Colombian American in Tampa on delisting from FARC

TAMPA, Florida – While elected officials from both sides of the aisle in Florida were quick to criticize news last week that President Joe Biden’s administration is removing from the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations the Colombian rebel group known as FARC, a Tampa resident Businessman with Colombian roots supports the decision.

“I think Biden is making the right decision,” said Francisco Carrillo, who runs a real estate agency in Tampa but is still closely monitoring Colombian politics. “Out of respect for the democratic process, it makes no sense that the FARC are still on the terrorist list.”

What you need to know

• In 2016, a peace agreement was signed between the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the Colombian government that ended the 52-year-old conflict.
• The FARC was placed on the US terrorist watch list in 1997 but will soon be removed, a State Department official said last week.
• Florida politicians on both sides of the aisle criticized the Biden administration’s announcement last week. About a third of all Colombian-Americans live in Florida.

The FARC (the acronym stands for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) signed a peace agreement with the Colombian government in 2016 that ended five decades of internal armed conflict. The Washington Post reported last month that the FARC’s continued presence on the US terrorist list maintained US Treasury Department sanctions against members of the now legal party and blocked their reintegration into Colombian society.

Carrillo agrees, saying that this decision can bring more financial aid to the Colombian people.

“Most of the money that Colombia has received from the US is only used to stop the drug trafficking and all the bad things that happen there, but it goes to the military and not to the civilian population,” he says. Money can direct go to the former guerrilla people who now work hard and want to integrate into bourgeois life and work as farmers. This money can help them. “

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed the Biden administration after the news broke last week and said in a statement that it would encourage terrorist groups across Latin America.

“Biden’s policies are an insult to members of the Colombian-American community, many of whom have fled the barbaric attacks on civilians by this terrorist group,” DeSantis said. “This is a grave mistake by the Biden government and it will harm the Floridians.”

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Annette Taddeo was born in Colombia but left the country as a teenager after the FARC kidnapped her father, an American fighter pilot in World War II and Korea. She told POLITICO last week that the decision by the Biden government to remove the FARC from the State Department’s list of groups considered terrorist organizations was “bad politics and bad politics”.

Taddeo told Spectrum Bay News 9 last Friday that the news upset her and other Colombian Americans in Florida.

“Everyone wants peace, but we have to be very, very careful to understand that when you remove a terrorist group from a terrorist list, when there are still certain factions of that terrorist group that it is really difficult to explain this to people Are terrorists. ”Said Taddeo. “You have to do it by first educating the public about what the Biden administration is trying to do, and that was not done, and that is not right. I think they need to be much better at ensuring that the public understands what they are trying to do. “

While thousands of FARC fighters were disarmed under the peace accord, several hundred chose not to be part of the peace accord and formed or joined drug trafficking gangs, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Carrillo was born in Cúcuta, Colombia, but moved to the United States in 1989. He knows all too well the violence that used to be part of everyday life for Colombians. In fact, his wife was kidnapped by attackers for a day in the 1980s, although the police never determined which group they came from. Carrillo says he cried the day the Colombian government-FARC peace agreement was announced.

“Because our family in Colombia is affected by violence,” he said. “Not just from the FARC, but from the paramilitary people and even the regular armed forces.”

According to a 2019 report by the Pew Research Center, about 1.2 million Colombians lived in the United States at the end of 2017, 31% of whom were in Florida.

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