REBEL ASSAULT As part of The Oxford Forum’s focus on Colombia, MALCOLM DEAS explains why taking on the FARC guerrillas has won President Uribe so many votes – and argues it’s high time Europe lent weight to the campaign
AYEAR AFTER September 11th 2001 President Alvaro Uribe informed the UN General Assembly that every year the direct victims of fighting in Colombia amount to some 3,000 – about the same number who died that infamous day in New York. Despite the dimensions of the conflict – by far the most violent in the Western Hemisphere – it is little known and understood. Coverage in the European media, with the single exception of The Economist, is patchy and sensationalist. Television reporters cannot resist counternarcotics helicopters. The Daily Telegraph correspondent always falls back on the shorthand simplification of calling the guerrillas ‘Marxists’ and the paramilitaries ‘right wing’. An excellent article, ‘Who knows how to govern Iraq?’, in the London Review of Books, speculates that the future of that country might be “something like Colombia” – well, yes and no. It is common to see references to “Colombia’s 40-year civil war”.
The following, then, is a brief characterisation of Colombia and her conflicts that will try to be more objective and complete.
Colombia has not known complete peace in the last four decades – or five or six for that matter – but the term ‘civil war’ is misleading. It fits better the sectarian political conflict between Conservatives and Liberals in the 1940s and 1950s, which was ended by truce and power-sharing at the close of that last decade. Some guerrillas from that era persisted,much encouraged by the Cuban revolution, but their numbers were tiny, the threats they posed remote; by the mid-1970s they appeared to have no future. But they survived and for various reasons – their own tenacity, encouraging developments in Central America, new sources of income from oil, drugs and more systematic kidnapping and extortion – they grew.At their height the two major guerrillas, the FARC and the ELN, together numbered over 20,000 in the ranks – many of them very young – with a larger tail of supporters, willing and unwilling.Against them emerged some 10,000 paramilitaries. Numbers of both have recently declined. The guerrillas have lost territory and influence under more effective military pressure: desertions are up and recruiting is more difficult. Government control of the parts of the country where most Colombians live and which contain most of the economy has much improved. There is still a long way to go in the peripheral parts, which contain most of the guerrillas and most of the coca.
YET ALL THIS has still not constituted a civil war in the usual sense of that term. Colombia has a population of some 42 million, and three quarters of that population is urban. It has a democratic and legitimate government. The country is not ‘polarised’ in the normal sense of the term (as Chile was polarised under Salvador Allende or Venezuela has been recently under Hugo Chavez) between supporters of the government or supporters of the FARC or ELN. The guerrillas on a national and even on a regional or departmental scale have never enjoyed any substantial popular support. Opinion surveys, which are frequent and many of them highly professional, rank their approval in low single figures – way below the institutions that enjoy the most popular confidence: consistently the Church and the Armed Forces. The FARC are not interested in popularity – that will come when they take power. Colombian cities have seen marches against kidnapping and violence with turn-outs of millions: Europeans take note when such demonstrations take place in Madrid, or even in Kiev, but not if it is Bogotá or Medellín. President Uribe, who is a hard-liner in confronting terrorism – no negotiations without a cessation of hostilities – has for three years maintained a favourable standing in the opinion polls of 60–70 per cent, a feat no other recent leader of the country has achieved. His detractors claim the polls are too urban, but his rural popularity is probably even higher. He has more support than that enjoyed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the reason for it is clear enough: the promise and delivery of greater security.
Why then has the conflict persisted? It fits in many aspects into the ‘greed’ category of the alternative ‘greed or grievance’ conflict explanations, and exemplifies the correlations revealed in Paul Collier’s World Bank studies: an immense country,much of it mountainous and jungly; porous frontiers; primary exports which subversives can extort (not only drugs, which became an important source of guerrilla and paramilitary resources from the mid 1980s, but also oil, gold, coal and bananas); a population pyramid that contains too many youthful rural unemployed; a past history of conflict. Then the FARC and the ELN are very conscious of their history: 40 years of struggle and survival and, until recently, growth are not lightly given up. Colombian guerrillas are militarily and logistically experienced. They are also autonomous: despite the presence of foreign ideologies – Moscow-line Marxist, Cuban,Maoist, even Albanian – no outside powers can exert leverage on them, a contrast with the much more dependent guerrillas of Central America.
The doctrine of the FARC leadership still remains Maoist-Leninist, and aims at the conquest of national power through “the combination of all forms of struggle”. This embraces peace negotiations only in so far as they favour that end, which is obviously not something that the democratically-elected government of the country can negotiate. The FARC have shown no interest in any partial programme. To expect a Colombian government to negotiate on such terms is no more reasonable than to expect the Italian government to negotiate with the Red Brigades. Despite its peasant and rural origins, the FARC have abandoned any vital concern with agrarian reform. In matters of specific policy the line is to sidestep the questions: ‘the people’, when the FARC have taken power, will make their desires known, and the armed might of the FARC will ensure that their desires are fulfilled. The more nebulous and utopian such a movement’s programme is, the more it signifies that it intends to go on fighting.
All such organisations are necessarily militarist and authoritarian, and negotiating peace, or even truce, is a hazardous prospect for them. Fighting is what maintains the authority of the leadership, order in the ranks and the flow of resources – a truce means no more kidnapping, no more gun-running, and every man or woman then begins to think of the uncertain future; morale and discipline break down. There is little trust in the government or in the guarantees it offers.
A FURTHER EXPLANATION of why conflict has continued is the nature of successive administrations’ responses. Colombian has no authoritarian or militarist tradition – no more than five years of military rule in 175 years of independent history. The army is subordinate to the civilian government: though its human rights record is not perfect, it has never been able to carry out the drastic sort of rural counterinsurgency campaigns that have taken place in some other Latin American republics. Neither the army nor the police have been sufficiently numerous or sufficiently equipped to meet the tasks facing them. Colombia has devoted (by world and regional standards) a low proportion of its budget to security. This began to change significantly from 1998, partly with US military aid under Plan Colombia – sizeable, and technically important, but not the massive militarisation its critics maintain. The annual sum is a couple of days of the Americans’ bill from Iraq, and not that much in military terms – a Blackhawk helicopter, depending on the specification, costs anything between 10 and 20 million dollars. Prior to the change in policy and in opinion that has come with the Uribe government, policy towards the guerrillas for 20 years oscillated between peace negotiations and half-hearted military containment. Uribe’s policies may in the future be modified in some aspects, but his success in improving security and giving the country renewed confidence means that the pendulum is unlikely to swing back far.
Colombia is firmly aligned with the United States and the Bush administration, and that alignment is in the present interests of the country. There is no other source of significant assistance. Given that the drugconsuming nations – which include the Europeans, who consume getting on for half of the drugs that come from Colombia – are not going to change their policies in the near future, US policy is broadly appropriate, effective, discreet and well informed: Miami is, after all, only a couple of hours away. Colombians are not anti-American – during a visit from Rumsfeld last year not a single stone was thrown or wall painted. Relations with immediate neighbours vary, but the Uribe government is not isolated. Cooperation with Brazil, which has large and growing drug-related problems, has much improved, and this has also been the case with Peru.Venezuela under the erratic populist Hugo Chavez remains a problem: he has from time to time inclined to neutral postures that favour the FARC, and makes arms purchases that it is hard for Colombia to ignore.
And what of Europe? The Colombian government has received consistent support from the UK and Spain – countries familiar with terrorism – but the rest, and particularly the EU, usually appear as distant and partial moralisers,manipulated by NGOs bent on discrediting President Uribe. After a lecture in Berlin, Paul Collier was asked by an earnest member of his audience: “What could Germany do to help?” I recall his concise reply: “Put your own house in order by controlling money-laundering and the sale of precursor chemicals, stop sympathising with groups that do not deserve your sympathy, and consider a modest programme of military aid.” It was greeted with astonished silence.
Malcolm Deas is a Fellow of St Antony´s College, where he was one of the founders of the University Latin American Centre in the early 1960s. He has been the Director of the Centre, and has written extensively on Colombian and Latin American affairs
