The Havana Negotiations

2013 may very well be remembered as the year that brought peace to Colombia. Since last October, representatives of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government have made dramatic, if halting, progress to end one of the world’s longest civil wars. The negotiations provide grounds for optimism that a conflict that has taken the lives of at least 220,000 people and displaced at least 4 million more might finally and mercifully end. Will talks yield an agreement? What will it take to create a positive peace in Colombia? I offer my own ruminations on these questions, a product of research in Colombia and an application of the lessons of the fields of CAR and political economy.

The talks in Havana have focused attention on the FARC, Latin America’s oldest insurgent group, particularly since the National Liberation Army (ELN) has remained on the sidelines. Characterizations of the FARC have tended to follow the vicissitudes of U.S. foreign policy. The Colombian state, in concert with its allies in Washington, has variously referred to the FARC as communists during the Cold War, drug traffickers during the height of the war on drugs, and terrorists since September 11, 2001. Despite the self-interest inherent in such narratives, however, drugs and crime undoubtedly have prolonged and intensified violence in Colombia, as predicted by Paul Collier and other political economists.

The story of the FARC’s origins, however, offers a different perspective, one that should be familiar to the S-CAR community. Colombia was and is one of the world’s most unequal countries, especially in land ownership; in 1960, the largest .5% of farms comprised roughly 40% of all farmland in Colombia. My and others’ research shows that land a long history of struggles for peasants’ land rights, coercive expropriation by large landowners, and sclerotic efforts at land reform provided the what Jeremy Weinstein would call the “social endowments” necessary for insurgency. These would sustain the FARC for nearly twenty years before it became involved in drug trafficking. Inequality, then, is at the core of Colombia’s story – and not merely economic inequality, but a more complex socio-political structure of exclusion that links the state and rich landowners, but excludes peasants. This inequality has only worsened after five decades of war, a product of displacement of the poor, especially Afro-Colombians. USAID, for instance, estimates that 0.4% of Colombians own 62% of Colombia’s best farmland.

Negotiators in Havana to their credit made addressing land inequality the first of five points for peace talks, reaching agreement on a land reform that they described in a joint statement as “the start of a radical transformation of rural Colombia.” The reform, if implemented, would invest heavily in rural areas, redistribute land to farmers, and compensate Colombians who have lost property during the war.

There are good reasons to temper our optimism, however. As in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian history tends to repeat itself. The Colombian government has attempted land reform no fewer than fourteen times since 1917; that’s an average of one land reform every seven years. A constant in these experiences is the opposition of Colombia’s landed class to any democratization of ownership. Landowners have repeatedly used violence to resist redistribution. Paramilitary groups connected, who at times have maintained close connections to Colombian politicians and the military, have assisted in this effort. Michael Albertus and Oliver Kaplan have found that piecemeal land reforms resulting from elite resistance often increased political violence.

The peace talks in Havana, then, face at least two major obstacles. First, the Colombian state faces a credible commitment problem, in the words of Barbara Walter; the state’s inability or unwillingness to stop rich landowners from derailing land reforms in the past should cause the FARC to doubt the government’s commitment to land reform today. Second, it is unclear whether landowning elites have reached what William Zartman would call a ripe moment. This is perhaps best seen in comments by Álvaro Uribe, president of Colombia between 2002 and 2008, on the peace process. Uribe, the son of a rich landowner killed by the FARC, has criticized the peace process and the agreed-upon land reforms fiercely and publicly.

The collapse of peace talks currently taking place in Havana would only extend the tragedy of Colombia’s war. Yet negotiations yielding a negative peace that leaves in place the economic roots of Colombia’s war raise the specter of a future of continued poverty, further political violence, crime, and injustice. Three steps might help support the pursuit of positive peace. First, both sides should invite the United Nations to participate in talks. United Nations Peacekeeping Operations are certainly no panacea, but can help resolve credible commitment problems through disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs and monitoring progress on land reform implementation. Second, the government must build consensus among landowning elites in favor of a major redistribution of land. Colombia’s history clearly demonstrates that large landowners can sink land reform. President Santos, himself the scion of a wealthy family, is uniquely placed to lead these dialogues. Third, both the government and the FARC should seek creative means of building confidence in each other. The government, for example, could crack down on renewed paramilitary violence. The FARC could release more civilian hostages and clamp down on future kidnappings. A mutual cease-fire, which the government has thus far resisted, would also be a good first step.

Let us hope, then, that these talks signal not only an end to Colombia’s long war, but also the beginning of the long road to a just peace.