Jaime Daremblum
October 3, 2013 11:05 AM
In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was a global murder capital held
hostage by warring drug cartels. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it
looked like a potential failed state. These days, it is described as “Latin America’s rising star,” “Latin America’s rising oil star,” “Latin America’s latest economic miracle,” “an economic powerhouse,” and “a magnet for foreign investment.”
While
the story of Colombia’s resurgence has become old news, it has not
become any less remarkable. A country where violence once seemed
uncontrollable is now a darling of global investors and one of the most
promising emerging-market economies in the world.
About a week before George W. Bush took office in January 2001, a San Antonio Express-News dispatch from
Bogotá described Colombia as a nation “engulfed on all sides by
violence and war.” Eight years later, when Bush was about to leave the
White House, things in Colombia had improved so dramatically that he
awarded then-President Álvaro Uribe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising him as someone who had “reawakened the hopes of his countrymen and shown a model of leadership to a watching world.”
Uribe’s successor in the Casa de Nariño,
Juan Manuel Santos, served as defense minister from 2006 to 2009,
during which time Colombia scored a number of major victories in its
battle against leftist narco-guerrillas, including the dramatic rescue
of French-Colombian politician Íngrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages
(three of them Americans) as part of Operation Checkmate in July 2008.
The following December, Colombia’s most influential magazine (Semana) named Santos person of the year, declaring that he “may be remembered as the best minister of defense the country has had.”
After Santos became president in 2010, he surprised many Colombians by seeking to improve relations with
the late Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez, who had previously denounced
Santos as a dangerous warmonger. (During the 2010 Colombian presidential
campaign, Chávez had warned that Santos “could cause a war in this part of the world, upon instructions from the Yankees.”) Santos also sought a rapprochement with Ecuador, whose president, Rafael Correa, a quasi-authoritarian Chávez disciple, had clashed with Uribe.
Meanwhile, he launched a new military offensive against
his country’s oldest and largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has been waging a campaign of
terror against the Colombian state since the mid-1960s. The offensive
was a huge success, as government forces killed some of most legendary
and powerful FARC commanders, including Mono Jojoy and Alfonso Cano. (Santoscalled the
death of Cano “the most devastating blow that [the FARC] has suffered
in its history.”) By mid-2012, government forces had weakened the FARC
so much that Santos formally announced a new round of peace talks, in hopes of finally ending a conflict that has claimed an estimated 220,000 lives.
Bogotá’s
peace initiative was connected to the restoration of diplomatic ties
with Venezuela and Ecuador. Chávez had provided the FARC with material
aid and safe haven for many years, and Correa had allegedly received up
to $400,000 from the Colombian guerrillas during his 2006 presidential
campaign (according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies). For that matter, relations between Colombia and Ecuador had collapsed in March 2008 after Colombian military forces raided a FARC camp just across the border on Ecuadorean soil. (The 2008 raid killed FARC leader Raúl Reyes and yielded a wealth of computer files linking the organization with both Chávez and Correa.) By
achieving détente with Caracas and Quito, Santos was creating the
conditions that would allow for serious peace talks with the rebels.
Just last week, he praised the Venezuelan government for its role in promoting the talks.
A
year after they first began, the negotiations have made substantial
progress on land reform, but not on anything else. The government and
the FARC are still very far apart on issues such as political
participation, drug trafficking, criminal justice, and victims’
compensation. For example, FARC leaders have called for Colombia to
draft a new constitution and delay its 2014 elections. Both proposals
are nonstarters with the government. Bogotá enacted a “Legal Framework for Peace” (LFP) to facilitate the negotiations, and the LFP (which has survived a constitutional challenge)
lays out broad parameters for ending the FARC war, achieving
reconciliation, and delivering reparations to victims. But the details
remain highly controversial, with critics on both the left and the right
warning that the LFP could lead to “amnesty” for war criminals.
“We are currently in a critical moment,” government negotiator Sergio Jaramillo said on
September 3. “I think that in the next months we will know if this is
going to work or not because we are beginning on essential issues.” When
he first announced the talks more than a year ago, Santos promised that
they would “be measured in months, not years.” Yet the Colombian president has acknowledged that the implementation of
any peace accord would be a long-term proposition. “If we eventually
reach an agreement, the real peace will have to be built over many
years,” he wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal.
“A genuine peace—a peace that guarantees non-repetition of conflict, a
peace that builds a new country around reconciliation and that heals the
wounds of confrontation—will be a collective effort.”
The Santos
strategy is high risk, high reward. It could deliver historic results,
but it could also prove disastrous. The last time Colombia pursued
lengthy peace negotiations with the FARC, between 1999 and 2002, it
allowed the terror group to control a Switzerland-sized “demilitarized
zone.” FARC commanders used the safe haven as a launching pad for
violent attacks. They also replenished their military strength and
expanded their lucrative drug activities. When the talks finally
collapsed, the guerrillas were stronger than ever. It was only after
Uribe and Santos inflicted devastating blows on the FARC (and a smaller
leftist rebel group known as the ELN) that Colombians were willing to
consider a new peace process.
Speaking of Uribe, he has become a vocal critic of Santos, as have many other Colombians. Uribe—who last month announced that
he would be running for the Colombian senate in 2014—fears that Santos
has abandoned the successful policies he inherited and is now offering
the FARC “impunity”
for decades of terrible crimes. The former president is still hugely
popular in Colombia, and his frequent denunciations of Santos—which
started well before the peace talks—have been a major news story.
Given
their history, many ordinary Colombians are uneasy about the FARC
negotiations. They’re also uneasy about the violent protests that
rattled their country in late August and early September. While the
protests began as a farmers’ strike over issues such as free trade and
fertilizer costs, they quickly grew to include students and trade
unionists. The farmers eventually agreed to end their demonstrations, but not before the government deployed troops in the streets of Bogotá. A Gallup poll released in early September showed that Santos’s approval rating had declined to 21 percent.
The good news for Colombia is that its economy grew by an impressive 4.2 percent (year
on year) in the second quarter, and it ranks ahead of all but two Latin
American economies (Chile and Peru) in the World Bank’s 2013 Ease of Doing Business Index.
The Andean nation has become a true global leader on free trade,
signing accords with the United States, Canada, Chile, the European
Union, and others. It has also established a new regional trade bloc (the Pacific Alliance) with Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Meanwhile, Colombia has been experiencing a massive oil boom. In August, it produced an average of 1.03 million barrels of crude oil per day, an increase of 13.7 percent from
its average daily crude production in August 2012. For that matter,
Colombia’s daily crude production has roughly doubled since 2005, when
it was only 525,000 barrels.
Indeed,
Colombia’s energy sector has been rapidly expanding. So has its banking
sector. As equity analyst Alejandro Pieschacón has noted,
“Colombian subsidiaries currently represent 23 percent of Panama’s
banking sector, 15 percent of Costa Rica’s, and 52 percent of El
Salvador’s, while also managing, on average, 20 percent of the pension
fund business in Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and El Salvador.”
In a September 2012 Bloomberg News interview,
Finance Minister Mauricio Cárdenas projected that a sustainable peace
agreement with the FARC would boost Colombia’s long-term economic growth
rate to 6 or 7 percent. Such a peace deal truly would be a game
changer. But nobody should have any illusions about the FARC. It is
Latin America’s oldest terrorist organization, with a five-decade
history of kidnapping, extorting, and murdering innocent civilians. The
guerrillas are much weaker today than they were in 2002, yet they
continue to launch deadly attacks against Colombian soldiers; they continue to sabotage Colombian infrastructure; they continue to profit from drug trafficking; and they continue to hold hostages.
Colombia’s
future looks bright, and a lasting peace accord would make it that much
brighter. But negotiating with terrorists is always a risky gambit, and
Santos will be navigating a minefield of potential dangers in the
months ahead.
Jaime
Daremblum, who served as Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United States
from 1998 to 2004, is director of the Center for Latin American Studies
at the Hudson Institute.
No comments:
Post a Comment