Broken Promises
Dear Readers,
Over the holidays, GlobalPost is bringing you special coverage of the key geopolitical issues facing some of the major regions of the world in 2025.
Today, we take a look at Colombia.
We wish you happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year.
Your GlobalPost Team
NEED TO KNOW
Broken Promises
COLOMBIA
Colombia is peaceful today but that peace is fragile.
In 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reached a peace deal to end more than 50 years of civil war, that has killed 450,000 people.
But soon after, Colombian voters rejected the agreement in a referendum.
Still, the Colombian government and some rebel leaders agreed to end the conflict anyway and work together to foster peace. Today, former guerilla fighters like Juan Carlos Garcia, who spent years in prison on terrorism and other charges, have laid down their arms and now work as farmers.
At the same time, some FARC rebels have refused to lay down their arms, and critics – like those who spoke to the Berghof Foundation – say officials have failed to address the economic and political problems that sparked the rebellion in the first place.
“We’re at a crossroads because the Colombian state has not fulfilled what was agreed upon,” Garcia told New Lines Magazine.
For example, in 2022, voters elected President Gustavo Petro, a former FARC fighter who is the country’s first leftist leader because he pledged to give 7.4 million acres to victims of the civil war and work for “Paz Total” (Total Peace). But, as Reuters reported, he has been slow to fulfill that promise.
Petro also reached a ceasefire deal with the National Liberation Army (ELN), a Marxist-Leninist rebel force that is still operating in the country. He suspended talks with the group in September, however, after ELN rebels killed two Colombian soldiers.
Meanwhile, right-wing paramilitaries that arose to combat FARC fighters in rural Colombia are also still active in the country. As InSight Crime reported, the Conquering Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra Nevada, for instance, runs drugs in the country’s north. The group is talking to the government about laying down its arms, but those talks have yet to go anywhere. Critics of the talks also say they are unlikely because groups like those make too much money and aren’t being offered anything comparable.
Meanwhile, new armed groups are springing up now and growing stronger. These groups are more interested in ill-gotten gains and drug revenues than leftwing or conservative ideals, the United Nations added.
As a result, Colombia is one of the most violent places in the world.
Analysts at the Washington Office on Latin America say that is the fault of right-wing President Ivan Duque, who served from 2018 to 2022 because he undermined the 2016 peace accords. Duque failed to devote money to fulfill the government’s commitments under the deal, they argued.
In the ensuing vacuum, the bonds that rebels and paramilitaries have formed with each other over the decades have offered community to Colombians who otherwise might gain a sense of belonging from citizenship, argued Peace Research Institute Oslo senior researcher Julia Palik in the Conversation.
Petro, meanwhile, is running out of time for his Total Peace, says the Economist, mainly because his term will expire in less than two years: “Total peace is not popular; some two-thirds of Colombians say it is going badly,” it wrote. “Mr. Petro’s successor may well ditch it. To avoid that he needs big wins, fast. Sadly for him (and) for Colombians … that looks unlikely.”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
The World, Briefly section will return on Jan. 3, 2025.
DISCOVERIES
The Invaders
In December 2020, Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission successfully returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu, delivering them to Earth in a sealed capsule. The pristine material was then distributed to scientists globally to unlock the secrets of the early solar system.
As researcher Matthew Genge and his team at Imperial College London began to analyze the material in 2022, they noticed something unusual while studying one of the Ryugu grains: Tiny rod-shaped filaments appeared on the rock’s surface, increasing in number with time.
“We found micro-organisms in a sample returned from an asteroid,” Genge recently told Space.com. ‘They appeared on the rock and spread with time before finally dying off.”
Initially, the discovery raised tantalizing questions about extraterrestrial life, such as whether these microbes have originated from the space rock.
Their new study, however, dashed those hopes. The rapid growth of the filaments strongly suggested terrestrial origins.
Genge explained that “the change in population suggests they only appeared after the rock was exposed to the atmosphere, more than a year after it was returned to Earth.”.
The contamination likely occurred during sample preparation at the Natural History Museum in London, where the grain was polished for study.
Despite meticulous protocols, Genge admitted to Scientific American that “you only need one bacterial cell to fall on your specimen – and that’s it, it’s contaminated.”
The microbes were likely Bacillus bacteria, known for their resilience and ability to thrive in extreme environments.
While the study may disappoint those hoping to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, it reveals an interesting silver lining – and a cautionary tale – about Earth’s lifeforms, according to Genge.
“It shows that microorganisms can readily metabolize and survive upon extraterrestrial materials,” Genge told Space.com. “Our findings suggest that space missions could be contaminating space environments. It also shows that terrestrial microorganisms are adept at rapid colonization.”
Andrew Steele, an astrobiologist at Carnegie Science who was not involved in the study, said the episode illustrates the challenges of working with extraterrestrial samples.
“Ultimately, we do live on a planet that is ruled by microbes, and chance events do happen,” he told Scientific American.