Colombian Peace Deal Signed: But Who is it for?

The 52 year old conflict between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) came to an official end after both sides agreed to a deal that has been negotiated over four years. The efforts for the deal started in 2012 under liberal president Santos. It has taken a long time for the deal to come to fruition due to the complication of the process which involved the integration and development of rural areas, the compensation of victims and their families and a solution to the illicit cultivations sometimes used in the drugs trade. The deal will be delayed further as it will be subject to a referendum which is expected to happen soon.  

It has to be stated from the outset that there are many ordinary Colombians, within and without the guerrilla forces, who have given their lives, often their blood, with the hope that a deal of this type could come to fruition. Celebrating this peace agreement with the capitalist comprador government of Colombia may seem incomprehensible to some, yet, when we take into account that most Colombian families have been direct victims of the violence generated by this war, we will understand why many are hopeful that something positive can come out of this process. 

Those who have studied the economic and political history of Colombia would know that the agreement between the FARC and the government is not going to bring actual reconciliation to the population at large. This agreement alone cannot bring peace to Colombia. The treaty simply falls short of amending the parasitic structure of the Colombian economy, which merely facilitates the fattening of the country's historical elite who have amassed their ancestral wealth from settler colonialism and slavery. The US role in the brokering of the deal also calls for scepticism; their involvement in the area is known to prioritise the interests of multinational companies over Colombian people.  In 1928 the US threatened to invade the country to put an end to the United Fruit workers strike. The conservative government of Miguel Mendez  complied to US demands by slaughtering strikers in a chapter that has gone down in Colombian history as “The Banana Massacre.” Today their interest in the area is similarly motivated by a desire to protect their investments and their long lasting obsession to wage “war on drugs.” 

Without addressing the root political and economic causes, this agreement can at best bring an end to the skirmishes between military and guerrilla forces. The cost of these skirmishes invariably falls on the poorest Colombians who get caught in the crossfire, or have no option but to join either of the armed forces. Yet even an end to skirmishes is doubtful since there are voices both among Columbia’s right and left who may oppose the upcoming referendum. One of them is Colombia’s second largest guerrilla group, the  National Liberation Army (ELN),  who have good reason to remain sceptical of the government’s call for demobilisation. 

The ELN’s distrust of the government’s call for ‘peace’ is not unfounded. It is not the first time that a peace agreement has been pursued by the government and it is not the first time that they have offered guerrilla groups a chance for demobilisation and participation in electoral politics. In the middle of the 1980s the FARC and the Colombian Communist Party formed the Union Patriotica, a political party, as part of peace negotiations with president Belisario Betancur. The outcome was the extermination of thousands of its members and the assassinations of two presidential candidates. It is therefore understandable that many in Columbia still feel a deep sense of mistrust against disarmament and consider it a trap to destroy the only chance of fundamental structural change in Colombia.  There is also a smaller, but boisterous, section of the Colombian political elite, led by ultra-rightwing ex-president Alvaro Uribe, who are against this peace agreement as they maintain that the FARC, and the guerrillas in general, are terrorists who deserve to be killed or put in prison. 

Colombia’s current president, Juan Manuel Santos, derives his power from the political and economic elites of the country and has been implicated in the ‘False Positive’  scandal. Since June 2012 thousands of cases have been revealed of civilians being lured into the remote parts of the country and executed by military personnel, then falsely identified as guerrilla members killed in combat. Make no mistake, this peace deal is not some magical wand, it merely puts a plaster on a bleeding wound. But it is not the manifestation of a uniquely Colombian ‘pathology’ as described by the clichéd colonial terminology of the US press and its so called ‘experts.’ The infection is imperialism and the treatment is immediate decolonisation.  

The final step of the process is a referendum. Ultimately, as in any other electoral process within the capitalist-imperialist system, the very essence of the violence against the people has not been brought up for discussion. We are sensitive to the hope that the majority of Colombians will finally be free from decades of extreme armed violence and so we hesitantly support the ‘Yes’ vote. However, as the outstanding Colombian anti-capitalist-imperialist Camilo Torres would say: we will fight for peace until the last consequences.