Bogota, Colombia — Former rebels who once controlled large swaths of rural Colombia are now fighting for their survival as a political party as the country holds high-stakes congressional elections on Sunday.
Getting enough votes to retain their congressional seats or maintain their status as a political party is a tall order for former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or the FARC, who now run the party known as the Communes or Commons.
The party had 10 guaranteed seats in Colombia’s Congress during the past two legislatures, a concession to the rebels in their 2016 peace deal with the government.
But now, under the terms of the agreement, those seats have been lost and the communities have to compete equally with other political parties.
Some observers expect the former rebels to retain their seats in the crowded field, where more than a dozen parties are vying for seats in the Senate and House of Representatives.
“He hasn’t really gained the support of the people,” said Yan Basset, a political science professor at the University of Rosario in Bogotá.
The former rebels kidnapped thousands of people and bombed dozens of villages during their five-decade conflict with the Colombian government.
The stigma of the conflict persists, “and obviously many Colombians find it difficult to forgive,” Bassett said.
Despite promising seats, the Communist Party saw dismal results in previous elections.
In the 2018 Congress elections, the party polled 89,300 votes nationwide. It will drop to 50,100 in 2022.
This decline is critical because Colombian electoral laws require parties to capture at least 3% of the total vote to maintain the status that allows them to field candidates and receive public funding. In the last election, parties needed 509,000 votes to reach the crucial 3% mark.
In an effort to improve its chances in this election, the Comunes has formed an alliance with Fuerza Ciudadana, founded 20 years ago by leftist activists and academics, which recently won a mayorship and governorship in northern Colombia.
Former rebels are hiding their symbols to make their candidates more palatable to average voters. Flyers, flags and stickers handed out by the party feature Fuerza Ciudadana’s logo, but the Commune’s red rose is absent from most marketing materials.
Communes has registered its union with electoral authorities as Fuerza Ciudadana, ensuring that the movement’s orange logo will appear on Sunday’s ballots instead of its own.
“Politics in Colombia is very complicated,” said Carlos Carreno Marin, a former FARC commander.
Marín was one of the FARC’s negotiators in the 2016 peace accord and has represented the communes in Congress since 2018.
Now he is trying to hold on to his Bogotá congressional seat and admits it will be a challenge.
“We are in a fierce fight against parties that have been doing this for two centuries,” the 48-year-old said.
About 300 seats in the Columbia Congress will be up for grabs on Sunday.
The outcome of the election is critical to President Gustavo Petro’s efforts to rewrite Colombia’s constitution. Petro has accused judges and lawmakers of blocking his efforts to nationalize the country’s health care system and reform the pension system.
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Contributed by Manuel Rueda in Bogota, Colombia.
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