Since demobilising in 2017, former rebel fighter Manuel Antonio Gonzalez has faced numerous death threats and lost his son in a bloody murder.
Part of the now-defunct Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group, who signed a peace deal with the government of Juan Manuel Santos in 2016, Gonzalez, 54, lives in worry, not only for his own life but for the thousands of other former fighters who signed up to the agreement alongside him.
The FARC, who have been accused of serious war crimes, handed more than 7,000 weapons to a UN peace mission in 2017, ending a five-decade-long conflict that left 260,000 dead.
By NORA GÁMEZ TORRES AND JACQUELINE CHARLES | Miami Herald | Published: January 16, 2021 (Tribune News Service) As president, Donald Trump focused much of U.S. policy in Latin America on curbing migration and clamping down on autocratic leaders in Venezuela, Cuba and, occasionally, Nicaragua three countries coined the “troika of tyranny” by one of his former advisers. By all accounts, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to take a different approach. “Biden’s Latin America policy will be profoundly different than the Trump strategy, which mostly focused on inhibiting migration and turning the screws on Cuba and Venezuela to please South Florida voters,” said Benjamin Gedan, an Obama-era National Security Council official who is now deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program.
English News and Press Release on Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) about Protection and Human Rights; published on 14 Jan 2021 by Amnesty, HRW and 3 other organizations