OH NO

Colombian FARC Leaders Call for Return to War

In a YouTube video, two commanders criticized President Iván Duque for not keeping up his end of a peace deal.

Two former commanders of the disbanded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) called for a return to guerrilla war in a YouTube video posted Thursday morning, according to The Guardian.

The announcement comes nearly three years after a peace deal sought to end South America’s longest guerrilla conflict that killed more than 260,000 people as left-wing rebels, government forces, and state-aligned paramilitaries fight for territory.

In the video, two men known by their aliases, Iván Márquez and Jesús Santrich, criticized President Iván Duque for not keeping up his end of the deal. “This is the continuation of the rebel fight in answer to the betrayal of the state of the Havana peace accords,” Márquez said. “We were never beaten or defeated ideologically, so the struggle continues.” Márquez, who led the negotiating deal, is currently wanted in the U.S. for cocaine trafficking charges.

The peace deal has been fraught with complications and, in many rural areas, has failed to actualize. Although a United Nations monitoring body collected weapons from 7,000 FARC fighters when the deal was signed, smaller rebel groups, dissidents, and drug traffickers have fought for control in the resultant power vacuum.