Government Balks at “Putting People” in
the Process
| by Chris Gilbert
( November 24, 2012, Caracas, Sri Lanka
Guardian) Earlier this week, in the context of the current Colombian peace
talks, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) declared an
immediate, unilateral ceasefire until January 20, 2013.[1] This step has left
the Santos government stunned, provoking precipitous declarations that the FARC
is not trustworthy, and that the Colombian Army will continue with its
offensives. Speculation aside about secondary motives, the insurgent group has
taken therewith a clear lead in securing the moral high ground. However, this
recent decision is simply part of a series of decisive steps the FARC’s
negotiating team has taken in that direction since the dialogues began.
For example, earlier this month in an
extended interview with the Anncol agency, chief FARC negotiator Iván Márquez
reiterated the organization’s desire to “put the people” into the peace
process. To conclude this historic interview, Márquez took control of the
conversation himself and, turning to face the camera, made the point even more
emphatically: “The participation of all Colombians is needed to achieve a peace
which would be stable and lasting… This is not the peace of the government or
of the guerrilla, but a collective matter and a collective dream.”[2]
The insurgency’s attitude, reinforced by
later declarations of FARC negotiator Jesús Santrich[3], contrasts sharply with
the Colombian establishment’s desire to keep the peace process within very
narrowly defined limits and with government negotiator Humberto de la Calle’s
repeated threats to leave the negotiating table should these limits be
transgressed. The government’s preoccupation – whether you define it as fear
that the FARC will enter into normal politics, fear of the “rabble” and its
voices, or simply fear of democracy – does not exactly shine in the eyes of
anyone willing to exercise moral or political judgment.
Combine that with the usual dirty tricks
(for example, Colombia’s establishment-controlled media mysteriously “lost the
signal” when Márquez was talking in Oslo last month, cutting out more than half
of his thought-provoking discourse) or the stiff-necked militarism shown in the
goverment’s buying drones and other military aircraft while claiming to seek
peace in good faith [4], and one can understand the profound dissatisfaction of
many Colombians with the Santos regimen’s lackluster, not to say shameful,
performance.
That is essentially because peace is
such a longstanding and deep-seated desire of the Colombian people: an
objective which has been sought through highly creative, quite varied
initiatives ranging from insistent social movements such as Congreso de los Pueblos
to the regional constituent peace assemblies with come out of Barrancabermeja’s
“El Diálogo es la Ruta” meeting of 2011 (to say nothing of the many times the
insurgency has impulsed peace processes). The government evidently fears the
consequences that could come out of combining such initiatives with the General
Constituent Assembly that the FARC has proposed as one of its central
objectives in the peace process.
A more ample participation in the
dialogues has in fact already been happening in spite of the “closed doors”
preferences of the government. It can be seen in the varied proposals that
individuals and organizations such as Marcha Patriótica have made regarding elements that need to be
taken into account in the current debate about land reform, or in the fact that
the Christmas ceasefire derives most likely from an open-letter exchange from
one of the FARC’s most solid and morally credible interlocutors: Colombianos y
Colombianas por la Paz. All of this risks creating a kind of domino effect that
would escape control of the government, and break with the two-part, mechanical
solution to the very grave structural problems that the country faces, despite
the oligarchy’s longstanding denial.
Years ago Camilo Torres, a Colombian
priest who joined the armed struggle after seeing that all other routes were
closed off to the popular movement, argued that the oligarchy would have to
give up its privileges or have them taken away violently. These days what
seemed to have been a simple alternative may have opened up to a range of
intermediate possibilities involving different and combined forms of popular
struggle in response to the oligarchy’s quite complex and varied application of
coercion and violence. Still, the basic dilemma remains; while recent declarations
from government officials and negotiators seem to indicate that the Colombian
oligarchy is not significantly different from the one Camilo Torres faced some
forty years ago.
Chris Gilbert is professor of
political science in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela.
NOTES
[1] “Las FARC declara un cese de fuego
unilateral de dos meses durante el fin del año”:
http://prensarural.org/spip/spip.php?article9663
[2] “Conversando con el Comandante Iván
Márquez sobre perspectivas de paz, por Dick Emanuelsson”:www.anncol.eu/index.php/colombia/insurgencia/farc-ep/744-video-conversando-con-el-comandante-ivan-marquez-sobre-perspectivas-de-paz-en-colombia-1-2
[3] “Entrevista con el Comandate Jesús
Santrich, integrante de la delegación de paz de las FARC-EP”:http://americadespierta.blogcip.cu/2012/11/16/entrevista-con-el-comandante-jesus-santrich-integrante-de-la-delegacion-de-paz-de-las-farc-ep/
[4] “Colombia comprará más armas de
guerra y aviones militares, incluidos “drones” de Isreal”:http://www.aporrea.org/internacionales/n217883.html
 Earlier...){kind=link}