The Economist 20161001 ed79b8

24 Briefing Colombia’s peace The Economist October 1st 2016
Concord in Cartagena
2 bia’s powerful constitutional court.
Much will depend on the speed and effectiveness
with which the agreement is
implemented. Shortly after the plebiscite
the FARC will assemble in 27 areas across
the country, including the one over the river
from El Playón; 30 days after the signing
ceremony its soldiers must start placing
their weapons in the UN’s containers, a
process to be completed four months later.
The guerrillas, many of whom were recruited
as peasant children, will be trained
in trades and, where necessary, taught to
read; they will also get a subsidy equal to
90% ofthe minimum wage for two years.
Because a group of serving generals
joined the Havana talks, trust between the
FARC’s military leaders and the armed
forces is surprisingly high. And because
this time few doubt that the FARC has given
up its war for good, there is little likelihood
that its new political party will suffer
the fate ofthe UP. One small FARC front on
the Brazilian border has rejected the peace
agreement. But the vast bulk of the guerrillas
are set to demobilise. Guerrilla delegates
from around the country endorsed
the agreement at a FARC conference held in
the llanos in September.
The big security worry concerns who
will fill the vacuum the FARC will leave behind
in the areas they controlled. One candidate
is the ELN, a much smaller guerrilla
group thatshowsno sign ofwantingpeace.
Then there are organised criminal gangs
which include recycled paramilitaries. According
to General Óscar Naranjo, a former
national police chiefand a member of
the government negotiating team, there
are some 5,000 people in the three biggest
gangs, 2,000 of them armed. They are reported
to be offering mid-ranking FARC
commanders $300,000 each to join them.
The defence ministryisimplementing a
plan to move beyond the all-consuming
focus on the FARC that has shaped the security
forces over the past 15 years. The
army is stepping up operations against the
ELN and against cocaine laboratories, and
is forming a joint task force with the police
to tackle organised crime, according to Luis
Carlos Villegas, the defence minister. “We
have begun to occupy FARC territory” to
prevent criminals from doing so, he adds.
What looks neat and tidy in Bogotá
looks messier on the ground. Take the Tumaco
area, where under the FARC’s aegis,
coca cultivation has surged from 1,800
hectares (4,500 acres) in 2000 to 16,900
hectares in 2015; critics of Mr Santos blame
his decision to stop spraying coca crops. In
the port the FARC’s militias have degenerated
into sicarios (guns for hire) and are in
the process ofswitching to the Urabeños, a
criminal gang. A community policing
scheme exists, in theory; but where General
Naranjo, who introduced such
schemes nationally, recommended 12 officers
perbarrio, here there are only two. Nobody
doubts that the battle for control of
drug exports to Mexico is the main driver
ofviolence.
From Bogotá to reality
Government officials see the peace agreement
as offering the first real opportunity
to wipe out coca forgood. Some 40% ofColombia’s
coca is in just 11 FARC-dominated
municipalities, says Rafael Pardo, Mr Santos’s
minister for the post-conflict. Now the
government plans to combine attacks on
drug processing with voluntary agreements
for eradication and substitution.
Will it work? “Every farmer here has
coca, not because we support drug trafficking
but because nothing else gives you a
decent income,” says Mr “Grossman” in El
Playón. “We don’t trust the state, there’s
corruption, but if there’s money from the
United States, you could have substitution.”
(So much for the FARC’s anti-imperialism.)
Creating viable economic alternatives
depends on building roads and
providing technical support, and the cash
for such ventures will be tight; peace has
come at a time of low oil prices. The myriad
government agencies involved find it
hard to co-ordinate with each other and
with local government. “The first thing
they have to do is de-Bogotá-ise this,” says
Edwin Palma, the secretary of Tumaco’s
town council.
The most overblown of the many fears
surrounding the peace agreement is the
notion that the FARC will win power at the
ballot box. The guerrillas are the political
bosses of only 500,000 Colombians (barely
more than 1% of the population) and impose
their domination by force. “They
can’t go on threatening and narco-ing to
the same extent as they did in the past,”
points out Mr Deas. That means their power
will decline, not increase.
For these reasons, Claudia López, a senator
from the centre-left Green Alliance,
doubts that the FARC’s candidates will win
many of the 16 new electoral districts. But
the FARC’s irruption, and its money, will
prompt a realignment on Colombia’s left,
which the conflict has made unusually
weak. “This has been a country in which
it’s been easierto exterminate political foes
rather than compete with them,” says Ms
López. Even so, she doubts any coalition
containing the FARC would get more than
5% of the vote in 2018. Its chances depend
on it communicating a genuine sense of
contrition for its crimes, and abandoning
the Stalinist dogmatism that few share.
Amid the arguments over detail, some
Colombians risk losing sight of what they
are gaining. At the openingofthe talks Iván
Márquez, the FARC’s chief negotiator, demanded:
“a peace which implies a profound
demilitarisation ofthe state and radical
socioeconomic reforms to found true
democracy, justice and freedom...Today
we’ve come to unmask that metaphysical
assassin that is the market, to denounce the
criminality of finance capital, to put neoliberalism
in the dock as the hangman of
peoples and the manufacturer ofdeath.”
None of that happened. The agreement
involves the FARC’s acceptance, for the first
time, of democracy, the rule of law and the
market economy. Back in 2001, during a
failed peace process, Alonso Cano, then
the FARC’s number two, told The Economist:
“Our struggle is to do away with the
state as it now exists in Colombia.” He added
that the FARC would not demobilise for
“houses, cars and scholarships…or a few
seats in Congress”. That is more or less
what they are about to do.
Many of the poorest areas of the country,
like Tumaco, can now be connected to
the national market for the first time and
receive the public services they lack. And
with the war with the FARC over, the Colombian
state can concentrate on tackling
organised crime, which is responsible for
most of the remaining violence. Whatever
the caveats, these are enormous gains. 7