Trying to End Colombia's Battle With FARC
Why Talks Are the Only Chance for Peace
Article Summary and Author Biography
The Colombian government and FARC have agreed to stage a cease-fire in their decades-long battle next week, during which FARC plans to release hostages that it has held since 1998. Washington and Bogotá should use the opportunity to restart talks and seek a negotiated end to the insurgency.
MILBURN LINE is Executive Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. From 2007-2009 he managed a U.S. government funded human rights project in Colombia that directly supported Colombian government, state, and civil society organizations working to protect human rights.
Snapshot
Although shooting female FARC members first during battle is not official policy, a retired Colombian colonel told the author in 2009, any sensible soldier would do so. With their "Kamikaze-like" mentality, he said, they are the deadliest combatants. This profile of one former member illustrates how the abuses women face once inside the group create such a mindset.
Snapshot
Even as Colombian troops fight FARC rebels in the jungle, the two sides are busy negotiating a peace deal. Land reform could pave the way to a lasting settlement and drive down the country’s inequality in the process.
(Fellowship of Reconciliation / flickr)
Update (April 4, 2012): This week, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) released ten police and military hostages that it had been holding for more than thirteen years. This was an important step toward fulfilling President Juan Manuel Santos' preconditions for dialogue with the guerrillas. It is unclear whether those negotiations will start soon, but even relative progress on this front could reduce the suffering of civilians caught in the crossfire of the insurgency -- an objective worthy of pursuing even if a full peace agreement cannot reached.
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Ten years ago, in February 2002, former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana broke off negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a group of Marxist guerrillas that had been fighting the government since 1964, and ordered security forces back on the attack. That May, Bogotá then suspended dialogue with the country's other major Marxist insurgency, the National Liberation Army (ELN). The public, military command, and business community had lost faith in the deliberations; atrocities at the hands of paramilitary forces with links to politicians and the armed forces had poisoned the process. For their parts, the insurgents had proven unreliable negotiators, with skirmishes and kidnappings continuing throughout the talks.
As negotiations broke down, Bogotá and Washington decided to focus instead on the U.S. assistance package to Colombia known as Plan Colombia. Originally conceived in 1998, it was designed as a kind of "Marshall Plan" for addressing the social and economic inequities that fuel the insurgency. The original $1.3 billion package also contained a sizeable military training component, which was intended to modernize the Colombian security forces...
