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Colombia's coming elections are vital for a peace process in disarray
NICK MACWILLIAM says the Ivan Duque government has not met its side of the bargain in the peace process and murders of trade unionists and environmental activists are rife in today's Colombia
5 uyears farc anniv

HAVING marked the fifth anniversary of its historic peace agreement on November 24, Colombia now looks towards another landmark date: next May’s presidential election. 

Whoever succeeds the current government of Ivan Duque will have an enormous bearing on the agreement between the then government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). The signing raised optimism for the future of a country blighted by decades of political violence. 

Duque’s 2018 election victory, however, provoked genuine fears for the peace process. His party, the hard-right Democratic Centre (CD), founded in 2013 by former president Alvaro Uribe, opposed negotiations with the Farc and subsequently orchestrated the successful No campaign in which Colombians narrowly rejected the agreement  before it was ratified through congress. It was Uribe who selected Duque, a low-profile senator, as the CD’s candidate for the 2018 election.

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