Unmarked graves of victims of Colombia’s half-century civil war, like this one in La Macarena in central Colombia, are scattered across the country. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Adam Schaffer and Gimena Sanchez
WASHINGTON , Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

After half a century, Colombia may put an end to its conflict—if the U.S. will allow it.

Colombia has been the host of some of the most extreme and brutal violence in Latin America’s history. The country’s half-century long conflict has taken the lives of almost a quarter million women, men, and children, and displaced nearly six million more.

The United States has financed much of the conflict in recent years, investing nine billion dollars since 2000 – much of it to bolster Colombia’s security forces.

Yet peace may be near. On May 16, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest guerrilla group, signed a preliminary accord on the third of five negotiating points in their ongoing peace talks in Havana, Cuba: illicit drugs.

The agreement offers a viable plan for the FARC to end its involvement in the Colombian drug trade, alternatives for small-scale cultivators of crops destined for illicit drug markets, and meaningful policy reforms at the national level for addressing issues of drug consumption and public health.

Hope too lies with an announcement that came earlier the same day. Following national and international pressure – including an inter-parliamentary letter signed by 245 representatives from the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland – the FARC announced a unilateral ceasefire.

While the government maintains that it will not end military operations until an agreement is signed, and though the FARC’s temporary ceasefire ended on May 28, this act is encouraging because it significantly decreased violence and will likely increase confidence at the negotiating table.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, hundreds of thousands of Colombians continue to be affected by the conflict every year. Ensuring that all parties respect international humanitarian law is essential and will likely help to advance the peace talks.

Domestic political shake-ups, though, threaten to disrupt this progress. In the first round of Colombia’s presidential elections on May 25, sitting President Juan Manuel Santos, who began the talks to the dismay of many former political allies, came in second to conservative hardliner Oscar Ivan Zuluaga.

Zuluaga, who is allied with former president (and current senator-elect) Alvaro Uribe, has made clear his scepticism towards the talks.

While he has now softened his stance in advance of the runoff election, his long-time opposition to the process remains concerning. Santos and Zuluaga will face off in a second-round vote on Jun. 15.

A step closer toward meaningful drug policy reform

The accord on the drug issue – declared a “partial agreement,” as no individual agreements are final until all points on the agenda have been agreed upon – is little short of historic.

The language, which was agreed upon by both parties, reflects a significant shift away from the prohibitionist approach to drug policy.

Adopting some of the proposals of the growing community calling for drug policy reform, the accord acknowledges that “evidence-based alternatives” to current policies are needed to address problems that may be associated with drug consumption, and distinguishes between the cultivation of crops for the illicit market and drug trafficking.

Furthermore, it calls for the expansion of crop substitution programmes, recognising that many rural communities rely on coca and opium poppy cultivation for their economic livelihoods.

However, it stipulates that “supportive measures…will be conditioned to…agreements on substitution and no-replanting,” implying that cultivators would be required to cede their earnings from crop cultivation before they see the benefits of alternative crops.

Experience in Latin America has shown that conditioning assistance on total eradication harms the chance of developing lasting alternatives, as cultivators lack a successful bridge between when the cultivation of crops for the illicit market ends and alternative livelihoods become sustainable.

Not surprisingly in these circumstances, many growers return to the cultivation of coca and poppy crops. A more effective model would be to offer a phasing out period and/or subsidies to cultivators until meaningful alternative livelihoods are actually in place.

Yet while proper sequencing on reducing crops for the illicit market will need to be reviewed, the parties get it right on local involvement. Opting for what one Colombian analyst described as “building the state from below,” the development programme would rely heavily on, and actively engage with, local communities to ensure their participation – and hence the programme’s sustainability.

The most monumental point came with the government’s concession to de-prioritise -though not entirely retire – the destructive and ineffective aerial herbicide spraying of coca crops, opting first for alternative development and manual eradication before spraying crops.

In more than a decade of its use in Colombia, aerial spraying has served only to disperse coca crops, destroy poor farmers’ livelihoods, and engender local distrust for government authorities, as the only contact many communities have had with the state has been the occasional visit of a plane spraying crops.

The agreement also addresses drug consumption, an issue generally thought to be outside the purview of the peace talks. While details here are scant, linking this issue to the peace talks will help continue regional debates on drug policy reform. Recognising that drug policy should be based on respect for human rights and public health is a valuable contribution.

But a full agreement, if eventually signed, will not be a panacea. Taking the FARC out of the cultivation and trafficking business will not independently solve the drug issue or the associated violence.

As long as there is worldwide – and particularly U.S. – demand for drugs, criminal organisations will find a way to supply them. Furthermore, an accord will likely leave a power vacuum in rural regions of the country as the FARC demobilises and cedes those territories.

There is a good chance that right-wing paramilitary successor groups and criminal gangs will try to fill it. Establishing a positive state presence and providing basic services will be a major challenge, especially in regions where the armed forces have been the primary face of the state.

Supporting peace from Washington

Because of these continued challenges, the United States has an important role to play in the implementation phase, both in supporting Colombia financially and in granting the Colombian government political space to implement the accords – even when they contradict U.S. policy priorities.

A State Department communiqué on the drug policy agreement, which highlights the continuation of forced eradication, raises questions about whether the United States will help or hinder the advancement of the peace process.
Nearly two of every three aid dollars destined for Colombia goes to the public security forces. Will the U.S. government be willing to shift aid to build peace rather than continue war?

Achieving durable reductions in poppy and coca crop cultivation for illicit drug production will require implementing alternative livelihoods and connecting long-forgotten rural areas with the national infrastructure.

After decades of waging a largely ineffective “war on drugs” in Colombia, will the United States allow its long-time ally to break with the prohibition-focused model and explore alternatives to the current militarised approach? Some of the most revolutionary agreements in the accord, such as all but ending aerial spraying, would challenge the existing U.S. approach.

These questions, and the many more that will be raised as the talks progress, will likely dismay hardliners in the U.S. government who are not ready to shift drug control tactics.

But with little progress to show after decades of violence and billions of dollars spent, the Colombian and FARC negotiators have made an important step toward ending decades of violence. The United States should stand ready to support Colombia, both financially and politically, in the coming months and years – and it should know when to stand down.

Adam Schaffer is an analyst with the Drug Policy and Colombia programme at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which promotes human rights, democracy, and social justice by working with partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to shape policies in the United States and abroad.  Gimena Sanchez is a Senior Associate for the Andes at WOLA. This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.

The Autana tepuy or mesa – a national park and the “tree of life” for the Uwottyja Indians, seen from the river. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
PUERTO AYACUCHO, Venezuela , Nov 26 2013 (IPS)

The presence of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is evident in Venezuela’s Amazon region, where the guerrillas can be seen on speed boats, in camps, or interacting with local indigenous communities.

“We see them once in a while passing by in a boat in the evening, dressed in green, armed, carrying supplies,” a veteran boatman, Antonio, told IPS standing next to the dark waters of the Cuao river, which runs into the Orinoco river in the southern Venezuelan state of Amazonas on the Colombian border.

Some 100 km to the south, in Maroa, a town of 2,000 people on the banks of the
Guainía river, which forms part of the border, “when the food for the Mercal [the government chain of stores selling food at heavily subsidised prices] arrives, part of it goes to the guys in the FARC,” a local told Catholic Bishop José Ángel Divassón, vicar apostolic in Amazonas.

And in Atabapo, another border town, “the FARC keep order and prevent theft,” while in indigenous communities “they try to set up camps and recruit young guys, who they offer work for three years,” he added.

Amazonas is a mineral-rich rainforest state with abundant rivers in southernmost Venezuela. Its huge 184,000-sq-km territory is home to just 180,000 people, 54 percent of whom belong to 20 different indigenous groups according to the 2011 census.

The presence of armed groups from Colombia is the latest affliction for this region which already suffers from isolation, a dearth of basic public services, and a lack of interest in its voters at election time, due to the sparse population and high poverty level.

The local environment and traditional indigenous ways of life have long been vulnerable to the impacts of activities such as illegal gold mining, which is only the most visible.

Amazonas governor Liborio Guarulla, an indigenous man who is a veteran left-wing leader opposed to the country’s leftist central government, estimates that there may be up to 4,000 Colombian guerrillas in this vast state.

In Puerto Ayacucho, the state capital, Guarulla told reporters that “five kilometres from here, they have held meetings with local shopkeepers to demand payment of a ‘vacuna’ [‘vaccine’ or war tax].”

The governor, who belongs to the Progressive Movement of Venezuela, believes the arrival of the FARC to Amazonas “is a result of the offensive unleashed by the army in their country in the last seven years, against the columns that they had as a rearguard in eastern Colombia, which have now spilt across the border.”

The FARC, which took up arms in 1964, is the oldest left-wing insurgent group in Latin America. Since November 2012 it has been involved in peace talks with the Colombian government in Cuba.

In May, FARC rebels under the command of Antonio Medina made contact with leaders of the Uwottyja or Piaroa indigenous community, who live along the middle stretch of the Orinoco – Venezuela’s biggest river – and its tributaries, to establish a cooperative relationship, José Carmona, the shaman of the Caño de Uña community, told IPS.

“We told them no, that both their presence and that of the miners offend our traditions because we are peoples who want to live without weapons – we only have machetes for our crops and shotguns for hunting,” Carmona said.

After the meetings, Uwottyja organisations issued a public letter addressed to the FARC in which they expressed “our total disagreement with your presence and movements in our territory.”

The Uwottyja also said they rejected trading with the FARC “or the hiring of indigenous persons” by the guerrillas, and urged the insurgents “to find a way to return to your country”.

César Sanguinetti, a lawmaker with the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela and a member of the Curripaco indigenous community, who live in the south of Amazonas and the southeast of Colombia, told IPS that “we are a sovereign country that should not permit incursions by any kind of armed force, and as a nation and a government, we demand respect.”

Other local indigenous people such as Uwottyja schooteacher Juan Pablo Arana and Yanomami health worker Luis Shatiwe say the guerrillas are aggravating the problems faced by native communities in obtaining supplies, because in order to acquire food, fuel and other goods indigenous people have to compete with those who smuggle contraband across the border.

“We travel hours to get flour, sugar, oil, rice or coffee, sometimes going all the way to Puerto Ayacucho,” Arana told IPS in the Raudal de Seguera community at the foot of the Autana tepuy – a mountain with vertical sides and a flat top – which is sacred to his people.

“And it’s expensive because of the cost of gasoline and oil [for the boat or canoe engines], and sometimes we get there and the products have run out in the Mercal shops.”

Venezuela’s gasoline is the cheapest in the world at 1.5 cents of a dollar per litre. But prices here suffer from other kinds of distortions.

A 200-litre barrel, which costs 20 bolivars in Puerto Ayacucho – as much as a can of soda – “costs thousands of bolivars on the upper stretch of the Orinoco, up to 8,000 or 10,000. Indigenous people’s canoes are closely inspected by the military, but apparently they let the boats of the miners or smugglers go by,” Shatiwe said.

Hundreds of small-scale miners pan for gold in Amazonas, even though mining is banned in this state.

And Guarulla remarked that “A shipment of 100,000 litres of gasoline that reaches the town of Maroa, which has only one power plant, runs out in just three days. Who is it being sold to?”

Divassón said “The big problems that we have identified are illegal mining, which destroys the habitat of the communities, the presence of irregular armed forces from Colombia, and sensitive issues like the lack of electricity, problems with other services, and scarcity of goods, and insecurity.”

What does reach Amazonas is the sharp political polarisation seen in the rest of the country. The sheet metal roofing for homes in indigenous communities is red if it was donated by the government of President Nicolás Maduro, or blue if it came from Governor Guarulla.

FARC negotiators in Havana speak to the press in November 2012. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 23 2013 (IPS)

Colombia’s FARC guerrillas announced Friday a “pause” in the peace talks in Havana, which formally opened a year ago. But analysts say it is only a temporary glitch.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos unexpectedly announced Thursday that he had introduced a fast-track bill in Congress to hold a referendum in which voters would approve or reject any peace agreement reached with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

The president said it would be best for the referendum to coincide with the March 2014 legislative elections, although he left open the possibility of it being held in May 2014 instead, during the presidential elections, when he is expected to run for re-election.

Colombia’s laws do not allow referendums to be held simultaneously with elections. The reform presented by Santos would make that possible.

That would formally set a deadline for the peace talks, even though the agreement to negotiate, published in September 2012, did not contemplate any time limits.

A clause in that agreement states that neither of the two sides will leave the negotiating table until a final accord has been reached. Norway and Cuba are guarantors of the peace talks, and Venezuela and Chile are observers.

Prior to the current crisis, sources knowledgeable about the negotiations said a final peace agreement could be ready in the first few months of 2014.

The sixth point in the document published in September 2012 includes the discussion of a referendum or another mechanism for approval of the final peace deal. But that question has only been addressed informally in Havana.

According to official reports, agreement has only been reached on the first point on the agenda – integral agrarian development – in the talks so far, although there are still key details to be worked out on that question.

The negotiators are reportedly discussing the second point, regarding rights and guarantees for the opposition, access to the media, and mechanisms of citizen participation, including guarantees of safety and equal conditions for vulnerable segments of the population.

Conflict and peace analyst Carlos Velandia said the talks in Havana “are much more advanced than what they have told us.”

He said progress has been made on several aspects of the agenda, although it is not clear which ones.

Historian Carlos Medina Gallego tweeted that “Conflict occurs in peace talks when one side takes decisions outside of what was agreed and seeks to impose its will on the other.”

The “pause” introduced by the FARC apparently indicates that there is no agreement on the mechanism for voters to approve an eventual peace accord.

The rebel group wants a constituent assembly to be elected, to rewrite the constitution.

But serious problems with the electoral system that have been denounced, such as vote-buying, raise fears that politicians with funds from drug trafficking and corruption would win a majority of seats on the assembly.

Nor is any parallel reform planned in the legislature, where the conservative president’s supporters hold a broad majority of seats, to resolve issues like low voter turnout or barriers that make it virtually impossible for voters in remote communities to participate in elections.

The communist FARC was founded in 1964, as was the second-largest insurgent group, the pro-Fidel Castro National Liberation Army (ELN), which was influenced by liberation theology, a current in the Roman Catholic Church which finds in the teachings of Jesus Christ a call to free people from unjust economic, political, or social conditions.

Discreet exploratory talks with the ELN have taken place since Santos took office in August 2010, but with ups and downs that led to a breakdown.

However, this week there were signals that the exploratory talks may resume.

According to Velandia, a former ELN leader who spent time in prison for his involvement in the guerrilla group, said the “pause” in the talks between the FARC and the government “is a temporary situation.”

“The FARC will certainly not leave the negotiating table,” he told IPS. “But the government’s actions have done a great deal of damage to the talks and could slow down the process.”

José Jairo González, an analyst with the Centro de Estudios Regionales del Sur, a local think tank, told IPS that “I don’t think it is the government’s intention to try to impose the referendum at any price.

“This is a reasonable pause to look at the limits and reach of the referendum and the prior conditions for participation in the (legislative) elections in March or the presidential elections,” said the analyst, who studies Colombia’s nearly half-century armed conflict.

González added that the referendum could not be held under the current electoral system, “which is being questioned; that’s what the FARC is saying.”

The referendum would have to be decided on by the new legislature elected in March.

In any case, it is not clear in Santos’ bill when a special constituency would be created to allow FARC representatives to run for Congress.

The FARC’s “pause” coincides with a national strike launched Monday Aug. 19 by coffee, cacao, potato and rice farmers, cargo truckers, gold miners and health workers, who have blocked key roads. There have been violent clashes between strikers and the riot police.

Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez played a decisive role in bringing about the exploratory talks with the FARC, which apparently began in early 2011.

Hundreds of families hope the remains of loved ones forcibly “disappeared” in the war will be found in cemeteries full of unidentified bodies, like this one in La Macarena in central Colombia. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By AJ Correspondents
DOHA, Jul 25 2013 (Al Jazeera)

Almost a quarter of a million Colombians have been killed in the country’s internal conflict since 1958, most of them civilians, a government-funded report has said.

The much-anticipated report was produced by the National Centre of Historical Memory, which was created under a 2011 law designed to indemnify victims of the conflict and return stolen land.

The law prefaced peace talks now being held in Cuba with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s main leftist rebel group.

The 434-page report, titled “Enough Already: Memories of War and Dignity”, says most of the killings occurred after far-right militias backed by ranchers and cocaine traffickers emerged in the 1980s to counter the FARC and other leftwing insurgent groups.

The report said that more than four out of every five victims were civilian non-combatants.

“We all deserve to know the truth, we all deserve to understand what happened in our rural areas and cities, and only then will we be able to say forcefully: ‘Stop!’ Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said at the presidential palace on Wednesday, when the study was released. “Only in a Colombia without fear and with truth can we begin to turn the page.”

Living in fear

The government has been in peace talks with the FARC since November. While human rights violations have receded, the report painted a grim picture of bloodshed from the height of the conflict until 2012.

Colombia’s armed forces, backed by billions of dollars in U.S. aid, have used better intelligence and logistics over the last decade to combat the illegal armed groups, pushing their fighters deep into the country’s jungles.

“It’s a war that has left most of the country in mourning, but very unevenly. It’s a war whose victims are, in the vast majority, non-combatant civilians. It’s a depraved war that has broken all humanitarian rules,” said Gonzalo Sanchez, director of the centre, who presented the report to Santos.

In over half a century, the war killed 220,000 Colombians, more than 177,300, or 80 percent, of whom were civilians, according to the report. Another 40,787 members of the armed forces, paramilitary and rebels groups were killed in combat.

The 400-page study, packed with shocking photos of victims, was conducted in some of Colombia’s most volatile areas, where communities have lived in fear for decades.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Navi Pillay at a press conference in the Palais des Nations, Geneva. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

The Colombian army killed Marta Díaz’s son Douglas in 2006, dressed him in combat fatigues and reported him as a FARC guerrilla killed in a shootout. Díaz searched for him everywhere, in prisons, hospitals and morgues, until she finally managed to track down his remains in 2008.

Douglas was just another “false positive” – the euphemism used in this South American country to describe army killings of young civilians passed off as guerrilla casualties.

Since then, Díaz, an activist with the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), has helped hundreds of other mothers who have lost their sons.

“Last year I received 27 death threats. And there have been seven so far this year,” she told IPS.

On Wednesday, Díaz was at the Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, established by the city government to promote debate and actions to document what is happening in Colombia’s decades-long civil war.“Last year I received 27 death threats. And there have been seven so far this year” -- Marta Díaz.

Seven human rights umbrella groups representing more than 400 organisations met this week with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay and Anders Kompass, her director of field operations and technical cooperation.

Many victims like Díaz were in the packed auditorium. Pillay and Kompass heard more than 100 three-minute speeches.

Closing the office

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced Tuesday that he would close the Colombia office of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Díaz said the fact that the announcement was made just when Pillay was starting a four-day visit to Colombia indicated that it was aimed at “confounding her and all of us human rights defenders, to get us all to fight to prevent the OHCHR from pulling out.”

The strategy was to divert attention from denunciations of human rights violations, which would be overshadowed by the news, Díaz said.

“It surprised me as much as it did the rest of you,” Pillay said on Wednesday, referring to the president’s announcement.

“We don’t need a U.N. human rights office in our country anymore,” Santos stated in an address given in Bogotá, which reached Pillay when she was in Santander de Quilichao, in the war-torn southwestern province of Cauca.

Pillay travelled to Cauca to meet for several hours with leaders of black, indigenous and rural communities who had plenty to say about the need for multilateral bodies to continue monitoring human rights in this country.

The OHCHR office in Colombia opened in 1997, and each renewal of its mandate has been preceded by a quiet diplomatic tug-of-war.

The authorities’ dislike of the U.N. office peaked after the May 2002 massacre in the village of Bojayá, where 119 people were killed and 98 injured after villagers took refuge in the church.

Shortly before they fled, the leftwing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), who were lobbing homemade mortars at far-right paramilitary fighters who had set up camp behind the church, hit the building with a gas cylinder bomb that veered off course.

Kompass, the OHCHR representative in Colombia at the time, went on a mission to the village of Bojayá, on the Atrato river in northwestern Chocó province.

In his report, Kompass said all of the armed parties to the conflict had to answer for the massacre: the FARC guerrillas, who bombed the church; the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) – since demobilised in talks with the government – which had occupied the village; and the state itself.

The government of then-President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) criticised the report, and the army’s Fourth Brigade said it did not “share unfounded versions which are aimed at showing possible ties between the army and navy and the illegal (paramilitary) self-defence groups.”

From Geneva, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson intervened in support of Kompass.

But on Jun. 14, 2002, Kompass’s mission in Colombia was abruptly cut short. His removal was the condition set by the government to keep the OHCHR office open.

Kompass is now the person who names the directors of the OHCHR country offices. For example, he designated Todd Howland to head the Colombia office, who at the start was seen by activists as too quiet.

But on Jul. 10, Howland issued a harshly worded report on what happened during protests by peasant farmers in Catatumbo, an impoverished area in northeast Colombia on the border with Venezuela.

The peasants in Catatumbo, who have been protesting for over a month, are demanding that the area be declared a “peasant reserve” and that a scheme be adopted that would allow them, in an organised manner, to stop producing coca – their main livelihood in the isolated, roadless area — and switch to alternative crops.

But no progress has been made towards an official declaration of the peasant reserve, and the government instead ordered the eradication of coca crops by force in June. The crackdown on the protests has left four dead and 15 injured.

Howland reported grave violations of economic, social and cultural rights in the Catatumbo region. He also said that during the crackdown on the protests shots were fired from high-powered rifles that are usually used by the security forces, which indicated “excessive use of force” against the demonstrators.

High-level Colombian officials accused the OHCHR office of exceeding its mandate, just a few days ahead of the second visit to the country by Pillay, who before being named to her current post served as a judge on the International Criminal Court, which has Colombia under observation.

Body count scandal

Pillay’s first visit was in October 2008, when the “false positives” scandal broke out, involving the killings of at least 1,416 people by the security forces as a result of the “body count” system. This army strategy used incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to reward soldiers and officers for “results” in the counterinsurgency effort.

The bodies of the victims, some of whom were lured from poor neighbourhoods by false job promises and then killed, were presented as guerrillas killed in combat.

Although extrajudicial executions have been committed for over three decades in Colombia, the statistics show that the number of “false positives” shot up during the government of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

According to Javier Giraldo, the priest who directs the human rights and political violence data bank of the Jesuit Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP), it is “very worrisome that the peak in false positives killings occurred from 2006 to 2008 – just when President Santos served as defence minister.”

Santos was defence minister from July 2006 to May 2009. The CINEP data bank documented 918 “false positives” between 2006 and 2008.

Reports of killings of this kind dropped to 18 a year in 2009 and 2010, before increasing to 85 in 2011 and falling again to 52 in 2012.

Santos claims that he worked to put an end to the practice when he was defence minister. “We changed the doctrine,” he said on Thursday – thus acknowledging that there was a specific “body count” strategy.

But according to the president, “the country’s need for a United Nations Human Rights Office…has gradually disappeared.

”I’m going to tell (Pillay) that we are discussing whether extending the mandate is really worth it. Or, if it is extended, it would be for a very short time, because Colombia has made enough progress to say: ‘We don’t need any more United Nations human rights offices in our country’,” he added.

Various U.N. sources, as well as international affairs expert Laura Gil, have been telling IPS over the last three years that the government was hoping to close down the U.N. office.

The sources said Santos wanted to shed Colombia’s reputation of having the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere, in order to request admission to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the 34-member-strong nations club, which aims to sets high human rights standards.

They explained that being under OHCHR monitoring was not compatible with membership in the OECD.

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

The synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Excerpt:

Schoolchildren in Quibdó, the capital of Chocó, a province where displacement is on the rise. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Jun 4 2013 (IPS)

Drugs and arms traffickers are muscling in on Colombia’s Pacific coastal region, forcibly displacing local people, according to a new report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).

One of the factors forcing people to leave their homes is “disputes and strategies to consolidate control over territories by the armed actors,” said Marco Romero, the head of CODHES, at the launch of the report titled “La crisis humanitaria en Colombia persiste: El Pacífico en disputa” (Colombia’s humanitarian crisis continues: The disputed Pacific region) on May 31.

Displacement in the region “is a consequence of its geographical location, as well as neglect by the state, which has benefited the drug trade. In addition the government policy known as ‘locomotora minera’ (‘drive for mining,’ a policy to foment large-scale mining) has increased production since 2009, and with it, the ambition of the armed factions,” Romero said.

Colombia’s internal armed conflict has dragged on since the early 1960s. Now the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are holding peace talks in Havana. But there are a number of other armed groups in this country, including drug trafficking syndicates and far-right paramilitary militias.

The report by CODHES, which is the most respected non-governmental source of statistics on displacement, says that last year 92,596 people were forced to flee their homes in the country’s Pacific region – 36 percent of the 2012 victims of forced displacement nationwide.

Since 1999, over 860,000 people have been displaced in the Pacific region, according to CODHES. The worst year for the region was 2012, when the number rose by 22 percent compared with 2011.

Nationwide, there were 256,590 cases of displacement last year, some 2,500 fewer than in 2011, when the number totalled 259,146.

But the number of cases of mass displacement in 2012 was 98 percent higher than in 2011.

“Mass displacement is the term used when a single episode of violence forces the migration of at least 10 families or 50 people,” CODHES researcher Paola Hurtado told IPS.

In the Pacific region, mass displacements have increased by 45 percent over the last two years.

Afro-Colombian and indigenous people, who live mainly in the western Pacific coastal departments (provinces) of Nariño, Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Chocó, are the most affected. In 2012, an estimated total of 51,938 blacks and 18,154 native people in this region were victims of forced displacement.

“The situation of Afro-descendant people is terrible,” Ariel Palacios, of the National Conference of Afro-Colombian Organisations (CNOA), said at the presentation of the report.

“Government protection policies are ineffective, and racism is rife in the cities. That’s why most Afro-Colombians try to relocate in small towns or villages, to mitigate the gravity of their situation,” Palacios said.

A newer aspect is intra-urban displacement, within or between cities, to which CODHES devotes part of its report, attributing it to disputes between criminal bands for control of small-scale drug dealing.

Romero said, “Paradoxical as it may seem, in the midst of conflict and the humanitarian crisis, the country is seeking peaceful solutions and reparations for the victims, with Law 1,448 and the peace talks between the national government and the FARC.”

He was referring to the Victims and Land Restitution Law, which began to be enforced in 2012 in response to the main injustice arising from the war, the other side of the coin of displacement: illegal appropriation of land.

The law “is a positive development because it accords recognition to victims and acknowledges that, if the state was not capable of protecting them in the past, it must do so now,” Gabriel Rojas, CODHES’s research coordinator, told IPS.

“It’s also positive that economic resources have been assigned,” amounting to some 30 million dollars, he said.

“However, we know, and the outgoing agriculture minister (Juan Camilo Restrepo) has admitted, that there are serious problems with organisational aspects and registration, which have caused difficulties and in some cases re-victimised people, who suffer anxiety knowing there is a law to protect them and yet, a year and a half later, implementation lags far behind,” Rojas said.

Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world. Civil society organisations and official estimates put the number of displaced since the 1980s at over five million people in this country of approximately 46 million people.

The situation reached such a pass that in 1998 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) opened a permanent office in Bogotá.

IPS requested comments and statistical information from the government’s Unit for Care and Comprehensive Reparations for Victims, and was promised a reply, “which would not be immediate,” on condition the request was sent by e-mail.

“The lack of official statistics is becoming a problem. The last known figure for the total of Afro-Colombian people affected by forced displacement in 2012 was about 90,000, but there is no certainty,” Rojas said.

Land reform was the first item on the agenda of Colombia’s peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Patricia Grogg and Constanza Vieira
HAVANA/BOGOTA, May 27 2013 (IPS)

Colombian government and guerrilla delegates have announced an agreement on the question of land reform – an important step in the peace talks that began six months ago in Havana.

“This first document…is the ‘golden gate’ for the continuation of talks on the rest of the issues,” FARC negotiator Andrés París commented to IPS shortly after Sunday’s announcement.

“This is a firm step towards a final agreement to end the conflict,” he said, adding that the peace process “is being strengthened as the government’s spirit of change and reform grows stronger and as Colombians begin to see a future of peace in these talks, as well as changes that benefit them and improve their living conditions.”

A Latin American diplomat close to the talks told IPS that it was important that the positions of the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents had come closer together on the question of rural development, and that the talks could now move forward on other issues on the agenda.

Land reform is the first item on the agenda for the peace talks aimed at putting an end to the conflict that began in 1964, when the FARC emerged on the scene.

The document on “integral land reform” clarifies however that implementation depends on the talks reaching a final peace accord, as one of the principles guiding the process is that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

Accords on different points on the agenda “will only be applied once we have an overall agreement to end the conflict. In other words: there will be no partial application of the accords,” said chief government negotiator Humberto de la Calle.

FARC chief Iván Márquez said the agreement on land reform was vague on some points, “which will necessarily have to be taken up again before a final agreement is reached.”

These specific aspects apparently include the maximum permitted extension of large landed estates and foreign-owned rural property.

“Everything will be done with full respect for private property and the rule of law. Legal property owners have nothing to fear,” said de la Calle, who added that the agreement would radically transform rural Colombia and that it went beyond the traditional view of agrarian reform and was aimed at closing the gap between rural and urban Colombia.

FARC sources have told IPS that in Colombia, where no real land reform process has ever been carried out, there are estates of up to 100,000 hectares in size, while 87 percent of peasants have no land.

And according to the Gini Index, which measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, land concentration in Colombia increased in the last decade from 0.74 to 0.87 – one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world.

The joint communiqué says the agreement on land issues would mean the start of radical transformations of rural Colombia, based on equality and democracy, by granting access to land for the largest possible number of landless peasants by means of a land bank, or “Fondo de Tierras para la Paz”.

The accord also covers housing plans, the provision of tap water, technical assistance and training, access to education, formal land titling, infrastructure, and soil recovery. “The agreement seeks to reverse the effects of the conflict and restore land to the victims of dispossession and forced displacement,” the document states.

“With the future generations of Colombians in mind, the accord delimits the agricultural frontier, protecting areas of special environmental interest,” it adds.

In addition, it says a food and nutrition system would be put in place as a form of social protection, to eradicate hunger.

The next round of talks, set to begin on Jun. 11, will focus on the question of political participation – FARC’s transition to a legal political movement. Other points on the agenda are an end to the armed conflict, the drug trade, victims’ rights and reparations, and mechanisms to oversee implementation of the agreements.

President Santos called the agreement on land issues “a fundamental step towards a final accord to put an end to half a century of conflict.”

“We will continue the process in a prudent and responsible fashion,” he wrote on Twitter.

In this stage of the talks, “these accords cannot be very concrete; they are just a framework,” sociologist Alfredo Molano, an expert on the conflict over land, told IPS.

A similar process will now follow with the remaining five points on the agenda, and after that, concrete details and numbers will be hashed out.

Molano stressed that the aspects on which agreement was reached included the gradual process of issuing formal title to all of the land occupied or possessed by peasants in Colombia.

“We’re talking about two million hectares,” he told IPS. “Today there are six peasant reserve zones (ZRCs) with a total of 800,000 hectares, and another five, covering 1.2 million hectares, are in the process of being created.”

The ZRCs are areas of collectively-owned rural land. But although they were recognised by law in 1994, they continue to battle for full recognition.

They curb the constant encroachment of the agricultural frontier in forested areas, and are considered a good formula to curtail the steady growth of latifundios or large landed estates.

Coal mining company Prodeco's port terminal in the Colombian city of Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 9 2013 (IPS)

“I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don’t write down where I’m from, let alone my name,” said a 40-year-old black man frightened for his safety. IPS agreed to say only that he is from Colombia’s southern Pacific coast region.

Two leftwing guerrilla movements are active in the biodiverse area between Colombia’s Andes mountains and the coast. The larger group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is currently engaged in peace negotiations with the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, and the smaller one, the National Liberation Army (ELN), is expected to start peace talks soon.

Far-right paramilitary groups are also operating in the region, termed by the authorities “bacrim” (from “bandas criminales” or criminal bands), after the demobilisation negotiated during the administration of former rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). The paramilitaries are the only armed sector that is growing in numbers.

The illegal armed groups are now involved in artisanal gold mining, which has long been practiced in the area. Production and trafficking of cocaine are apparently in decline in the south of the Pacific coast region. “Gold is the business now,” the displaced source said.

He said gold generates between 13 and 23 times more net profit now than cocaine in the southwest of Colombia, near the Ecuadorean border.

But to extract gold, initial capital is needed. And mining brings conflicts in its wake.

In the last 20 years, Colombia has been transformed radically, as it became a mineral and oil producing country. And its institutions have not yet adjusted to the new reality.

These are the conclusions arrived at by experts who talked to IPS at the presentation of “Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el model extractivista” (Mining in Colombia: A basis for improving the extractivist model), the most complete study to date, and the first of a series of reports from the comptroller-general’s office, the country’s highest fiscal control agency.

For six months, economist Luis Jorge Garay led the group of co-authors, made up of experts Julio Fierro, Guillermo Rudas, Álvaro Pardo, Fernando Vargas, Mauricio Cabrera, Rodrigo Negrete and Jorge Espitia.

The speakers during the Monday, May 6 launch of the report were former environment minister Manuel Rodríguez; Jorge Iván González, head of the National University of Colombia’s Centre for Economic Studies; and constitutional law expert Rodrigo Uprimny, head of the local NGO Dejusticia.

“This study is extremely important,” Rodríguez said. “For the first time, the complexity of mining in all its facets has been analysed in one volume, including environmental, social, legal and economic aspects.”

The report “indicates that we are undertaking mining with very little regard for the enormous social and environmental costs involved,” he said.

The 1991 constitution establishes a series of fundamental rights that have, however, been eroded when it comes to mining regulations. A government official can adopt a measure that runs counter to the constitution, but will take precedence in practice.

“For the last two or three decades, the state has been giving up a large part of its potential share in legal mining profits,” said Rudas, an economist. “The problem is not only illegal mining, but legal mining too, which is not yielding enough returns for the country to have a strong state that can afford to solve its other problems.”

Comptroller General Sandra Morelli said “the Colombian state has been considerably weakened, and it is not a question of size but of technical capacity and legal powers to intervene in a much more timely manner, to prevent the public interest from being harmed.”

Mining brings 1.1 billion dollars a year to Colombia, according to Morelli. “But the question is whether this sum is sufficient compensation for the impact of mining activity,” she said.

Colombia’s main mineral products are coal, nickel and gold, for which it is the world’s tenth, seventh and 22nd largest producer, respectively.

“There is an idea in Colombia that foreign investment must be attracted by offering gifts. This is not true. Foreign investment goes where there are resources, but even more to where there are clear rules,” said Garay, who coordinated the study.

“The report shows that mining, while it is promising, also entails enormous dangers,” said Uprimny. These range from environmental hazards, harm to indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, and disputes over land, to the possible intensification of armed conflict and forced displacement.

The study “makes recommendations to strengthen environmental regulations and legal regulatory powers. It is a very important report in a country that has become a mining nation,” said the expert on constitutional law.

“Environmental licences (to conduct mining operations) are given to anyone who asks; only three percent of applications are denied,” said Uprimny.

The displaced man, who attended the launch of the report, is part of the affected minorities – and of the three percent who are refused mining licences. “Afro-descendant communities are not given mining permits. We are told that we do not meet the requirements,” he said.

“In geographic terms, there is overlap of areas where displacement has occurred and where licences have been applied for or granted,” said report co-author Fernando Vargas, a lawyer and sociologist.

“Especially in the ancestral territories (of indigenous and black communities), gold mining is generating extremely serious tensions and humanitarian crises, violations of international humanitarian law and serious and systematic violations of human rights,” he said.

By Clara Nieto
BOGOTA, May 7 2013 (IPS)

The crisis in Venezuela caused by the violent opposition of followers of Henrique Capriles, who is accusing President Nicolás Maduro of election fraud, and peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in Havana, are occupying the attention of national and foreign media.

Cuba and Norway are guarantors of the Colombian peace negotiations, and Venezuela and Chile are observers. Commentators and analysts of all stripes are wondering about the role of Venezuela and its late president Hugo Chávez (who died of cancer Mar. 5), and of Cuba and the Castro brothers, in this process that aims to end 50 years of armed conflict.

Achieving peace is a priority for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Bogotá and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) chose Havana as the location for the talks. Cuba has been a friendly nation to the guerrillas, which gives them confidence and a sense of security.

Clara Nieto. Credit: Margarita Carrillo/IPS

However, according to José Arbesú, a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of Cuba, his country has not given the Colombian insurgents arms or funding, as it did in the case of Central American rebels decades ago when they were involved in civil wars against brutal and corrupt dictatorships.

Santos sought an understanding with Cuba, talked of inviting the country to be an observer at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a United States-backed project that excluded the Caribbean island nation, and sought the support of Fidel Castro and President Raúl Castro to hold secret exploratory talks with the FARC in Cuba. These led to a 10-point agenda that is the basis of the current negotiations.

Venezuela and Chávez supported Colombia in this. Santos reestablished good bilateral relations with Venezuela, broken off during the government of former president Álvaro Uribe, and created an atmosphere of peace and collaboration. Recently he stated that this support was crucial for achieving essential agreements in Havana.

Chávez, a friend to the FARC, regarded the Colombian conflict as a threat to the security of Venezuela. A solution was necessary to remove a pretext for the United States to intervene in their countries, he said. Venezuela is surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Caribbean, including seven in Colombian territory that former president Uribe ceded to the United States.

Peace in Colombia is a security issue for Venezuela, and also for Ecuador. Leftist insurgents and far-right paramilitaries cross their porous borders freely, and thousands of undocumented Colombian refugees flock to the neighbouring nations, fleeing the conflict and the chemical spraying intended to eradicate coca crops (ordered by the United States) that poisons their families and animals, and destroys the soil and subsistence crops.

Chávez, the main challenger to Washington’s influence in Latin America, was the architect, along with former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of regional integration systems that exclude the United States (such as the Union of South American Nations, UNASUR).

Chávez was more than a pebble in Uncle Sam’s shoe, and it is in the U.S.’s interests to eradicate Chavismo. This poses a major threat to President Maduro, his successor.

The Venezuelan right, headed by Capriles and supported by the international far right, is already on the move against the new president, purportedly “in defence” of Venezuelan democracy which it claims was violated and abused by “the dictator” Chávez.

Meanwhile, the moment is ripe for Colombia’s peace plans. The most influential leftwing leaders in the continent, Chávez and Fidel Castro, repeatedly stated that the time for armed struggle was over. Chávez asked the FARC to release their hostages unconditionally and to end the fighting.

The conservative Santos, for his part, has co-opted some of the leftwing rebels’ core demands, such as redistribution of land to the destitute and to those whose land was taken by paramilitaries and guerrillas, and offering compensation for victims.

Times have indeed changed.

Uribe’s government, in which Santos was defence minister, hit the FARC hard and killed several of its top leaders. The guerrillas were not defeated, but they have been weakened.

The negotiations are taking place in the midst of conflict, and peace would be a boon. But they are demanding structural changes to ensure an equitable country – Colombia is the most unequal country in Latin America – with opportunities, land, health and education for all.

The Colombian far right, with Uribe at the head, is mobilising against the peace process, and encouraging discontent in the armed forces against the government.

And, if not U.S. President Barack Obama himself, the U.S. Southern Command is also active. General John Kelly, its commander, spoke at length in a presentation to Congress on Mar. 20 about the regional danger represented by the FARC, saying they had acquired surface-to-air missiles and submarines that could reach Florida, Texas or California in 10 to 12 days, and could travel as far as Africa.

Such statements could influence the Colombian military, which is hostile to negotiations with the guerrillas, and undermine the peace process. Kelly mentioned the joint operations carried out with the Colombian army against the FARC – an intervention in internal affairs and public order in the country – and he spoke in favour of the continuation of military action against the guerrillas.

The media are closely observing both these conflicts. In Colombia, most media outlets support the peace process. In Venezuela it remains to be seen whether Chavismo, without Chávez, will fully back Maduro, who is faced with a difficult scenario. There are many who are trying to not let him govern. Colombia needs peace in its important neighbour, and ought to have Venezuela’s support. Maduro has promised that it will.

* Clara Nieto is a writer and diplomat, former Colombian ambassador to the United Nations and author of the book “Obama y la nueva izquierda latinoamericana” (Obama and the New Latin American Left).

Excerpt:

Colombia has suffered an internal armed conflict for so many decades that it almost amounts to a “forgotten crisis” for external donors. But the president of neighbouring Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is well aware of the conflict, and understands that it destabilises Latin America, where centre-left governments proliferate.

“He is a man who is determined (to find) a political solution, and to bring peace to this country. He did not lose the sense that Colombia deserves a better fate,” a source familiar with the ongoing negotiations between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas, told IPS on condition of anonymity.

Chavez “has understood that this internal conflict causes tremendous damage to the country, but that it is also a destabilising factor in the region,” he said.

Amid the secrecy, the government and people familiar with the negotiations agree that the Venezuelan president has played a cardinal role in the current peace efforts.

The outbreak of civil war in this country dates to 1946, and in its current phase persists between the state security forces and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), both guerrilla groups that emerged in 1964.

Apparently, Santos told Chavez about his intention to explore a peace agreement with the guerrillas in a meeting in August 2010, during the early days of Santos’ administration.

The negotiations with FARC are no longer secret, but IPS has learned that separate talks with ELN are also moving forward.

Inquiries by IPS found that, with great courage, Chavez encouraged FARC leaders to accept Santos’ gestures. The Venezuelan leader’s initiative was also endorsed by Cuban President Raul Castro.

The proposal probably came as a surprise to FARC, whose leaders finally said “Yes” to the negotiations.

The source close to the talks said that the decision was approved by all of the guerrilla leaders, though some had recorded their written reservations over secondary issues, such as whether the timing was right or if the guerrillas were contributing to the popularity of Santos, which was indeed what happened.

Chavez not only approached the parties, but has acted decisively as the facilitator.

The first contact between the Santos government and FARC took place in the Colombian territory of Catatumbo, on the border with Venezuela, according to Mauricio Jaramillo, the nom de guerre of Jaime Alberto Parra, one of the guerrilla leaders involved in the exploratory talks.

Jaramillo is the current commander of the Bloque Oriental (Eastern Bloc), which operates in the giant bi-national valley of the Orinoco River and especially along the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

This meeting took place before the talks formally started, Jaramillo said in a letter on Jan. 9. “The process was about to fail because of the difficulty of finding an agreed location for the negotiations,” he added.

Santos also boldly began the rapprochement, without the army’s knowledge, as revealed in an article on Dec. 29 in the Bogota newspaper ‘El Espectador’, written by the president’s brother, journalist Enrique Santos.

But Santos rejected FARC’s proposal that the negotiations continue in Colombia.

Venezuela also was ruled out as a venue to avoid accusations against Chavez’s government, according to IPS’ annonymous source. The Colombian military regularly warns that there are limits to Venezuela’s tolerance for FARC presence on its soil.

Finally, Havana was chosen to host the exploratory talks: “We decided on Cuba for safety reasons and, above all, because it guaranteed confidentiality,” wrote Enrique Santos.

This exploratory phase ended in August of 2012, leading to the formal negotiation stage, which opened last October in Oslo and since November has been taking place in Cuba.

The process has involved much political arm-wrestling – just answering the question of how Jaramillo was going to be transported to Venezuela and then to Havana took almost a year, demonstrating the level of mistrust between the parties.

The government wanted to arrange an overland journey, crossing three-quarters of Colombia’s territory to reach the border city of Cucuta in the northeast. According to Jaramillo, the government claimed that “the airlift transport was impossible because it violated the drug controls agreed with the USA.”

Thus, Chavez also facilitated the transportation logistics for Jaramillo and other insurgents to Havana, which was a matter of “vital importance”, the source added without giving details, although these difficulties are “well known” by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Finally, Jaramillo was taken to Venezuela by helicopter and from there travelled to Cuba. The same operation was repeated for the other guerrilla fighters.

The talks have had ups and downs, including a severe slump after the death of “Alfonso Cano”, the then commander of FARC and considered an expert negotiator, in a military operation in November 2011.

According to Jaramillo, “Upon formal request of the Colombian government, the bedridden Chavez was kind enough to intervene at some difficult times, contributing to smoothening some rough edges with his enormous prestige.”

Negotiations have moved behind closed doors in the middle of the war, since the government does not accept a truce. FARC, on the other hand, unilaterally decreed an offensive ceasefire for two months, starting last November and expiring on the 20th of this month.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the National University of Colombia on Wednesday handed government negotiators in Bogota, and FARC representatives in Havana, the civilian proposals to resolve what has triggered the war: inequality in land ownership, which in the Gini index ranks 0.87.

These propositions are contained in 11 volumes, compiling 546 proposals from 522 farmers and business organisations that participated in an agrarian forum held in Bogota last December.

(END)

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, France, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

Having survived the announced end of the world on Dec. 21, we can now try to foretell our immediate future, based on geopolitical principles that will help us understand the overall shifts of global powers and assess the major risks and dangers.

Ignacio Ramonet

Looking at a map of the world, we can immediately see some hotspots lit up in red. Four of them represent high levels of danger: Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

In the European Union (EU), 2013 will be the worst year since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. Austerity is the only creed and deep cuts to the welfare state continue because Germany, which for the first time in history dominates Europe and is ruling it with an iron fist, wills it so.

In Spain, political tensions will rise as the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) decides the terms of a local referendum on independence for this autonomous community (province), a process that will be watched with great interest by the separatists in Euskadi, the Basque Country.

As for the economy, already in dire straits, it all depends on what happens – in the Italian elections in February; and on how the markets react to a possible win by conservative candidate Mario Monti, who has the support of Berlin and the Vatican, or by centre-left candidate Pier Luigi Bersani, who is the frontrunner in the polls.

Social explosions could occur in any of the countries of southern Europe (Greece, Portugal, Italy or Spain), exasperated as their people are with the constant cutbacks. The EU will not emerge from the doldrums in 2013, and everything could get worse if, on top of it all, the response of the markets is brutal (as neoliberals are urging) in France under the very moderate socialist President François Hollande.

In Latin America, 2013 will also be a year of challenges. In the first place, in Venezuela, which since 1999 has been a driver of progressive changes throughout the region, the unforeseen relapse in the health of President Hugo Chávez – re-elected Oct. 7 – is creating uncertainty.

There will also be elections on Feb. 17 in Ecuador. President Rafael Correa, another key Latin American leader, is expected to be re-elected. On Nov. 10 important elections will be held in Honduras, where former president Manuel Zelaya was toppled on Jun. 28, 2009. The Electoral Tribunal has authorised the registration of the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE – Freedom and Refoundation Party), led by Zelaya.

Chileans are due to go to the polls on Nov. 17. The unpopularity of conservative President Sebastián Piñera opens the way for a possible victory by socialist candidate and former president Michelle Bachelet.

International attention will be focused on Cuba as talks continue in Havana between the Colombian government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) with the aim of putting an end to Latin America’s last armed conflict.

Meanwhile, there again appears to be a stalemate in the Middle East, the location of the most disturbing events in the world.

The Arab Spring uprisings toppled several dictators in the region: Zine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

But subsequent elections allowed reactionary Islamist parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, to come to power. Now, as we are seeing in Egypt, they want to hold onto it at all costs, to the consternation of the secular segments of society who had been the first to rise up in protest, and are refusing to accept this new form of authoritarianism. Tunisia faces the same problem.

After following with interest the explosions of freedom in the spring of 2011, European societies have again become apathetic about what is going on in the Middle East.

For example, the inexorably deepening civil war in Syria clearly shows how the big Western powers (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), allies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have decided to support – with money, arms and instructors – the Sunni Islamist insurgents. On all fronts, they are gaining ground. How long can the government of President Bashar al-Assad last?

In the face of the “Shiite Front” (Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syria and Iran), the United States has built a broad regional “Sunni Front” (from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to Morocco, including Egypt, Libya and Tunisia). Its goal: to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and deprive Teheran of its big regional ally by next spring.

Why? Because on Jun. 14 Iran will hold presidential elections, in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not eligible to stand. In other words, for the next six months Iran will be immersed in a violent election campaign between partisans of a hard anti-Washington line and supporters of negotiations.

Given this situation in Iran, Israel will no doubt be preparing for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. The Jan. 22 elections in Israel will probably result in victory for the ultra-conservative coalition that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is all for bombing Iran as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama is looking toward Asia, a priority region for Washington since it decided on a strategic redirection of its foreign policy. The United States is attempting to curb the expansion of China by surrounding that country with military bases and relying on the support of its traditional partners: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

China’s seas have become the areas with the greatest potential for armed conflict in the Asia Pacific region. Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo caused by the sovereignty dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands could be heightened following the Dec. 16 electoral victory of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, led by the new Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who is a nationalist hawk.

China is moving full speed ahead with the modernisation of its navy. On Sept. 25 it launched its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with the intention of intimidating its neighbours. Beijing is increasingly intolerant of the U.S. military presence in Asia. A dangerous “strategic distrust” is building between the two giants, which will doubtless leave its mark on international politics in the 21st century.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

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.

IPS spoke to people Sunday in Bogotá’s Bolívar square about the peace talks that began Monday in Havana. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Nov 19 2012 (IPS)

Scepticism, fear of expressing an opinion and a dash of hope make up the cocktail of responses from Colombians asked about the possibility of the decades-old civil war finally coming to an end as a result of the peace talks between the government and the FARC guerrillas, which began Monday in Havana.

“I really hope so,” María Jaramillo, a 40-years-old accountant, told IPS. “God willing. But I think it’ll be difficult, because nothing is easy with the guerrillas. Of course if peace is achieved it would be an enormous accomplishment, because many peasants would return to their land, all the bombing would stop, and the country would grow.”

Some of the other people interviewed by IPS in Bogotá’s central Bolívar square were more sceptical. Political science student Elizabeth Núñez said she did not believe the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) were really seeking peace, “although nothing is impossible.”

“So far, to judge by what the guerrillas are saying, it’s the same as ever. As if they had no intention of respecting the results of the dialogue,” Núñez told IPS, before the FARC negotiators announced a unilateral ceasefire on Monday in Cuba.

The actual start of talks in Havana is the culmination of six months of secret preliminary contacts between the government of conservative Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the FARC, the left-wing rebel group created in 1964 in the central province of Caldas by peasant farmers in response to injustice on the part of the government and the courts.

Santos announced in August that peace talks would be launched as a result of the preliminary negotiations held with the support of the governments of Cuba and Norway, which are now guarantors of the talks, and of Venezuela and Chile, as observers.

The “general agreement for the end of the conflict and the construction of a stable, lasting peace” that emerged from the preliminary talks basically proposes that the FARC will abandon armed struggle if the government agrees, among other things, to bring to a halt major mining and infrastructure projects in rural areas, and to carry out an ambitious comprehensive agrarian development plan.

The peace talks formally began in October in Oslo, with an agenda that encompasses land reform, including alternatives for illegal drugs; the future legal political participation of the guerrillas; an end to the armed conflict; and assistance for victims.

However, the content of each point on the agenda has not been clearly worked out, and radical differences have emerged. For example, the land restitution programme, the Santos administration’s flagship strategy, which the president sees as a major stride forward in the area of land reform, is criticised by the guerrillas as a measure that will actually benefit the business elites and foreign corporations.

Many Colombians, meanwhile, prefer to keep silent in this polarised nation.

When IPS approached a random selection of people in the square, which is surrounded by the cathedral, parliament, the Supreme Court, and city hall, nearly a dozen declined to talk, saying they didn’t have time, even though it was Sunday.

But many others did respond. “Peace! We have been needing a peace process for the past 20 years. The deaths of so many soldiers, guerrillas and civilians would have been avoided. That’s why I hope there will be no interferences in this process,” responded Arturo, 50, who said he was a secondary school teacher.

“But we also know about the economic interests behind the war,” he added. “Peace would take resources away from the army, and would end the business of the others (the insurgents), which is also lucrative. I think the conflict will still stretch on for a number of years.”

“One factor is the polarisation that was aggravated by (right-wing) president (Álvaro) Uribe in his two consecutive terms (2002-2010), by fanning radical hatred,” university professor Armando Ramírez, an expert on public opinion, told IPS.

“To this is added the generalised lack of understanding, all the way from primary school up to university, of the real significance of democracy, public opinion or civil society…and the media efficiently contribute to the disorientation by favouring the establishment’s arguments,” said Ramírez.

“On radio and television, most political programmes address this issue like show business: there are anecdotes, curious aspects, and short reports devoid of context, while serious newspaper stories and columns target experts or academics, not ordinary people,” he said.

Andrés Felipe Ortiz, a member of the non-governmental Observatorio de Medios en Derechos Humanos, Medios al Derecho, agreed with Ramírez. “People depend on information to have an opinion, but the press is not clear, and polarisation is exacerbated, so people conclude that the (peace) process won’t go anywhere,” he told IPS.

“Santos called for prudence, and that’s valid, but it’s not the same as concealing things,” he said. “It’s clear that the media do not help people understand things that are of mass interest. Nor is there any sort of teaching on human rights or international humanitarian law. Journalists document things, they don’t explain.”

In Bolívar square, there were also people who believe the peace talks should be joined by the demobilised United Self-Defence Units of Colombia (AUC), the far-right paramilitary militias created by large landowners in the 1980s, allegedly to fight the guerrillas, and who took part in a demobilisation process under the Uribe administration.

“It’s obvious that we should give ourselves a chance at peace,” Carlos Blanco, a lawyer who said he was an adviser to “an organisation that defends the demobilised” paramilitaries, told IPS. “But it’s also obvious that in this process, the AUC should be represented, because their demobilisation was autonomous and voluntary.”

The AUC “were created as a political platform that collapsed, because the initial rules of the game were modified and the chiefs were extradited,” he said, referring to the paramilitary leaders who were extradited to the United States on drug charges, such as Salvatore Mancuso, who is serving time in a U.S. prison and has asked to take part in the current peace talks.

“We will achieve peace when the different sides give in and the victims and victimisers sit down across from each other and forgive each other,” said Ismael Rodríguez, a 31-year-old airline employee.

Protests held in Bogotá by groups that suffer the consequences of the war and do not feel represented in the peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

Closed-door talks between members of the FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government began in Oslo Wednesday, after the delegates were taken from the airport to an undisclosed location.

The negotiators plan to speak to the press in the Norwegian capital on Thursday. The two delegations travelled to Norway separately on Tuesday afternoon.

The government and the communist FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels, which have been fighting since 1964 and control a large part of rural Colombia, each named five chief negotiators, five alternates, and 20 other delegates as advisors.

The number of delegates formed part of the agreement reached after a year and a half of exploratory talks held in near total secrecy, with Norway and Cuba as guarantors and Venezuela and Chile as observers.

The government delegation is headed by former vice president Humberto de la Calle, and includes other key negotiators chosen by conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, such as representatives of industry and senior military officers.

A source close to the FARC told IPS that in Wednesday’s meeting, the insurgent group’s delegation would draw attention to an “empty chair.”

While there are five government delegates, there are only four sitting on the FARC’s side of the negotiating table.

The empty chair belongs to Simón Trinidad, nom de guerre of former banker Ricardo Palmera, who was extradited to the United States in 2004 by then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). Trinidad is serving a 60-year sentence in a Colorado maximum security prison for the FARC kidnapping of three U.S. military contractors in 2003, who were held as hostages by the rebel group until 2008.

By naming Trinidad as one of their principal negotiators, the FARC is apparently indicating that his extradition marked the start of the undermining of Colombia’s autonomy in solving its internal armed conflict.

The group also appears to be pointing out that the peace talks require definitions of the U.S. role in the counterinsurgency war in Colombia, where it is the main source of military funds and the principal military strategist.

On Sept. 7, Colombia’s RCN radio station read out a letter from Trinidad in which he told President Santos: “My attendance as a peace delegate is feasible…All it would take is a simple political and diplomatic request on your part to the government of the United States; you know that very well.”

Colombia’s Justice Minister Ruth Stella Correa and the attorney general, Eduardo Montealegre, expressed more modest expectations, saying Trinidad could participate by means of a teleconference, if the U.S. authorities gave their permission.

There has been no public reaction on the question by the government of Barack Obama.

On Tuesday, INTERPOL’s (international police) wanted list still included the names of two other FARC negotiators facing U.S. arrest warrants in connection with the kidnapping of the three military contractors: Andrés París (Emilio Carvajalino), one of the FARC’s chief negotiators, and Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dutch-born rebel who forms part of the team of advisers.

But Interpol confirmed Tuesday that it had suspended the international arrest warrants for the negotiators named by the FARC, as requested by the Colombian government. Colombian arrest warrants for the guerrilla negotiators were also suspended.

The empty chair has been a symbol in peace talks between the government and the FARC since January 1999.

At that time, the then FARC commander Manuel Marulanda left his seat empty next to then president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) when formal negotiations began in San Vicente del Caguán in southern Colombia.

On that occasion, Marulanda – described to IPS by someone in the know as “a tremendously wary peasant and a born military strategist” – contended that the FARC had uncovered a plan to assassinate him during the ceremony.

According to another source in Bogota, the second issues that the FARC will bring up in Oslo is the need for a comprehensive peace process, that would also include the National Liberation Army (ELN) in parallel talks.

The ELN, which also emerged in 1964, inspired by the Cuban revolution, is smaller than the FARC but has an influence over many communities.

In 2009, the FARC and the ELN put an end to a war between regional structures of the two guerrilla armies, which had led to the deaths of insurgents as well as civilians and had driven a wave of refugees across the border into Venezuela.

The agreement between the two rebel groups included a commitment not to negotiate for peace without the other insurgent organisation.

A communiqué issued by the leaders of the FARC and the ELN, with a September dateline, reported that a summit of guerrilla leaders had stressed the two group’s staunch determination to seek a peace agreement, and the aim to make their “ideas and actions converge.” However, they did not specifically state an interest in talks between the ELN and the government.

The same source close to the FARC told IPS that eventual negotiations with the ELN would be independent, until the two processes merged into one towards the end of the talks, when the question of victims would be addressed.

The source also confirmed that there have been contacts between the ELN and the government.

At the meeting between leaders of the two insurgent groups, they decided to mutually back the negotiating agendas of the respective peace processes.

The agenda for talks with the FARC contains five main points: land, political participation, an end to hostilities with the surrender of weapons, drug trafficking and victims.

The ELN agenda refers to power relations, territory and population, as well as natural resources and sovereignty.

The need for peace talks with the ELN is also underscored by new civil society networks and coordinating mechanisms that are emerging with the objective of influencing the peace talks with the FARC and the changes that lie ahead if a peace accord is reached.

When 12 Colombian soldiers were killed by FARC insurgents a stone’s throw away from the northern border with Venezuela, the consequences included military cooperation that reinforces the political, diplomatic and trade-related links that have developed over the past two years between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Santos said that after the attack on Monday he spoke to Chávez, who immediately “ordered the deployment of two brigades to the border zone, with instructions to try to locate” the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) column that attacked a Colombian army unit.

“If they manage to find them, they will capture them. If they resist, they will open fire. They will shoot them down,” Santos said.

He said Chávez told him over the phone, “Our position is the same as it has been since you and I restored dialogue (in August 2010, when Santos took office as president) and we began our cooperation: we will not tolerate incursions by any illegal armed force, whatever its nature, into Venezuelan territory.”

The left-wing Venezuelan president said on television that his government would not allow “irregular groups, whatever side they are on, to use Venezuela as a camping site, a training ground, or a base to attack forces of other countries, in this case Colombia.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be mixed up in a conflict that is not our own,” Chávez said.

The attack took place at dawn on Monday May 21, in Colombian territory but very close to Guana, a Venezuelan village of 300 people located 200 metres from the border in the northern peninsula of La Guajira.

A Venezuelan army contingent was in position there by sunset.

The people of Guana, still frightened by the intense gunfire and explosions, spent several nights away from their homes, staying in nearby villages, the local press reported.

“Santos has persuaded Chávez to start pursuing the guerrillas. Now Chávez will ask Santos to pursue the criminal gangs (based in Colombia) smuggling gasoline, trafficking drugs and engaging in extortion rackets” in Venezuela, said Ariel Ávila, head of the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Bogotá think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris (CNAI).

In Ávila’s view, Chávez’s decision is “a setback” for the FARC, because “the guerrillas need a rearguard territory to retreat to.” He said “cooperation between the armed forces of the two countries will mean the FARC will be hit hard,” as well as the other Colombian left-wing insurgent group, the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

Colombian Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón said the FARC unit responsible for the attack “has probably been based in Venezuela for a considerable time.”

General Sergio Mantilla, the Colombian army chief, said the FARC rebels “presumably came from Venezuela and fled back there” after the attack.

Mantilla said he had personally verified that the body of one of the dead soldiers was in Colombian territory, barely 150 metres from the boundary between the Colombian department (province) of La Guajira and the Venezuelan state of Zulia.

These statements have not been denied by the Venezuelan authorities.

Venezuelan opposition leaders like presidential candidate Henrique Capriles and Zulia state Governor Pablo Pérez have said it has long been known that Colombian irregulars operate all along the border.

“Why is the Venezuelan army not fulfilling its primary function of guarding the border?” asked Pérez, while Capriles maintained that “the places where the FARC operates in our border states are known, and the government is complicit in this situation.”

In the past few years, IPS correspondents visiting Venezuelan border areas to report on problems facing indigenous communities, shopkeepers or Colombian refugees have gathered testimonies about the presence of guerrillas or far-right paramilitaries from Colombia.

Rocío San Miguel, head of Citizen’s Control for Security, Defence and the Armed Forces, a Venezuelan NGO, told IPS that earlier cooperation mechanisms “have not worked because they did not give rise to clear and effective instructions that could be followed by middle-ranking officers of military units.

“This is apparent from the (Venezuelan) response arising from a telephone conversation between the presidents,” San Miguel said.

However, “the Venezuelan military deployment on the border is not credible,” she argued.

“The Venezuelan defence minister, General Henry Rangel, has talked of mobilising up to 140,000 troops, when the strength of the country’s entire armed forces is 124,000,” she said.

“The only way to address the problem in a consistent fashion is through effective cooperation between units led by middle-ranking officers, with permanent patrolling, and cooperation on intelligence and communications with the Colombian side, instead of sporadic actions,” said San Miguel.

The military cooperation against the guerrillas comes on top of agreements between Chávez and Santos on trade, which have paved the way for Venezuela’s pending debt to Colombian exporters to be paid, as well as reciprocal arrangements for handing over people wanted for drug trafficking and insurgency.

Colombia and Venezuela have also entered into a diplomatic understanding, in particular to buttress the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which brings together the 12 countries of the region.

Their amicable relationship apparently continues to flourish, in spite of the ideological differences between the two presidents which led to confrontation in the past.

When the conservative Santos was defence minister in the government of former right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), Chávez described the Colombian guerrilla groups as “political forces with a Bolivarian ideology” and said they deserved the status of legitimate belligerents because they “control territory” in Colombia. (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.