In These Times March 21, 1999

Obstacles to Peace

By Ana Carrigan

 There are times in Colombia, and this is one of them, when the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear to have taken up permanent residence in
this beautiful and tragic land. The Jan. 25 earthquake that devastated
Colombia's coffee growing region was the worst since 1875. It's hard to
fathom the catastrophic human consequences­­"biblical," President Andrès
Pastrana called them--that the recent earthquake left in its wake in the
city of Armenia. The number of recovered dead--almost 1,000--dwarfed by the
more than 2,000 people who disappeared and are not expected ever to be seen
alive again; the homes of more than 6,000 peasant families destroyed;
35,000 homeless families; 250,000 people suddenly without jobs, or a roof,
or any possessions or any means of supporting themselves. No one will ever
know the sum of individual tragedies--the families, lives, plans and
dreams--that lie, torn to shreds, buried beneath disaster statistics on
such a scale.

 Even before the earthquake struck this had been a nerve- wracking New
Year. Hope, absent for so long, has been riding high on Pastrana's
commitment to ending the hemisphere's oldest insurgency war. So when talks
between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) were formally inaugurated on Jan. 7, and the national media and
hundreds of national and international celebrities descended on the small,
tropical town of San Vicente del Caguán to bear witness to history in the
making, for one short and happy week it finally seemed possible that
Colombia's yearnings for peace might be respected by those with the guns.

 Yet elsewhere in Colombia on that day, new violence raged. As in so many
other peace processes, opening talks with one side has enraged the other.
Even as the people of San Vicente were dancing in the square to the
ear-splitting music of Ivan and his Bam Band, flown in by the government
from Bogotá for the post-inaugural celebrations, right-wing paramilitaries,
acting on their threat to sabotage the peace talks, went on a rampage. In
undefended villages and rural townships, where local army and police sat
out the killings in their barracks, the toll from dozens of massacres
mounted. During the next four days, more than 150 people accused of
guerrilla sympathies were slaughtered. The militarists in the FARC, who
remain unconvinced that peace through negotiations will deliver the radical
political changes for which they have fought their entire lives, froze the
talks, pending government action to attack and disband the paramilitaries.

 No one ever said peace negotiations in Colombia would be easy. First,
there are two long-lived guerrilla forces--the FARC and the National
Liberation Army (ELN)--with different priorities, constituencies,
ideologies and methods, which have been fighting the state for more than 35
years. Within the last two years, the 15,000-strong peasant army of the
FARC has won a string of military victories, and between them, the
insurgents now control almost 40 percent of the national territory. Both
forces, however, are split along generational lines. Within the FARC, the
younger militarists, who believe peace can be imposed with their guns, are
opposed to the policies of the would-be peacemakers, led by the FARC's
legendary 68-year-old founder-leader, Manuel Marulanda, known as "Tiro
Fijo," or "Sureshot." Fortunately, the authority of "Tiro Fijo" is still
supreme, but the pressures on him to delay negotiations while the
paramilitaries run amok are certain to increase.

 Meanwhile, lacking more than rhetorical support from his generals--or from
the Colombian rich, who hope to be "rescued" from the FARC by U.S. military
aid--Pastrana has been unable to deal with the greatest obstacle to peace:
the nearly 10,000 heavily armed, well-paid (largely with drug money)
right-wing paramilitaries. First formed 18 years ago by the army for
counter-insurgency, the paramilitaries now act as the militarized arm of
the Colombian far-right. In the countryside they carry out a scorched-earth
policy against the guerrilla's social base that has created 1.3 million
internally displaced refugees, while simultaneously "cleansing" the land
for their financiers' benefit. In the cities, they provide death squads to
order. On Jan. 28, paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño announced the opening
of "a second front in the war"--against nongovernmental organizations--when
he sent thugs to seize the director and three staff members of the
Institute for Popular Training (IPC), a highly respected NGO in Medellín.
Castaño is holding two of the victims of the daylight raid as "POWs."

 The paramilitaries seek political recognition and are prepared to murder
their way to the negotiating table. Since, in accordance with the old adage
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend," many senior and mid-level army
officers and their troops continue to give the paramilitaries tacit
protection and support, the paramilitaries now stalk the land like
Frankenstein. Created by the state, this monster has escaped its control.

 Finally, the insurgency and counter-insurgency are not the only wars in
Colombia. Washington's "war on drugs," specifically its aerial drug
eradication program, has not only failed to affect production of Colombian
coca and poppy plants for the worldwide cocaine and heroin market by one
iota, but it has created schizophrenic confusion in U.S. policy just when
clarity and united, bipartisan support for the Colombian government's peace
efforts is most crucial. Pastrana, who is trying simultaneously to end the
insurgency and Colombian drug production, needs the collaboration of the
FARC to eradicate the coca and poppy plantations. Since the coca growers
are also the FARC's social base, further aerial spraying--which is funded
by the U.S. Congress against the wishes of the Colombian
government--threatens to erase the entire peace process.

 By expunging the line between "counter-narcotics" and
"counter-insurgency," the drug war has drawn the Pentagon into an
ever-deepening alliance with the failed Colombian Army, and, by extension,
with the murdering paramilitaries; it also has recruited countless young
peasants into the guerrilla ranks. The growing relationship between the two
armies, north and south--unaccompanied by demands either for sanctions
against known paramilitary supporters in high command positions, or for
obedience and execution of presidential orders to attack and disband the
paramilitaries--risks further eroding critical civilian authority over the
Colombian Army. As the warm relationship between the Pentagon Southern
Command and the Colombian generals progresses, it is fair to ask why the
"narco-paramilitary" consistently fails to make it onto the Clinton
administration's list of enemies. U.S. interests would be better served if
U.S. money, equipment and training--now going to fight impoverished coca
farmers and their "narco-guerrilla" protectors--instead were deployed to
combat the drug-trafficking paramilitaries that are holding Colombia hostage.

 Still, something new is stirring in Colombia. At long last, the population
has decided--en masse--to repudiate the war. For the first time, a civic
society has emerged, and civilian leaders are organized in regional and
local peace commissions in every city, town and rural community nationwide.
The long overdue debate over the kind of country Colombians want to
construct from the embers of their terrible war has begun.

 Pastrana is not the first president to try to end the political violence,
but he is a new kind of Colombian leader: a centrist of courage, character,
imagination and principle. He understands that achieving peace with
Colombia's guerrillas requires more than a seat in Congress in return for
silencing the guns. Pastrana knows that any durable peace will require
confronting the root causes of the insurgency--land ownership and economic
and social justice for the poverty-stricken peasants.

 These are issues that have bedeviled Latin American societies since the
beginning of this century, and which no Latin nation has solved. What makes
Colombia such a fascinating country today is that at the ideologically
exhausted end of the century, in the midst of their appalling carnage,
Colombians are still actively searching for new answers to an intractable,
age-old question: How do you construct a more just, more equitable society?

 This is Pastrana's challenge. His decision to facilitate talks by creating
a demilitarized zone the size of Switzerland in the tropical southeastern
coca-growing region controlled by the FARC--in the face of opposition at
home and in Washington--took political courage. It has paid dividends.
Today, the DMZ is the only region in the country where there is no
violence. Since the army and police withdrew last Nov. 7, only one person
has died violently. An unarmed civic police force takes care of routine law
enforcement in five small towns, and the civilian population and the local
municipal authorities are collaborating peacefully with the FARC in an
experimental, power-sharing arrangement. Even after the talks were
officially frozen, the FARC and government negotiators met and reached
agreement on the implementation of the first pilot programs for coca
eradication, alternative crop development and reforestation of rainforest
territory devastated by peasant colonizers.

 Pastrana has extended the DMZ until May. His decision was opposed by the
Colombian generals and the Republican right in the U.S. Congress. But the
people of San Vicente, capital of the demilitarized region, terrified that
any return by the army would bring paramilitaries in its wake, were greatly
relieved. From the local perspective, so far, this experiment in
co-habitation with the guerrillas is working just fine. 

Ana Carrigan is the author of The Palace of Justice, a Colombian Tragedy
(Four Walls Eight Windows) and is writing a new book for Verso on the
search for peace in Colombia. Research for this article was funded in part
by the investigative fund of The Nation Institute.