A few notes on the "Paz Colombia" meeting, by Adam Isacson, October 22, 2000

A few notes on the "Paz Colombia" meeting, by Adam Isacson, October 22, 2000
A few notes on the "Paz Colombia" meeting
(Adam Isacson, Center for International Policy)

On October 16-18 I was lucky enough to be one of over 300 people taking part in a spirited, ambitious conference in Costa Rica. The gathering at a luxury hotel outside San José, calling itself "Paz Colombia" (Peace Colombia), sought peaceful ways to end Colombia's war, and provided a chance to discuss alternatives to the "Plan Colombia."

(The "Plan Colombia," for those unfamiliar with it, is a Colombian government investment plan, developed by a small group of officials in Washington and Bogotá. Since being introduced a year ago, the plan has enjoyed only one significant international grant so far: nearly a billion dollars of mostly military aid from the United States, signed into law in July.)

Organized by several of Colombia's leading peace and human rights organizations, the Costa Rica event brought together dozens of non-governmental organizations (including many from remote rural areas), academics, labor and business leaders, indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, foreign diplomats, international activists, reporters, UN representatives, Colombian government officials, and even a few leaders of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group. Such a large, inclusive, and incongruous collection of people had never before assembled to deal with issues of war and peace in Colombia.

The result, of course, was three chaotic days of proposals, debates and negotiations with no instant breakthroughs or commitments to end the violence. Indeed, on the surface, Paz Colombia may have looked like a disappointment - it started late, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas didn't come, everyone made a bunch of speeches, they didn't agree on much, then they painstakingly drafted some platitude-filled documents that few people will read. In a narrow who-what-where-when-why sense, that's all that happened at the Costa Rica meeting. Press coverage, as a result, was rather glum ("Conference on Colombia concludes with few tangible results," "No accord about Plan Colombia," "Peace a distant goal as Colombia conference concludes," etc.).

But the meeting was not - emphatically not - a failure. To the contrary, it was quite an achievement, albeit an incomplete one.

Colombian society - even just its human rights and peace communities - is extremely divided, and a combination of long-standing acrimony and real security concerns has kept meetings like this from even being contemplated. Previous gatherings, such as the Permanent Assembly of Civil Society for Peace meetings in 1998 and 1999, helped to unite a wide variety of "sectors" of civil society, but combatants (government or guerrillas) were not present. Over and over I heard people declare, "This would have been impossible even two years ago." What has brought everyone together for the first time, it seems, is the U.S. aid and the "Plan Colombia."

The variety of people present was truly amazing. Of the Colombian organizations represented, a huge number were from outside of Bogotá and the major cities - many from rural areas that will be most affected by the U.S.-funded military and drug-crop fumigation operations. Someone told me that an incredible 40% of them had to get a passport for the first time in order to come to the meeting.

It was great to be able to talk at length to several people from Putumayo, the remote, insurgent-controlled, coca-growing department that will soon host the "Push Into Southern Colombia," a three-battalion Colombian Army offensive to be paid for with the majority of the money in the U.S. aid package. The governor of Putumayo, the mayor and "ombudsman" of its largest city (Puerto Asís), and other local government and church officials were present.

For the past four weeks Putumayo has been beset by intense fighting between FARC guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, in what most view as a prelude to the U.S.-funded "push." The FARC has declared a "paro armado" - a stoppage of all traffic on Putumayo's roads - which is not only creating severe food shortages, but has made most Putumayo residents prisoners in their towns or villages. Some members of the Putumayo contingent had to find creative ways to get out in order to attend the meeting; one local health official hitched a ride on an ambulance from the capital, Mocoa, over the Andes to Pasto, the capital of neighboring Nariño department.

Of course, many invitees who could have come more easily were conspicuously absent. Luis Eduardo Garzón, who heads the country's largest labor union and is hard at work forming a new left-of-center political party, was missing in action (a colleague of his explained to me why he wasn't there, but to be honest I don't remember what the explanation was). The government's chief negotiator, High Commissioner for Peace Camilo Gómez, also did not attend, though he had indicated earlier that he would. The country's largest guerrilla group, the 17,000-strong FARC, disappointed many by failing to send representatives.

The Colombian government was clearly unenthusiastic about participating in a meeting organized by some of the Plan Colombia's most vocal domestic opponents. Government officials in attendance made the conference organizers' job decidedly more difficult. The conference started six hours late because of government delays in transporting two ELN leaders temporarily furloughed from their jail cell outside Medellín. While all other speakers at the event's opening ceremony held their remarks to ten or fifteen minutes, the government's speaker - Minister of Development Augusto Ramírez Ocampo, a participant in earlier civil-society peace initiatives - clocked in at a Fidel Castro-like hour and ten minutes. Ramírez's speech was not tailored for its audience; his recitation of government "achievements" toward human rights and peace and his provocative criticisms of the ELN had many attendees squirming in their seats. In some of the five commissions into which the conferees divided themselves to deal with specific issues, government officials gave similar lengthy declarations and proved unwilling to compromise. (In the human rights commission, for example, government participants refused to allow any mention of military-paramilitary collaboration in the final document's consensus portion.)

The U.S. government, represented by Leslie Bassett, the head of the Bogotá embassy's political section, was nearly invisible. While she spent a couple of minutes standing near the back of each of the five commissions, Ms. Bassett was not much in evidence during most of the event. I spoke to no Colombian who had a conversation with her. Hopefully I had the wrong impression, and she circulated widely. But I fear that the U.S. government lost a beautiful opportunity to talk to people who will be directly affected by our policy - many of them from places that are normally too dangerous for a cautious U.S. diplomat to visit.

For its part, the FARC - which had indicated it might send a seven-person delegation headed by Comandante Raul Reyes - instead sent a communiqué that was distributed on the second day of the meeting. The communiqué cited security concerns, claiming that Colombian President Andrés Pastrana "has ordered his embassies to carry out a perverse repressive campaign against the FARC overseas." It also included a lengthy explanation that the Plan Colombia is part of a U.S. strategy to gain control of the Amazon basin, dollarize the region's economies, and break the Mercosur economic bloc. The only obstacle to this sinister plan, the FARC contends, is "Socialist Cuba, Bolivarian Venezuela, and the FARC."

If someone had sidled up to me at the meeting and started spouting such views, I would have dismissed him as a fringe character and tried to extricate myself from the conversation. But these are the published opinions of one of the country's main political actors, a powerful army that controls much of rural Colombia. These views reveal the extreme depth of the guerrillas' distrust and antipathy for Colombia's political leadership, which extends well beyond mere politics and is perhaps the biggest obstacle Colombia's peace process faces. Undoing it will require a lot of communication, discussion, persuasion and, most of all, patience from both Colombia and the United States.

Many in attendance speculated that the FARC in fact skipped San José for other reasons: (a) a belief that these discussions should be happening at the site of their peace talks with the Colombian government, in a demilitarized zone in southern Colombia; (b) a belief that they, not "Paz Colombia," are the true expression of the country's civil society; and (c) an unwillingness to share the stage with the smaller, weaker ELN.

The ELN did send three representatives: Francisco Galán and Felipe Torres, temporarily freed from their comfortable cell in the Itagüí prison, and Ramiro Vargas, one of the group's five-member central command who handles the group's "international relations." Vargas - more of a military strategist than an orator, I imagine - gave a speech that was mostly the usual warmed-over rhetoric about their righteous struggle against the "assassin state." He did say two interesting things, though. Vargas admitted that the ELN has had some human rights difficulties in the past and promised to do better. He also affirmed the group's desire to start a peace process with a six-month "national convention" with government and civil-society leaders, which would take place in a demilitarized zone in the north-central Magdalena Medio region (though the right-wing paramilitaries active in the zone might make that difficult to pull off).

Don't think, though, that the ELN's presence in Costa Rica signals that peace with the group is near. In conversation, Galán and Vargas volunteered their disdain for Central America's guerrilla groups who, according to their analysis, meekly turned in their weapons without affecting their countries' extreme concentration of power and wealth. If the ELN's leaders were in command, they indicated, El Salvador's FMLN and Guatemala's URNG would still be fighting today.

Jorge Rojas, the director of the human rights group CODHES and the titular coordinator of "Paz Colombia," gave a good opening speech with a provocative proposal. Rojas called for a hundred-day moratorium on just about everything - fumigations, the implementation of "Plan Colombia," military operations by all sides, kidnapping for ransom - to begin on December 1. During this period, all sides would try to make progress in peace talks and come up with alternatives to the U.S.-sponsored anti-drug offensive to be launched in December. Though Rojas' proposal did not appear in the conference's rather bland final document, neither the ELN nor the government ruled it out.

As I said above, though, the meeting's real success was its ability to convene such an incredible variety of people. This was most evident in the five commissions into which the participants divided themselves to discuss specific issues and to craft position documents. Consider the commission on anti-drug policy, which included Klaus Nyholm of the UN Drug Control Program; Ricardo Vargas of Acción Andina, probably Colombia's most respected drug-policy expert; Gonzalo de Francisco, President Pastrana's advisor in charge of development programs in Putumayo department; Putumayo's governor, Jorge Devia; Jairo Rojas, head of the drug policy committee in the lower house of Colombia's congress; Francisco Galán of the ELN; representatives of peasant groups, including those who led large-scale anti-fumigation protests in 1996; and many other Colombian and international activists and experts. How terrific to have all of them together in one room for twelve hours. How terrific as well to see them doing politics: expressing deep disagreements respectfully without shouting, name-calling or shooting. It could have been a U.S. congressional debate (though it was far more substantive) or a New England town meeting. The caliber of the discussion was good, and the effort to draft a document was serious and disciplined.

Even if Paz Colombia fails to achieve anything else, it signals the beginning of the end for Plan Colombia. In the presence of dozens of European diplomats, the participants at the Costa Rica meeting voiced near-unanimous opposition to the Plan Colombia for a long list of reasons. Europe's governments will now be very unlikely to contribute the billion-plus dollars that the Colombian and U.S. governments have expected them to offer the "plan." Europe has been slow to support a plan with a huge U.S.-funded military component and fierce opposition from the country's human rights community. After this week it is hard to imagine that Europe will contribute much more than the $100 million in grant aid promised by Spain. European donors will probably insist that their aid to Colombia be considered support for the peace process - not Pastrana's plan - and non-governmental organizations will likely get the lion's share of support. "Plan Colombia" may end up being little more than the U.S. contribution (75 percent for Colombia's security forces) and whatever the Colombian government manages to raise.

While it was important that such a broad sampling of Colombian society was able to carry out a dialogue, the next steps will reveal whether Paz Colombia is going to make any real difference. At least three things need to happen. First, it's important to strike while the iron is still hot: Paz Colombia should schedule another mega-meeting within the next four to six months to keep the dialogue going, to deepen the agreements arrived at this week, and to measure progress toward the goals outlined in the conference declarations. Second, the conference organizers must share the spotlight with each other - nothing will be more sure to kill Paz Colombia than if its creators hog the credit for themselves and their organizations. Finally, Paz Colombia must keep pushing hard for the 100-day moratorium proposed in Jorge Rojas' speech, an idea that must not be allowed to fade away.

I'm pleased and honored that I could be on hand to witness this week's meeting, and I congratulate the brave and tireless people who put it all together. May it happen again soon!