FMSMUN V GENERAL ASSEMBLY FIRST COMMITTEE THE SITUATION IN COLOMBIA Author: Brian D. Sutliff “No one can feel as the owner of the country and no one can feel excluded from the right of property. We must all suffer Colombia.” - former President Alvaro Uribe Velez Introduction The prevalence and constancy of armed violence in Colombia is its undeniable contemporary tragedy. Torn apart by the ravages of nearly sixty-five years of civil war and internal conflicts, Colombia’s tragedy has become a critical security issue for the entire Western Hemisphere. As the various actors in this seemingly interminable series of conflicts interact and revise their strategies, they impose considerable burdens on Colombia’s neighbors, but most especially on the civilians caught in the middle. The international community, including the UN System, needs to consider the ending of violence and the implementation of comprehensive disarmament and development strategies in Colombia among its immediate and long-term security priorities. Former President Alvaro Uribe articulated that he believed that the end of armed conflict in Colombia may be in sight because of his government’s aggressive counterinsurgency policies against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); his successor, Juan Manuel Santos, served as Minister of National Defense from 2006-09 and has mostly maintained the more assertive, or confrontational, policies of the Uribe government. Recent evidence points to a weakening of the FARC’s operational capacities but it is still too early for the Colombian government to proclaim victory. Previous governments have sought to claim victory over the FARC and other guerrilla groups in Colombia only to see the guerrillas stage audacious actions and raids. Furthermore, President Santos and the Colombian military need to repair their relationships with Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela as well as quite possibly account for possible war crimes, including in the July 2, 2008 hostage rescue where at least one Colombian soldier illegally used the insignia of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on his uniform. La Violencia Colombia’s centrality in the Western Hemisphere has been a constant over the past 200 years. Colombia occupies a critical geographic location, situated at the northern tip of South America, directly linking the continents of North and South America together while also touching both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Colombia’s importance for the Western Hemisphere was also solidified through Simon Bolivar’s original Gran Colombia, a larger country that once also contained modern Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. Ecuador and Venezuela would break away from Colombia in the nineteenth century and the United States would assist Panama in gaining its independence from Colombia in 1903 by positioning American warships off Colombia’s coast while Panamanian rebels staged a brief uprising. Throughout the first 150 years of Colombia’s existence as an independent country, the dominant Conservative and Liberal parties contested elections, argued, and engaged in armed conflict against each other. In 1948, after the murder of the leading Liberal candidate for president, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala (hereafter referred to as Gaitán), Colombia was torn apart by horrific violence as Colombia would bear witness to its own version of Cold War antagonisms between the Conservatives, many of whom sought to emulate Francisco Franco, the Fascist leader of Spain, the Liberals, and the small Communist party. The Conservatives, as the dominant political party after the Liberals boycotted the 1950 presidential elections in protest against the concerted wave of violence unleashed in the wake of Gaitán’s death, used the security forces to create cadres of assassins known as pájaros [birds in Spanish] who intimidated and eliminated political opposition in many areas. The Liberals began to retaliate in kind and by the early 1950s, La Violencia was in full swing. Journalist and human rights monitor Robin Kirk writes that “the struggle that rapidly consumed Colombia, was personal. Grand political fortunes were at stake, but so too were simmering land disputes, municipal rivalries, indiscretions, ambitions and affairs of the heart…”1 As La Violencia engulfed more Colombian communities, it exacerbated the persistent social and economic inequality that has always plagued Colombia. When poor peasants were forced off their lands, wealthy landowners and their political allies used their, often forced, exodus to expand their own landholdings. The deepening of these social and economic inequalities only seemed to be reinforced by the violence perpetrated by the official security forces as well as their unofficial allies. The peasants and other internally displaced persons (IDPs) who were forcibly relocated or fled in advance of the 1 Robin Kirk, More Terrible Than Death: Violence, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia PublicAffairs New York 2004 p. 25. encroaching violence eventually created communities from which sprang the most organized and fiercest resistance to La Violencia. Enter Las Guerrillas By 1960, the effects of La Violencia were felt throughout Colombia, particularly in the rural areas. The Liberal party fractured further, with some of the most marginalized members, such as Pedro Marín, later to be known as Manuel Marulanda Velez or Tirofijo [Sureshot], joining forces with the Communists. By the mid-1960s, Colombia’s landscape was being radically reshaped by the conflicts between the security forces and a rapidly expanding cadre of guerrilla groups including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Popular Liberation Army (ELP), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the April 19 Movement (M-19). As these rebel groups survived large-scale government military operations, they also began to pose a serious challenge to the Colombian government. By the early 1960s, the FARC and other rebel groups had carved out several “independent republics” in the poor rural southern provinces of Colombia and they began to exercise sovereignty in these zones. The government’s alliance with the United States only served to alarm many of these groups further at the height of the international Cold War rivalry. The government would gradually adapt its strategy to include relief aid and medical services, modeled along the lines of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Called Plan Lazo, this combination of relief aid and military force was aimed at eliminating the autonomous status of the “independent republics.” Plan Lazo failed to eliminate the “independent republics” completely. Marín, or Tirofijo, would later argue “that if the government had spent even a fraction of the money it used equipping soldiers to help needy farmers and build roads and schools, it might well have avoided decades of trouble with the FARC.”2 Later Colombian governments, including the successive governments of Ernesto Samper (1994-1998) and Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), effectively ceded control of large areas of southern Colombia to the FARC in attempts to reduce violence and also induce the guerrillas to negotiate. As these attempts at negotiation failed to produce positive results, the violence between the government and the guerrillas would be augmented by the government’s creation of and alliances with new paramilitary organizations, or “self-defense” groups. “Self-Defense” Groups That Go On the Offense The extremely close relationships between the Colombian military and the paramilitary organizations, or “self-defense” groups, have been critical linkages for the economic, military and political elites in Colombia for many years. The infamous pájaros of La Violencia would in time be superseded by the more well-organized and largely self- 2 Robin Kirk, More Terrible Than Death 2004 p. 53. financed “self-defense” groups of the 1980s and 1990s, especially the United Self- Defense Forces (AUC). The influential paramilitary leader, Carlos Castaño, of the AUC presented his armed forces, eventually totaling 32,000, as developing organically in response to the violent excesses and Marxist ideology of the guerrillas. In reality, though, “the paramilitaries were never a homogenous organization but rather a marriage of interests between powerful local warlords, drug barons, organized crime, members of local political and economic elites and counter-insurgent groups.”3 The rhetoric of the “self-defense” groups also consistently conflicted with their own actions in the rural areas of Colombia. The paramilitaries have frequently used drug cultivation and trafficking, donations from wealthy landowners, extortion, smuggling, and other organized criminal activities to finance their growth and activities.4 The paramilitary groups in Colombia constituted the infamous “Sixth Division” of the Colombian armed forces because of their extremely close partnerships and working relationships. The Colombian military routinely shared intelligence feeds and information with the paramilitaries, particularly given that many paramilitary commanders and fighters had previously been active members of the Colombian security forces. In a chilling echo of the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan, investigators and journalists have documented attacks where the Colombian military began actions and then left the area to allow the paramilitaries to work without any official oversight or obstruction.5 As the chilling realities of the paramilitaries’ actions, as well as their continued close relationships