Plan Colombia and Beyond

« Bush and Uribe make their shopping list | Main | Paramilitary Talks (4): The post-demobilization security vacuum »

November 24, 2004

Paramilitary talks (3): Improvisation and secrecy

I apologize for the delay in posting this continuation of the paramilitary talks discussion. Blame Bush's visit to Cartagena, which proved to be a bit of a distraction.

-----

Between now and December 31, at least 3,000 of the AUC paramilitary group's approximately 20,000 members are to hand in their weapons and re-enter civilian life. In other words, a massive demobilization process – larger than what happened in Colombia over a decade ago, when the M-19, EPL, and several other guerrilla groups turned in their weapons – is to occur in a timeframe of just over two months.

This would be an amazingly good piece of news if the demobilization were part of a reasonably well thought-out, well-funded process. But it isn't. The coming AUC "layoff" leaves the impression that thousands of unemployed young men with violent backgrounds are being thrust upon a Colombian government that has little more than a hastily thrown-together plan for dealing with them, and probably doesn't have the resources even for this plan.

In all, ten or eleven paramilitary fronts from eight parts of the country are to demobilize between now and the new year.

1. The Self-Defense Groups of Córdoba, commanded by Salvatore Mancuso;
2. The Catatumbo Bloc, commanded by Mancuso – this bloc is the largest to demobilize, with approximately 1,400 members;
3. The Urabá-based Bananero Bloc, commanded by "Hernán Hernández," which is to be the first to demobilize formally, starting tomorrow (November 25);
4. The Valle del Cauca-based Calima Bloc, commanded by "Hernán Hernández";
5. The Pacific Bloc, commanded by "Don Berna";
6. The Cundinamarca Bloc, commanded by Luis Eduardo Cifuentes ("Águila");
7. The Sucre-based Mojana Front, commanded by "Ramón Mojana";
8. The Southeast Antioquia Front, commanded by "John Santamaría" (this 50-man front recently indicated it may not in fact be ready to demobilize by the end of the year);
9. The Self-Defense Groups of Southern Magdalena and San Fernando Island, commanded by "Chepe Barrera";
10. The Self-Defense Groups of Meta and Vichada, commanded by Guillermo Torres; and
11. The Vichada Front of the Central Bolívar Bloc, commanded by "Javier Montañez" and "Julián Bolívar" alias "Macaco."

Right now, and for several more weeks, top paramilitary leaders like Salvatore Mancuso have their arrest warrants suspended and can travel throughout the country without fear of detention or extradition to the United States, in order to "coordinate" the demobilization. As columnist María Isabel Rueda wrote in Semana magazine, "It won't be long until we see Mancuso sitting down to eat in northern Bogotá's best-known restaurants."

            A compressed "cronograma"

The process began on November 3. Members of the Bananero Bloc, the first to turn itself in, have been trickling into their concentration zone, a ¾-square-kilometer ranch in the municipality of Turbo, Antioquia, in anticipation of a November 25 kickoff ceremony.

There is a plan, or "cronograma," in place, although it is remarkably rushed in comparison with demobilization efforts carried out in other countries and contexts. A first phase, covering roughly the month of November, has involved educating citizens and local governments in affected areas about what is to come, compiling lists of those who will turn themselves in, and concentrating the paramilitary fighters in the zones where they will hand in their weapons.

A second phase – beginning November 25 for the Bananero Bloc, later for others – will include several challenging tasks; incredibly, all of the following is to happen in only two to ten days. Fighters will turn in their weapons. Their identities will be verified. Minors will be sorted out and sent into the government family welfare system (ICBF). Fighters will be interviewed to determine if they have any marketable skills useful for future civilian employment.

All will undergo a background check to uncover allegations of past human-rights abuse. It is not clear how thorough this check will be, though, since Colombian authorities will be performing hundreds of them in less than ten days. Existing Colombian law ("Law 782" and "Decree 128") will allow most rank-and-file paramilitaries to benefit from amnesty for their crimes. Paramilitary leaders, and members accused of committing larger-scale crimes against humanity, will not be amnestied. Currently, there is no law in place to determine what will happen to these leaders and top abusers (they have made clear that they will not turn themselves in at all if they must enter Colombia's regular criminal-justice system); until this legal framework exists, these "unpardonables" will be concentrated in a special zone, probably the demilitarized area in San José de Ralito, Córdoba, where negotiations have been taking place.

In a third and final phase, which the "cronograma" compresses into eight days, ex-fighters will return to their places of origin. The Colombian government will set up four regional "centers of reference" to serve a variety of needs: legal status, education, health, psychological adjustment, and a legal way to make a living. Each ex-fighter who participates in job-training or microenterprise programs will be entitled to 300,000 pesos ($125) per month for up to two years. Many will be given short-term employment performing tasks like manual eradication of coca, while local businesses will be given tax breaks for hiring ex-paramilitaries.

All of this is to be carried out in two months by a Colombian government that is so cash-strapped and inefficient that displaced people in many areas must wait months to have their status "verified," people who have had their legal crops fumigated must wait months or years to have their compensation petitions resolved, and rural communities country-wide are still awaiting fulfillment of years-old promises to maintain roads, build schools or formalize land titles. What, short of a miracle, will guarantee that Bogotá has the political will to see this ambitious new commitment through?

And are the resources on hand? If done right, this will be a very expensive undertaking. The Colombian Treasury Ministry claims to have set aside 410 billion pesos (about $160 million) for the AUC's disarmament, about $8,000 per fighter. In a country that already has a ballooning fiscal budget deficit, it is not clear where Colombia's government plans to find even this extra 0.2 percent of GDP.

            A poor precedent: the 2003 BCN demobilization

The experience of the first AUC demobilization, which happened a year ago tomorrow, gives further cause for skepticism. Last November 25 in Medellín, 874 members of Don Berna's Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN) turned in 200-plus weapons in a ceremony that received a good deal of media attention in Colombia and some favorable coverage in the United States. The ex-fighters were whisked off for three weeks' "reorientation" at a recreation center outside Medellín; quick background checks there found 214 under suspicion of having committed past crimes, and fourteen have been detained.

Those demobilized have entered poorly funded education, job training and job placement programs, run largely by the Medellín mayor's office. Though the programs have certainly helped some ex-fighters, the overall result of the BCN process is far from encouraging. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group, which has done the most thorough follow-up on this process, found in August that efforts "made on a limited budget, with little central government support and against the backdrop of a partial demobilization process" have failed to address key issues like "bringing offenders to justice, compensating victims or dealing with drug trafficking and other illegal activities," leaving a "long-term risk … that paramilitary power in Medellín will be strengthened by institutionalizing it."

Worse, the ICG and other observers have pointed out that many of those who demobilized – somewhere between 30 to 70 percent – were not even AUC members in the first place. It appears that, in the days before the weapons-handover ceremony, the BCN recruited hundreds of gang members, common criminals, and aimless young men from Medellín's slums to pose as paramilitary members and enter the process as free-riders. It is not clear why Don Berna would have felt a need to pad his group's numbers, since a BCN "political coordinator" told Medellín's El Colombiano in March 2003 that his group had 4,000 members.

Today, many ex-BCN members have returned to their former activities, dominating their marginal Medellín neighborhoods and controlling common crime and the local drug trade. The ICG reports that many "appear to remain in close contact with the AUC through a cellular phone network, to consult their commanders on important decisions, and to operate according to their strict hierarchy." Some, according to Colombia's human rights ombudsman, have joined other paramilitary blocs like the Antioquia-based "Heroes of Granada." As of August, the OAS verification mission reported, seven demobilized fighters had been murdered. Less than fifty have found work in the private sector, according to El Tiempo. Even the Colombian government's peace negotiator, the ever-optimistic Luis Carlos Restrepo, has called the BCN process "an embarrassment."

Restrepo and other Colombian officials insist that the upcoming demobilization will not be a repeat of what happened in Medellín last year. Lists of those turning themselves in are to be handed over beforehand, instead of demobilizing anybody who shows up. Many of the weapons are being turned over beforehand as well.

Measures like these are not enough, though, to head off many likely consequences of a partial, largely improvised demobilization. The current plan does little to guarantee that the demobilized individuals will truly be removed from the paramilitary orbit. Most of the blocs about to turn themselves in co-exist geographically with other AUC groups. The Bananero Bloc, for instance, operates in Urabá alongside Don Berna's "Heroes of Tolová" bloc and the venerable Élmer Cárdenas bloc, headed by "Alemán," which is not participating in peace talks. (Don't miss the bizarre "Farcman and Elena" flash-animation story on the Élmer Cárdenas bloc's website.)

Will such active groups absorb, or at least exercise strong influence over, those who demobilize? Or as El Tiempo's editorial-writers put it, "What are the mechanisms foreseen to avoid a situation in which, two years from now, these zones are under the control of pro-'para' political movements, NGOs or cooperatives, this time legalized and legitimized?" Re-recruitment has certainly happened after past peace processes; in fact, dozens of those likely to be demobilizing from the Bananero Bloc are former members of the EPL guerrilla group that dominated Urabá in the 1980s, and who participated in demobilization programs over a decade ago.

Meanwhile, there is little way to tell whether those being demobilized are paramilitaries, or whether all of the paramilitaries who belonged to a particular bloc are demobilizing. Colombian prosecutors and intelligence agents note that paramilitary blocs' sizes fluctuate wildly, depending on needs – it is not unusual for a bloc's membership to range between 50 and 500 over the course of a year. At the same time, few are convinced that Colombia's military and police have either the resources or the strategic plans in place to fill the "security vacuum" left in zones where paramilitaries are disappearing. (This topic will be covered in our next posting.)

A pattern of improvisation

These are just some of the consequences of a peace process that, for two years now, has consistently adopted a cart-before-the-horse, "let's see what happens next" approach. Post-mortems of President Andrés Pastrana's failed 1998-2002 attempt to negotiate with the FARC almost uniformly note that a major reason for failure was the lack of a coherent plan. With both negotiating teams wildly improvising, the talks careened from topic to topic, commitments were made hastily and without consultation (such as agreeing to cede five municipalities to the FARC), other commitments were ignored, and the talks often ran aground on fruitless discussions of procedural details.

The critics were right. While some improvisation is necessary – negotiators have to be flexible in a very fluid situation – something as serious and risky as a peace negotiation cannot be made up as one goes along. Without a plan and a timeline in place, consideration of the thorniest, most difficult issues – and there are many – gets delayed and put off; delay and foot-dragging in turn deteriorate confidence in the process and sharpen divisions on both sides about how, and whether, to proceed.

In the case of the paramilitary talks, we can even discern a troubling pattern resulting from over-improvisation. The talks have shown a tendency to flounder for months with no breakthrough, until a crisis takes them to a potential breaking point. At that point, an ultimatum is issued and both sides take a small, very public step that is intended to show "progress." Then the talks go back to their previous floundering.

For instance, this spring the talks were going nowhere, then were thrown into crisis by reports of continued cease-fire violations and the disappearance / murder of Carlos Castaño. On April 27, President Uribe issued a strongly worded statement demanding that the paramilitaries concentrate themselves in special zones and progress toward demobilization. By late June, the AUC leadership had relocated to the San José de Ralito zone. The latest "breakthrough" – the upcoming demobilizations – came after several more months with no progress, followed by numerous crises, such as the September killing of paramilitary leader Miguel Arroyave, reports of narcotraffickers entering the paramilitaries (the so-called "paracaidistas"), press coverage of increasing paramilitary influence over Colombian politics, and Mancuso's leak of controversial recordings from the peace negotiations (discussed below). The Uribe government reacted by agreeing to extradite a mid-level paramilitary leader; only Mancuso's October announcement of a big new demobilization was able to break the impasse.

An elusive legal framework

Improvisation has led to a situation in which combatants are demobilizing, but there is no law in place to deal with those who stand accused of crimes against humanity. Those accused of war crimes who turn themselves in over the next five weeks will enter a legal limbo, confined to sites like the Ralito zone while they await passage of legislation.

Though the Uribe government has introduced two "alternative punishment" bills in Colombia's Congress – the first calling for only "symbolic" punishments and payments – these have gone nowhere, with opposition coming even from some of President Uribe's strongest supporters. Nearly two years into the process, the government has failed to develop a consensus proposal that major political factions, as well as victims' groups and the human rights community, can support.

Senator Rafael Pardo, a leading opponent of Uribe's first legislative efforts, has worked with members of other parties – including congressman Wilson Borja of the left-of-center Democratic Alternative party, who was wounded in a 2000 paramilitary assassination attempt – to craft a new "justice, reconciliation and reparation" law. This bill hasn't been introduced in Colombia's Congress yet, but it proposes to resolve some of the thorniest issues with five to ten-year jail sentences for the worst violators and an effort to compensate victims, both through paramilitaries' return of stolen assets and government compensation for damages. The latter commitment could carry an enormous price tag. A special tribunal, a new branch of the inspector-general's office (Procuraduría), and a new National Reparations Council would take on most of these responsibilities.

The legislation should undergo a few modifications – so far, for instance, anyone who aided, abetted, or funded the paramilitaries remains untouched – but it is a significant improvement over past attempts to create a legal framework for this demobilization and possible future processes with guerrillas. However, it has not been introduced yet, the Uribe government has not yet signaled its support, and it remains to be seen whether all major paramilitary leaders will agree to spend up to ten years in jail. (While Salvatore Mancuso has indicated he might accede to this, some of those who have spent more time in Colombia's drug underground, like "Don Berna," may refuse.) Even after being introduced, the bill could take months to pass, and will probably undergo a Constitutional Court challenge afterward. So a legal framework for demobilization could be lacking for some time to come.

Money

Colombia has a good deal of experience now with demobilizing armed groups, but few examples of success. Past "forgive and forget" peace processes have left behind seething hatreds among survivors. There has also been a failure to address the poverty and lack of opportunity that led fighters to join armed groups in the first place. Desire for revenge in an atmosphere of few economic options is a recipe for another generation of conflict.

These are difficult challenges to overcome, and they require of the Colombian government not only a deep reserve of political will, but a clear plan and lots of resources. Not only are justice and opportunity impossible to improvise, they are also expensive. And for the moment, it is far from clear how Bogotá plans to pay for them.

Even if Colombia's government can indeed carve $160 million out of its existing revenues to demobilize the AUC, this is unlikely to be anywhere enough to help rebuild lives, livelihoods and communities in the zones the paramilitaries have dominated. Colombia is obviously counting on the international community to step in and help. But the international community has so far proven reluctant: the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands have offered modest support for logistical aspects of the negotiations, but nobody has paid for demobilizations yet. The European Union is typical: it has sought clearer human rights guarantees – nobody wants to fund amnesty for war criminals – but is also holding off until a clearer plan is in place.

Like any investor, they are unwilling to put their money down without having a better sense of the details. The continued reliance on improvisation is deterring them. This is, of course, a bit of a vicious circle: it is difficult to craft a workable plan until one knows what level of resources one can expect to have on hand – but donors are unwilling to grant resources until they see a plan. The way out of this circle is to craft a plan in close coordination with the donor community, something that has not been done systematically for the paramilitary demobilizations.

The U.S. government shares some of the EU critique. The House-Senate Conference Committee's final version of the 2005 foreign aid bill, which may be signed into law at any moment, includes in its non-binding narrative report the following concerns about the lack of well-thought-out safeguards.

The managers [the bill's primary authors] believe that the costs of demobilizing illegal armed groups should be borne by the Colombian Government, not the United States. The managers are concerned that the demobilization process is being undertaken without adequate safeguards to ensure the dismantling of such FTOs, to deter members of such groups from resuming illegal activities, or to prosecute and punish those involved in drug trafficking and human rights violations.

Since it is non-binding, this language does not make it illegal for the United States to fund the demobilization of rank-and-file paramilitaries, something that many in the executive branch would like to do after receiving repeated entreaties from the Uribe government.

What does make it illegal, remarkably, is the 2001 USA-PATRIOT Act. Section 803 of this very controversial law makes those who "harbor or conceal" terrorists subject to fines or up to ten years in jail. The Justice Department has advised the State Department that this provision could make it a jailable offense to fund the demobilization even of those who have renounced membership in terrorist groups (the AUC, FARC and ELN are all on the State Department's list of international terrorist groups). So no U.S. money for demobilization will be forthcoming even if Colombia comes up with a detailed, foolproof plan – at least until a legislative fix is made to Section 803 of the PATRIOT Act.

Secrecy

Compounding the sense that the talks are occurring in an atmosphere of improvisation and disorganization – that they are going around in circles – is the high level of secrecy in which they are taking place. It is difficult to gauge what progress, if any, emerges from the periodic meetings between negotiators, or how close or distant agreement on key points may be.

This shield of secrecy is in part a reaction to the Pastrana government's talks with the FARC, which took place amid heavy media coverage in the Caguán demilitarized zone. Every minor setback was amplified, and both sides set the process back by posturing in the press.

The current talks have gone to the other extreme. Without transparency, confidence in the talks is damaged – especially when the talks are taking place between a government and an armed group that happens to be pro-government. The AUC's many victims and other stakeholders are denied opportunities for meaningful input into the negotiations as well, adding to a sense of outrage that was perhaps most palpable when three AUC leaders addressed Colombia's Congress in July.

Suspicions of foul play are magnified when scandalous pieces of news do penetrate the barrier of secrecy, such as the recordings of negotiation sessions leaked to the media by Salvatore Mancuso in September. In the tapes, government peace negotiator Restrepo assures Mancuso that he is trying to keep reports of paramilitaries murdering civilians in the Ralito demilitarized zone out of the media. Restrepo also tells the paramilitaries that they have nothing to fear from the International Criminal Court, even though Colombia is a signatory to the Rome Statute.

Make a plan and stick with it

Defenders of the paramilitary talks in their current form often acknowledge the negotiators' reliance on improvisation, but respond that the situation is too complex to demand adherence to a fixed strategy. But nobody is calling for a rigid, subpoint-by-subpoint timeline – confidence in the talks would suffer every time they ran behind such a detailed schedule. Of course flexibility is important. But the current level of improvisation may end up being worse than no talks at all.

Without plans and mechanisms to keep the talks on track and to verify gains, the Colombian government is forced to depend heavily on the paramilitaries' goodwill. For instance, we are required right now to trust that the AUC is indeed demobilizing eleven blocs and truly reducing its presence in the affected zones. There is no way to verify this, especially when the timeframe is compressed to two months and the international community is hardly participating. "Trust but don't verify" is a poor guideline.

Colombia has improvised its peace processes before, and it has nearly always gone badly. Simply taking a leap into the unknown and hoping for the best is not a strategy. It is a recipe for future neglect of the demobilized fighters, future resentments in affected communities, and future violence as Colombia's conflict drags on.

Coming soon: (4) The post-demobilization security vacuum

Posted by isacson at November 24, 2004 07:17 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://ciponline.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/18

Comments

Posted by: jcg at December 1, 2004 02:01 PM

Post a comment