All of the usual caveats apply, and it is far too early to judge success or failure, but the very fact that the end of the Colombian civil war may be upon us is big news and deserves more attention than it is getting from the gringo press.
Colombia’s battle against the Marxist insurgents cum drug dealers known as FARC (a Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is one of the longest running wars on the planet. That conflict is exceeded in length only by the Palestinian conflict against Israel, the Kachin and Karen war against Burma, and a few other rump struggles. As recently as 15 years ago, the FARC controlled a quarter of Colombia’s territory–more land than Switzerland–and appeared on the verge of taking power. From those heady heights to today, with FARC’s 7,000 or so fighters pledged to disarm, is as dramatic a turnabout as we have seen in the annals of counterinsurgency.
What happened? Two factors account for FARC’s downfall.
First and most important was the election of Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia in 2002. He is in many ways the opposite of Hamid Karzai or Nouri al-Maliki, weak leaders who sought to appease powerbroker and warlords and wound up plunging their countries deeper into the hell of internecine conflict. Uribe was a strong man in the best sense–not a dictator but a democratic leader in the tradition of Churchill, Lincoln, and Roosevelt who understood what had to be done to win a war and did it.
He curbed corruption and abuse against by the populace by the security forces. He brokered the disarmament of right-wing militias. He instituted a war tax to pay for an increased war effort, and he committed to a policy of “democratic security” that allowed the military to secure parts of the Colombian countryside that had never been under the control of any central government.
Uribe received a critical assist from the United States. Plan Colombia, begun under President Clinton and expanded by President Bush, funneled more than $10 billion to Colombia. Initially, the money was designed to assist with anti-drug efforts but then, after 9/11, the remit expanded to support the general struggle against FARC, which made perfect sense, because it was impossible to disentangle insurgent activities from those of narco-traffickers. Along with U.S. funds came U.S. advisers, with the Special Forces taking an especially prominent role in advising the Colombian armed forces in the tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.
The U.S. Embassy in Bogota lists some of the achievements that I have glimpsed for myself on several visits to Colombia: “In 2004, the Uribe government established, for the first time in recent Colombian history, a government presence in all of the country’s 1,099 municipalities (county seats). Attacks conducted by illegally armed groups against rural towns decreased by 91 percent from 2002 to 2005. Between 2002 and 2008, Colombia saw a decrease in homicides by 44 percent, kidnappings by 88 percent, terrorist attacks by 79 percent, and attacks on the country’s infrastructure by 60 percent.”
The war might have ended long ago were it not for FARC’s drug-running profits and the shelter that it received from next-door Venezuela. Indeed, one of the failures of Plan Colombia has been a recent increase in Colombian drug production. Still, by any standard, this is spectacular success made possible by the combination of enlightened U.S. aid and enlightened local leadership. Too often the U.S. has been too heavy-handed in advising local allies, and those allies have been led by men such as Karzai and Maliki who were not the great wartime leaders they needed. Colombia was one of the few exceptions to these baleful trends, and what was accomplished there shows the potential of counterinsurgency strategy at its best.
It is all the more regrettable, then, that Uribe, now a senator, is sullying his record by conducting a bitter political campaign against his successor as president, Juan Manual Santos, and the peace accord he has engineered. Uribe should see the treaty as ratification of his success–FARC would never have agreed to stop fighting were it not for the battlefield defeats it suffered beginning in the Uribe administration. But, much like Theodore Roosevelt turning against William Howard Taft, Uribe has decided to prosecute a vendetta against his successor, who served as defense minister in his own government. Uribe is actively campaigning for the Colombian people to reject the accord in a national plebiscite on October 2.
Uribe claims the peace agreement, negotiated in Havana, is full of unwarranted giveaways to FARC. These include a guarantee that FARC’s political party will receive a minimum of five seats in the Senate and five more in the lower chamber of parliament for two legislative terms. The deal promises demobilized FARC fighters a monthly stipend for two years and possible one-time payments of $2,500. The accord also offers an alternative justice system that will allow both ex-guerrillas and soldiers accused of war crimes an alternative to serving long prison terms.
As the Washington Post has noted, Santos himself has described this as “toad swallowing,” i.e., having to take bitter medicine. In an ideal world, the government wouldn’t have to offer such concessions. But the world that Colombia inhabits is hardly ideal. Despite all of the setbacks the rebels have suffered, they could have kept on fighting indefinitely. The government showed itself capable of blunting the insurgency but could not end it entirely by force. Hence, the need to reach a deal with the rebels that naturally includes some sweeteners.
Colombia’s voters will have to pass their own judgment on this accord, but from where I sit—admittedly, a long way from the jungles where FARC has been a law onto itself–it appears to be a fair bargain to end the longest-running war in Latin America and one of the longest anywhere in the world. Colombia will still have deep problems in the future, and there is no doubt that many of the FARC fighters who have known nothing but war will become gangsters rather than solid citizens. But to remove the shadow of war is a significant achievement in a country that has been wracked by internal violence since its 19th Century origins.
