Crisis?  What Crisis?   Security Issues in Colombia

Keynote Address: The Historical Perspective

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I was asked to speak on the historical background of the Colombian situation, but I have since been reassured that I did not have to pay too much attention to that, as it has already been given, so I won’t belabor it greatly.

I first went to Colombia almost thirty years ago, when there was a great deal of U.S. preoccupation and very few guerrillas under Marxist leadership. I look back over what has changed in thirty years, and there are now a great many guerrillas under Marxist leadership and not much U.S. preoccupation, at least until now.

It’s been a changing scene. When I was thinking of more closely obeying the orders of the invitation to speak at this workshop, I went over in my mind all the shifts in emphasis in public order preoccupations in Colombia, in visibility and geography, in numbers, in strategies over the last thirty years. How much things do change! I still find it interesting, and I still find it difficult to make up my mind. Colombia is a difficult country. I think it is too difficult for journalists, or more politely, for journalism, at the level at which it is usually covered and in the short space it gets.

I concur with a number of things that have already been said during this workshop. It’s not Vietnam yet, and it’s not the Balkans, either. It’s also not so obviously a question of steady guerrilla escalation. When you look closely at the figures, you will find some indicators that increase with a suspicious regularity. The number of guerrillas and fronts goes up rather as if someone in the Bank of the Republic was adjusting them for the annual rate of inflation. The number of municipalities where there is some guerrilla presence increases too. But the intensity of combat and the number of deaths in the confrontation with the guerrillas do not increase at the same rate or move with the same regularity. This is not necessarily comforting, because the guerrillas have learned to expand their influence without that much confrontation.

A few months ago at the meeting in Houston,¹¹¹ I was asked if I could attempt to characterize the nature of Colombia’s guerrilla violence. I will now rapidly repeat the attempt.

First, the guerrillas are very persistent and enduring. When I have looked for parallels to Colombia’s troubles elsewhere in the world, one that has sprung to mind is Italy in the last century: another liberal state with inadequate institutions that suffered for decades from grave problems of internal order. It was Italy then that held the international record for kidnapping.

Second, the guerrillas are both very Colombian and un-Colombian. There is a small paradox here. The conflict is Colombian in its autonomy, which is already been touched upon; it is not a conflict subject to a great deal of tangible influence from the outside the country. At the same time it is somewhat less Colombian than some Colombian commentators assume, in that it has been influenced by, to make a short list, Cuba, Mao, Moscow, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru a bit, even Albania: the Popular Liberation Army (EPL) named one of its fronts after Enver Hoxha, not a familiar Colombian figure.

Third, in terms of political projections at the national level, the Colombian guerrillas seem to me to have been very weak. They have produced no political leader of major standing, and their discourse is feeble and contradictory. They do not enjoy widespread popular support. The guerrillas are not even in my view very agrarian. In general, I think their ideological motivation is quite low. There is a great capacity for disruption and for noise-making, but there is much less capacity for translating that into solid political support.

They have a highly developed capacity for vegetable reproduction, as has been already touched upon, and great organizational capacity, but these organizational achievements in part mean that they don’t need popular support.

They have deep social camouflage. They are not easily seen. Everybody is not out on campaign, climbing up and down mountains in some sort of uniform.

At times the leadership is extremely conversational and unhermetic. Apart from its obvious lack of monopoly of violence, in this area of national life the Colombian government has no monopoly of communication. The guerrilla leadership is able to communicate with the general population with extraordinary facility.

It is probably at the same time vulnerable at times of truces and peacemaking. Such processes are notoriously difficult for any guerrillas to manage, and Colombian guerrillas are unlikely to be an exception. They produce many potentially lethal internal tensions, apart from the great problem of lack of external guarantees for their security. Maintaining coherence of authority within the guerrilla ranks is often most easily attained by continuing the armed struggle, and one must remember that guerrillas are authoritarian organizations by their essential nature.

After that brief and necessarily incomplete characterization of the guerrillas, I would next like to state a number of propositions that are, I find, difficult for people to face. It is not always easy to accept that things are as they are, especially when the facts have, as I think they do in this situation, a great deal of inherent ambivalence. These propositions are meant to excite debate, and I think they have certain policy implications.

First proposition: Colombian democracy has many defects, some of which, such as corruption, we have touched upon, but it still has much capacity for change and it is still very much worth defending and supporting. That is my first proposition and point of departure.

Second proposition: Colombian guerrillas do have political projects, but at the same time they are quasicriminals. And their political projects are, I think, unrealizable, certainly in their maximum expression.

Third proposition, in the same line of awkwardness: Some of the Colombian military and forces of order have been guilty of committing human rights abuses. But if the current deteriorating human rights situation is to be improved, there is no alternative to strengthening both the armed forces and the police.

Here I am going to insert a parenthesis, because we had a great deal of discussion this morning about military reform. I have my doubts about wholesale military reform for a number of reasons. One is a reason that has been mentioned: It is not clear who is going to carry out the reform or who has the expertise required. There is in Colombia very little civilian capacity for analyzing military problems, and civilians do not have enough patience in listening to the military. I would rephrase the analysis in that I think it has to be the number one priority of the incoming government to carry out, I will put it if you like in Spanish, a replanteamiento general (general restatement) of civil/military relations and to work toward some agreed aims and strategy. It is impossible to judge efficiency and impossible to plan efficiency, if one does not have agreed aims and agreed strategy, and consequently the continued complaints about the ineffectiveness of the armed forces are, let us say, not properly grounded.

A fourth proposition: Colombian corruption is very far from being total. I do not agree with the much-quoted ranking of Colombia as the third most corrupt country in the world. I think it is absurd. In some of the forms it takes in Colombia, corruption is at its most virulent and most menacing, but corruption is not universal. Scandals at ministerial levels are rare.

I will follow these propositions with one of a different order -- that there is some onus on critics of the Colombian government and the armed forces, some duty to come clear about their policy options. I repeat, I do not see the way out of the current situation without a substantial strengthening of the forces of law and order, broadly defined as the army, police, and justice. I do not see a way out through peace pacts in the near future, for a great many reasons. For a lack, if you like, of the sort of correlation of forces that produces meaningful deals; for a lack of clarity of project among the protagonists and clarity about their objective strength or weakness or legitimacy – not helped by some of the international press coverage of the situation, including some of the recent U.S. coverage. There is also the problem of the salability of agreements, similar to the problem the British government has faced in Northern Ireland. Accords reached must be of a sort that they can enjoy the support of a large majority of the population. Otherwise they may even increase violence.

I would like to sustain what I said about the lack of clarity in the projects and some of the contenders. I have recently read the stated demands and propositions of all concerned conveniently gathered in the supplement "La Paz Sobre La Mesa" of the weekly Cambio 16.¹¹² There is a great deal that seems reasonable in those pages, which leads one to suspect that the fighting is about something that is not in them. I think that there is also a correlation between the vagueness and imprecision of demands and their un-negotiability. You cannot negotiate things like equality; you cannot negotiate social justice. It is not possible. And the more that sort of language is present, the less likelihood there is that real negotiations are occurring. Other people are going to speak more about peace, so I shall not say more about that.

I want to go on after this morning’s very clear and very useful presentation on the Washington view of things about what I feel from the sidelines about that. I am apprehensive about U.S. policy and about the international aspects of the Colombian situation.

I’m apprehensive that there will be a new cycle of public certification and decertification of Colombia on human rights grounds. We’ve heard four years of certification and decertification on the usual grounds. I hope here to express myself with a great deal of care. When I first came to Washington on Colombian affairs some years ago, I remember, being unacculturated, that I was a bit shocked when someone sprang up in the audience and began his intervention by saying "we of the human rights community …" obviously excluding myself from that community. Then I thought, I am not a torturer, am I not in favor of basic human rights?

Now, looking at the real world, Colombia is a country that is for a number of reasons diplomatically defenseless; it is not very strategic, and I’m afraid that the U.S. sometimes appears in European eyes to use it as a sort of diplomatic adventure playground, in which and toward which moral attitudes can be costlessly struck. I am worried about the consequences of such a certification and decertification on human rights policy, as distinct from other policies by which the U.S. can make its concern for human rights in Colombia effective. The sort of public – if you like – "trial by visa" could have consequences that are bad for human rights and make the situation worse. Although it puts certain actors in the clear, it makes it harder to come to grips with a situation in which human rights abuses rank high, and which, let us face it, is very difficult to clean up.

I mentioned that as a historian I try to look at similar conflicts in other parts of the world. I was reading recently a good book on the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the conflicts in County Cork 1916 – 1923, where the British and later the Irish Free State fought a dirty war with many similarities to the Colombian conflict.¹¹³ One sees from the archives quoted there how impossible it was to make that conflict very clean. If the British government, which was immensely more powerful in those circumstances than the Colombian, and the British army, a highly disciplined and professional force, could not make all clean in Northern Ireland, there are obviously practical limitations to the degree to which the Colombian government is going to be able to avoid and prevent the sort of things we all wish to avoid and prevent, and I don’t think that a realistic policy can be formulated without taking that into account. That is something very much on the agenda.

Let’s ask ourselves what diminishes and what increases human rights abuses. Let us look at the paramilitary problem. What diminishes paramilitarism, what sort of action must a government take against it? This is very much a problem now on the agenda, a most serious one in both Colombian domestic policy and international relations. Paramilitarism has to be confronted at some point on the ground. I think that an efficient and confident military is more likely to manage the tasks involved than a demoralized army suffering from an isolation complex. That last may well act on the old English proverb, "May as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

It seems to me that Colombia faces the need to make many internal policy changes in the area of security. Many of these have yet to be brought forward and debated, but they do seem to me to be possible. The situation is grave, the country has suffered four years of exhausting political crisis that have obviously had multiple consequences and high costs. All the same, many necessary changes in defense and security policy were in the pipeline, and there have been a number of positive changes that have yet to yield all their results.

Some of these changes have been disappointing so far. The change to a civilian minister of defense has been one such disappointment, as has already been said. I think it was an important and necessary change, which opened up many positive possibilities, but frankly, the civilians have so far not passed the test. This does not, however, imply that the momentum there cannot be recovered, and that there are not a number of further reforms and reorganizations that can be undertaken. We should be aware that a number of relatively rudimentary and obvious reforms have yet to be implemented. They have not been tried because of the vacillating politics of the last years and the deterioration in civil/military relations that has resulted. I see much that it is both possible and necessary to do, that ought to be done, that should attract support, not spectacular or overpublicized, but discreet and intelligent, from the U.S.

Other policies in other fields: I have heard it asked whether possibly outside pressure, which usually means U.S. pressure, might be brought to bear to bring about sweeping changes within the country. For example, what about an agrarian reform? That sort of suggestion. Legitimate speculation perhaps, but to my mind naïve. Frankly, I do not see that there exists an obvious list of such initiatives in internal policy that would lead to a rapid improvement in the situation. It would be nice if that were so, but I don’t think it is the case. As I have said, a reading of the demands of the guerrillas is not stimulating; it is frankly boring. Among the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (FARC’s) demands, for example, are listed items as odd as a unicameral legislature and a procurador (attorney general) popularly elected. I do not believe that Colombians care whether the legislature has one or two chambers, or five, nor that anyone has gone to fight for a popularly elected procurador.

One looks at these statements of demands with a certain curiosity, but as I have said before, one concludes that the struggle is not about them. The struggle is about power, and about history – the Colombian guerrilla leadership is very conscious of its history, as many publications show. Forty years is a long time, and that time is itself part of the guerrillas’ capital. Survival, successful organization – all represent an effort that must eventually receive some sort of compensating descarga (discharge), recognition, reply. And it has to be something of significance, more than has been previously offered to retiring guerrillas. What exactly that something of significance is has to emerge from political processes within Colombia. I do not think that foreigners have all that much to contribute to that definition.

This brings me to my concluding point, the question of democracy – point four on the State Department list of things related to Colombia beginning with the letter D. I see the democratic aspect of the conflict as follows: that a "salable" peace has to have as its final goal a country that is more democratic than before, not less. In my view, Colombia is already pretty democratic, but I am English, and perhaps the English have rather primitive and unadvanced views of the nature of democracy.

This has important practical consequences and implications for policy. Those of us who have studied in Colombia will have frequently heard the opinion from Colombians that the root of the blame for the conflict lies with the National Front power-sharing agreement (1958 -- 1974) between the Liberal and Conservative parties, Colombia’s Republicans and Democrats, because the National Front was a pact made by elites against the rest of the population, that it was exclusionary. I do not myself agree with that diagnosis, for other reasons besides the fact that the Front came to an end a long time ago. But the argument does lead me to raise a question to those involved in current peace-making: Are you going to be successful in arranging matters now just with another pact? That does not look so feasible to me. A pact between a government and a guerrilla elite may not soon come to be criticized as being as antidemocratic as the National Front, or more so? This consideration has surely to be present in all those conversations.

Here I do not mean to criticize Dr. García-Peña and others who have made arduous efforts to get peace conversations going, whose efforts are frequently misinterpreted. I would only criticize them for thinking that a secret could be kept for two months. It is impossible to keep a secret in Colombia, even for two months.

I return to a final point, also about democracy. Some commentators in Colombia seek to set out for general consideration proposals of what the future of the country should be like once peace is attained, what policies should then be. I feel that many of these policies should not wait upon peace accords being reached, and that there is a negative and paralyzing effect on government in fixing the mind too much on agreements that lie in an indefinite future and that are going to be very hard to reach. Essential measures are semiconsciously postponed until peace accords have been attained. In many areas of policy such postponement is neither necessary nor desirable, nor democratic.

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Last Update:  September 30, 2002