MIAMI - The top official in Latin America at the National Security Council met with Colombian Americans in Miami Monday to discuss leaked news that the U.S. would remove a former Marxist rebel group from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
The designation will be removed from the U.S. on Tuesday to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the historic peace accord between the former President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
The Biden administration is putting two breakaway groups, formed by former FARC rebels, on the terrorism list Tuesday. One is La Segunda Marquetalia led by a former FARC commander and the other is the FARC-EP. These groups are part of the reason that conflict still exists in many parts of Colombia.
The information that leaked was only about the delisting of the FARC and so the reaction was a very negative one, Juan S. Gonzalez, senior director for Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council, told NBC News in an interview.
It's been characterized as lifting the pressure off the FARC, but it also shifts toward the organizations that are the dissident groups of the FARC.
This does not forgive anything that the FARC has done over the last 52 years. Gonzalez, who was born in Colombia, said that it is shifting the tools of the U.S. government to focus on those organizations that are still involved in terrorist activity.
Santos won a 2016 Nobel Peace Prize after being negotiated in Cuba with support from the U.S. under former President Barack Obama. After the deal was signed, FARC members began to demobilize and some 13,000 laid down their weapons.
If a guerrilla group gets involved politically and disarms, that is what you want to happen, and that is what you want to encourage, and it sends a signal that these processes can lead to peace, said Gonzalez. It has been misrepresented, and it is part of a political debate that we should have based on facts. The peace accord has been divisive in Colombia and Florida, where there is a heavy Colombian-American population. Those who oppose the peace deal are critical of removing the FARC from the terrorism list.
After the delisting last week, Colombian American state senator Annette Taddeo, whose father was kidnapped by the FARC, called the news outrageous. Taddeo did not attend the meeting with Gonzalez, saying it was short notice and she was in Tallahassee, though she was invited.
This is extremely personal for me, no matter how you put it. Taddeo said that it is not just for me, it is for our entire community.
In Florida, the state that swung toward Trump in 2020, Colombian Americans make up about 250,000 eligible voters. After his campaign spent a lot of time courting them, the former president made inroads with Colombians, often talking about Colombian politics more than domestic policy and criticizing the Obama administration's support for the peace accord.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava urged the administration to reject this move in a tweet. Some Democrats like the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist criticized the delisting. Republicans in Florida, including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, also took aim at the decision.
There is no perfect way to move forward, but this is the best way to move forward. The wounds are still open. They will take time to heal, but this is the right way forward, said Marco Frieri, a Democratic political analyst who attended the meeting with Gonzalez.
It is an emotional topic, but the reactions we have been seeing are not based on complete facts, they are based on emotions, Frieri said.
Colombia has had the longest running war in the Americas, which has defined generations of Colombians. The war between the government, right-wing groups, and the FARC lasted 52 years, killed about 220,000 and displaced over five million people. But former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe led a campaign against the peace deal, saying it was amounted to unjust amnesty for the rebels, something many Uribistas are calling echo.
The FARC review began under the Trump administration and concluded under Biden s, and all terrorist designations by the U.S. are subject to a review every five years.
Gonzalez said that removing the FARC from the list would allow the U.S. Agency for International Development to work in areas where demobilized FARC soldiers are located. It would allow former rebels to travel to the U.S., but he did issue a warning.
If they are going to visit here, they better be sure that they don't have an indictment. Because if they do, the indictments, the charges regarding involvement in drug trafficking, those investigations continue in force, he said.
Gonzalez said the stain of history on the FARC is something that will never wash off.