Daniela Mohor

On March 2, 2001, in a daylong conference focusing on the complexities of contemporary Colombia, a flurry of energy and ideas emerged in the detailed discussions and sometimes-heated debates among panelists and attendees. Entitled Colombia in Context, the conference was organized by CLAS to bring together students, policymakers, community members, and concerned citizens grappling with the conflict in Colombia. As Professor and CLAS Chair Harley Shaken explained in his opening remarks, the conference sought to frame "immediate issues that are so consuming in terms of what's going on in Colombia, into a broader historical context," allowing a deeper understanding of the social and political forces shaping current events.

Concerns about U.S. involvement in the country of 40 million people have grown since last December, when the controversial U.S-funded coca leaves eradication program began. The program started after the Clinton administration agreed to provide Colombia with $1.3 billion in additional aid to assist the government in fighting a drug economy that finances rebel and paramilitary groups and fuels the decades-long civil war. The extent to which the George W. Bush administration will continue this commitment is unclear. President Bush recently aggravated tensions between the United States and Colombia when he said the United States would not participate in the peace talks between the Colombian government, led by President Andrés Pastrana, and the country's principal guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), led by Manuel Marulanda.

The left-wing FARC, along with a smaller guerilla force known as the National Liberation Army (ELN), has fought against the government and right-wing paramilitary groups for almost four decades. More than 130,000 people are believed to have perished in the conflict. Since 1999, however, the violence involving the government, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas has escalated; last year alone, the number of people killed in massacres topped 1,800. An estimated 1.8 million people have been displaced from conflicted rural areas, many of them congregating in urban zones.

Catherine LeGrand, a professor of history and specialist on Colombia from McGill University in Canada, addressed the roots of these problems in an introductory lecture framing the conference. The country's troubles began much earlier, she explained, in the decades-old conflict between peasants and the government; recent developments have only aggravated longstanding social problems. Today, LeGrand said, there is a new kind of violence that affects both rural and urban populations and is linked to the economic recession.

As panelist Roberto Steiner explained, Colombia has now entered the deepest economic recession in its history. Director of the Center of Studies on Economic Development (CEDE) in Bogotá, Steiner said Colombia had passed from being one of Latin America's leading economies to being its least vibrant. After averaging annual growth rates of 4.5 percent over two decades, GDP grew just 0.2 percent in 1998. "Colombia is the only country [in Latin America] where the per capita growth in the 1990s is worse than in the 1980s," he said, adding that unemployment hit 20 percent, and income distribution was as bad today as it had been in 1985. While some blame neoliberalism or the illicit drug market for the crisis, Steiner considers this the direct result of inconsistencies between the 1990 economic reforms and the 1991 Constitution.

Ana María Bejarano, a Colombian political scientist and a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, emphasized the complexity of a conflict that she qualified as "protracted" and "fragmented." She said the long duration of the conflict has strengthened the authoritarian forces and brought social and political distrust. This, combined with the multiplicity of actors involved, constitute major obstacles in peace negotiations. "It is difficult to think that if Marulanda and Pastrana come to a negotiation, that will eventually solve the whole situation, because there will still be opposition within young forces," she said. Bejarano also underscored the increasing autonomy of armed actors, who now rely on the drug trade rather than on external political support.

While several panelists aimed to explain the historical roots of the current crisis, drug trafficking and U.S policy in Colombia took center stage for much of the conference.

Professor Juan Tokatlián of the Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina echoed others when he said that Colombia's problems stem at least in part from a domestic issue in the United States. Tokatlián spoke of the effects of the "Americanization" of the war on drugs. U.S.-inspired strategies - based on drug crop eradication, extradition, and similar sanctions - have been tried and proven failures, Tokatlián said. "Just in the past six years, the government has eradicated close to 400,000 acres of coca, marijuana, and poppy seed crops," he said. "But something went wrong, because by 1981 Colombia had only 23,000 acres of cultivated illicit crops and in 2001É Colombia has 200,000 acres of coca plantations." This growth, he said, reflects the democratization of the drug business occurring after the government's dismantling of the Medellín and Cali cartels. The weakening of these organizations merely led to the emergence of new, better organized, and more powerful groups.

A number of panelists also criticized the U. S. government's decertification of Colombia between 1996 and 1999. The Foreign Assistance Act, passed in 1986, requires the president of the United States to prepare a list of major drug-producing countries every year, and to submit it to the Congress for certification. Countries that are not certified as "allies" in the war on drugs lose half of their U.S. assistance.

According to Bruce Bagley, a professor of international and comparative studies at the University of Miami and the former director of the Andean republics courses at the U.S. Department of State, Colombia's decertification by the U.S. contributed to the loss of legitimacy of Colombia's government and military forces. This led to the current economic recession by forcing former president Ernesto Samper to use the national budget to buy political popularity as a way to stabilize his administration. Samper, Bagley said, expanded where they were no resources, spent money he didn't have, and drove Colombia into a deep fiscal crisis - all of this prompted in part by the U.S.' decision to identify his government as uncooperative in the war on drugs. "The overall impact was not just the weakening of the Colombian state," he said, "but an international condemnation of the Colombian state that further emboldened the guerillas and further deepened the legitimacy crisis."

The discussion intensified when Mauricio Cárdenas, a former member of the Pastrana administration, presented the government's Plan Colombia as a possible "therapy to resume peace and economic prosperity." Disclosed in September 1999, Plan Colombia is structured around four principal strategies, including economic and social recovery, peace negotiations, institutional reforms, and counter-narcotics policies. This last component of the plan is the most controversial; it includes $1.3 billion in U. S. aid, including financial support as well as the presence of hundreds of American troops and advisers training anti-narcotics battalions on Colombian soil.

Both Prof. Bagley and Andrew Miller, Acting Advocacy Director for Latin America at Amnesty International USA, strongly criticized the plan's military component, saying that it rewarded an undeserving military. Miller pointed out that in many cases, massacres committed by the paramilitaries have been covered up by the Colombian army. He insisted on the need to base any peace process on the respect for human rights.

The controversial plan sparked interest among audience members as well, many of whom asked questions related to different aspects of its implementation. In response to a set of such questions, Colombian political scientist Eduardo Pizarro urged people to remember the distinction between the Colombian version of the plan, which includes social development programs and other non-military priorities, and what he called its "North American package." While the U.S. military aid to Colombia has attracted more attention than the other programs, it constitutes only one aspect of the more extensive Plan Colombia. While Bagley, Miller, and others were deeply critical of the U.S. military aid, most panelists conceded that other aspects of the plan held greater promise for Colombia. Pizarro, for example, explained that he hoped the U.S. aid package would be modified, but did not oppose the plan as a whole.

Indeed, although sharp differences on specific policies emerged throughout the course of the day, there were areas of general agreement among the participants. Most emphasized the need for additional political reforms in Colombia and the necessity to refocus the Colombia drug war on the North American drug consumption problem. And many underscored the importance of continuing dialogues on these issues in settings of serious engagement and study. Only through careful analysis can lasting solutions be constructively identified, helping to bring an end to the decades of violence which have racked Colombia.

Daniela Mohor is a second-year M.A. student at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Her interests include reporting on Latin American social issues and politics.