Colombia's Winds of Change

An old legend says that when God made Colombia, St Peter questioned “Why have you given so much natural wealth to one country?”  God replies, “You haven’t seen the leaders I will give them yet”.

It is this same wealth which is at the heart of the West’s close interest in Colombia, and it is this same poor leadership which explains why Colombia has so frequently handed it over to them. For despite Colombia’s possession of 16 of the world’s 22 most desirable resources, including oil, gold, platinum, emeralds, and some of the richest soils in the world, 68 per cent of Colombians live in poverty. While 2.5million families have no homes and 3.5million children have no school place, a mere one per cent of the population own well over half of Colombia’s land.

This wealth could benefit not just Colombia’s people, but the ‘many’ across the world. The fact that it has only benefited a few at the top, explains the 19 conflicts which have blighted Colombia since independence. The current conflict has lasted 55 years, and claimed the lives of millions. This war is a dirty war, conducted not between armies, but by a proxy paramilitary force working with the official armed forces and inflicting murder, torture and displacement on innocent civilians, while claiming to fight a leftwing guerrilla insurgency – most notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and also the smaller ELN group.  

Since 1953 there have been nine peace processes, each convincing certain guerrilla factions to disband. In every instance, the guerrilla leaders who agreed to re-enter civil society have been assassinated. In 1985, for example, the FARC agreed to a ceasefire, to form a political party – the Patriotic Union – and to contest elections. In the following months, two presidential candidates, scores of elected Congressmen, regional deputies and local councillors and over 3,000 party activists were assassinated.

This one fact is central to an understanding of Colombia’s continued armed conflict – the insurgents do not trust the State. Our current President, Alvaro Uribe Velaz, often seems to say, like the current US administration, that Colombia is in the grip of an international terrorist campaign initiated on 11th September 2001- a ludicrous myth which flies in the face of such history.

In more analytical moments, Uribe claims, like the last US administration, that it is drugs which are the problem. Of course drug money plays a role in fuelling Colombia’s conflict, but it isn’t merely the armed groups that benefit.  Every layer of society right up to the presidency is infected. The 500 tonnes of Cocaine exported from Colombia last year had a street value of $110billion. Only $3billion of this ended up in Colombia, mostly in the hands of wealthy landowners and others in the elite, with a small proportion going to the peasant farmers. The chemicals needed to turn coca into cocaine are all produced by multi-national corporations in the West. Surely in the face of such figures we must ask whose drug business is this? If the intention is to halt coca growing then the billions in US military aid could instead have paid the small farmers, many times over, simply not to grow it. 

But both drugs and terrorism have provided perfect pretexts in Colombia, as elsewhere, for US intervention in the conflict. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, behind only Israel and, marginally, Egypt. Plan Colombia, a billion-dollar ‘anti-narcotics’ military assistance package, may have caused misery to thousands of desperate coca farmers through a vicious campaign of aerial fumigation reminiscent of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, but it is essentially shoring up US control of the Colombian economy.  

Terrorism also provides the pretext in Colombia, as elsewhere, for draconian legislation aimed squarely at civilians. Uribe claims his “war on terrorism” is reducing human rights abuses. But while indicators show a decline in kidnapping, the government’s own sources show human rights violations attributable directly to the armed forces on the increase. In one example, several months ago, 2,000 people were arrested in Saravena in Arauca, rounded up in a sports stadium and marked on their wrists with indelible ink. Only 1 of those people remains under arrest. This is what we call a “miracle fishing” exercise. The rebels used to detain a busload of people in the hope of finding a rich individual to kidnap for ransom. Now the State will round up hundreds of civilians in the hope of finding a single rebel.

The War on Terror turns the truth on its head. Laws currently being debated include allowing the state to intercept communications, conduct raids, open mail, tap phones and give the army the powers to investigate, prosecute and judge. Are these powers really aimed at guerrillas who live in hammocks in the jungle and don’t receive post or have telephones? Or is this actually empowering the same armed forces that have well documented links with the paramilitaries who carry out the vast majority of massacres, torture, murder and disappearances against trade unionists, human rights defenders, teachers and peasant leaders?

We have been bombarded with claims of Uribe’s “unprecedented popularity” for many months, often polling 70% approval for his ‘total war’ on the guerrillas. This is not surprising given the years of war the Colombian people have endured, the total control of the media by his closest friends and the seduction of Uribe’s simple solution. But when Uribe went to the polls with a 14 point referendum, people woke up to the fact that he was proposing a neo-liberal onslaught in line with the dictates of the IMF, as well as extending his own Presidential office. A campaign of active abstention, breaking the traditional political model in Colombia, succeeded in defeating the referendum with over three-quarters of the electorate staying away from the polls.

The opposition movement to Uribe disagrees on many points, but we are united in saying that while we reject violence and the use of force as a political weapon, we still have to accept that this is a political conflict. Only a negotiated political settlement will produce a solution to the conflict, and a settlement must be based on social justice which undercuts the attraction of violence.

In October Luis Eduardo Garzon, running on a progressive alliance ticket, won the Mayor of Bogotá. Garzon was beaten for the Presidency by Uribe in 2002 and has consistently opposed Uribe’s policies which have turned much of the country into militarised zones and dragged an increasing number of civilians into the conflict by the introduction of such programs as the ‘informant networks’ and ‘peasant militias’, as well as sweeping privatisation and austerity measures. Claiming the rich in Colombia have been given preference for too long, Garzon has declared his first day in office “a day without hunger” and proposes the establishment of massive food distribution networks in Bogotá’s sprawling shanty towns.

Altogether the alliance took a third of regional votes and won many hundreds of municipal council seats as well as the governorships of two provinces.  Garzon’s victory opens a vital political space which bodes well. The winds of democratic change in Latin America which swept Lula and Chavez to power and overthrew the rule of the IMF in Argentina are beginning to blow into Colombia.

Wilson Borja is a Congress member for the Social and Political Front in Colombia. He has been the victim of numerous assassination attempts.  He has recently been touring the UK with campaign groups War on Want and Justice for Colombia.  For more details see www.waronwant.org/colombia or www.justiceforcolombia.org