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Colombian Peace Negotiations: the Long Road to Resolution1 CCA Fellow: Stephen J

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Colombian Peace Negotiations: the Long Road to Resolution1 CCA Fellow: Stephen J Hemisphere Backgrounder: February 2016 Colombian Peace Negotiations: the Long Road to Resolution1 CCA Fellow: Stephen J. Randall FRSC* With the deadline looming for an agreement between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC negotiators it is timely to recall the torturous course that peace negotiations have taken in Colombia and the issues which remain. Critical as it is to bring the current negotiations to a successful conclusion, there are few who believe that this agreement alone will resolve the long history of violence and criminal activity, the massive challenge of the millions of displaced persons, land restitution and the meaningful reintegration of combatants into mainstream Colombian society. This is not to deny that peace with FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) has massive symbolic and substantive importance in moving the country toward a more stable and equitable society. The following short article traces the evolution of the insurgent groups, the decades of conflict and the halting steps toward resolution. The Historical Background: Peace negotiations with Colombia’s main insurgent groups- FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- People’s Army), ELN (National Liberation Army), EPL (People’s Liberation Army), M-19 (19th of April Movement) - have a lengthy history. Of the four main guerrilla groups, FARC and the ELN remain active. The ELN remains outside the peace negotiations, as do some of the FARC fronts. Colombian insurgent groups emerged in the context of the Cold War, the Cuban and Chinese Revolutions and the domestic Colombian political dynamic generated by the lengthy and violent civil war, La Violencia, in the late 1940s and 1950s. FARC, the ELN and EPL all emerged in the 1960s. FARC was established as a Marxist-Leninist movement dedicated to agrarianism and anti-imperialism. It was and has remained a peasant movement although in the course of its history it also developed strong urban cells. The ELN was founded on the basis of a blend of liberation theology, hence the importance of radical Roman Catholic priests in the movement, and Marxist ideology. The smallest of the main insurgent groups, the EPL, was an offshoot of the tiny Colombian Communist Party. At least for part of its history it adhered to a Maoist philosophy. M-19, in contrast, emerged in the early 1970s in the aftermath of the widely regarded fraudulent election of 1970 which witnessed the defeat of the followers of former military 1 Note: Information in this article is drawn in large part from my book, Colombia-United States Relations since 1974 (Bogota: Random House, 2016) Hemisphere Background Series: February 2016 president, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. More urban than rural, M-19’s leaders espoused a mixture of socialism and populism. By the early 1980s it was second in numbers only to FARC. Except for a brief period of U.S.-supported counter-insurgency in the early 1960s, and until cocaine altered the entire political and economic dynamic in the country starting in the late 1970s, insurgent membership was small. Their movements were isolated and contained or even ignored. The emergence of the Medellin narcotics Cartel under Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel under the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and the expansion of coca growing, processing and global export revolutionized the funding sources for insurgent groups. The insurgents also significantly stepped up their military operations. In the course of the 1980s and 1990s FARC came to dominate the countryside with Colombian security forces focused more on a strategy of containment than offense. M-19 engaged in a dramatic hostage taking at the Embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogotá in 1980 and in 1985 seized the Palace of Justice. During the military siege of the Court building that followed, most members of the Supreme Court, many staff and the insurgents were killed. By the early 1980s both U.S. and Colombian officials had begun to talk of a NARC-FARC connection. The Failure of Political Integration in the 1980s: FARC had no political wing until the 1980s when, encouraged by the openness of the Belisario Betancur government to negotiations, it joined a coalition of insurgents, which included the ADO (Movimiento de Autodefensas Obrera), two demobilized fronts of the ELN, and the Communist Party to establish the Patriotic Union Party. The party platform was not especially revolutionary, in spite of the vitriolic and violent response that its formation sparked on the right. It advocated an economy independent of global capitalism, agrarian reform and the nationalization of natural resources. Its candidates demonstrated considerable electoral appeal at the municipal and departmental levels and to some extent at the national level, but its leaders, candidates and supporters were targeted by right wing death squads. As a result, the party was abandoned shortly after the 1990 elections. The experience of the UP in the 1980s continues to feed FARC’s and other insurgent’s suspicions about meaningful negotiations and the willingness of traditional conservative elites to accept the left into the mainstream of Colombian political life. Jacobo Arbenz, for instance, was considered the main intellectual leader of the UP in the 1980s and he has been an important figure in current peace negotiations. Negotiations with the EPL during the administration of Virgilio Barco at the end of the 1980s led to the demobilization of a number of its members in 1991. The main group remained active and concentrated in the northwest Urabá region. The subsequent administration of Cesár Gaviria also briefly pursued negotiations with FARC and other groups following the violence marred 1990 presidential election which witnessed the narco assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, the Liberal candidate whom Gaviria replaced. 2 Canadian Council for the Americas PO Box 1175, TD Centre, 77 King St. West, Toronto, Ontario M5K 1P2 www.ccacanada.com Hemisphere Background Series: February 2016 In the early 1990s the insurgent alliance, the Simon Bolivar Coordinating Group, composed of FARC, the ELN, and the EPL, continued their primary strategy to maintain their rural enclaves, engage in hit and run tactics against military and police forces, disrupt oil pipeline and electrical facilities, kidnap and extort those with the capacity to pay, and engage in terrorist actions in the cities. By the 1990s, FARC had shown considerable growth since the 1970s, with 49 Fronts operating throughout the country and the ELN with 34. In the course of the decade FARC established its presence in an estimated 57% of all Colombian municipalities. In 1991 Gaviria initiated talks with the guerrillas in an effort to reduce violence while promising some of the smaller groups which had demobilized assistance with social reintegration. The administration pressed the active guerrilla groups for cease-fire terms, a cessation of attacks on military and civilian targets and a movement toward disarmament. After a year of frustration in pursuit of a policy of accommodation the administration ended talks and moved to the offensive. Failure of Peace Negotiations and increased militarization: For the balance of the decade the security situation continued to deteriorate along with severe economic challenges. Paramilitary operations against the left, FARC kidnappings and killings, further displacement of rural people, and the tainted presidency of Ernesto Samper had the country reeling by the time Andrés Pastrana gained the presidency in 1998. There had been no progress on peace negotiations during the Samper presidency (1994-98), although the ELN agreed to discussions under German mediator Werner Mauss. They refused to meet with Colombian government representatives. Pastrana in contrast came to office with a firm commitment to engage in serious negotiations with FARC. That ambition quickly ran up against the reality of FARC’s strength. Pastrana met with FARC leader Manuel Marulanda while president-elect and indicated in his inaugural address that he would be seeking negotiation. Yet only two days after his inauguration the Colombian military suffered one of its most humiliating defeats at the hands of FARC at the military and national police base at Miraflores in Guaviare department. The massive FARC attack involving some 1200 FARC combatants killed thirty police and soldiers, wounded more than fifty and 100 were taken prisoner. In a simultaneous attack near a displaced persons camp in Antioquia, FARC used a high pressure pump to spray gasoline on soldiers before setting them on fire with grenades. The message was clear: FARC would negotiate from a position of strength. Pastrana persisted and against considerable political and military opposition embraced the FARC request to establish a demilitarized zone to facilitate negotiations. Once established the zone was massive, comprising some 42,000 square kilometers of territory in the southeastern departments of Meta and Caquetá. The zone remained in place until February 2002, accomplishing nothing in terms of advancing peace, but leaving FARC with a free hand to tax the local population, recruit and train more combatants, engage in 3 Canadian Council for the Americas PO Box 1175, TD Centre, 77 King St. West, Toronto, Ontario M5K 1P2 www.ccacanada.com Hemisphere Background Series: February 2016 narcotics trafficking, and seek legitimate belligerent status internationally. Throughout what passed for negotiations FARC leaders consistently argued they would not engage in a cease fire let
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