Former President Santos expresses his support for Petro in his plan to consolidate peace in Colombia

MADRID, 9 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has expressed this Friday his support for the peace agreements that the country's president-elect, Gustavo Petro, intends to carry out with the country's guerrillas and that he himself began in 2016 by signing an agreement with the Armed Forces. Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

"I support 100 percent of the new president of Colombia in his determination to implement the peace process and have the Special Justice for Peace (JEP) as a model for the pacification of the country," Santos detailed in an interview with the newspaper. Brazilian 'Folha de Sao Paulo'.

In this sense, Santos has emphasized that the JEP model --an 'ad hoc' court that investigates and judges FARC crimes committed before December 1, 2016-- not only focuses on peace and in violence, but also in the importance of carrying out an agrarian reform.

"If someone opposes the agreements, I know that he (Petro) is going to be there in front, the Agrarian Reform is one of the first issues of the peace agreement," added the former Colombian president.

Likewise, the former president has stressed that if in the Petro government "it is possible to adequately implement what is proposed in the peace agreements, then it will be a period that will generate transformation for the country." "If they apply the agreement well, his government will generate a transformation and Petro knows it," added Santos.

On the other hand, the former Colombian president has assured that "the traditional focus of the war on drugs only tends to strengthen drug trafficking," and has urged their legalization to stop the mafias.

"I have no problem assuming that I applied recipes from the World War on Drugs. I worked to destroy coca crops with chemicals that are destructive to nature and man, I made drug arrests, I extradited more than 1,400 drug traffickers. And yet , the drug trafficking business continued and continues even bigger than before," Santos explained in the interview with the Brazilian newspaper.

For this reason, the former Colombian president has confessed that the lesson he learned from the fight against drugs during his years as president was that such solutions do not weaken the mafias and that the solution is the legalization of drugs.

"With Fernando Henrique Cardoso (former president of Brazil), we are now campaigning around the world to abolish the prohibition of drug marketing, in a way that is based on evidence, on health, on Human Rights. I am convinced that it is the only way to take away the business and power from the mafias," Santos reiterated.