The first delegation of victims of Colombia’s armed conflict offer a press conference after their talks with the government and FARC negotiators on Aug. 16 in Havana, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 25 2014 (IPS)

Three major advances were made over the last week in the peace talks that have been moving forward in Cuba for nearly two years between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, while the decades-old civil war rages on.

On Saturday Aug. 16, a group of relatives of victims of both sides met face-to-face in the Cuban capital. It was the first time in the world that victims have sat down at the same table with representatives of their victimisers in negotiations to put an end to a civil war.

And on Thursday Aug. 21 an academic commission was set up to study the roots of the conflict and the factors that have stood in the way of bringing it to an end.

That day, the unthinkable happened.

High-level army, air force, navy and police officers flew to Cuba, under the command of General Javier Alberto Flórez, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the 24-hour technical mission they met with their archenemies, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which emerged in 1964) to discuss “how to implement a definitive bilateral ceasefire, and how the FARC would disband and lay down their arms,” said President Juan Manuel Santos.

Santos described the participation of active officers in the talks, as part of a subcommission installed on Friday Aug. 22, as “a historic step forward.”

Twelve victims, of the 60 who will travel to Havana in five groups, met for nearly seven hours on Aug. 16 with the FARC and government negotiators, who included two retired generals, one of whom was Jorge Enrique Mora Rangel, an army officer accused of human rights abuses.At one extreme, former rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) proposes the creation of a higher court to review the sentences handed down against members of the security forces from 1980 to 2026, and to release them while the sentences are revised. At the other extreme, the FARC do not recognise Colombia’s legal system as having the authority to try the guerrillas, once a peace agreement is reached.

The group of 12 was made up of six relatives of victims of crimes of state and of the far-right paramilitaries (which partially demobilised in the last decade), four victims of the FARC, and two victims of two or three different armed actors.

It was “a unique experiment that has not been seen anywhere else,” according to Fabrizio Hochschild, representative of the United Nations in Colombia.

In previous forums in Colombia, thousands of family members of victims have expressed their main demands: the truth about what happened to their loved ones, improvements in the mechanisms for reparations, guarantees that what happened will not be repeated, and justice.

The negotiators gave the task of selecting the groups of victims’ relatives to the U.N., Colombia’s National University, and the Catholic bishops’ conference. They were chosen from an official universe of 6.7 million victims and survivors, including 5.7 million victims of forced displacement, most of whom are small-scale farmers.

In the Colombian conflict, the last civil war in Latin America, the dead number at least 420,000 since 1946, including more than 220,000 since 1958, according to commissions for the historic memory set up in 1962 and 2012.

The creation of a Historical Commission on the Conflict and Victims (CHCV), at the behest of the negotiating table, was announced Thursday Aug. 21.

The commission consists of six academics and one rapporteur named by each side, for a total of 14 historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economist and political scientists.

The CHCV will analyse the origins of the armed conflict, the aspects that have stood in the way of a solution, and the question of who is responsible for its impacts on the population.

The rapporteurs will produce a joint report, by late December, although they will not “attribute individual responsibilities” and the report “must not be written with the aim of achieving specific legal effects,” the negotiating table stipulated.

This is not a truth commission, which should emerge once a peace agreement is signed. But it is a firm step in that direction.

Meanwhile, the aspect that appears to be foremost in the mind of public opinion in Colombia is neither the question of truth nor how to guarantee that the atrocities won’t happen again; it is the question of justice.

At one extreme, former rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) proposes the creation of a higher court to review the sentences handed down against members of the security forces from 1980 to 2026, and to release them while the sentences are revised.

At the other extreme, the FARC do not recognise Colombia’s legal system as having the authority to try the guerrillas, once a peace agreement is reached.

That position is based on a certain logic: if the guerrilla group is part of the negotiations, along with the state, and both have committed crimes, the state “cannot be both judge and jury,” the FARC negotiator, a commander whose nom de guerre is Pablo Catatumbo, told IPS in Havana.

At the same time, the families of victims of forced disappearance do not accept impunity.

The victims’ families asked the negotiators on both sides not to get up from the table until an agreement is reached.

But the fragility of the peace talks, held under the principle of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” is evident.

There are still 28 pending aspects in the three points that have been agreed, of the six points on the agenda for the talks. It will be difficult to reach a consensus on these unresolved aspects, which are marked in red: 14 sub-points in the area of agriculture, 10 in political participation and four in the area of illegal drugs.

The CHVC is to make recommendations for reaching agreement on these sub-points.
Besides its interest in the question of justice, the public wants the FARC to demobilise and lay down their arms.

General Mora Rangel said in June “they must demobilise and hand over their weapons…they have to do so to join society and Colombia’s democratic system.”

But according to peace analyst Carlos Velandia, there will be no demobilisation, no laying down of arms, and no reinsertion.

There will be no photo ops of a “mass demobilisation”, like the ceremonies held in the mid-2000s showing the paramilitaries handing in their weapons, he said. Instead armed structures will be transformed into political structures, although the mechanism has not been worked out yet, he added.

And unlike in the case of the paramilitaries, “there won’t be thousands of insurgents stretching out their hands for ‘Papá State’ to help them,” he said.

Despite the obstacles, “the problem doesn’t lie over there, where both sides are taking a proactive stance,” a Catholic priest who is well-informed on what is going on in the talks in Havana told IPS.

The problem lies in Colombia, he said, where Uribe – now an extreme-right senator and a leader of the opposition in the legislature – had an enormous influence on public opinion during his two terms as president.

Uribe is “working on” businesspersons, bankers, large-scale merchants, and some journalists, to win them over in his fierce campaign against the peace talks, the priest said.

“Santos isn’t a leader, he’s a follower. If the country turns against him, he’ll abandon the peace process,” he maintained.

If there is strong public support for an eventual peace deal, the powerful oligarchy’s pressure on Santos could convince him to block a referendum on the peace agreement.
But if Uribe and victimisers who do not want to be more openly identified by the victims manage to foment rejection of the peace talks among voters, they would not object to a referendum on an eventual peace accord.

A precedent for this was set in Guatemala, where turnout for a referendum on a peace deal that put an end to 36 years of civil war – 1960-1996 – was extremely low, and among the few voters who did show up, a majority rejected the peace agreement.

In Colombia’s peace talks in Havana, the mechanism of a popular referendum is the sixth point on the agenda, which is still pending, and Santos has not referred to it in public.

To block these maneuvers, “there have to be more and more decisions aimed at recognising the legitimacy of the talks, including acts of truth and forgiveness. That will make it more likely, although not more sure, that the peace process will move forward successfully,” because “the more people who can forgive, the closer we are to seeing peace win out,” the priest said.

Different sectors of society agree on the need for “a new social pact” to approve the accords and work out the pending aspects marked in red. For the FARC and many others, on the left or the far right, these pacts should be reached through a constituent assembly that would rewrite the constitution. But Santos would appear to be leaning towards a referendum instead.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

People in the streets and squares of the Colombian capital are breathing easier. The air is fresh with hope, in contrast to the former leaden and fearful atmosphere of eternal violence and interminable conflict.

Ignacio Ramonet

The war in Colombia is one of the longest-running armed conflicts in the world. It began (or intensified) when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, an immensely popular social leader who advocated social justice, including financial system reform and land reform, was murdered by the oligarchy on Apr. 9, 1948.

Since then the number of casualties has reached the hundreds of thousands. Today, in a continent that is overwhelmingly at peace, this conflict – Latin America’s last guerrilla war – is like a vestige of another era.

Travelling around the country and talking with diplomats, intellectuals, social workers, journalists, academics or local residents in low-income neighbourhoods, the conclusion that can be drawn is that this time, intentions are serious.

Things have apparently been on the move since President Juan Manuel Santos, in office since August 2010, publicly announced in early September that the government and the insurgents would be starting peace talks, first in Oslo and then in Havana, with the governments of Norway and Cuba as guarantors and of Venezuela and Chile as observers.

Colombians have confidence in the peace process; they feel that internal and external circumstances allow them – prudently – to dream. What if peace were, at last, possible? During the last 65 years of war, it is not the first time that the authorities and the rebels have sat down to negotiate.

Why has President Santos, who was an implacable opponent of the guerrillas as defence minister under former president Álvaro Uribe, chosen the path of negotiation? Because this time, he says, “the stars are aligned to end the conflict.” In other words, the national and international situations could not be more propitious.

In the first place, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are no longer what they used to be. They remain the most formidable guerrilla force in Latin America, with 20,000 combatants. And the FARC is the only guerrilla army that has not been defeated by force of arms in Latin America. But satellite tracking and massive use of drones (unmanned spy planes) now allow their communications and movements to be tracked.

Secondly, the killings of the FARC’s top commanders (by means of the Israeli technique of selective killings) have made it more difficult for the guerrillas to regroup. In addition, some odious combat methods used by the FARC, such as kidnapping, summary execution of prisoners and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, have provoked rejection by a significant part of civil society.

The FARC are far from defeated, and could probably continue the conflict for years. But they are certainly not able to win it; the opportunity for a military victory has vanished. Peace talks, if they lead to a dignified agreement, would let them leave the field walking tall, to join political life.

But when Santos decided, to widespread surprise, to embark on peace negotiations with the insurgents, it was not only because the FARC were weakened militarily. It was also because the landowning oligarchy opposed to land reform (Colombia is practically the only country in Latin America that, because of the landowners’ blinkered attitude, has not redistributed land) were no longer the dominant power.

In the last few decades, a new urban oligarchy has become established, with far more power than the rural elites.

During the worst years of the war, the large cities were cut off from the countryside. It was impossible to travel overland from one place to another, and the portion of Colombia that was usable was limited to a sort of archipelago of cities. To these large cities came the millions of people fleeing the conflict, and dynamic, growing local economies were developed, based on industry, services, finance, import-export and other sectors.

Today, this is the economy that predominates in the country, and is to a certain extent represented by Santos, just as Uribe represents the large landowners who are opposed to the peace process.

The urban oligarchy wants peace for economic reasons. First, the cost of peace – probably a modest land reform – will be borne by the big landowners. The urban elites are not interested in the soil, but in the subsoil: pacification would allow exploitation of Colombia’s immense mineral resources, for which China is an insatiable market.

The urban business community also perceives that, if peace is achieved, the present excessive military expenditure could be devoted to reducing inequality, which continues to be enormous in the country. The entrepreneurs know that Colombia is heading towards a population of 50 million, a significant critical mass in terms of consumption, if average purchasing power rises.

They are aware of the redistribution policies taking place in several Latin American countries (Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and others) that have reactivated domestic production and promoted the growth of local businesses.

Meanwhile, Latin America is experiencing a high point in terms of integration, with the recent creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), in which Colombia plays an important role.

Given these dynamics, the war is an anachronism, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has often claimed. The FARC know that this is the case. The time has come for both sides to lay down their arms.

Current events in Latin America show that, in spite of the hurdles, gaining power by peaceful, political means is possible for a progressive organisation. This has been proved in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Uruguay and Brazil, among other countries.

Many perils must still be faced. Opponents of peace (Pentagon hawks, ultra-rightwing members of the military, landowners and paramilitaries) will try to sabotage the process. But everything seems to indicate, while negotiations continue in Havana, that the end of the conflict is approaching. At last.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

Illegal spying on human rights activists and journalists is still happening in Colombia, according to a new report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Juan Carlos Monge and Todd Howland presenting the report. Credit:OHCHR Colombia

In response to the allegation, Interior Minister Germán Vargas categorically stated: “It’s not true. There is no illegal wiretapping.”

“These allegations should be more precise, they should not be generalisations,” he added.

After a major scandal broke out in 2009 over wiretapping and harassment of Supreme Court magistrates, political dissidents, human rights defenders and reporters by the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the domestic intelligence agency was officially closed in October 2011.

One month earlier, Jorge Noguera, director of DAS from 2002 to 2005, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his involvement in the 2004 murder of a prominent sociologist by far-right paramilitaries.

More recent DAS directors as well as over 40 DAS employees and several high-ranking officials of the government of rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) are currently under prosecution for illegal spying and harassment.

Nevertheless, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) states in its report for 2011, presented Monday Feb. 27 in Bogotá, that it continued receiving reports about illegal spying, especially from human rights defenders and journalists.

The OHCHR report on the situation of human rights in Colombia says “there has been uncorroborated information on the involvement of State agents, including members of civilian and military intelligence services, in illegal and clandestine operations.

“Most cases have not been resolved. If no significant progress is made in preventing, investigating and punishing these acts, it will be difficult to guarantee non-repetition,” it adds.

The report cites, for example, interception of emails and information theft against human rights defenders and journalists, even after DAS was closed down.

Virtually every United Nations report on Colombia since 1997 has recommended purging the country’s intelligence files, to guarantee respect for human rights. The latest report is no exception, which indicates that the purge has not been carried out.

The report recommends that “the process for updating, rectifying, annulling or keeping personal information in intelligence files should be regulated,” Juan Carlos Monge, deputy director of the OHCHR office in Colombia, said in a press conference in Bogotá Monday.

The Constitutional Court handed down a ruling to that effect in October.

The report says “The military intelligence services require public regulations to define and limit their actions. Their internal control mechanisms and public accountability need to be substantially strengthened, particularly in view of the increased allocation of military intelligence service resources planned” by the government of centre-right President Juan Manuel Santos, who took office in August 2010.

The OHCHR report, which was also presented Monday in Geneva to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, recognises that progress has been made in some cases of interception of emails and surveillance. “Not progress that we can be totally satisfied with, but a step forward at least,” Monge said.

The main progress made on that front, according to the U.N. agency, was the adoption in mid-2011 of the “Intelligence Law”, which was drawn up with advice and observations from the OHCHR office in Colombia, “to ensure that it was compatible with international human rights standards,” Monge said.

The report explains that “The law defines the limits and purposes of intelligence in terms of respecting human rights and creates two commissions: one to assist in the purging of intelligence files and another, a congressional commission, to monitor intelligence activities.”

But, it adds, “Noteworthy challenges to the implementation of this law are the weak mandate of the congressional commission and the lack of effective internal control mechanisms.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay recommended that the office of the inspector general (Procuraduría General de la Nación) “take more in-depth preventive and disciplinary actions vis-à-vis the intelligence agencies” Monge said.

The office of the inspector general should take on a more active role in purging the intelligence files, the OHCHR report adds, especially given the fact that it was left in charge of the DAS files when the intelligence agency was shut down.

“The 2011 report indicates the importance of the procuraduría in the purge,” Todd Howland, the new director of the OHCHR office in Colombia, said in response to a question from IPS. “That recommendation is very important, because they can take on a role of civilian oversight with respect to the files and that process.”

In response to another question from IPS, and referring to the prosecutions in the DAS case, Monge said it is best in these cases to continue forward “with actions that vindicate the good use to which intelligence should be put.”

The OHCHR recommends that measures be adopted in order to comprehensively reform the intelligence services and “transform the institutional culture that led to the commission of human rights violations.”

It also says it is “necessary to protect public officials from the intelligence services who report abuses or refuse to comply with illegal requests.”

The espionage carried out by the DAS, which answered directly to Uribe, went across borders, targeted citizens from other countries, and purportedly diverted U.S. and British military aid.

In May 2011, the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee urged Colombia to clarify and explain DAS’s spying activities and determine who was responsible for illegal espionage activities carried out in Europe, and against European citizens.

And the U.S. Congress ordered the State Department to review the use to which military aid to Colombia was put over the last decade. The aid totalled eight billion dollars and was channelled through the Plan Colombia military and counterinsurgency programme. (END)

After Colombia’s attorney general announced that she was bringing charges against a former government peace commissioner for his role in a staged surrender of a fake guerrilla unit, he called for an investigation of her husband – which she promptly ordered.

Saying she “cannot be blackmailed,” attorney general Viviane Morales launched an investigation of her husband, former guerrilla and former senator Carlos Alonso Lucio.

She had announced on Monday that her office would seek the arrest of Luis Carlos Restrepo, a former high peace commissioner under then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

According to Restrepo, Morales “lashed back because I know a secret story about her husband.”

Restrepo will face charges for the case of Cacica Gaitana, which according to military intelligence was a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) unit that operated in the central province of Tolima.

The Cacica Gaitana unit demobilised with great fanfare on Mar. 7, 2006 in the middle of the campaign for the re-election of Uribe, and even surrendered a plane that was supposedly used by FARC founder Manuel Marulanda, who died in 2008.

A U.S. embassy cable leaked by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, dated Mar. 22, 2006, raised doubts about the “veracity” of the demobilisation, and said Restrepo “was warmly congratulated by senior military officials.”

The Cacica Gaitana unit in fact never existed. The demobilisation of some 70 purported guerrillas was a farce that received wide media coverage. Around 15 of them were FARC deserters, and the rest were unemployed or homeless people recruited for the fake surrender operation.

The “leader” of the false unit, alias Saldaña, had been in prison for two years. Part of the weapons surrendered apparently came from a cache of the far-right paramilitary militias, and the plane had been in government custody since 2003.

“Unemployed people were picked up, armed, given military supplies and instructed about FARC ideas, and then they ‘surrendered’,” José Alfredo Pacheco, a former FARC insurgent who took part in the farce told La FM radio station in 2008. “Demobilisations of this kind have always been carried out in coordination with the army.”

After a 10-month investigation, the attorney general’s office plans to issue an arrest warrant for Restrepo on Jan. 20 and charge him with fraud, conspiracy to commit a crime, and trafficking of arms.

Army colonels Hugo Castellanos and Jaime Ariza will also be accused, along with Pacheco and other participants, and drug trafficker Hugo Rojas – now in prison in the United States, where he was extradited – who reportedly financed the sham with between 500,000 and one million dollars.

Retired Colonel Castellanos was the liaison officer between then peace commissioner Restrepo and the defence ministry, to deal with the demobilisations of paramilitaries and guerrillas that were frequent during the Uribe administration. And Colonel Ariza was regional head of military intelligence in Tolima.

Restrepo said military intelligence informed him in 2006 of the imminent demobilisation of the Cacica Gaitana unit, and added that the report was “confirmed by then army chief (General) Mario Montoya,” who assigned a helicopter to carry reporters to cover the event.

He also said “the high command were there. What were they doing in that area? Several top generals were in the area where the demobilisation occurred.”

Without going into detail, he said the defence ministry “knows that it was a military operation whose results are secret. Since it involves documents pertaining to national security, they cannot hand them over,” Restrepo said, adding that the classified documents are necessary for him to defend himself in court.

“Why do they insist on keeping that information classified? Why do they deny it? Tell us everything,” Restrepo said in an explosive interview Monday night with the RCN radio station.

He declared himself “opponent number one” of President Juan Manuel Santos, who was Uribe’s defence minister, and asked “What is Santos afraid of? That maybe one of his brilliant officials who are now in the presidency and who were involved with the Cacica Gaitana case until well into 2010, under his ministry, will end up being implicated?

“Yes, there were many military operatives with them,” he added, referring to the fake guerrillas who surrendered with Cacica Gaitana, “and there were high-level defence ministry officials working with them.”

Restrepo urged the government to reveal who in the defence ministry “worked with these gentlemen after and during the ministry of Santos, and what they were involved in.” He also did not rule out the possibility that military intelligence was “deceived.”

Former government minister Camilo González, director of the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (INDEPAZ), said the Cacica Gaitana demobilisation was not the only sham.

According to the Uribe administration, some 52,000 armed fighters laid down their weapons in eight years.

That total includes 32,000 members of the far-right paramilitary militias who surrendered in collective demobilisation ceremonies after controversial negotiations with the Uribe administration.

But only 15,000 people actually handed over weapons in these high-profile ceremonies: 10,000 armed combatants and 5,000 people close to them, who were recruited for the purpose, according to a civil society monitoring committee of which INDEPAZ formed part.

“There were 17,000 false paramilitaries who ‘demobilised’,” said González.

“The demobilisation of Cacica Gaitana was a total parody,” he told IPS. “But that was not the main problem. The big sham was (the paramilitary demobilisation) which was of such dimensions that it was impossible for the highest spheres of government not to know.”

In González’s view, the Uribe government “formed part of the entire farce.”

The demobilised paramilitary chiefs confessed to the prosecutors that the militias “had training schools where the people who showed up at the last minute put on uniforms, got haircuts, and learned to describe where they patrolled, what paramilitary front they were in, and what they did.”

Restrepo, meanwhile, argues that attorney general Morales, to whom he sent a letter containing his accusations, should herself be investigated because she took part in a public forum in Santa Fe de Ralito, where the government and the paramilitaries negotiated the demobilisation agreement.

He also maintained that it was a crime for her husband to be an adviser to paramilitaries and guerrillas, in the search for reconciliation. He alleged that Lucio was involved in negotiations with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez – who helped broker releases of hostages by the FARC – and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

In response to his letter, Morales ordered the investigation of her husband, in which she said she would not take part. She also wondered why Restrepo only called for an investigation of Lucio after the attorney general’s office announced that charges would be brought against the former high peace commissioner.