GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR DISCUSSION OF THE CEASE FIRE

The FARC-EP is a response to the State's violence against the people and their organizations.

1.1 In 1948, during the government of Ospina Perez, the Liberal Party leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was assassinated by the Colombia oligarchy. The presidency of Ospina Perez was succeeded by that of Laureano Gomez.

1.2 It was under these Conservative Party governments that bands of gunman were organized in their service, the paramilitaries of the epoch. Their purpose was to unleash terror in the countryside and cities, to expropriate peasants' lands and to physically eliminate the Liberal Party leadership, giving rise to the armed uprising, in which the FARC has its roots.

1.3 The persistence of an antidemocratic, violent and repressive political regime, which upholds the interests and privileges of a minority, created a new phase for the capitalist model in Colombia, a generator of poverty and misery for the Colombian people.

1.4 This new situation created the conditions for the development and consolidation of the revolutionary guerrilla movement in our country. In this way, the FARC arose in 1964 as an organized response to State violence against the people.

2. The Cease Fire has always been a banner of the FARC-EP. In the same way the search for agreements, which would lead us to cease-fires, has been, and is, a banner of the FARC.

2.1 The FARC-EP has always struggled to achieve revolutionary change in Colombian society. We have been forced by the governmental violence to resort to armed struggle, as we are denied the possibility of looking for change through the peaceful path.

2.2 Convinced of the need to find the least painful path for our people, we have always been ready to go ahead with discussions with the various governments and to try to arrive at agreements for a lasting peace with social justice.

2.3 Knowing well the suffering of the Colombian people as a consequence of state terrorism, we are the first to seek an agreement for a cease fire that would alleviate this suffering, that would serve to cement advances in the process for peace and which would generate better conditions, such as the active and massive participation of society in the public audiences, for the development of discussion on agenda points.

3. The policy of negotiation in midst of the conflict has its origin during the distinct governments of the past 20 years.

3.1 Belisario Betancur took the first step towards beginning a dialogue in the town of Dolores, Tolima. Nonetheless, this was frustrated by an attempt to turn the event into an opportunity for members of the Sixth Brigade of the Army to assassinate the members of the Secretariat of the FARC who went to the meeting.

3.2 Shortly afterwards, President Betancur, pressured by militarism and the high officials of the military, did not keep his promise to demilitarize the muncipalities of Vistahermosa and Mesetas in the state of Meta. Despite this, the Agreements of Uribe were signed and extended during the government of Virgilio Barco.

3.3 The underhanded attack on Casa Verde, December 9, 1990, after 7 years of putting efforts into national reconciliation, without giving notice of ending the agreements signed with the two previous governments, together with the policy of integral war declared by the government of Cesar Gaviria against the Colombian people, signified a new moment in the history of the conflict. After this attack, the conversations between the government of Gaviria and the insurgency had to take place in the exterior, in Caracas and Tlaxcala, because the government refused, despite our insistence, to suspend the military operations in the area of La Uribe so that contact could be reinitiated.

3.4 The same happened with the government of Ernesto Samper, which was incapable of demilitarizing Uribe in Meta because of opposition from the military command.

CEASE FIRES

4. A cease fire, to be bilateral, obliges on the one side, the FARC-EP and, on the other side, the Public Forces and the rest of the government security forces such as the DAS, DIJIN, SIJIN, B-2, Justice Department (Fiscalia) and the rest of the intelligence and security forces of the State.

4.1 Understood as the cessation of offensive military actions between the armed bodies.

4.2 The order for the Cease Fire will occur simultaneously in date and time throughout the national territory, given by the President of the Republic and by the Central High Command of the FARC-EP.

4.3 Upon initiation of the Cease Fire, each of the forces will maintain themselves in the site they occupy at the moment of the signing of the agreement.

4.4 The Cease Fire does not exclude the right to defense against an enemy attack.

4.5 The duration time for the cease-fire will be defined in its moment by the parties to the agreement. It may be extended according to the results obtained, the fulfillment of the cease-fire agreement, and according to the advances made in the discussion of agenda items.

4.6 At the moment in which the cease fire agreement goes into effect, the Public Forces and all the rest of the State's security organisms will suspend the patrols, military and intelligence operations and captures in the national territory related to members and fronts of the FARC-EP. This, with the goal of guaranteeing a cessation of armed confrontations.

4.7 The National Commission of Verification will be composed of members of both sides and will have the means necessary to carry out its mission.

4.8 The National Commission of Verification will present reports on non-compliance with the agreement to the National Table of Dialogue and Negotiation.

TO SUSPEND HOSTILITIES:

DISMANTLE STATE PARAMILITARISM

1. To suspend hostilities by the State against the Colombian people implies, necessarily, to cleanse the Armed Forces of all the officials committed to the paramilitary groups, taking them before the ordinary tribunals of justice so that they pay for their crimes. The same fate must belong to the civilians who are committed to paramilitary financing, promotion and patronage.

2. Paramilitarism in Colombia provokes: massacres, forced displacement, selective assassinations, expropriation and repopulation of lands, evictions, threats, narcotics traffic, generalized terror, exile, and the immobilization of the social forces proposing democratic changes. This is a State policy carried out by sectors of the Armed Forces and it threatens the present institutions including the government over which Doctor Andres Pastrana presides.

Paramilitarism is a policy of the State in Colombia that corresponds to the application of the Doctrine of National Security.

RESPECT THE POLITICAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS OF COLOMBIANS

3.The FARC-EP considers it necessary that the Colombian State and government, in fulfilling an agreement for a cessation of hostilities, stop the repression against the people and the workers. That it stop criminalizing social protest and guarantee the free exercise of civil and political rights, and stop the massacres, torture, disappearances, extra judicial executions, arbitrary detentions, displacement of populations, blockades, safe conducts and secret judgments (faceless justice).

4. The Colombian people since times past have suffered the non-recognition of their economic, social and cultural rights by the State and its various governments. A cessation of hostilities agreement must include the suspension of the neoliberal economic policy which provokes firings of workers and employees of private and public enterprises; the loss of the right to work; restriction on the freedom to unionize, mobilize and strike; the closure of schools, colleges, universities and public hospitals; evictions of debtors of the UPAC, peasants and homeless; an increase in exploitation of child labor, the privatization of factories and their closure; increasing taxes, and the persecution of informal workers.

4.1 The neoliberal economic model has brought us into the worst economic crises of recent times. Ruin in the countryside; bankruptcy of small and medium national industry; the concentration of wealth and monopolization of the financial, industrial, commercial, agribusiness and mining sectors; record unemployment, social inequality; all this as a result of this economic policy which is totally injurious to the Colombian people. The Colombian State and government must be committed to modifying this policy, to the benefit of the Colombians, within the framework of an agreement on the cessation of hostilities.

AN END TO PRIVATIZATION

5. In the course of the Public Audiences held within the framework of the Dialogue Process, the demand by diverse social sectors was public and well known that the Colombian State and the present government not go forward with the sale of the national patrimony. The policy of privatization weakens the development, sovereignty and independence of the country by placing strategic economic sectors in the hands of the transnational corporations. An agreement for a cessation of hostilities must include that the Colombian people, through the State, are the principle proprietors and administrator for the communication, transport, ports, roads, airports, energy production, natural and mineral resources, and of the public services, education, health, and social security sectors.

SUSPENSION OF THE EXTRADITION OF COLOMBIAN NATIONALS

6. An agreement for cessation of hostilities must include an end to the extradition of Colombian nationals, reestablishing dignity and the sovereignty of the Colombian State to design a judicial system that corresponds to our traditions and to our national reality.

PUNISHMENT FOR CORRUPTION

7. Corruption is a cancer from which the nation has suffered since its beginnings. The struggle against this phenomenon has among its earliest beginnings a decree by the Liberator, Simon Bolivar that established severe penalties for State functionaries who steal public monies. Today, while living conditions deteriorate rapidly for all Colombians, we see daily scandalous cases of corruption with a common denominator of impunity and the authorization of representatives of the administrative, political class of the State. The theft and pilfering of billions and billions of pesos from public funds, while the people suffer the lack of necessities, is a true attack against the Colombians. Such pillage must be stopped. The agreement for a cessation of hostilities must include model punishment for those responsible for corruption, as is demanded by society as a whole.

A COLLABORATIVE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF ILLEGAL CROPS

8. The aggression of the State against the peasants who grow coca leaf and poppy, as part of a policy imposed by foreign interests, cannot continue. The murder of hundreds of compatriots; damage to the health of the villagers, principally the children; thousands of hectares of crops destroyed; hundreds of domestic animals dead; water sources contaminated and immense damage done to the ecosystem and biodiversity; economic ruin in the affected regions and displacement of the peasantry is what this demented action leaves behind. No government, no State, in the name of any interest, has the right to treat its fellow citizens in this manner, unless it proposes becoming the executioner of its own people. An agreement for the cessation of hostilities must include agreement with the communities on the manual eradication and substitution of crops, with the technical advice from national professionals; financing; the construction of roads, schools, health care centers; and market guarantees for the new products. Such an agreement is indispensable, given the situation in which damage being done to the Amazon, the most important natural reserve for humanity, will be irreparable. Financial responsibility must be shared by the international community and responsibility for managing the plan under the National Table of Dialogue and Negotiation.

THE COMMUNICATION MEDIA

9. The communication media should/must stop its hostilities against the Colombian people and their social, political and armed organizations. Continuing this policy apologizes for the paramilitary and should be penalized by the cancellation of their licenses of operation.

VERIFICATION COMMISSION

10. After achieving an agreement on hostilities at the table which includes the above mentioned points, it will be necessary to name a National Commission of Verification, with the participation of both sides, and with representatives from sectors of Colombian society. Those social organizations, which consider that their rights have been damaged as a consequence of Government and State policy, will have recourse via spokespersons to present their complaints to the National Commission of Verification. This National Commission of Verification will have all the guarantees and means necessary for its functioning, and will have as its responsibility to verify the fulfillment of the accords signed for a cessation of hostilities. The result of its work will be reported to the National Table of Dialogue and Negotiation.

In presenting this proposal, the FARC-EP wishes to contribute elements for the solution of the current national problematica, convinced, as we are, that with the participation of society and with the support of the international community, we will be able to defeat the enemies of national reconciliation, laying the basis for the consolidation of the present peace process and creating the appropriate atmosphere to advance the discussion on the substantive themes of the Common Agenda for a New Colombia.

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples Army FARC-EP