Systems of Violence, Second Edition: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia

Prologue

xi Prologue “Prospects for Peace in Colombia” In February 2012, exactly one decade after the last round of dialogues between representatives of the Colombian government and the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC-EP) ended in Caguán, secret exploratory talks between the parties began in Cuba. In late August, the parties signed a framework agreement for the renewal of peace talks. The agreement, the “Acuerdo General para la Terminación del Conflicto y la Construcción de una Paz Estable y Duradera,” lays out a road map for ending the conflict that includes a six-point agenda on agrarian development policy, political participation, an end to the conflict, illicit crops, victims, and verification mechanisms. By year’s end, the parties had appointed their negotiators, launched official peace talks in Oslo, Norway, and reconvened in Havana, Cuba, to discuss the first agenda item—agrarian policy. Civil society is conspicuously absent from the government team, which includes representatives of the business sector and the armed forces, two sectors that have been spoilers in past peace processes and whose evolving relationship to the conflict is analyzed in this book. The parties nonetheless established three mechanisms for civil society engagement outside the table. The first, a website (www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co) with documents in Sikuani, Wayúu, Embera, English, and Spanish, where civil society can submit proposals related to the six agenda items, registered more than 2,000 proposals in the first two hours after it came online on December 7, 2012. The second was a three-day forum on December 17–19, 2012, on integrated agrarian development, coordinated by the National University and the United Nations. More than 1,300 people participated in the forum, which many hoped would be a model that could be replicated for each of the items on the Havana agenda. Finally, the parties made provisions for inviting experts to the peace table as needed and have reportedly have begun to hear testimonies on agricultural development. These initiatives join many others supporting an end to the long decades of internal armed conflict in Colombia. Women’s groups, indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, campesinos, victims’ organizations, and numerous other sectors who have been calling for a political solution are organizing xii SYSTEMS OF VIOLENCE to support the peace process. The peace commissions of the Colombian Congress, with the support of the United Nations, held a series of nine regional workshops in October and November 2012, to discuss three of the agenda items—agrarian policy, political participation, and illicit crop production--and are planning a second round of meetings to discuss victims in early 2013. As this period of unofficial national peace dialogue unfolds, many ideas are being generated on the changes required for a nation to be at peace. A consensus is emerging that civil society must continue to pressure the parties at the table to ensure that talks continue until the parties reach agreement, and the political pressure for the parties to undertake further humanitarian gestures, including a bilateral ceasefire, is growing. At the end of 2012, the talks in Havana were suspended for the holiday season and will resume in mid-January 2013. Supported by Norway and Cuba, and accompanied by Venezuela and Chile, the talks have taken place in what the parties call an atmosphere of mutual respect. Nonetheless, some differences have emerged regarding how long each believes the process should take. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who hopes to declare his candidacy for a second term, has expressed his desire to have an agreement by November 2013. The guerrillas have disparaged this accelerated timetable and suggested that the “express” approach to peace could prove fatal. At this stage, talks between the government and the other insurgent groups—namely the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL)-- have not been officially announced. It is widely assumed nonetheless that the groundwork is being laid for these groups to be brought into the process at a later stage. Nazih Richani’s book, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, published a decade ago, and reissued in 2013 with several new chapters, examines the other side of this movement toward peace—namely the resilience of war. In this book, Richani analyzes the complex and dynamic system of violence that has provided the scaffolding for Colombia’s war for nearly half a century. He traces the course of a war that began as a response to political, economic, and social exclusion, and whose...