Plan Colombia and Beyond

« A really big arms sale | Main | An eye on Bolivia »

December 13, 2005

Funding an ELN cease-fire

It is good news, of course, that representatives of the ELN guerrillas and the Colombian government will sit down in Havana later this week to discuss peace negotiations. But it will take a good deal of flexibility for these “exploratory dialogues” to avoid suffering the fate of earlier attempts to get talks going with Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group. Most of all, keeping the talks alight will require President Uribe to make some politically risky decisions in the middle of a re-election campaign.

The big decision to watch for – the one that will bring the most contentious debate within Colombia – is whether President Uribe will agree to the guerrillas’ likely demand for financial support during an eventual cease-fire. The idea of writing checks to guerrillas who want to overthrow you, even before a peace agreement has been signed, may seem preposterous on the surface – sort of like paying protection money to keep a cease-fire going – but in the case of the ELN it actually makes sense.

The ELN gets very little money from drug trafficking (though, as indicated in an earlier posting, that may be starting to change). As a result, the group funds much of its costs through acts of aggression against Colombia’s civilian population, particularly extortion and kidnapping for ransom. If the ELN were to declare a cease-fire including a halt to kidnapping and extortion, most of its revenue would dry up.

“Since the ELN has refused and will continue to refuse to involve itself in narcotrafficking,” top ELN leader Antonio García told a guerrilla magazine in April, “we cannot suspend our retentions and taxation [guerrilla terms for kidnapping and extortion], because we need to finance our social and political activities and the sustainment of our men.” Unlike the AUC paramilitaries, whose heavy reliance on narcotrafficking has helped sustain them through three years of a partially observed cease-fire, the ELN views a total cease-fire as tantamount to bankruptcy. Indeed, the ELN has never in its history declared a cease-fire (other than occasional Christmas holiday truces).

If President Uribe is to coax the ELN into a bilateral cease-fire, then, he is going to have to address the guerrilla group’s economic concerns. This issue has set back attempts to negotiate with the ELN in the recent past. A round of talks in Cuba with the outgoing Pastrana government fell apart in May 2002 after the guerrillas demanded that the government provide a $40 million stipend during a six-month cease-fire period. While this was likely just an opening offer – sort of like a tourist bargaining on a souvenir in a market – it was, for Pastrana and his lame-duck negotiating team, a political impossibility.

In April of this year, a round of contacts between the Colombian government and the ELN, mediated by the Mexican government, fell apart over the same issue. This time, the ELN refused to sign a cease-fire that prohibited kidnapping, again out of concerns for its income stream. (The discussions became stuck on this point, and the ELN withdrew completely after Mexico voted to condemn Cuba’s human rights record at the annual UN Human Rights Commission hearings.)

ELN leaders must have known in April that the Uribe government could not accept a cease-fire agreement that condoned the practice of kidnapping. Their request was no doubt an effort to pressure the Uribe government to consider financing the guerrillas during an eventual cease-fire. In July, President Uribe signaled, in an interview with a Spanish newspaper, that he would be willing to take this controversial step. “If they accept a complete halt to hostilities, the government has no problem in seeking funds to sustain the members of the ELN in a peace process as long as they do not commit crimes,” Uribe told El Pais. “It is the first time I say that in public.”

Let’s hope that, with elections only five months away, President Uribe has not changed his mind. Funding the ELN during a cease-fire will be politically difficult - once the topic comes up, we can expect to see a firestorm of criticism on Colombia’s right wing, including many members of Uribe’s traditional support base.

It is critical that this criticism be ignored and overruled: a few million dollars per month is a bargain if it buys a real cease-fire and a negotiation process that ends a decades-long insurgency. Besides, to require the ELN to cease fire without financing is to send a perverse message. The subtext will be that in order to insure itself against a failed negotiation, an armed group must rely on other illegal means of support during the truce period – especially drug-dealing.

Let’s hope that donor nations are ready to step in and help with the guerrillas’ financial support during the cease-fire period, thus taking some of the political heat off of Uribe. The PATRIOT Act would likely make it illegal for the United States to provide such support; as with much else in Latin America these days, other countries will have to take the lead.

Posted by isacson at December 13, 2005 10:58 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:

Comments

Post a comment