WARNING - This is a fairly long and convoluted account. It is not scholarly, and a lot of the statements can probably be explained, footnoted, or made more precise. The purpose is to give a sense of how complicated this situation has become and why understanding the historical origins of current situations is important. Without naming names, or making comparisons, it is an example of why knowledge and experience may be important in foreign policy. I would not know how to deal with these issues. Would you?

Recent Events

The three northern South American countries that used to be the Gran Colombia (Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela), are currently in a war of bullets, words and propaganda. Three events in the past week have shown the volatility of the region. First, on Wednesday, four congress people kept as hostages since 2001 were released by FARC to officials in Venezuelan helicopters with Red Cross insignia inside Colombian territory. They were flown to Venezuela to meet with relatives and to thank president Chavez for his intervention on their behalf. Second, yesterday Colombian military forces attacked a FARC guerrilla camp inside Ecuador, and killed Raul Reyes, second in command of FARC and maybe even the one in real command given the age of FARC’s founder. Today, president Chavez recalled all personnel from the Colombian embassy in Bogota and agreed to assist Ecuador with any defensive military operations against further incursions by Colombia into Venezuelan territory.

The Gran Colombia

These three countries stayed remained as one after independence from Spain only for a short period. Bolivar tried to keep them together, but ultimately failed. Through the decades, the political and economic histories of the three countries shared many common trends. Coming into the middle of the 20th century they all had had a history of democratic elections, punctuated with periods of dictatorships. Their economies were primarily agricultural. Unequal distribution of wealth was centered on land ownership issues, and those issues largely defined many of the political strifes.

Birth of Guerrilla Movements

Battles for land ownership started in the early 20th century, with traditional political parties (with words such as “Conservative”, “Liberal”, “Democratic” somewhere in their names). These parties took different sides of the conflict between landowners and the landless poor, but ultimately caved to the rich and powerful, solving few problems. Some of these conflicts led to insurgent nationalist groups in the first part of the century which morphed or were replaced by communist guerrilla movements in the second half of the 1900s. In the 1960s, after the Cuban revolution, two groups became well established in Colombia, FARC and ELN. The first one was a spinoff of earlier nationalist groups and was the armed branch of the more conservative communist party. The second was initiated by clergy and intellectuals with stronger Maoist views and had no political arm. These groups operated mostly in remote rural areas, making token attacks on military or police garrisons, but have never posed a real threat of militarily taking over an area and much less the government. They used local taxation, extortion and kidnapping as sources of revenue to supplement funding presumably coming from Russia and China.

Narcotrafficking

The 1980s brought about the expansion of the Colombian drug empires with infamous drug lords becoming highly visible and influential. Entrepeneurs that started the 1970s with marihuana production and survived, moved into the much more profitable cocaine business. Revenues were phenomenal and all aspects of the economy and politics were influenced. The cash flow was so intense that it spilled over into bribes, charity and laundered into inflated purchases of real estate, businesses and rural properties.

Self defenses and paramilitaries

The expansion of the drug lords into rural areas brought them into contact with the guerrilla organizations, and the monied new rich became targets of kidnappings and extortion. As a response to this threat, they started funding “self-defense” groups, unconventional conglomerates of common criminals, local residents and former police and military personnel. These groups often formed lose associations with farming associations, politicians and the military because of their common goals of eliminating the problem of communist guerrillas in rural areas.

Narco-terrorism and Narco-paramilitarism

As the Cold War came to an end, the ideological basis for the communist-inspired guerrillas disappeared, together with whatever monetary or logistical support they had presumably been receiving from foreign countries. The guerrilla groups started supplementing the income from kidnapping with profits from the drug trade, either as taxation, protection money for growers and shippers, or direct involvement in the trade. The chaos of law and order of the times also spilled over into the paramilitary groups, which in turn got involved to the same extent in the drug trade. The Colombian government, struggling with all of these law and order issues, agreed to initiate peace talks with the larger guerrilla group, FARC, and ceded a large area of territory for safety negotiation. In retrospect, FARC was not really committed to a true peaceful solution, and used the demilitarized area to establish a country within a country and a haven out of which they could conduct all of their business and military operations.

Uribe and the Plan Colombia

The current president of Colombia, a Harvard-educated technocrat, whose father died in a kidnapping by FARC, started a hard-line approach to all of Colombia’s security problems. Attacks on the drug trade were supported by U.S. funds in Plan Colombia, stipulating use exclusively for combating drug trade. Uribe started a primarily military campaign against FARC eliminating any “concessions” from past administrations. After September 11, FARC was declared a terrorist group, and money from Plan Colombia was authorized for combating terrorism. Part of this campaign jailed many guerrillas and threatened their leaders with jail and extradition. The primary response from FARC was to change the kidnapping tactic to taking high valued targets and police and military to be held indefinitely for prisoner exchanges. Among 40 “valuable” prisoners are many congressmen, three US contractors whose plane was downed in 2001, and a presidential candidate of Colombo-French origins, Ingrid Betancourt, which has brought the French government into the scene.

Plan Colombia and the Free Trade Agreement

As part of a U.S. incentive for Colombia to continue with parallel wars on narcotrafficking and on terrorism, an offer of a special trade agreement has been proposed. Passage of this special status is uncertain. The Colombian govenrment’s human rights record in these battles, and more specifically, the possible association of Uribe allies with paramilitary groups have made senators in the US hold back on voting for this agreement.

Chavez and Bolivarian Socialism

Venezuela had a period of guerrilla activity, but it did not have the strength and duration of the one in Colombia. Oil revenues and weak trickle down approaches possibly alleviated poverty. The only real political crises through the decades in Venezuela came from successful or failed coups. Chavez, the current president, initially became well known for a failed coup attempt with other military officers inspired by “Bolivarian” principles. He eventually was elected and has established a vast network of social programs funded by oil revenues. His rhetoric is Castro-like, and because of his extreme ideologies has been challenged with a coup attempt and a recall.

Mediation, Hostage Releases, and the Current Crisis

The Colombian government and FARC have discussed very superficially a “humanitarian exchange” of prisoners, but negotiations have not gone very far, largely because of inflexibility on both sides. Chavez has attempted to mediate in negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC, but his rhetoric and accusations against the Colombian government the release agreements have been fraught with obstacles. To date, six “high value” prisoners of FARC have been released. What will occur with the rest is now in question with the events of last week, especially with the death of Raul Reyes in the Gran Colombia.