United States Revokes The FARC’s Designation As A Terrorist Organization

The United States has revoked the designation of the Colombian group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as a “foreign terrorist organization”. The implication is that US officials can work with members of the group now as they continue to shift into political life.

According to a statement by the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he said removing the “terrorist” designation would make it easier for the US to support the implementation of the accord as the group is also now guaranteed a share of seats in Colombia’s legislature

The announcement comes days after the Marxist rebels and Colombia’s government celebrated the five-year anniversary of a peace deal that ended five decades of violence.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken\
Published by the European Commission at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuJcQrkKaB4 under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2018, the group took part in a United Nations-supervised decommissioning of the last of its accessible weapons.

The FARC group, which fought for five decades in an era of devastating political violence in Colombia – carrying out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and attacks in the name of redistributing wealth to Colombia’s poor – has been designated a political party in the wake of the peace agreement signed in 2016.

The FARC was designated a “foreign terrorist” organization by the US in 1997.

Written by BoomRadioNG