December 11, 2006

How the EU and Canada Could Work for Peace in Colombia

By Garry Leech

For the most part, the United States has established the terms of the international debate on Colombia’s civil conflict. Consequently, the language of war has dominated the discourse, a fact most apparent in Washington’s labeling of US intervention in Colombia as a “war on drugs” and more recently a “war on terror.” Prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, the European Union and Canada maintained a certain degree of independence with regard to their approaches to Colombia. In fact, both the EU and Canada refused to directly participate in the Clinton administration’s counter-narcotics initiative known as Plan Colombia or to consider the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) a terrorist organization. However, following 9/11, the latter situation changed when the EU and Canada placed the FARC on their terrorist lists, adding legitimacy to the Bush administration’s efforts to seek a military solution in Colombia. But given the current regional political context in South America and the evident military shortcomings of the US global war on terror, the EU and Canada are perfectly situated to begin contributing to a negotiated solution to Colombia’s long-running conflict by re-visiting their decisions to list the FARC as a terrorist organization.

Peasants formed the FARC more than 40 years ago in response to government repression and the country’s historic social and economic inequalities. The EU and Canada recognized that, despite the FARC’s involvement in the illicit drug trade and its use of terrorist tactics, the rebel group was primarily a nationally-based armed political movement engaged in a civil conflict. But following 9/11, the EU and Canada fell in line with Washington’s global war on terror and acquiesced to US pressure by placing the FARC on their lists of international terrorist organizations—Canada in April 2003 and the EU in June 2002, despite opposition from Sweden and France. In reality, while the FARC does engage in bombings, kidnappings and other attacks that result in civilian deaths in Colombia, the guerrilla group’s military operations pose no threat to the United States, Canada or Europe.

Meanwhile, every reputable Colombian and international human rights organization, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the annual reports issued by the United Nations and even the US State Department, hold the Colombian military and its paramilitary allies responsible for more than 70 percent of the human rights violations in Colombia. Among these abuses are such terrorist acts as massacres, assassinations and “disappearances.” And yet, it is the FARC that has found itself branded as a terrorist organization while the Colombian government has escaped being labeled a terrorist state or a state-sponsor of terrorism despite its well-documented political and military links to right-wing paramilitary groups also on international terrorist lists.

By placing the FARC on their terrorist lists, the EU and Canada have added legitimacy to the Bush administration’s efforts to seek a military solution in Colombia and have contributed to closing the door on any negotiated peace. However, given that neither the Colombian government nor the guerrillas are currently capable of achieving a military victory, the only real solution lies in a negotiated peace. Such a peace will be virtually impossible to achieve as long as the FARC is viewed through the lens of the global war on terror.

By removing the FARC from their terrorist lists, the EU and Canada could begin to work with all sides in the conflict in order to shift the terms of debate away from drugs and terror to the real issues at the root of Colombia’s violence: the country’s gross social and economic inequalities. After all, Colombia’s social conflict existed long before the wars on drugs and terror were contrived in Washington to justify defending and furthering US political and economic interests in the South American nation.

Previous attempts to negotiate peace have been hampered by the Colombian government’s refusal to seriously negotiate a restructuring of the country’s economic system in order to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. This inflexibility was the principal reason that the Pastrana administration’s peace process (1999-2002) with the FARC failed to make any significant progress during almost three years of negotiations. Ultimately, the objective of the Pastrana administration was to achieve the demobilization of the FARC without having to commit to any structural changes in the country’s economic system.

For its part, the United States refused to support the peace process, unwilling to compromise the neoliberal, or “free market,” economic system being implemented in Colombia. Instead, Washington chose to escalate its military intervention in the country under Plan Colombia in order to defend the status quo. And while Canada and many EU countries are ideologically aligned with the United States with regard to the global implementation of neoliberalism—which also benefits Canadian and European corporations—they have differed in approach by not whole-heartedly supporting the militaristic implementation of this economic model in countries such as Iraq and Colombia.

The US war on terror has failed to establish security and a functioning economy throughout the entirety of the national territory in the three principal countries in which it has been waged: Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. Serious questions are now being asked in the United States about the viability of continuing the military intervention in Iraq; the same questions need to be asked about Colombia. The US State Department reported that more coca—the raw ingredient in cocaine—was being cultivated in Colombia in 2006 than when Plan Colombia was initiated five years earlier. Clearly, the militarized drug war has failed to achieve its objective of reducing the supply of cocaine to US and European cities. Additionally, the US war on terror in Colombia has failed to diminish the FARC’s military capacity in the country’s rural regions.

While Colombia’s current president Alvaro Uribe maintains high approval ratings for security policies that have made life safer in urban areas, there is little support among the country’s poor majority for his neoliberal economic policies. This is particularly true in many rural regions where the conflict continues to rage and 85 percent of the population lives in poverty. The growing opposition to Uribe’s social and economic policies contributed to an unprecedented second-place finish for a center-left candidate—Carlos Gaviria of the Polo Democrático Alternativa—in the May 2006 presidential election. Additionally, anti-neoliberal sentiment is evident in the widespread opposition among Colombians to the recently signed bilateral free trade agreement with the United States.

The impressive gains made by the Polo Democrático Alternativa in both the congressional and presidential elections in 2006 illustrate that Colombia is not immune to the shift to the left that is occurring throughout South America. Venezuelans, Bolivians and Ecuadorians, and to varying degrees Brazilians, Argentineans and Uruguayans, have all made it clear that they do not support the US-pushed neoliberal economic model. Instead, they are seeking a more just economic system that addresses social inequalities through alternative policies that include a redistribution of the national wealth.

This emerging regional challenge to neoliberalism provides the perfect context in which to shift the focus of the debate in Colombia away from terror and drugs to the social and economic issues that lie at the root of the country’s violence. In order to achieve this shift, however, it is essential that the international community work to convince the government in Bogotá that a negotiated settlement must include far-reaching structural changes in Colombia’s social and economic policies if a just and lasting peace is to be realized. The EU, Canada and like-minded South American nations could take a leading role in such a shift by not only working to influence the Colombian government of the merits of such a peace process, but by also convincing the United States not to undermine it. Ultimately, a negotiated peace in Colombia that acknowledges the widespread opposition to neoliberalism would reflect the desires of a majority of Colombians and bring the country more in line with its neighbors.

By removing the FARC from their terrorist lists, the EU and Canada would raise serious questions about Washington’s militaristic approach in Colombia and open the door for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. The EU and Canada could help facilitate a peace process that involves not only the Colombian government and the FARC, but also representatives from all sectors of Colombian society. For too long Washington has unilaterally set the terms for the international debate on Colombia; and the focus of that debate has been to coerce nations into supporting increased militarism. Clearly this approach has failed to achieve peace. The time has come for the EU, Canada and South American nations, in solidarity with Colombia’s social movements, to advocate an alternative vision that addresses the gross social and economic inequalities that lie at the root of the country’s conflict.

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