Colombia’s FARC a political party formed from a former rebel group following a historic peace deal said on Wednesday, it was fielding its leader as a candidate in next year’s presidential elections.
Rodrigo Londono, 58, better known by his nickname “Timochenko,” will be the party’s choice for the polls, a FARC spokesman told a news conference.
The first round of voting is scheduled for May 2018.
Timochenko was previously the supreme commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARC in Spanish a Marxist guerrilla group that for half a century battled the government and right-wing paramilitaries.
The conflict, marked by kidnappings and disappearances, left some 260,000 people dead, 60,000 unaccounted for and seven million displaced.
The FARC rebels agreed in 2016 to a landmark peace deal with the government. It disarmed and in September transformed itself into a political party, keeping the same initials but changing its official name to the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force.
Just ahead of the political FARC’s founding congress in August, Timochenko — who suffered a temporary arterial brain blockage in July, impeding his speech had ruled out the party putting forward a presidential candidate next year.
But the party named Timochenko its leader, and with Wednesday’s announcement showed it changed its mind, and intended to have him try to succeed current President Juan Manuel Santos, who is ineligible to stand for re-election.
In October, UN assistant secretary-general for human rights Andrew Gilmour warned that reintegration of former FARC fighters “is not going so well.”
Many are finding it difficult or impossible to return to civilian life, raising the risk they might turn to crime rings, illegal mining or drugs, he said.
“If you don’t reintegrate the fighters then there is a strong chance that they will go back to something worse, even if they’ve given up their weapons,” Gilmour told reporters at UN headquarters on October 20.
An analyst on Colombia’s conflict, Victor de Currea Lugo, said the FARC “knows they are not going to win (the presidential election), but they know they can strengthen their political movement” by taking part.
Carlos Arias, another analyst and a professor, said Timochenko’s candidacy was part of “a positioning strategy” to gauge the party’s electoral support and possible political alliances.
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