Colombia’s four-decade-long civil war caught the world’s attention recently, as international negotiations produced the release of hostages who had been detained for six years.  The high profile return of two Venezuelan politicians who had been kidnapped by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s major leftist guerrilla army, exposed tensions between Alvaro Uribue and Hugo Chávez. Chávez, whose work as mediator was instrumental in securing the release of the two hostages, provoked Uribe, South America’s lonely right-wing president, by dealing directly with a FARC general and by commenting that the rebels should be seen as a legitimate army rather than as a terrorist group.  The affair also seemed to beg the question: is Colombia’s war ever going to end?

 

Colombia’s civil war has dragged on for so long that it has become almost an afterthought for most observers of the region. A lingering level of violence and instability has become the expected norm.  A scholarly article in 1997 argued that the Colombian conflict had been a rooted war system that perpetuated itself because legitimate political institutions failed to mediate conflict, the actors had come to benefit economically from the state of war, and no one actor could gain hegemony over the others;  violent conflict is portrayed as the overriding theme in Colombian history in the standard Anglophone survey by David Bushnell that carries the subtitle “A Country in Spite of Itself.”

With no end to the war in sight, the country seems to have adapted itself to the violence, like a person with a chronic—but perfectly manageable—illness.  Even foreign tourists, who less than a decade ago thought Colombia about as attractive as a leper colony, have begun to shed their reservations. While Lonely Planet’s 2006 edition admitted that “Colombia definitely isn’t the safest of countries,” it still urged potential visitors not to “let the rumors and urban legends scare [them] off.”

President Uribe’s aggressive action against the guerrillas is widely credited with the relative pacification of the country in recent years.  His record of reigning in the largely unpopular FARC, and his role in demobilizing right-wing paramilitary groups have helped to maintain his high approval ratings and allowed him to secure a second presidential term after a constitutional alteration. A recent program has also been implemented to disarm the FARC by offering amnesty to those willing to return to mainstream Colombian society.

Unfortunately, these attempts to disarm the combatants have not succeeded in significantly reducing their numbers.  New recruits are willing to replace them.  One has to wonder as well, how much incentive the official government can provide to the guerrillas to disarm, when the FARC controls large portions of the territory claimed by the Colombian state.  Chávez’s comment that the FARC constitutes a legitimate army with honest political demands was as obvious as it was politically foolish. To end the conflict, the official government will have to either broker a peace with more favorable terms than the rebels have already secured militarily, or defeat the rebel movement by arms.  Neither possibility is likely to happen in the near future.

REFERENCES

Henry Mance.  “Colombia’s Campaign to Win Rebel Minds.”  BBC  23 January 2008

<< http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7194377.stm>>

David Bushnell.  The Making of Modern Colombia:  A Nation in Spite of Iteself. 

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Richard Hopper and Andrés Schipani.  “Colombia Refuses Chávez Hostage Efforts.” 

Financial Times  23 January 2008  <<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9d4047cc-ca01-11dc-b5dc-000077b07658.html>>  

Nazih Richani.  “The Political Economy of Violence:  The War-System in Colombia.” 

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 39, no. 2 (1997): 37-81.

Michael Kohn and Robert Landon.  Colombia.  Lonely Planet, 2006.