Promissory winds seem to befall Colombia’s, long overdue, search for peace. Yet again, Colombia’s government, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have found themselves sitting in the negotiating table. This time, the outcome actually looks promising.
Have Colombians become less violent? Have social indicators improved? Has corruption decreased? Has land reform actually been implemented? The answer is probably quite the opposite. And yet, the soil set out for peace appears more fertile nowadays, the simple answer being that war has stopped being lucrative for a large section of Colombia’s economic elite.
With decreased Plan Colombia assistance during the Obama years, and military expenditure accounting for half of the total governmental expenditure in Colombia, the Uribe war-economy model has become unsustainable. Santos’ bet for a first sector extraction economy based on foreign investment will have the final green light with the FARC, voluntarily, out of the way. This makes peace a necessity, or at least an insurmountable opportunity for Santos, to clinch re-election in 2014 and thus to keep his Unidad Nacional political clientele happy.
The equation is not solved yet however, for some stand to lose from peace. For now former president Alvaro Uribe, and wealthy landowners have already expressed their opposition to the peace process. Uribe is bound to suffer at least politically from successful peace talks and a de-mobilized FARC. Alas, his whole political platform is based on fighting that armed group, and Colombians have forgiven what has been described by experts as the “gradual africanization of the country” just to see the end of the armed rebels. Without FARC, what’s left for Uribe?
Landowners have also expressed their fears regarding the peace negotiations. The alarms of agrarian reform have already set this minoritarian, yet powerful, population group on the alert. Their opposition is bound to be fierce, and, based on previous experience, sectarian. Just some years ago, Colombian land owners repudiated the long standing preferential trade scheme, where Venezuela’s government handed them a de facto monopoly over meat and dairy imports. The reason being, their dislike for leftist Hugo Chavez.
Can Santos and his allies’ economic interests triumph over Uribe and company’s, in order to have a peace agreement? For now it seems highly probable. Santos has powerful economic allies, the traditional (and highly corrupt) political machinery in his pocket as well as the media on his side. Still, Uribe, an arduous fighter, will make an attempt to sabotage the peace agreement by running in the senatorial race for the, unaptly named, Puro Centro Democratico movement.
Meanwhile, the non-traditional political sectors, and the left (who by the next congressional and presidential elections might include former FARC members) have been openly supporting the peace talks. Former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus even offered “1,000 hours of labor” to act an as advisor for the peace process. The actual chances which these sectors stand for the upcoming elections are quite unclear, however. When these sectors have actually reached political office in Colombia, it is usually on account of conjunctural electoral phenomena.
Now then, will a successful peace agreement guarantee peace itself and happy times? Not a chance, but it is certainly a necessary step in the right direction. It would seem that this time the stars are aligned for successful resolution, and that the potential threat can only become an actual threat by surging from that quintessential flaw of Democracy: Colombian’s bad decisions at the voting polls.