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Colombia’s peace talks near collapse

Colombia’s peace talks near collapse
By Andrew Webb-Vidal, recently in Monteria, north Colombia
Published: April 17 2005 23:34 | Last updated: April 17 2005 23:34, Financial Times

Glance at the memorabilia that fill Iván Roberto Duque's study in a house on the edge of a remote village in northern Colombia and you might think you have walked into a communist rebel's hideout.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Vladimir Lenin look down from pictures on the wall. Yet the room's symbolic artifacts belong to no leftwing rebel. Instead, this is home to “Ernesto Báez”, nom-de-guerre of the political commander from Colombia's outlawed rightwing paramilitary army.

“Politically I'm a world away from Che Guevara. I'm a visceral anti-Marxist,” says the uniformed and bespectacled Mr Báez, 47, in an interview with the FT. “But what I admire in Guevara, as in Lenin, is the pursuit of an ideal, the perfect condition of revolutionary conviction.”

But growing tension between, on the one hand, Mr Báez and the ideals of 15,000 fellow paramilitaries and, on the other, the politicians is threatening to unravel one of the few hopes for eventual peace in war-torn Colombia.

Optimism reigned when President Alvaro Uribe, a popular leader who has been in office nearly three years, agreed to begin peace talks aimed at demobilising the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Today, however, the AUC, which is branded a “terrorist” organisation by the US and Europe, is warning that it may “return to the mountains” because peace negotiations are nearing collapse.

Failure of the talks could bring Colombia back to levels of violence not seen for several years and scupper Mr Uribe's drive to bring peace to Colombia after 40 years of drugs-financed, internecine armed conflict.

“The current impasse poses perhaps the most significant test of Uribe's political wizardry,” says Michael Shifter, senior analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington. “The core impasse is that the paramilitaries are not prepared to accept any punishment or risk extradition, while some sectors of the international community will not tolerate impunity.”

From a few disparate vigilante groups created by cattle-ranchers and drugs barons in the 1980s, the AUC had evolved to become, by three years ago, a 20,000-strong clandestine army fighting Colombia's guerrillas. Like the leftwing guerrillas, the rightwing “paras” have committed atrocities, sometimes in league with rogue army elements. Some AUC members were trained by US special forces. Optimism is fading fast as Colombian legislators, under pressure from the US, attempt to give extra teeth to a law already opposed by the paramilitaries. Under the so-called justice and peace bill, AUC leaders found guilty of mass murder and torture face jail for up to eight years. “There is a strong sense of pessimism around here,” says Mr Báez. “After reading this law not even the most inoffensive or downright bored paramilitary or guerrilla fighter is going to demobilise.”

The AUC, which has demobilised 5,000 fighters, claims that talks with Luis Carlos Restrepo, the peace commissioner, have been a waste of time. “The law does not contain anything attractive or any incentive for those armed groups who have spent more than 20 years in the mountains,” Mr Báez says. “Do the politicians really think this is an instrument of peace?” However, in the legislature this week a group of lawmakers blocked an article that granted special status to AUC leaders by protecting them from extradition on drugs charges, a welcome caveat. Commanders would face much tougher penalties on drugs charges in the US.

The AUC argues that it was formed to defend its members against the guerrillas because state authority was absent. But critics of Mr Uribe who want a more stringent law appear to be gaining the upper hand. Analysts are pessimistic over demobilisation.

“The paramilitaries don't want to go through a process that, in their view, would have them surrender with little or no prior negotiation,” says Patrick Esteruelas, Latin America analyst at Eurasia Group, a consultancy in New York. “We should take paramilitary statements at face value.”

Adolfo Paz, 43, the AUC's inspector-general, suggests the process will fail. “The target is that all 20,000 of our combatants demobilise by the end of 2005,” says Mr Paz, whose real name is Diego Murillo and who is wanted by the US for alleged involvement in drugs trafficking. “But that's only if the right political and judicial conditions are in place.”

By arturo on Apr 18, 2005, 22:53 in Politics & the war.