Week 9 - Colombia

PART 1. Democracy and Violence; Experiences of Political Violence in Colombia: The FARC, The Paras, and Those In-Between
Associated Readings

1. Jan Knippers Black and William Godnick, “Colombia's split-level realities,” from Latin America: Its Problems and Its Promise, pp. 381-398 (2011)
2. Gruner, Sheila. 2017. “Territory, Autonomy, and the Good Life: Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Ethno-Territorial Movements in Colombia’s Peace Process.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 22 (1): 174–182.

Key Resource for this Week: Guest presentation from Prof. Ligia Aldana from the SUNY-NP Dept. of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Here is the link to her presentation. The presentation lasts just over an hour and it jam-packed with information. I suggest you watch it in thirds, as you work your way through the content below, and the Gruner article. Don't get overwhelmed by the amount of detail - focus on the broad processes and key moments.

Handouts ("Course Documents" on Bb)

1. Handout 4. Colombia - Recent History
2. Handout 5. Colombia - Plan Colombia

I. Introduction to Colombia (Draws from World Scholar/Latin America & the Caribbean, 2011)

Colombia, the fourth-largest and third-most-populous country in South America, is bordered by Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama. Its long coastline is split by the Isthmus of Panama between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The country's coastal plains, where the vast majority of its 44.2 million (2010) people live, give way to rugged mountains and eastern grasslands. Unlike most of the countries we will consider in this course, Colombia has not experienced by an authoritarian regime (for example, a military dictatorship) in recent decades.

Some Colombians you might have heard of:  the pop singer Shakira, the Nobel Prize in Literature winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the Formula One race car driver Juan Pablo Montoyez, and the rock and roll musician Juanes.  Actress Catalina Sandino Moreno was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in “Maria, Full of Grace,” the story of a young woman who mules drugs from Colombia to New Jersey.  And many know the coffee bean picker Juan Valdez, a fictional character used to promote Colombian coffee. Speaking of coffee, see this Washington Post piece on this year's World Barista Championship.

Colombia's colonial history illustrates well the patter described in my Week 2 blog: The first Spanish settlements date to 1510, and by midcentury the foundations for colonial society were established. Thought the encomienda and draft labor systems, indigenous people were forced into something close to slavery; as their numbers dwindled due to disease and desertion, many Africans were enslaved and brought to the colony to fulfill its labor requirements. The colonial economy was based on agriculture and gold mining, supplemented in the seventeenth century by trade. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown created the Viceroyalty of New Granada, centered in the present-day capital, Bogotá. Simón Bolívar defeated the Spanish near Bogotá in 1819, establishing and becoming president of Gran Colombia (comprising contemporary Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador). Following the breakup of this entity by 1832, the foundations were laid for the modern Republic of Colombia.

In the early twentieth century, coffee became the engine of the economy, spurring industrialization and urbanization. Freely elected civilian governments represented both the Liberal and Conservative parties. Interparty rivalry led to an extended period of civil war, known as "La Violencia," between 1948 and 1958, costing some 300,000 lives. In 1957 a power-sharing alliance, the National Front, ended the war; the alliance was phased out by 1974.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was established in 1964 as an armed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement and has since expanded to gain de-facto control of large portions of rural Colombia. Subsequent governments struggled with terrorist violence by the FARC insurgency and other left-wing guerrilla organizations, drug cartels, and paramilitary forces.

During President Alvaro Uribe's two terms (2002-2010), security improved, with significant gains against drug trafficking and increased military pressure against the FARC guerrillas. Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe's defense minister, became president in 2010.

Despite its ongoing internal political strife, Colombia remains a culturally rich and vibrant country, with a dizzying array of urban landscapes and beautiful rural landscapes.

II. Understanding the Major Players in Colombia's Political Violence
As we begin getting familiar with the theme "political violence" in Colombia, I would like to suggest that you resist the temptation to determine who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys." What makes Colombia so troubling (and so fascinating) is that, at this point in time, it is very difficult to tell who is on whose side and how armed groups official ideologies (which may sound very good) match up to what they actually do (which may sound very bad). Take this suggestion seriously as you read the selections from Michael Taussig's Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza Campaign in Colombia.


Prior to moving forward, make sure you have printed out handouts 2 and 3. Look at them from time to time as we move ahead.

In order to understand political violence in Colombia, you need to get familiar with two groups and a government initiative. The two groups are the FARC and the Paras, and the initiative is Plan Colombia. Be aware that Colombians have very strong feelings about these three issue. (If you have any Colombian friends or teachers, you will find out quickly.) Look over this short article to get your feet wet.

Here are short introductions to each of these:
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was established in 1964 as an armed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement. Since its inception, the FARC has been based geographically in the southeastern jungles and in the plains at the base of the Andes. According to its official ideologies, the FARC claims to represent the rural poor in a struggle against Colombia's wealthier classes. It opposes U.S. influence in Colombia (particularly Plan Colombia), and it fights against the privatization of natural resources, against multinational corporations, and against paramilitary violence. The possible appeal of these priorities and principles has been complicated by the FARC's actions, including armed insurgency (guerilla) campaigns against successive Colombian governments (with the goal of seizing power through an armed revolution) and involvement in Colombia's international drug trade. Within the international community, the FARC is considered a terrorist organization due to its well-documented random kidnappings, violence, and human rights abuses.

Paramilitary Forces are groups whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces. In Colombia, in recent years several massive paramilitary forces (or, to use the colloquial term, "Paras") have emerged. In the beginning, these groups claimed to be protecting ordinary citizens from insurgent groups like the FARC, since the state police and military was failing to do so. In time, the interests and priorities of the Paras have become much more complicated. An umbrella group you should know about is the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or "AUC"), which consolidated multiple paramilitary groups into one umbrella organization and presently has somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 members. Like the FARC, AUC is considered a terrorist organization by multiple countries and organizations, including the United States and the European Union. Also like the FARC, Colombian paras have been linked to drug production and trafficking. Unlike the FARC, they have collaborated with the Colombian police and military and have received funding and support from the government--funding which, at least in part, came from the U.S. via Plan Colombia (see below). Listen to this NPR story on right-wing paramilitaries and the assassination of union leaders. (This is the topic of Leslie Gill's short readings about Coca Cola in Part 2.) 

Plan Colombia. Conceived and implemented in the late 1990s, Plan Colombia emerged out of a series of conversations between Colombia's late-1990s president, Andrés Pastrana, and the U.S. administration of Bill Clinton. For his part, Pastrana was interested in social and economic revitalization, ending the armed conflict and creating an anti-drug strategy; the priorities of the U.S. were counternarcotics projects (following the "War on Drugs" approach), and sustainable economic development projects that would convince coca farmers to grow and market other crops. Having cost us several billion dollars to date, Plan Colombia is the U.S.’s largest military aid initiative outside of the Middle East.

Watch the following two-part documentary on the FARC and the Paras (copy and paste link into your browser): http://youtu.be/SKJblKuj84E

III. Michael Taussig
Michael Taussig is a senior anthropologist and longtime professor on the faculty at Columbia University. Over the years, he's written on variety of themes, including peasants, violence, capitalism, religion, healing and medicine. In his text, based on fieldwork carried out in 2001, one gets a good idea of what life is like in the Colombian countryside, where paranoia and fear of both the FARC and the Paras permeates the consciousness of ordinary citizens. The narrative Taussig tells is chilling, but it is real and, for the most part, is still happening. As you read, attempt to answer these questions:

1. What is a limpieza campaign?
2. Who carries them out?
3. Who are the targets?

IV. Some Updates
Between 2003 and 2006, the Colombian government began a campaign to demobilize the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia/AUC), an armed coalition of regional paramilitary groups that had been regularly accused of murder, forced displacement, extortion, and other human rights violations against local populations in their efforts to combat left-wing insurgents in Colombia. Although over 30,000 persons involved in the AUC were disarmed during this controversial campaign, there is growing concern that new paramilitary groups have since emerged, and formerly demobilized paramilitaries are reconstituting themselves as criminal gangs.
 
Despite government efforts at eradication of the coca crop, Colombia remains the world's leading producer of coca, and is a major supplier of cocaine to the U.S. and other international markets. It also produces opium poppy (used in heroin production), although cultivation is estimated to have decreased significantly since 2006, and cannabis (marijuana).
 

The FARC insurgency was weakened in September 2010 when Colombian security forces killed the group's second in command. The bombing raid in a remote mountainous area, coupled with a ground operation, also killed about twenty FARC members.
 

In July 2008, under Operation Jaque, Colombian military commandos succeeded in a dramatic rescue of fifteen FARC hostages, including three U.S. military contractors. Among the hostages was Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian politician who had been held for six years.

PART 2.Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence

I. Colombia and Neoliberalism

As you know from last week’s blog, Latin American economies were characterized by stagnation and inflation in the 1980s, due in large part to the debt crisis (itself a reflection of the 1973 Oil Crisis). Remember from my Week 2 blog entry that to “rescue” Latin American economies from further implosion (thereby ensuring that debt repayment could resume), international lending institutions like the IMF and World Bank imposed “structural adjustment” policies which enacted austerity measures to slash government budgets, for example, by freezing the wages of government employees and lowering public expenditures for social services such as health and education. Structural adjustment policies also asked Latin American states to increase exports and remove barriers on trade--to reintegrate their national economies, in other words, into the global market. As I have stated earlier, the immediate consequences of structural policies enacted in the 1980s were both positive and negative.  On the one hand, these policies did successfully stabilize many Latin American economies (curtailing skyrocketing inflation rates, for example). On the other hand, the slashing of public social services proved devastating for the quality of life of ordinary citizens. During the 1980s, thus, economies stabilized, but poverty and social inequality deepened.

In Colombia, structural adjustment policies implemented by Colombia’s president Pastrana in the late 1990s cut federal budgets for health care, education and for development programs. While these cuts allowed Colombia to meet its debt repayment obligations to the Work Bank, they triggered a major internal economic and political crisis, exacerbating political violence and the quasi-“civil war” between the FARC, the Paras, and the government police and military.