dream of bringing down Colombia’s democracy, The Wall Street Journal suggests.
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