This is the New World Report. I'm John Bachelot with my colleague, Professor Amid Nalas.

Reuters Bogota, Columbia should speed the dismantling of armed groups to reduce violence

in human rights violations and implement the country's 2016 peace accord with FARC rebels.

The in-country representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

said most recently. The Reuters cosonne to say Columbia's nearly six decades of armed

conflict between the armed forces left to strabels, right wing paramilitaries and crime gangs

have killed at least 450,000 people since the 1960s. That is a big number, Professor.

Now, Petro is meant to be a response to this. Correct? He comes out of the armed group

rising and was seen as a cure? How's he doing?

Well, John, you know, Petro certainly is, he continues to have substantial popularity

among his base, but also what you point out is really the difficulty of the legacy of

Columbia's insecurity and civil war. And it really goes all the way back to the period

which was referred to as the Valencia, which gave rise to a number of different groups

including the FARC and others. But what you also referred to in 2016, you had a relatively

controversial peace agreement and that was a supposed to at least take one of the two

big groups off the table, the FARC. However, in reality, the FARC only partially demobilized

a group of the FARC referred to as the FARC dissidents for idea of different fronts who

were heavily involved in narcotrafficking, you kind of stayed on the board. The other major

group, the ELN, actually gained them strength as some FARC went to the ELN. And then you

had a whole array of other kind of conservative and just purely criminal groups that collectively

have been referred to as the Bacchidium, one, the Gulf Cartel, but a number of smaller

ones. And so the issue is that with this array of different, some more ideological, some

...