Gunmen Kill Ex-Colombia Peace Commissioner

Reuters
16 September 1999
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BOGOTA -- A former government official who played a pivotal role in peace talks with Colombia's Marxist rebels in the early 1990s was shot dead Wednesday on the campus of a Bogota university.

Police quoted witnesses as saying 53-year-old Jesus Antonio Bejarano, who served as peace commissioner under former President Cesar Gaviria, was killed at dusk by one of two gunmen who sauntered up to him as he entered a building at the National University, where he taught an economics course.

He suffered a single gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead on arrival at the city's nearby Palermo Hospital, hospital officials said.

Bejarano, an outspoken political commentator, had recently stepped down as head of the Colombian Farmers' Association, a post in which he had often complained about the high costs of the country's long-running war pitting rebels against the military and right-wing death squads.

His killing came just one month after that of Jaime Garzon, a political activist and Colombia's best-loved comic, who was shot dead by two motorcycle gunmen as he drove to work at one of Bogota's leading radio stations.

Bejarano helped Gaviria negotiate a peace accord with the now defunct M-19 guerrilla group in 1990.

But his efforts to broker a peace deal with the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) ended in disarray in the early days of Gaviria's administration, which ended in 1994.

``He was a peacemaker,'' Antonio Navarro Wolff, a prominent congressman and former M-19 commander, told reporters, referring to his former adversary at the peace bargaining table by his nickname ``Chucho.''

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Bejarano's murder, and no arrests have been made in the killing of Garzon. Judicial officials say around 95 percent of all crimes in Colombia go unpunished.

Mauricio Cardenas, a prominent journalist who served as Gaviria's chief press officer, said some guerrilla leaders had sought to ``stigmatize'' Bejarano by blaming him for the collapse of peace talks in 1991.

President Andres Pastrana, who took office in August 1998, has reopened peace talks with the FARC, the hemisphere's largest and oldest rebel group.

Negotiations have been suspended since July, when insurgents refused to accept the presence of international observers in an area demilitarized by Pastrana as a confidence-building measure.