Polishing off a steak almuerzo in one of the Candelaria’s expensive French restaurants, I spot a goblinly, bug-eyed, short and very well fed man, sitting a few tables to my right. As I exit past him, we lock eyes and I feel an icy heat spread across my thoracic vertebrae.
Two days later I see him again, in a cafe on Parkway; just to the north west of the centre. Again, the following day; this time with his daughter and a couple of aged-rockers wearing plastic looking leather jackets.
No one says anything, hushes in fear, or tuts in disapproval. He ambles to the cashier, pays, and leaves with no fan-fare, no discernible furtiveness or obvious skulkery. I catch his sulphurous whiff, but the strato 6 Colombians dissimulate.
By Friday I’ve seen him four times; and I’m getting used to his unpleasant presence. He arrives or departs with four body guards, wet-look-gelled, post-adolescent chaps in jeans who hang languidly off the iron gates outside the coffee shop, stealing glances at their phones. He never drinks or eats alone; and always has a comradely – not a lackey – audience.
‘You know who that is, don’t you?’ I asked a friend. He paused, ‘Erm, he’s in here all the time. He’s a politician isn’t he?’.
It’s easy to confuse them, I suppose.
In a way, my friend was right. It’s no longer acceptable to call Andres Paris a murderous narcotrafficking guerrilla, he’s now a civilian leader of the newly legitimate ‘socialist’ party, FARC (yes, they retain the name). In March’s elections he could enter Colombia’s congress.
Mr Paris is considered one of the FARC’s ‘intellectuals’; partly owing his seniority to a marriage to Beatriz Arenas, the daughter of the late Jacobo Arenas, one of the FARC’s founders and its leading ideologue.
The demobilisation of the FARC is an opportunity for Paris and others to exchange the bullet for the ballot box, and to make their case for a Marxist Leninist utopia through argument rather than violence.
Undeniable progress.
However, President Santos made a strategic blunder in Havana. He negotiated a deal which sits somewhere between impunity and absolution for the FARC. His successors, and Colombia will pay for this.
The FARC peace agreement means war criminals, those who massacred, raped, tortured and kidnapped can enter congress, without atonement, or even a day in jail. Pablo Escobar looks on with bemused envy.
During the peace talks Mr Santos promised, ‘No-one who has committed crimes against humanity will be allowed to stand for election’. But the supreme leader of the FARC, alias Timochenko, is on the ballot to become the next President of the Republic.
Timochenko, the leader of the world’s longest running guerrilla group, the head of what many believe to be the largest narcotrafficking cartel in the world, is running to be president, before the FARC have fully demobilised, before spending a day in prison, before the truth commission has begun its real work, before the transitional justice system considers his crimes.
Colombians are unimpressed, some are resisting. Timochenko has been forced to suspend his campaign amid egg-throwing protests. Recent polls also show Timochenko’s support is at 1 per cent; well within the margin of error. And Mr Santos’ favourability ratings have dropped to 14%; he leaves a country more polarised even than when he came to power.
The peace agreement is in danger. Peace without justice is a truce, nothing more.
If the Colombian state fails to exercise justice, the admonishment of the FARC will come direct, raw and unfiltered from the people.
Colombians will soon resent the sight of war criminals walking, lunching, free; rich men subsidised by the taxpayer, protected by a state incapable of offering ordinary citizens the most basic of coverage.
An emboldened right needs no further justification to incite action, to whip up angry opposition. And for the left, it’ll be the perfect opportunity to claim persecution, as Timochenko has already done.
The logic of the war persists. Without justice peace cannot prosper. The blame for future violence may well fall on a president who was seen as weak, and who capitulated.