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Colombia's options
16 Aug 2002
 Website: Website: http://www.fuhem.es/CIP/

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    Mariano Aguirre, director of Peace Studies Centre (CIP), Madrid, argues that Colombia's newly elected president needs to put top priority on promoting peace talks, and that a path of increased force, civilian militias and could lead to failure and even greater violence.

    Colombia's newly elected president, Alvaro Uribe, visited Europe not long ago to garner support for his planned policies, based on brute strength and negotiation. In a country fed up with political and criminal violence, most voters backed this plan. Uribe's mandate began in August, and he might renew the peace process that disintegrated in February, or he could take the country backwards to an even cruder conflict. Both scenarios are possible, based on his election commitments.

    Colombia is a state that is out of order. It has a government, administration, elections, parliament and laws, but a large part of its territory is not under the administrative control of the state and is either no man's land or is directly or indirectly controlled by the guerrilla organisations the Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) or the National Liberation Army (ELN) or by increasingly powerful paramilitary groups. The fundamental principle that the modern state should have a legitimate monopoly on the use of force bears no weight. At the same time, the system is highly inefficient. The country's economy s deformed by illegal drug production and exports.

    Future scenarios were analysed in Washington DC a little while ago in a meeting organised by Georgetown University's Center for Latin American Studies, the French Ecole de la Paix and the German Ebert Foundation. Representatives of European governments, the United States and Colombia, as well as NGOs and research centres, agreed that state reform is necessary, although some were concerned that Uribe might pay more attention to building up the armed forces and the police with U.S. backing than to making the justice system more efficient. The government has already imposed a state of emergency that does away with the few judicial guarantees that remained.

    The country's civil society is active, with numerous initiatives organised around human rights, gender, child soldiers, the internally displaced and the (neglected) oppression of the black and indigenous populations, among other issues. Some groups are concerned that instead of seeking civil society support, the new government might stir up fear and set up civilian anti-terrorist militias. This policy -- put into practice in Peru to combat Shining Path, in Guatemala's counterinsurgency war during the 1980s, in Algeria in the 1990s in the context against radical Islamists -- has caused deaths, vendettas and state loss of control over the firearms in circulation and used in society. The paramilitaries, the guerrillas, and in some cases the security forces themselves, have already had involved the population in violence, either in a bid to win its support or in the form of reprisals against people thought to have provided material support to the other side. Adding training and arms to this situation would not have a positive effect.

    What is needed is a stronger state with more justice, more efficient administration, more mechanisms for devolution from the state to society, more democratic control of the security forces, new negotiations, and the use of force only as a last resort if necessary.

    Apparently, everyone is in favour of negotiation. The new government team says that it needs force to bring the other party to the negotiating table. The FARC and the ELN share the same traditional theories of war. The paramilitaries want to become legal and legitimate players whether or not there is a peace process. New peace talks could last years, and both the armed and unarmed sectors of the population need to be included in consultation groups and negotiation circles.

    However, one problem is what to negotiate. In Colombia there is a serious long-standing conflict over fertile land that could produce coffee, drugs, gold, oil and other resources. Force is used to displace thousands of people and take their land. There have not been any land reforms. Is Uribe prepared to confront this problem?

    At the root of the drug trafficking problem -- often wrongly singled out as the cause of the conflict -- is land and poverty, the lack of other employment options for dozens of thousands of people. From the peasant cultivators to the traffickers who operate the international trafficking system and shift capital around, they all have a place in the political economy of the drugs trade. Will a place be made for them in the legal economy? For more and more people in Colombia, the armed conflict provides them with an economic mark of reference (albeit an unstable and dangerous one), some norms (either of the guerrillas or the paramilitaries or the narcos) and a protection that the state does not offer. These groups need to be legitimised or the number of violent groups led by warlords will rise.

    The question of drug exports is related to the massive demand in the United States and Europe. Developed countries and their governments need to take some of the responsibility. Strategies based on controlling production and trafficking from the place of origin, whether it be Colombia or Afghanistan, have not had good results, although the United States and the government are fumigating immense zones of the country with terrible results for the populations and the ecological system.

    The state needs to be in working order. But reform is not simply a matter of strengthening the security system. And building a state involves more than the institutional side of things. There has to be work in conjunction with civil society and its numerous initiatives to strengthen social cohesion. Too many people in Colombia believe that the opposing sides just need to battle it out. If the state is already inefficient and then operates through violence, that confirms this perception and everything will be lost.

    Colombia runs a serious risk if the new president's policies are led solely by the fight against terrorism. This would confirm that his country should be on the list of targets for the U.S. government's international war on terrorism. Washington policy is increasingly based on the use of force and pressure over cooperation and negotiation. Colombia could become trapped by internal and external violence. Europe, in this context, needs to suggest firmly to Uribe that he should implement vertical and horizontal reforms to the state, encourage civil society and simultaneously act as a counterweight to U.S. policy. The logic of force could lead Uribe to failure and Colombia towards an even more dramatic era.

    A version of this article was first published in El País.


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