Building toward Peace in Colombia means more than "No Mas FARC"     

     The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) are a campesino army. Their roots grew in the struggles in the banana plantations in the early part of the 20th Century, in the struggle for land throughout the middle part of the 20th Century, and in the social upheaval known as La Violencia (The Violence) that lasted from 1948-1958, and took 200,000 lives. I recommend Robin Kirk’s “More Terrible Than Death” or, for readers of Spanish, Alfredo Molano’s “Trochas y Fusiles” (Shortcuts and Rifles) for anyone who wants to get a feel for the origins and ideology of this revolutionary army. 

     The worldwide Facebook-inspired demonstrations of February 4 that drew over a million participants and perhaps as many as 2 million, are being widely viewed as “anti-FARC”. The demonstrations were encouraged by the Uribe government and have been characterized by mainstream media outlets as anti-FARC demonstrations. However, in Colombia, the Alternative Democratic Pole, a political party that opposes Uribe’s policies, marched with their own banners, which also criticized the Colombian military and paramilitary groups. Also, an entire portion of Colombian civil society did not support the marches, including the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, the Movement of Christians for Peace with Dignity and Justice, the National Movement for Health and Security, and the Movement of Black Communities. They started their statement on the anti-FARC marches as follows, “We are in favor of a political and negotiated solution to the social and armed conflict that lives on in Colombia, we are many more than a million voices. We will not march on the 4th of February.” In New York, there was a similar alternative message by demonstrators that went beyond the NO MORE FARC message and called for an end to the violence perpetrated by all armed actors involved in the 44 year civil war. The families of hostages, including the family of Ingrid Betancourt, the French Colombian presidential candidate who has been a captive of the FARC for 5 years, also expressed their fears that the rallies could be counter-productive, and that the organizers were being used by rightwing interests who want to avoid negotiations. 

     Nevertheless, the February 4 marches were clearly an outpouring for peace, motivated by empathy for the plight of the hostages. The marches were also encouraged by a media campaign that has labelled the FARC an intractable terrorist group and suggests that the FARC is the root of the Colombian conflict. A deeper look at the reality of the armed conflict in Colombia shows the superficiality of a flatly anti-FARC ideology. It is my contention that if the FARC were magicly erased with the wave of a hundred thousand iPhones, the violence, kidnapping, murder, corruption and extortion of Colombia would continue unabated. Below is a small portion of recently published data by a Colombian human rights monitoring group, Banco de Datos, from an analysis in a recent edition of their magazine Noche y Niebla (Night and Fog). 

          Extrajudicial Execution and Sociopolitical Homicides 

Total of dead victims and percentages, listed by perpetrators or presumed perpetrators by time period 

                            Agents of the State              Paramilitaries                 Guerrillas 

July '96 to June '97              134                                   1203                               322 

July '97 to June '98              132                                   1146                               278 

July '98 to June '99                97                                   1233                               518 

July '99 to June 2000           115                                    1678                              518 

July '00 to June '01              100                                    2153                              486 

July '01 to June '02              133                                    1745                              629 

July '02 to June '03              127                                    1345                              667 

July '03 to June '04              197                                    1050                              423 

July '04 to June '05              197                                      701                               271 

July '05 to June '06              198                                      299                               219 

July '06 to June '07              236                                      195                               212 

Totals                                1980                                 14,915                              4581 

     Note that from 2006-2007, “Agents of the State”, the Army and police, were responsible for more extrajudicial executions than the FARC. I spoke with John Lindsay-Poland, co-director of the Colombian Peace Presence of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR – www.forcolombia.org ) and author of “Emperors in the Jungle:  The Hidden History of the US in Panama”, a comprehensive history of United States involvement with a part of Colombia sold off to the US and now known as Panama, about the Sunday rallies and the current state of the Colombian conflict. He noted that the rallies express a genuine outpouring of sentiment against the violence, and stated, “The thing that gets lost is that in the last year the Armed Forces of Colombia have committed more extrajudicial killing than the FARC.” 

     The heavy handprint of the United States is all over Colombia. The State Department foreign aid for Colombia was released to Congress on February 5, and offers more of the same recipe of fumigation, support for the military, and maintenance of the status quo. It offers more than $500 million in military and police aid to Colombia . (See the Center for International Policy’s weblog for graphs and analysis of the package – note also the spike for military aid for Mexico: http://www.cipcol.org/?p=536 ) This makes Colombia the largest recipient of US aid in the hemisphere, and continues to place the human rights situation in grave danger. 

     Permit me a Chomsky quote here: “We should look closely at a very elementary fact, a striking fact, it takes real discipline not to notice it. If you take a look at the countries, say, of the Caribbean region, they are closest to us, where we are most influential, you discover that the poorest of them, practically destroyed, is Haiti. It also happens to be the target of the most US intervention in the 20th Century. Woodrow Wilson invaded it, with hideous effect, and it went on and on. The second two poorest countries in the Hemisphere are Nicaragua and Guatemala. They also happen to be in second place in the record of US military intervention.” 

     “And then we can proceed. You don’t usually get correlations like that in international affairs. It takes discipline not to see them, just as it takes discipline not to see something well known to scholarship: US military aid and training is highly correlated with torture and other egregious human rights abuses. This is a staple of scholarship, well documented, persisting right to the present, for example, in Colombia.” -Noam Chomsky, from an interview in the film about the SOA, “Hidden in Plain Sight” 

      The value in the outpouring against the FARC and for peace in Colombia is that perhaps interested people can be encouraged to look deeper into the reality of Colombia and focus on all the armed actors that are committing human rights violations. For those of us in the United States, a deeper analysis means once again that we will be looking into a bloody mirror. It is US dollars that continue to prop up a system of violence in Colombia. In a democracy, we could hope for a change, perhaps for a funding cutoff till military and paramilitary murders could be controlled. It is a clear goal that could be achieved, and would be a worthy subject for worldwide demonstrations – END MILITARY AID TO PARAMILITARY GOVERNMENTS.  (For more on the paramilitary nature of the Colombian government, see this Counterpunch article, "Colombia's Civil War and the US", by this author.

      For an excellent piece on the February rallies by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, check out the FOR Colombia Peace Presence website, www.forcolombia.org.  –Joe DeRaymond