Colombia: Debating the Relevance of the Armed Struggle
Chernick, Marc
Like their southern cone counterparts who, while living under the harsh repression of authoritarian regimes, came to reevaluate their earlier hostility to "bourgeois democracy," so Colombia's...
...Salomon Kalmanovitz, economist...
...Yet their letter, although respectful, underscored a fundamentally different analysis of politics in Colombia...
...They were not given a choice...
...And the cauldron of political violence continues to overflow...
...Even those who still believed in a negotiated settlement wanted their voice heard that the current incarnation of the guerrillas was no longer worthy of support...
...s the intellectual Left strug- gles to find its voice, many of the"other Colombias"are moving forward without it...
...Embassy, the Presidency of the Republic, the intelligence services and a couple of Bogota publications that actively attempt to derail our commitment to the most noble causes in Colom- bia...
...In the second half of 1992, despite the new Constitution, and the emergence of the M-19 as a political force, armed confrontation increased...
...The intellectuals themselves have begun to re-interpret their own past as well as the role of the Left in Colombia...
...The CSGB rejects and condemns drug trafficking...
...By March, 1992, the negotiations had completely collapsed...
...After a decade of attempts to bring Colombia's longstanding insurgency to a peaceful resolution, some guerrillas have laid down their arms, while others continue to recruit among Colombia's rural and urban poor...
...The CGSB welcomes the different proposals that have been put forward by various groups to halt the escalation of the conflict into a full-scale war...
...However, consolidating democracy and waging counterinsurgency war are not compatible political processes...
...There was an eleventh hour debate about whether or not the letter should be published given the new political conditions...
...For many, the Constitution still has the potential to become a strong and compassionate midwife capable of birthing the new society...
...In fact, it reinforced the government's position, deferred the democratic opening, and moved politics further down the road to open hostilities...
...Neither does the Left's tormented revisionism appear to be finding an echo among the young and restless...
...Such practices have converted despotism into the natural form of governing...
...Today, as violence increases in many sectors of Colombian society, the armed movements have more military power than at any previous point in their history...
...It is important to underscore that the revolutionary guerrilla struggle in Colombia developed and continues to grow as a result of the permanent violence of the state that impedes with fire and blood the existence of an opposition to the establishment...
...What emerged was one of the most enlightened political charters to be found anywhere, with major advances in human, civil, social, minority and ecological rights...
...The M-19 represented a "secondgeneration" movement...
...The government, the aspiring democratic Left, the ex-guerrillas and the guerrillas remain caught in a bloody embrace, defining the political struggle in their own "enlightened" terms...
...While Colombia's fragmented Left has Marc Chernick is currently a visiting pro- fessor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota, and a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...The new society can emerge only in the context of a negotiated settlement to the decades-old war...
...It is time for a deep and patriotic reflection, and a radical rectification of years of mistakes...
...What was disturbing to some, though not all, was the fact that the letter, which The Guerrillas' Response The mountains of Colombia, December 2, 1992 Sefiores Antonio Caballero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nicolas Buveaventura, Fernando Botero and the other signatories of the letter: We extend our greetings and thank you for your important observations on the persistence of armed insurgency in Colombia...
...Armed struggle has not been either an end or an objective...
...We reject the government's calls for an "integral war...
...Armed struggle, instead of leading to greater social justice, has engendered all kinds of extremisms, such as the resurgence of reactionary violence, paramilitary forces, merciless crime and excesses committed by the armed forces, which we condemn with equal energy...
...Yet each step forward was accompanied by an escalation of political violence, particularly directed against amnestied guerrillas and new parties and movements on the Left...
...The letter was the fruit of an intense, often soul-searching debate among Colombia's historically left-leaning intellectual elite...
...And the context of the letter's publication made it appear that the intellectuals were directly endorsing the President's policy of escalated war...
...For nine months after the promulgation of the new Constitution, the government held separate negotiations with the remaining guerrilla movements-the FARC, the ELN, and a dissident faction of the EPL that had refused to surrender its arms...
...The truth is that well before there emerged revolu- tionary armed struggle in Colombia, there existed a dirty war which was fought with complete impunity...
...Luis Alberto Restrepo, philosopher...
...Others are working with communitybased social movements...
...The Minister of Defense cockily declared that it would take 18 months...
...Colombian society appeared to be drowning in its own rivers of blood, much like during la Violencia...
...While revolutionary focos failed to take root or win an enduring social base elsewhere in South America, they prospered in Colombia...
...The signatories, including Nobellaureate Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez (who crafted the final version), the renowned painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, and a group of university professors centered at the National University of Colombia, had come together to define a new politics...
...Partially fueled by the boom in drug exports to insatiable Northern markets, violence escalated, returning to levels not seen since the 1940s and 1950s...
...Increasingly, both the unarmed NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 10UPDATE / COLOMBIA Left and the government began to blame the guerrillas for the continued violence and the slow pace of change...
...In the current circumstances, we oppose the means you use to carry on your struggle...
...As a result, the gunfire, bombs and accumulating corpses are threatening to drown out the new politics...
...He is working on a comparative study of political vio- lence in Colombia and Peru sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation...
...It is incumbent on us all to work toward a solution that creates an environment where the recourse to arms is only a bad memory of our unfortu- nate history...
...Daniel Samper, journalist...
...Again, we appreciate your interest and your initiative to communicate with us...
...In the mid 1960s, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Ej6rcito de Liberaci6n Nacional (ELN), and the Ej6rcito Popular de Liberaci6n (EPL) were formed...
...The promise of a new political order established through the institutions of the 1991 Constitution remains quite remote to the daily lives of many of their followers in the remote reaches of the Andes and throughout the numbingly verdant Amazon basin...
...We hope you will persist in your efforts for peace...
...We don't believe that you represent the popular will...
...no one consulted withdrew his or her signature...
...n late 1992, a group of intellectuals decided to publicly denounce armed struggle through an open letter to the Coordinadora Guerrillera [see "The Intellectuals' Letter," this page...
...Colombia deserves better...
...In mid-September, wielding arms and wearing ski masks, the Red Guards burned the car of the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, a sociologist and former militant in the Communist Party...
...The ELN was formed by Colombian students in Havana who sought to replicate the experience of the Cuban revolution in Colombia, and saw the closed bipartisan system known as the National Front as the equivalent of other forms of Latin American despotism...
...There, and on other university campuses, the emerging movements are the Shining Path-inspired Red Guards, and a belligerent and irreverent group called Anarchists to Combat...
...The CGSB [Coordinadora Guerrillera Simon Bolivar] remains committed to the search for a political solution to the crisis...
...The revolutionary guerrillas date from this period...
...It was more urban, and combined the languages of nationalism and Colombian politics with a heterodox Marxism...
...The guerrillas were now united in the Coordinadora Guerrillera Sim6n Bolivar (CGSB...
...In the early 1970s, the April 19th Movement (M-19)-named for the date the presidential election was overtly stolen from a progressive candidate in 1970-was founded...
...In the face of political exclusion during periods of single-party hegemony, each of Colombia's traditional parties turned to armed struggle as a legitimate form of political opposition...
...But the decision was unanimous to go ahead...
...Many are being recruited to work with the Libolombia's Uribe eral party, now fully in control of the country's destiny...
...Fernando Botero, painter...
...E Vol XXVII, No4 JAN/FEB 1994 11UPDATE / COLOMBIA appeared in Colombia's leading daily, El Tiempo, under the headline "Your war, gentlemen, has lost its historical force," seemed to echo the words of the President...
...Again, many who were excluded by the narrowly cast two-party hegemony felt justified in taking up arms as a legitimate form of political opposition...
...both sides prepared to resume the war...
...The untold and useless deaths on both sides, as well as the systematic attacks against the national wealth and the ecological disasters that you have caused are a price too high for a country that has already paid too much...
...The letter from the guerrilla comandantes answered the intellectuals' concerns and attempted to open the door to a renewed dialogue, with them and with the government...
...For the guerrillas, armed struggle continued to be an extension of popular mobilization, not its chief obstacle...
...But to a growing number of people outside the cultural mainstream, the debate over revolutionary focos versus grassroots democracy and popular mobilization seems irrelevant-a relic of a failed past...
...Four guerrilla movements-the M-19, the majority of Vol XXVII, No 4 JAN/FEB 1994 9UPDATE / COLOMBIA the EPL and two smaller groups-surrendered their arms in exchange for political guarantees and participation in the writing of a new constitution for Colombia [see "An Interview with Navarro Wolff," page 12...
...Three successive presidentsBelisario Betancur (1982-1986), Virgilio Barco (1986-90) and Cesar Gaviria (1990-1994) supported negotiating with the guerrillas...
...established political regime in Bogoti...
...In 1958, after a decade of extreme political violence, the two traditional parties agreed to share power...
...Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the principal political cleavage was between the mutually exclusive nineteenth-century agendas of the Liberal and Conservative parties...
...This is best represented by the stunning emergence of the indigenous and black movements, creating a new politics of identity that is redefining the old political game and leaving many of the old Left on the sidelines...
...become polarized between those who continue to believe in armed struggle and those who do not, the guerrillas' armed actions and economic terrorism seem only to underscore their political isolation...
...It was imposed on them...
...M-19 leader Antonio Navarro Wolff served as co-president of the Constitutional Assembly, together with representatives from the Liberal and Conservative parties...
...Alvaro Camacho, sociologist...
...It is notable that no indigethe entrance to a FARC guerrilla base in C nous or black leader, or intellectual or activist associated with their cause, signed the letter to the CGSB...
...In this context of renewed despair, peace became a desired end in itself for many on the Left, including many of the nation's leading intellectuals...
...Amid the escalating chaos, a new political fault line now came to rest between those who continued to advocate a politics of armed opposition-both on the Left and Right-and those who rejected such a path...
...The political experiment raised great expectations...
...It has simply been a means by which to resist aggression and fight for democracy and dignity...
...The state appeared to be on the verge of collapse...
...In like manner, Anarchists to Combat recently kidnapped the university's president and imprisoned him in a people's jail on campus...
...In the 1980s, the bipolar conflict between government and guerrillas turned into a multipolar shooting gallery, with complex, shifting alliances emerging among guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitary groups, local political bosses, and the state...
...Violence, once again, became the principal currency of politics, and the principal catalyst of social decay...
...The principal political division was now between those who accepted bipartisan rule, and those who did not...
...Antonio Caballero, journalist...
...Apolinar Diaz Callejas, lawyer...
...How is it that you ignore the traffickers' reactionary nature as well as their contribution to the breakdown of our communities and society...
...Your war, gentlemen, lost its historical significance long ago...
...Only the Communist newspaper, Voz, printed the letter signed by Manuel Marulanda Velez, the legendary commander of the FARC who first took up arms in the 1940s as a Liberal guerrilla, Manuel P6rez, the excommunicated Spanish priest who leads the ELN, and six other guerrilla commanders...
...All of these movements found the soil of politics particularly conducive to guerrilla struggle...
...Corruption, which you also rejected in the past, has contaminated your own ranks through your dealings with drug traffickers...
...The infamous "pajaros," paramilitary groups and state intelligence forces have been the principal protagonists of this long history of terror...
...Particu- larly important are the proposals for national and international mediation that would supervise the implementation of a future agreement, ensuring that each side respects its commitments while enforcing compliance to the agreed upon rules of the game...
...Like their southern cone counterparts who, while living under the harsh repression of authoritarian regimes, came to re-evaluate their earlier hostility to "bourgeois democracy," so Colombia's intellectuals came to value an end to armed conflict and a restoration of peace as a necessary precondition for any future political struggle...
...Gonzalo Sanchez, historian (plus another 50 signatures...
...Opposition politics was redefined...
...Many on the Left empathized with or supported the armed movements...
...The letter from the intellectuals, although written and conceived before the imposition of emergency rule and Gaviria's belligerent speech, put the intellectuals and the President on the same side opposing armed struggle...
...They have also begun to directly challenge other sectors of the Left, as well as university authorities...
...Sincerely, Compatriotas, Coordinadora Guerrillera Simon Bolivar Manuel Marulanda V., Alfonso Cano, Rabl Reyes, Timolen Jimenez, Ivan Marquez, Manuel P6rez Martinez, Nicolas Rodriguez Bautista, Pablo Tejada, Francisco Galan, Milton Hernandez, Francisco Carabal- lo, Diego Ruiz...
...Each, in his own way, sought to re-legitimize Colombian politics, and the stewardship of the traditional parties, by advocating political reform and the reincorporation of the armed opposition...
...Such a situation cannot lead to a common dream of a democratic and joyous society...
...cy offered by the 1991 Constitution, and the seismic changes in world affairs, the government and the military believe that the long-elusive goal of military victory is now possible...
...Since the 1980s, the bipolar conflict between government and guerrillas has turned into a multipolar shooting gallery...
...Neither the discourse of the guerrillas, nor of the democratizing intellectuals, nor of the amnestied guerrillas such as the M19 has any resonance...
...We also support those proposals that seek to include a broad range of representatives from Colombian society in the negotiating process and to seat them at the negotiating table...
...they viewed them as a legitimate form of opposition to an oligarchically dominated system that relied on emergency powers and the armed forces to maintain public order...
...It must be said that if certain practices and historical conceptions have lost their historical significance, it is precisely the practice of state terrorism and the systematic use of institutional mechanisms to assassinate and "dis- appear" political opposition...
...The 1991 Constitution provides a still unrealized The Intellectuals' Letter Santa Fe de Bogota, November 20, 1992 Seriores Coordinadora Guerrillera Sim6n Bolivar: As a group of convinced democrats who oppose violence and authoritarian solutions of all kinds, we have the moral right to question the legitimacy and the effectiveness of the actions that you have pursued now for many years...
...We propose an integral solution and a lasting peace...
...The forms of struggle that the Colombian people have chosen to achieve a better future was not a free decision...
...In the circumstances of Colombia's war footing in late 1992, the response from the CGSB [see "The Guerrillas' Response," p. 11] was ignored...
...Not only was it no longer able to maintain order, but it had also become a major source of disorder and a central contributor to the political violence...
...The FARC, born of earlier peasant struggles and Communist organizing in the countryside, also mobilized former Liberal guerrillas and peasants in the new zones of agricultural colonization to oppose the NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8UPDATE / COLOMBIA The funeral procession for Juan Gabriel Cuadros, a trade unionist in Medellin who was gunned down on his way to work in December, 1987...
...It is time to search for a new and innovative form of politics more in tune with the realities of today's world...
...On November 9, two weeks before the letter was published, President Gaviria had appeared on national television to announce a major new offensive against the guerrillas in the wake of the breakdown of negotiations in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and to publicly reinstate emergency rule in the face of the crisis of public order...
...The timing of the letter's publication was controversial...
...Old enemies found themselves, at first somewhat awkwardly, on the same side...
...Indeed, it had already partially collapsed in certain geographic zones and in the exercise of many of its functions, most notably maintaining order, providing security, and administering justice...
...Meanwhile, the guerrilla war continues to shape the direction of national politics...
...Today your standard tactics include kidnapping, coercion and forced contributions, all of which are an abominable violation of human rights...
...The government is investing heavily in elite counterinsurgency soldiers and helicopters, in an effort to professionalize-and win-the war...
...Particularly with the A sentry guards renewed legitima- region...
...Yet by the 1990s, the fault line of politics had fragmented almost beyond recognition...
...For nearly half a century, Colombia has experienced successive waves of war and violence, from the inter-party civil war between Liberals and Conservatives in the 1940s and 1950s-known as la Violencia-to the guerrilla insurgencies and revolutionary focos of the 1960s and 1970s, to the multifaceted orgy of violence among guerrillas, drug traffickers and paramilitary groups that first seduced, then corrupted and atomized Colombian society in the 1980s and 1990s...
...Guerrilla war continues without reprieve in the northern Andes...
...Gabriel Garcia Mirquez, writer, Nicolas Buenaventura, historian...
...Finally, the Maoist EPL was founded, reflecting the larger Sino-Soviet split...
...Many still believed in a negotiated settlement...
...The drug trade gave new resources to all actors...
...Out of the antagonistic conflict between the dirty war and the peace process emerged the foundational note of Colombian politics for the 1990s and the early twentyfirst century...
...They operated in zones that had long traditions of armed rebellion against the state, in some cases dating back to the mid-nineteenth century...
...Eduardo Pizarro, sociologist...
...The letter did not open up the debate as many had hoped...
...Always, our nation has been forced to live with torture, disap- pearances, authoritarianism and collective intimidation which have obliged many compatriots to choose the route of exile as an extreme recourse in defense of their physical and moral integrity...
...First in Caracas and then in Tlaxcala, Mexico, negotiators from each side struggled over the terms of a cease-fire agreement and a negotiating agenda...
...But in the Colombia of the 1990s, the guerrillas' political voice is hardly heard amid the din of a multiplicity of groups-indigenous, urban, regional, local, black, campesino, feminist, university-trying to break out of the straitjacket of traditional politics...
...S framework for a new democratic politics, together with broad visions of multiculturalism and a united and democratic Latin America...
...Unlike the generals who led the archetypal Latin American "dirty war" in Argentina, Colombia's reforming presidents sought to distance themselves from reactionary violence, and attempted-with only partial success-to limit the state's involvement...
...Recognizing this fact in good faith will also be a political victory...
...All of Colombia has been a witness to their actions, which at times have been characterized by selective assassination, and at other times have included massacres and genocide...
...El pais nuevo," forged in the democratic crucible of the Constitutional Assembly, appeared to be stillborn, or at best, retarded in its development...
...The Red Guards burned the ballot box during a recent student election, symbolically copying the actions of Shining Path when it began its revolutionary war in Peru...
...Meanwhile, the nation, increasingly atomized in self-interested groups, is now creating politics without them...
...You, the "convinced democrats, opposed to violence and authoritarian options" could use your newspapers, magazines, university posts and public fora to work for a change in the current atmosphere of aggression...
...Like their southern cone counterparts who, while living under the harsh repression of authoritarian regimes, came to reevaluate their earlier hostility to "bourgeois democracy," so Colombia's intellectuals have come to value an end to armed conflict as a necessary precondition for any future political struggle...
...At the National University of Colombia in Bogota, once a center of guerrilla support and recruitment, neither the legal Left nor the Colombian guerrilla seems to command much respect...
...Between us, surely, we can cre- ate the necessary elements that will close the door to further bloodshed...
...Some are working with the M19/Democratic Alliance (M-19/AD...
...We, too, would like to share with you some of our reflections which we hope can be of some use...
...Your war, understandable in its origins, now goes against the grain of history...
...Terrorism, which you had always condemned as an illegitimate form of revolutionary struggle, is today a daily recourse...
...You should not let yourselves be confused by a dishonest plot cooked up by the U.S...
...On the contrary, your actions have created a climate of political and ideological confusion which is converting Colombia into a battle camp in which the most common form of free expression is that made through the barrel of a gun...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 4
