The Red Line: Colombia (FARC, Paramilitarios and Cocaine)

 Colombia has always been closely associated with the international Cocaine trade, but the situation there is far more complicated with wider ramifications for the entire region. The government of Bogota has been at war with the rebels in a 6-way struggle for almost 60 years, with a peace deal now sitting on the table. Is this deal a workable peace though, or just the start of the next phase? We ask our expert panel. Alison Fedirka (Geopolitical Futures) Ted Piccone (Brookings Institution) Chris Sabatini (Chatham House) For more info visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod or Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

listen to the podcast

Vox: Why Colombia has taken in 1 million Venezuelans (Nov 27, 2018)

Colombia is currently dealing with a massive wave of refugees coming from Venezuela. Venezuelans are fleeing their home because of a severe economic crisis under President Nicolas Maduro. There are high inflation rates and there isn’t enough food available for people within Venezuela to even eat. Thousands of Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge located at Cúcuta every day and Colombia doesn’t seem to be turning anyone way.

This borders episode looks at why Colombia doesn’t turn away these refugees, the shared history of the two nations and how there may be a limit to Colombia’s acceptance of incoming Venezuelans.

Jacobin Magazine: Who Fights Colombia’s Wars?

Many nations employ some form of military service, but most are rarely engaged in conflict. Colombia, which has suffered from civil war almost continuously since 1948, is quite different. While the conflict has waxed and waned, with long periods of relative peace punctuated by peaks of violence, serving as an enlisted member of the nation’s military has never been a safe occupation. [...]

A 1993 law states that all Colombian men must “define” their military situation upon reaching the age of majority. This vague term hints at how the law applies differently to men of different classes. The vast majority of the middle and upper class pay to avoid serving. The poorest members of society, especially those from neglected rural areas, are those who are forced to fight because they are unable to pay these legalized bribes.

Even among those who serve, there is legalized discrimination. Soldiers who have finished high school are assigned to non-combat zones and formerly had to serve only one year. Those who have not finished high school, usually from the poorest and most neglected places in the country, must serve between eighteen months and two years, usually in the most dangerous parts of Colombia. Because of this, the vast majority of those killed in the conflict — soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians — are among the poorest people in Colombia. [...]

In the 2014 election campaign, Santos seemingly recognized the unpopularity of military service. He claimed that, should the peace process prove successful, it would be abolished. There is now no sign of this happening. In fact, the period of service for those who have not graduated will be increased, with all such soldiers now serving for two years.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: A Second Chance

However, in spite of the setback, government and FARC negotiators managed to quickly make changes to the agreement, and it was signed in Bogotá’s Teatro Colon on November 24. While Uribe’s Democratic Center party has maintained its opposition, the new deal will be ratified by Congress, where Santos’s ruling coalition has a commanding majority. Uribe’s populistic and often truth-distorting campaign managed to derail the previous version but it appears that the new deal will pass a congressional vote on December 1.

It is a pity, then, that the new version is in many ways a worse deal.

Businessmen who funded the right-wing paramilitaries, who have crushed Colombian trade unions, displaced millions of peasants from their land, and have been responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in the conflict, will now be shielded from prosecution. While the previous deal allowed for the redistribution of idle land from ranchers to peasants, such moves will now be illegal.

Foreign judges in the transitional justice system will not have sentencing power, only acting as advisers to Colombian judges. And the government will be able to employ the dangerous practice of aerial fumigation to combat coca cultivation. These changes make the transitional justice system less effective and more open to corruption, endanger the health of Colombians living in coca-producing areas, and fail to address Colombia’s appalling inequality and uneven distribution of farm land.

Nonetheless, this deal is still better than the return to conflict which many feared.  With thousands of FARC fighters awaiting demobilization, any delay could prove costly and lead to more breakaway groups such as FARC’s first front, who rejected the peace process and are still engaged in fighting.

read the article 

The Economist: Will the Nobel prize bring peace to Colombia?

By entering talks the FARC implicitly recognised that they could no longer win the war. But they view themselves as an undefeated army motivated by communist ideology, rather than as the drug-trafficking terrorists other Colombians perceived them to be. They were determined not to be the first guerrilla leaders to disarm in order to serve long prison sentences. And they wanted things they could claim as political conquests, such as a government commitment to land reform. But the FARC’s arrogant insistence on presenting the talks as being between two equally legitimate sides was a political mistake that made the agreement look more generous to them than it actually was—and made winning the plebiscite harder. [...]

Salvaging Colombia’s peace will not be easy. The No campaign and the FARC will have to find common ground. Mr Uribe has adopted a conciliatory tone since the vote, even meeting Mr Santos for the first time in six years. On October 9th he set out the changes he wants to the peace agreement. Some echo what is already the government’s position—that the pace of rural development and land reform will take into account fiscal constraints, for example. Others are points on which, in light of the plebiscite, the government should press the FARC: Mr Uribe wants the “effective restrictions on liberty” that would apply to those who confess to war crimes to involve confinement, though not prison, and for these to be incompatible with a seat in congress. Harder to accommodate is Mr Uribe’s insistence that FARC leaders should be tried by Colombia’s supreme court, rather than by the special tribunal, the centrepiece of the agreement’s chapter on justice. [...]

Whether or not the government holds another plebiscite on a revised agreement, it is clear that peace requires a broader political accord. That is where the Nobel prize might just help. It is encouraging that 400 business leaders this week called for a “swift search for a definitive, inclusive and sustainable peace”. The world is watching Colombia, and thus Mr Uribe’s and the FARC’s next moves. But its attention span is short.

read the article 

The New York Times: Colombian Opposition to Peace Deal Feeds Off Gay Rights Backlash

When Colombians last weekend rejected the peace deal between Mr. Santos’s government and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the decision shocked the region and laid bare generations of anger at the rebels. Many Colombians felt the guerrillas would have gotten off too easily in a deal that would have allowed a vast majority of them to avoid prison.

But critics of the agreement appear to have harnessed something else as well: a resurgent conservative movement, angered by Colombia’s socially liberal tilt in recent months.

“The opposition used that argument regarding gay marriage, abortion, religion to attract and rally against the peace accords,” said Juan Carlos Garzón, a researcher at the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a research group in Colombia. “It was an effective strategy to drive the most conservative voters against the peace agreement.” [...]

In April, Colombia’s highest court legalized same-sex marriage, and last year it removed barriers to adopting children for gay individuals and couples. The country, torn by long drug wars, legalized medical marijuana late last year. A push to lift restrictions on abortions also emerged this year as the Zika virus spread.

Then came the deal with the FARC. For some conservatives, it was bridge too far: a pact with a Marxist guerrilla organization that had terrorized Colombia for decades.

“People have used the reaction to the peace agenda to talk about a larger conservative rollback in Colombia, a broadened cultural war,” said Winifred Tate, an anthropology professor at Colby College in Maine who studies Colombia.

read the article 

The Guardian: Colombia referendum rejects peace deal with Farc guerrillas

Colombians have rejected a peace deal to end 52 years of war with Farc guerrillas, throwing the country into confusion about its future.

With counting completed from 98% of polling stations, the no vote led with 50.23% to 49.76%, a difference of 61,000 votes. [...]

Polls before the vote predicted yes would win with a comfortable 66% share. Santos had been confident of a yes result and said during the campaign that he did not have a plan B and that Colombia would return to war if the no vote won. His opponents, led by former president Alvaro Uribe, said a win for their side would be a mandate for the government and rebels to negotiate a “better agreement”. [...]

Fernando Giraldo, a political analyst, said the fact that both the government and guerrilla reiterated their commitment to peace was a good sign but the future was unclear. “The plebiscite laid everything out in black and white and now we’re stuck in a grey area,” he said. [...]

In the days before the vote, Farc commanders rushed to make a round of public apologies to their victims in an attempt to boost support for the yes vote. On Thursday, chief rebel negotiator Iván Márquez presented the community of Bojayá, Chocó, where the 2002 bombing of a church killed 119 people, with a new crucifix. At a similar event on Friday in Apartadó, Antioquia, the site of a 1994 Farc massacre of 35 people, Márquez said it “never should have happened”.

read the article 

Alternet: A 50-Year Civil War That Killed Over 250,000 and Devastated Colombia Has Finally Reached a Peace Agreement

Tension sits heavy across sections of Colombia. Polls suggest that the majority of the population will vote to ratify the peace deal. Exhaustion is the mood. Colombians want the war to end. This was not a war with a frontline necessarily, although there were frontlines between the FARC areas and the government zones. This was a war across the country, with precious resources squandered in the battle and fear pervasive even far from the battlefield. [...]

Tension sits heavy across sections of Colombia. Polls suggest that the majority of the population will vote to ratify the peace deal. Exhaustion is the mood. Colombians want the war to end. This was not a war with a frontline necessarily, although there were frontlines between the FARC areas and the government zones. This was a war across the country, with precious resources squandered in the battle and fear pervasive even far from the battlefield. [...]

But there is no guarantee that the referendum on October 2nd will pass. Santos was the Defence Minister under former President Álvaro Uribe, who left office in 2010. Uribe is leading the charge against the deal. He is now a Senator, whose Democratic Centre party hopes for a defeat of the referendum. Uribe believes that the Colombian state should not negotiate with the FARC. Amnesty for fighters should be off the table, and indeed, the full force of the Colombian army – backed by the United States – should crush the FARC. Uribe shares a great deal with Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa, who prosecuted a war unto the death against the Tamil Tigers. Rajapaksa set aside the peace process in Sri Lanka that began in 2002. He then turned to his military to destroy the Tigers. The UN Report on the Sri Lanka’s government’s war showed that it was almost genocide. It makes for difficult reading. It is what Uribe hopes for Colombia.

read the article