Colombia: What Happened to Peace
On
Monday, September 26, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and
Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias Timochenko, leader of the Fuerzas
Armadas de Colombia, or FARC, signed a peace accord in the photogenic
coastal city of Cartagena. I was in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, that
afternoon, packed into the central Plaza de Bolivar along with several
thousand celebrants. Giant screens had been set up in public parks and
squares, and in the Plaza de Bolivar three of Colombia’s top musical
groups were announced as warmup acts to the peace-signing itself. It was
a gorgeous afternoon, the best this Andean city can offer, with clear
skies and a high breeze. In the golden sunset a parade of euphoric
neighborhood delegations marched in, dancing on stilts, leaping about or
drumming ecstatically while the watching crowd danced and cheered.
After
four years of exhausting negotiations held mainly in Havana, the accord
had put an end to a confrontation between state and rebels that neither
side had been able to win for more than half a century. In the course
of those decades of useless violence some 220,000 people, mostly
civilians, were killed. Another 92,000 disappeared, and an estimated six
million Colombians, mostly peasant farmers, fled their place of birth
or, in the case of so many who had already left their native communities
because of violence, were forced to abandon their new homes.
Under
the terms of the agreement the FARC agreed to hand over their weapons
in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution and full political
rights. Their ambition was to transition into a political party, much as
another guerrilla group did, quite successfully, in 1985. In the peace
talks, they demanded, and got, the right to run for public office and an
initial ten guaranteed slots in Congress. It was these two points,
immunity and political participation, that would prove the peace
accord’s undoing, but they were not yet a concern at the highly
choreographed signing ceremony in Cartagena.
Twelve
Latin American presidents, Ban Ki-moon, Christine Lagarde, and any
number of other national and international dignitaries attended what was
in fact, and confusingly, merely a prologue to the actual
implementation of the accords. In order to take effect, the treaty had
to be ratified in a national plebiscite, which was set for six days
later. It was expected that the vast network of international support
generated for the accord and made public at the signing ceremony, plus
the benefits of a bilateral cease-fire, in effect now for over a year,
would guarantee a victory for Yes when it came to a vote in the
plebiscite on October 2.
In
the end, a third of the electorate cast their vote, apathy and
torrential rains kept many potential Yes voters away from the voting
booths, the No vote won by less than half a percent, and it was Brexit
all over again.
The
government might have seen it coming at the Plaza de Bolivar in Bogotá
on the day of the signing. After the first two bands had played it
became clear that, with five minutes left to go before the start of the
peace ceremony, the revered rock group Aterciopelados would not be
appearing. Standing on the cathedral steps with a clear view of the
crowd, I realized that the plaza was emptying out before the giant
screens even blinked on to show the ceremony in Cartagena.
Many
years ago in Nicaragua I was witness to a similar moment, at a closing
rally for the candidate of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation
Front in the 1990 presidential elections. The plaza in Managua was
packed to overflowing; according to all the polls, the clear winner was
expected to be the Sandinista candidate, Daniel Ortega (the current
President of Nicaragua since 2007). But long before Ortega began his
speech, huge numbers of people began to stream out. Startled, I asked
people why they were leaving. “We’ve already signed in,” they explained.
Two days later voters handed the leftist Ortega a crushing defeat in
that all-important election.
The
people at the plaza last week in Bogotá had not been required to attend
in the way that Nicaraguans had; no one had checked their names off a
list. They were there on their own, and no doubt those who left early
would have said that they were in favor of peace if asked, but they were
there for the music. Most polls showed that Colombians favored the
accord by a two-to-one margin, but when it came to it, not enough of
them took the trouble to vote on Sunday, six days after the peace
ceremony, whereas those against the peace accord made every effort to go
out to register their protest.
In
a masochistic effort to measure the spilt milk, lasillavacia.com, a
prominent political website, calculated how many votes were lost in
each departamento, or state, either because of the torrential rains brought by Hurricane Matthew, or by the lack ofmermelada that
is ordinarily distributed to local politicians at election time. The
marmalade, or under-the-table money, is used to buy baseball caps or
construction materials for voters—and to hire the buses needed to
transport rural voters to the booths. The difference between the votes
cast on Sunday and the usual number of votes produced by Santos’s
Liberal Party operators in any major coastal city would have produced a
victory for Yes.
Even
though Timochenko, the FARC leader, promptly declared that the
guerrillas would not take up arms again, the No victory struck most
observers as a brutal all-around defeat for Colombia: there is the very
real risk that, given the circumstances, many FARC fighters will refuse
to follow their leadership on the road to civilian life (many have
already abandoned the ranks of the FARC for a rival, though considerably
smaller, rebel group). In expectation of renewed violence the country’s
investment rating could be downgraded, with a consequent effect on
desperately-needed inflows of foreign capital. A lion’s share of the
national budget will now continue to go to the military rather than to
education or sorely needed infrastructure. And the likelihood is that a
population grown mistrustful, isolated and cynical after generations of
senseless war will once again find justification for internecine
hatred.
But
there is a clear winner, too, and that is former president Álvaro
Uribe, a fervent tweeter who combines a passion for extermination with
an unsettling priestly demeanor. In private he has been recorded
threatening disobedient associates (“I’ll hit you in the face, you
faggot!”). In public he has lectured piously and without pause against
the peace accord, for guaranteeing that even the known assassins and
drug traffickers of the FARC would not serve jail sentences for their
crimes. The truth of this injustice was so evident—the FARC did commit
countless murders, and it has long been a major participant in
Colombia’s drug trade—that it obscured a greater reality: even under
Uribe’s energetic prosecution of the war effort when he was president
(2002-2010) the FARC remained diminished but undefeated.
In
2003, following an agreement with Uribe, the guerrillas’ bloodthirsty
paramilitary enemies laid down their arms. A formal structure for the
disarmament was put in place in 2006: paramilitaries who confessed to an
unspecified number of crimes—by no means all—would receive maximum jail
sentences of five to eight years. It was understood that there would be
no extradition to the United States, where most paramilitaries were
wanted on drug trafficking charges. In 2008 fourteen prominent
paramilitary prisoners were rounded up overnight and secretly extradited
to the United States. In an article published in The New York Times last
month, Deborah Sontag cites evidence that the extraditions may have
been an emergency effort to keep the prisoners from telling what they
knew not only about the long involvement of Uribe’s friends and
relatives with the drug-trafficking paramilitaries, but of Uribe
himself.
Uribe’s hatred of the FARC is personal; his father was killed at the family finca by
guerrillas, and with Juan Manuel Santos as his Defense Minister and
generous funding from the United States he led the military’s often
dirty campaign against the guerrillas. Without it the FARC would never
have sat down to talks, but rebel groups do not generally agree to what
Uribe has blasted the Santos deal for lacking—provisions for criminal
trials for themselves on the grounds of drug-trafficking or crimes
against humanity.
As
president, Uribe wangled a constitutional amendment allowing presidents
to stand for a second term in office, and he was headed for a certain
second reelection in 2010 when the country’s constitutional court ruled
against a referendum to approve the possibility of three-term
presidencies. Something about his capacity for rage strikes a deep chord
in the Colombian electorate, not unlike what Uribe’s archenemy Hugo
Chávez provoked in Venezuela, and even today Uribe’s popularity hovers
in the mid-fifties, whereas only the FARC’s Timochenko rivals president
Santos’s appalling ratings, which in recent months have dipped as low as
13 percent. (Go figure the citizenry; Colombians rate liberal Barack
Obama far higher than Uribe, at close to 80 percent, and the head of the
government negotiating team at a respectable 45 percent.)
Some
years ago the Colombian senator Antonio Navarro Wolff, a canny analyst,
told me that the minute a peace accord was signed Uribe would stop
campaigning against it, because it would no longer be politically
profitable for him to do so. But the former president turned out to be
even smarter than that. Having fought the accord in a campaign that
featured the imaginary threat of something called castro-chavismo and
the unlikely possibility of a “President Timochenko,” he took command
of what remained of the peace process within hours of the final vote
tally on Sunday.
In
a restrained five-minute speech, Uribe said that talks should begin
again—now to be carried out on his terms—and prison sentences for the
FARC leadership must be included. (“Señores of the FARC: it will
contribute greatly to the unity of Colombians if you, duly protected,
permit the enjoyment of tranquility.”) Then he moved on to the real
purpose of his address, and of the No campaign: the unveiling of the
political platform for his surrogates in the 2018 presidential election.
No tax increases, he demanded. (A major and much-needed tax reform
hangs in the balance now.) Social welfare, he said, should not “put
honorable private enterprise at risk.” (This is code against the peace
accord’s proposed redistribution of land to campesinos expelled from it
during the war.) Uribe called for financial austerity; “solidarity” with
the armed forces, among whose members the peace accord has proved a
particularly hard sell; quality education for all; and, finally, family
values, because many of the No voters were as much against legal
abortion and gay marriage as they were against the peace accord.
The
fatal idea of holding a plebiscite to ratify the agreement between the
guerrillas and the government was President Santos’s alone, and
according to participants in the peace talks, he stuck to it against
strenuous opposition from his advisers. The risks, after all, were
great. But faced with strident opposition by Uribe and his surrogates,
Santos was trying to guarantee that the 297 pages of the accord’s terms
would hold even if a subsequent president—an Uribe clone, for
example—were determined to overthrow the agreement. There are precedents
for such reversals, notably in Argentina, where generals responsible
for the atrocities committed during the Dirty War were first condemned,
then pardoned, then condemned again by successive administrations.
Perhaps Santos was being prudent, perhaps he was merely stubborn. In
either case, the referendum he designed to guarantee the peace
agreement’s permanence proved its undoing and he lost. The question is
what comes now.
Though
the president’s extreme unpopularity is hard to explain—to me at
least—it may owe something to his arrogance, which appears considerable.
He had stated earlier that there was no plan B to the peace deal, and
we now learn that he wasn’t kidding. As I write, he is holding meetings
with the members of the accord’s negotiating team, with his cabinet, and
with members of the opposition. A meeting with Uribe has been scheduled
for Wednesday to figure out what, if anything, can be done about
Sunday’s results. The head of his negotiating team, considered until the
vote a likely front-runner in the 2018 presidential elections, tendered
his resignation, but Santos has sent him instead to deal with Uribe and
his surrogates. Timochenko is back in Havana, conferring with the other
members of the FARC directorate and insisting, irrelevantly, that the
results of the plebiscite are politically significant but not legally
binding. The FARC troops, who were supposed to begin gathering in
twenty-eight designated ‘concentration areas’ as of this week are in
freeze position and looking very much like sitting ducks.
The
idea that large sectors of the Colombian electorate would actually want
to continue the war with the FARC seems baffling, but not everyone who
voted No in the plebiscite is a warmonger. Although it is true that the
areas of the country where the No vote won are among those least
affected by the nightmarish war, there are also many people who voted No
because a relative of theirs was kidnapped, or a co-worker was trapped
in one of the FARC’s mass highway muggings, or they were simply revolted
by the idea of the FARC leaders going scot free. After the peace
ceremony began last week a friend and I decided to head to one of the
little traditional cafés around the Plaza de Bolivar, where we could
watch the event more quietly on a television screen. There were a number
of us crowded into an upstairs gallery at one such place, but my
attention was caught by one of the waiters, a sweet boy—I think he told
me he was nineteen—who watched raptly, I thought, as Timochenko, the
FARC leader, droned on about his group’s respect for life and children
and butterflies. (There are a lot of FARC songs about butterflies too.)
It was all a bit much, particularly considering that the FARC had made a
systematic practice of recruiting fifteen and even twelve-year-olds
into their fighting ranks, but I was not expecting the waiter’s answer
when I asked him how he would vote. “I’m voting No,” he said softly. It
turned out that his mother had received his father’s body, kidnapped by
the FARC, cut to pieces in a black plastic bag.
Hazarding
a guess, one might conclude that residents of areas where entire
communities were subjected to the war’s atrocities were more able to see
how necessary it is to bring the war to an end, whereas isolated
individuals who suffered kidnappings or violence at the hands of the
guerrillas were left alone with their pain and voted No. Nor were the No
voters necessarily in favor of more war. They, too want peace, but many
people I spoke to over the course of the last few months feel terrified
of the profound changes in their world, one in which FARC killers could
run for public office, people with threateningly different forms of
sexuality can feel free to hold hands in public and even marry, as they
now can in Colombia, and long-haired potheads are the legal equal of
law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Still others, friends of mine, were
willing to vote No because they despise a president they see as a
fatuous toff. A proviso in the legal framework for the plebiscite
stipulates that in case of a No majority, a renegotiation of peace terms
can take place, followed by a second plebiscite to approve whatever
accord is eventually agreed to by all parties. At the moment, restarting
negotiations and getting current No voters to approve a peace treaty
acceptable to the FARC looks like a fantastically difficult task, but
erasing all the effort, achievements, and great expectations of the last
four years would be a disaster.
October 4, 2016, 8:02 pm