Vatican City
Francis is sure to hail the cease-fire with the National Liberation Army, or ELN, when he arrives in Bogota today, seeing it as another major step forward in Colombia’s path of reconciliation after five decades of bloody conflict.
Even before the deal, Francis had a full plate in seeking to help heal the wounds of Latin America’s longest-running conflict while advancing his own pastoral agenda. On tap for his 20th foreign trip are expected messages promoting care for the environment, denouncing the drug trade and urging Colombia’s political class to address the economic and social disparities that were at the root of the fighting.
“We certainly can’t expect magic solutions from the pope,” said Guzman Carriquiry, a top Vatican adviser on Latin America. “But the true causes of the violence must be confronted if they want a true pacification in Colombia.”
While his focus will be on Colombia, Francis also will be pressed to address the political and humanitarian crisis in neighboring Venezuela, where the Vatican tried but failed to facilitate talks between the opposition and what local Catholic leaders have declared the “dictatorship” of President Nicolas Maduro.
In the final drive of peace talks between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Francis laid out a public challenge to negotiators who were meeting Cuba: “Please, we do not have the right to allow ourselves yet another failure on this path of peace and reconciliation,” Francis begged them in 2015 from Havana’s Revolution Square.
He followed up with a promise: Once an accord was signed and sealed, he would visit the overwhelmingly Catholic country to help solidify it.
Francis is making good on that with this trip, hoping to promote reconciliation between victims of the conflict and those who victimized them. That could be a tall order, given the divisions that doomed a 2016 popular referendum on the initial peace accord and remain today after a revised agreement was approved by Congress last year.
One of the highlights of the trip will be a reconciliation meeting in the central city of Villavicencio, near a longtime rebel stronghold.
Francis could hardly travel to the edge of the Amazon without making a strong appeal for responsible stewardship of the planet, given that environmentalism has been a priority of his pontificate.
That’s especially true since vast swaths of Colombia’s rainforest and mining areas that were inaccessible due to the conflict — and therefore protected — are now ripe for development and exploitation.
The first Latin American pope has often lamented that the world’s poorest and indigenous people typically suffer the most when multinationals move in and disrupt delicate ecosystems.
Francis is expected to speak about the environment and his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Sii” (“Praise Be”), which warned that today’s “structurally perverse” economic system risks turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”