The Challenges that Colombia faces

Horacio Serpa Uribe, Leader of the Colombian Liberal Party and Presidential candidate tells of the difficulties in securing peace in the country.

Colombia has never faced so many challenges at the one time: saving democracy, bolstering peace, defeating the drug-trafficking, righting the economy, maintaining national unity and inserting itself in the international system.

Over the past forty years the country has lived in the midst of an acute internal armed conflict in which the state is fighting against various illegal forces, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. The tragic balance sheet speaks for itself about the humanitarian tragedy which the nation is going through: 35,000 violent deaths a year, nearly two million people forced out of their homes, around 500 massacres a year, thousands of exiles and disappeared people, tens of blacklists. Death, despair and fear stalk our land and threaten our common future.

Thus it is that people’s principal preoccupation is the search for peace. In order to find it the government is pushing forward with a negotiation process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC, which started on 7 January in the midst of a feeling of euphoria for peace which filled the national consciousness with hope.

Two years later things have changed radically. In the face of the lack of results and the arrogance of the FARC, one of the oldest Marxist guerrilla groups in the world, some 90 per cent of public opinion is rejecting this process.

The government’s low popularity, where the president has the lowest rating in almost a century, is due to the general feeling that it has given much to the rebels and received nothing in return: the guerrillas administer as they please a cleared area of 42,000 square kilometres where there is no legal authority and have converted it into a military fortress and supply base while they continue to destroy villages - about 200 in the last two years - and sow panic among the civilian population which is threatened with kidnapping, extortion and forced recruitment into their ranks.

After many false starts and a long period of uncertainty, this initiative caught its second wind on 9 February this year after a meeting between President Pastrana and the FARC commander Manuel Marulanda Vélez which attracted attention worldwide. The guerrillas had suspended the talks unilaterally on 17 November 2000.

After a rapid exchange of messages between the two sides and broad political negotiations President Pastrana extended the deadline for the maintenance of the cleared area for four days as he waited for his interlocutor in the Caguan region to agree on a new meeting at the highest level which would define once and for all the outcome of the peace process. This outcome was fixed with the signature of a joint agreement which laid the bases for progress.

The direct diplomacy put into practice by Pastrana and Marulanda Vélez lifted hopes for the success of this effort at national reconciliation. Nevertheless, public opinion is still awaiting from the FARC peaceful actions which could confirm that it has a real intention to negotiate. The country is also looking forward to the prompt freeing of fifty sick soldiers and police who have been held in the hands of the guerrillas for more than three years. This would be the first gesture to emerge from the historic meeting.

At the same time the government has corrected the mistakes committed at the beginning of its period in office as it administered the agreements signed by the previous government with the Army of National Liberation, the ELN, which would have spared Colombia a great number of terrorist acts, violations of international humanitarian law, deaths and destruction of the infrastructure by the guerrillas.

Having overcome all sorts of obstacles and thanks to the support of organised civil society this initiative seems to be making good progress.

In fact there do already exist two agreements, signed in Havana between the parties, for the creation of a cleared area in two municipalities in the south of the department of Bolivar where a National Convention will take place to enable that organisation to leave the armed struggle and defend its ideas within a framework of democracy.

The impending agreement between the government and the ELN with the community and the local and regional authorities in that part of the country will soon allow this unique form of negotiation to be tested in which civil society and the international community will play a very important role.

Although there exist many reasons for the inhabitants of this future cleared area to distrust this initiative, pressured as they are by paramilitary forces, it is clear that once the process has started there will be no turning back.

The peace processes with the FARC and the ELN have been threatened by a third actor, the paramilitaries who support a politico-military project of the extreme right, who are present in many parts of the country, who have strong support, who are backed by radical cattle breeders, traders and landowners and who are active in the drugs trade. Their armed incursions are aimed at stopping the guerrilla advance to which end they commit a great many crimes against humanity such as massacres of villages and summary executions which cause waves of forced evacuations, terror and poverty among the unarmed civilian population

The FARC have made it a condition of their return to the negotiating table that there be a demonstration by the government that there exists a strategy to tackle these paramilitary groups who, they say, are part of the counter-insurgent policy of the state.

The truth is that although the government seems every day to be more disposed to eradicate this illegal armed group it is continue to expand and grow at a rapid rate with the help I have mentioned and backing of a few servants of the state

It is said that there are some 9,000 men under arms at the orders of Carlos Castaño who are willing to become the third force at the negotiating table.

The attitude of the guerrillas, arrogant and challenging has without a doubt helped the growth of these illegal expressions of private justice who are battling the guerrillas for control of large parts of the country.

In a word the map of Colombia today shows the cruel struggle for territorial, political, social and economic control in which the absence of the state and the victimisation of civil society are the principal characteristics.

The motive force for the increasingly savage war is the trade in drugs which is a source of money and support for the illegal groups in their war with each other and whose private cartels are moreover another source of threat to democratic stability.

It is in the light of this that the controversial Plan Colombia has been conceived by President Pastrana’s government and put together by the government of the United States of America, whose military component is worrying the NGOs concerned with human rights, the political parties, academics, the concerned population in the south of the country and their neighbours many of whom, including President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, expressed worries about its effects.

Although there is no going back on the Plan and it is clear that the new residents of the White House will give their own push to it, there are more and more calls, at home and abroad, for a reconsideration of its military component and its extension, with some social content, to the whole Andean region so that its benefits and potential for peace can be real.

What is certain is that this Plan has, thanks to the negotiations with the FARC and the ELN, its rejection by the European Union and the worries expressed by the affected communities, turned into a factor which will determine the future of the country.

The most praiseworthy thing would be to turn it into an Andean strategy with a strong social component to quicken the eradication of the areas under drugs.

These factors, the negotiations with the guerrillas, the solution of the paramilitary problem, and the management of the Plan Colombia are the focus of the national reconciliation. If it fails we will be condemned to many more years of sterile fratricidal violence.

The patriotic opposition, lead by the Colombian Liberal Party, has not stood idly by waiting for all this to happen because it is conscious of its historic responsibility. Consequently it has backed all the government’s efforts and has stood ready to save the process when that has been needed. We understand that worsening of the armed conflict has brought irrecuperable damage to society as a whole and to our democracy, already weakened and boxed in by violent people and the inability of the state to rein them in.

This state of affairs which is keeping people in a state of uncertainty and has put off foreign investors has started a massive exodus of Colombians and a strong shift to the right of many in society who are calling for the crisis to be ended by violent means.

The Colombian Liberal Party, a full member of the Socialist International, leads the opposition to the government and nevertheless supports the Common Front for Peace and against Violence made up of various political organisation and movements to try and save and strengthen the talks with the FARC and bring about the drawing up of a national peace strategy in the knowledge that reconciliation is everyone’s business.

The defeat of scepticism, polarisation and the shift to the right, the strengthening of democracy - through a thoroughgoing political reform, the establishment of lasting negotiated peace, the rescue of the economy, the founding of a new social contract and the achievement of the solidarity of the international community are the tasks we Colombian Liberals have set ourselves in order to pull the country out of the morass into which it has fallen.

It is vital that the Socialist International keeps us company as we overcome the ills which beset us.

It is evident that we Colombians will have to use all the imagination and tenacity which marks us out if we are to ensure a better future, but without foreign help in the context of our sovereignty this will be harder. As a nation we face many challenges but socialist ideas give us the assurance that there is a future.

Signed articles represent the views of the authors only, not necessarily those of Socialist Affairs or the Socialist International

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