21 October 2015
“The policies of the state have always been aimed at violence, because for the governments of Colombia maintaining the war is business. It’s beneficial to big businessmen, so it’s a very big challenge, it’s a process that will take many years. Hopefully one day we will see peace, but I think there are lots of obstacles”.
So speaks Jesús Emilio Tuberquia, a peasant farmer from the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a community in the North-West region of Urabá that declared themselves ‘neutral’ in the five-decade Colombian internal armed conflict in 1997. This ‘neutrality’ was a strategy to try to protect themselves and remain on their land amidst violence and chaos as the FARC guerrilla (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) battled against the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries, and all three made use of rural civilians as pawns and resources in their war.
One of the concerns of Jesús Emilio and others from his community is that although a peace accord would make their lives safer because they would no longer risk being caught in crossfire when they go to farm their land, the paramilitary structures would still exist, and would still be at the service of the economic interests of the state and multinational businesses. The region of Urabá has been afflicted since the 1980s by violent abuses of human rights by the right-wing AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – United Self-defence Forces of Colombia). The AUC often collaborated with the army, imposing a reign of terror and quasi-military control. The government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) led a demobilisation process in 2003-6, which has been widely criticised by social movements and the international human rights community. Many of the paramilitary structures continue to exist, albeit mutated in different ways in each region, and one of the Peace Community’s most frequently expressed concerns is the threats that they receive from the inheritors of these structures.
Mistrust of the army is another element that causes fear. Many of the threats the Peace Community denounce are worded in such a way as to suggest that the paramilitaries continue to maintain their alliance with the Seventeenth Brigade of the Army, which has jurisdiction in their territory. The truth of this claim is not the point: this is a strongly-rooted perception that feeds the mistrust of the Community for an army which has in the recent past been responsible for massacres and other violations, in collaboration with paramilitaries. Convincing the Peace Community that the army has changed is going to be a tall order.
One member of the Community told me in May that his son had gone to work in his cocoa plantation and had crossed paths with a group of soldiers who told him that they didn’t want the FARC to demobilise because if the war ended, they would lose their jobs. They wrote on one of the cocoa trees, “guerrilleros, no se demovilicen”.
Urabá is a geographically isolated region where, ever since independence, the civil state institutions have been barely present. In the rural mountains and jungle where the Peace Community have their settlements, the only state presence they see regularly is the Armed Forces. The Community’s perception of the state is largely based on what they see of the army, which has been trained with a mentality of war, not of peace-building. A phrase I hear often in the Community is, “they are over there talking about peace, but here on the ground they keep violating human rights, and so what peace are they talking about?” One of the principles of the negotiations in Havana is that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’, which means that implementation will not start until all the points on the six-point agenda have been covered. However there is a view commonly held throughout Colombia that the state is hypocritical because while it is making a grand media show about peace, it hasn’t changed anything yet on the ground.
So speaks Jesús Emilio Tuberquia, a peasant farmer from the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a community in the North-West region of Urabá that declared themselves ‘neutral’ in the five-decade Colombian internal armed conflict in 1997. This ‘neutrality’ was a strategy to try to protect themselves and remain on their land amidst violence and chaos as the FARC guerrilla (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) battled against the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries, and all three made use of rural civilians as pawns and resources in their war.
The Peace Community
I have been visiting the Peace Community and talking to members about how they perceive national-level political developments for over four years. As part of my research as an anthropologist, I have been talking to them about the peace process which began in October 2012 between the FARC and the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018). The Peace Community is comprised of some 900 farmers who live in eleven settlements scattered across the low parts of the Abibe mountain range, seven in the department of Antioquia and four in the department of Córdoba. The settlements are between two hours and two days’ walk or mule-ride from each other. They are one of the groups that have suffered the most human rights violations in Colombia. They have lived through massacres, multiple forced displacements, selective assassinations of leaders and stigmatisation in local and national press. In contrast to three previous failed attempts to negotiate with the FARC, the current peace process has emphasised the importance of including as protagonists the more than seven million victims of the armed conflict (about 15 percent of the population). This emphasis has been celebrated as ground-breaking by many NGOs and international bodies and has set the bar for future models of conflict resolution around the world. Additionally, the first partial agreement on agrarian reform, published by the parties in May 2013, stipulates the need for a “territorial approach” in order to address differentially the needs in the regions of Colombia and permit community participation in the formulation of development policies. But how much of what goes on at top level politics filters down to the people who are supposed to benefit? The sceptical narratives that I have heard from many members of the Peace Community, reflect the common perceptions of many victims’ groups and other sectors of society around the country.
The persistence of the paramilitaries
One of the concerns of Jesús Emilio and others from his community is that although a peace accord would make their lives safer because they would no longer risk being caught in crossfire when they go to farm their land, the paramilitary structures would still exist, and would still be at the service of the economic interests of the state and multinational businesses. The region of Urabá has been afflicted since the 1980s by violent abuses of human rights by the right-wing AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – United Self-defence Forces of Colombia). The AUC often collaborated with the army, imposing a reign of terror and quasi-military control. The government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) led a demobilisation process in 2003-6, which has been widely criticised by social movements and the international human rights community. Many of the paramilitary structures continue to exist, albeit mutated in different ways in each region, and one of the Peace Community’s most frequently expressed concerns is the threats that they receive from the inheritors of these structures.
Mistrust of the army is another element that causes fear. Many of the threats the Peace Community denounce are worded in such a way as to suggest that the paramilitaries continue to maintain their alliance with the Seventeenth Brigade of the Army, which has jurisdiction in their territory. The truth of this claim is not the point: this is a strongly-rooted perception that feeds the mistrust of the Community for an army which has in the recent past been responsible for massacres and other violations, in collaboration with paramilitaries. Convincing the Peace Community that the army has changed is going to be a tall order.
One member of the Community told me in May that his son had gone to work in his cocoa plantation and had crossed paths with a group of soldiers who told him that they didn’t want the FARC to demobilise because if the war ended, they would lose their jobs. They wrote on one of the cocoa trees, “guerrilleros, no se demovilicen”.
Urabá is a geographically isolated region where, ever since independence, the civil state institutions have been barely present. In the rural mountains and jungle where the Peace Community have their settlements, the only state presence they see regularly is the Armed Forces. The Community’s perception of the state is largely based on what they see of the army, which has been trained with a mentality of war, not of peace-building. A phrase I hear often in the Community is, “they are over there talking about peace, but here on the ground they keep violating human rights, and so what peace are they talking about?” One of the principles of the negotiations in Havana is that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’, which means that implementation will not start until all the points on the six-point agenda have been covered. However there is a view commonly held throughout Colombia that the state is hypocritical because while it is making a grand media show about peace, it hasn’t changed anything yet on the ground.