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

Notes to the Second Edition

xvii Notes to the Second Edition This new edition has three main objectives: (1) to tackle the latest advancements made in conflict theory discussing some its major conceptual and methodological shortcomings; (2) to validate the warsystem theory verifying its capacity to explain conflict duration as it applies to Colombia as well as to the protracted civil wars of Angola, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Italy, and Lebanon; and (3) to analyze the changing dynamics and political economy of the Colombian conflict between 2002 and 2012. This work sheds new light on the political economy of the civil war, which in 2012 completes its fortyninth year, making it the second longest running civil war in the world today after that in Myanmar (Burma), which started in 1948 and which still rages today. This new edition was in production when in February 2012 representatives of President Juan Manuel Santos’s government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) met in Habana, Cuba, to discuss means to end the war. This important development did not alter the analysis presented, its inferences, or its predictions. In fact, the possibility of a negotiated settlement looming in the horizon validated the major analytical thrust presented in chapters 9 and 11, particularly my evaluation of the evolving balance of forces that emerged after FARC introduced in 2008 Plan Renacer. This plan put in effect a flexible, decentralized, yet interdependent military structures allowing more mobility and employed new tactics such as snipers and different types of mines, which increased the number of fatalities in the ranks of state forces affecting its morale while reducing the guerrillas’ own. Plan Renacer recalibrated a new point of equilibrium in the war system that was less favorable to the state. This edition adds three new chapters as well as a chapter that is reprint of a published article on the failed peace process of 1998–2002 that I thought important to incorporate because that phase in the conflict is when the role of the United States became more salient than ever, affecting the conflict dynamics and political economy thereafter. The three new chapters are based on newly declassified material from the U.S. National Security Archives and those made public by Wikileaks, supplemented by archival material that I have collected. These materials are complemented with interviews and xviii SYSTEMS OF VIOLENCE secondary sources. The new findings presented shed light on the changing dynamics of the war system and the conditions under which the comfortable impasse eroded. Drawing on systems theory, I introduced the condition of unstable equilibrium under which the war system lost its initial resting point (comfortable impasse) and is yet to find a new point to regain some stability. The unstable equilibrium captures the conflict dynamics during the post1997 phase. Two key factors colluded to create the unstable equilibrium. One was the emergence of the right wing as a unified force in 1997 and the other was the salient role of the United States in the conflict after 2000, both coincided in denying the FARC a military victory. Chapter 5 of the first edition demonstrates how the emergence of the unified paramilitary force destabilized the war system, which was inferred from the escalation of the conflict, increase in fatalities, massacres, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. In this edition, I focus on the elephant in the room in the conflict: the United States. The United States, as the archival material reveals, has played a core role since the early 1960s, which most of the literature on Colombia’s conflict either underplays or overlooks. The U.S. role became more salient and aggressive in the 2000s with the introduction of Plan Colombia. This new edition casts additional light on the U.S. role in the political economy of the war system. It underscores the sharp shift in U.S. policy in Colombia from containment to offense, which in turn contributed to the unstable equilibrium. The irony is that the U.S. containment strategy devised for Colombia was the one that created the comfortable impasse in the first place. U.S. decision-makers attributed the shift from containment to offense to the growing security threat posed by the FARC military power reached in the late 1990s. Such change in the U.S. thinking led to a significant increase in military hardware, assistance, training, military personnel, and especial forces, changing the conflict dynamics, which helped to create the unstable equilibrium of the war system. Let me now briefly present the outline and themes...