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Building Peace in a Time of War Virginia M. Bouvier Senior Program Officer United States Institute of Peace Draft of a book being prepared for United States Institute of Press, Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War

In a recent talk at the U.S. Institute of Peace, I asked some fifty high school teachers to list all the words and images they associate with Colombia.i Their responses included a range of general and specific terms related to the theme of violent conflict--war, violence, drugs, kidnapping, FARC (Colombias largest guerrilla group), arms, paramilitaries, child soldiers, corruption, sexual exploitation, and trafficking in women. Other terms mentionedcoffee, music-were less obviously related to the conflict. The teachers did not propose a single image linked to peace or the many efforts to pursue peace in Colombia. Addressing this gap in public opinion and in the scholarly literature on this topic, this book seeks to rectify some of the distortions created by the neglect of these conflict actors, to consider how peace initiatives and their proponents might contribute further to a resolution of the Colombian conflict, and to assess the implications of this adjusted vision for the international community and policy

makers. The lack of attention to Colombias peace efforts and actors, particularly in the English-speaking world, is not all that surprising. Colombia claims relatively little attention from the American media, the public, or the broader global community; when it does appear in the news, drugs and violence frequently dominate the headlines. Agendas of violence, power, drugs, and greed have by and large eclipsed attention to the political partisanship and ideologies that provided the backdrop for a guerrilla war kindled by socioeconomic inequities and political exclusion some forty years ago. In recent decades, drugs have provided a steady source of income that has fueled the conflict and contributed to its intractability.ii Today more than ninety percent of the cocaine and about half of the heroin consumed in the United States is produced in or transits through Colombia.iii Increasingly, Colombias cocaine is finding markets in Brazil, Africa, and Europe as well.iv Scholars, journalists, and others have produced a steady stream of books with a wide readership in both Spanish and English on Colombian cartels and drugtrafficking.v In addition to its infamy as a leader in the drug trade, Colombia is also a leader in statistics on violence. The longstanding internal armed conflict in Colombia involves multiple armed actors (including guerrillas, paramilitary forces, state armed forces, common criminals, and drug traffickers), has evolved over time, and seems to defy resolution. Each day conflict-related violence claims the lives of more than a dozen Colombians (usually civilians) and internally displaces

850 Colombians.vi After Sudan, Colombia has the second largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) estimated at between 2-3 million -- in the world.vii Labor leaders, journalists, human rights workers, church leaders, elected officials, and judicial authorities in Colombia are among the most threatened on the face of the earth. In 2005, with more than 1,100 mine victims, Colombia took over the record for the country with the most land mine accidents, surpassing Cambodia and Afghanistan.viii Colombia has long been known as the kidnap capital of the world, with more than 16,000 people-- including prominent legislators, government ministers, presidential candidates, business people, and U.S. contractors-- kidnapped in the past five years, and some 4,000 kidnap victims currently being held.ix A number of related factors contribute to the drug and violence prism through which the world tends to view Colombia. News stories are usually shaped by policy hooks, story angles that link events of the day to government policies or to an explicit relationship with the news consumer. In the United States, policymakers have promoted three sometimes-overlapping paradigms that have shaped U.S. relations with Colombia: Beginning in the 1950s (and increasing especially after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba), counterinsurgency concerns governed U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America; in the 1980s, the U.S. war on drugs dominated U.S. policy directives in the Andean producer countries; and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., the war on terror has driven U.S foreign

policy concerns around the globe. These policy approaches have sometimes warranted coverage because they carried a steep price tag or because they showcased U.S. interests abroad. With the launching in 2000 of Plan Colombia, a multi-billion dollar plan to strengthen the Colombian state, Colombia became one of the top U.S. aid recipients in the world, surpassed at that the time only by Egypt and Israel. From 2000-2006, Colombia received unprecedented levels of U.S. aid totaling some $4.7 billion, more than three-quarters of which went to the Colombian military and police for counterinsurgency, counter-narcotics, and oil pipeline protection.x Since most U.S. foreign aid thus far has been earmarked for the prosecution of the war, other agendas -- regional stability; democracy, human rights, and the rule of law; socioeconomic development and humanitarian needs;, and peace initiatives -- only occasionally make headlines.xi More often than not, however--especially following 9/11 and the national preoccupation with war in Iraq--neither peace efforts in Colombia or the conflict itself have gotten much print. Nonetheless, U.S. involvement is far from negligible. The relative lack of attention to the conflict in Colombia is all the more surprising given that the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, with some 2,000 employees representing 32 agencies, is second in size only to that in Iraq.xii Furthermore, the U.S. presence in Colombia on the ground has grown rapidly since 2000. U.S. troops and advisors are now legally capped at 800, and U.S. civilian government contractors are capped at 600 (plus foreign contractors).xiii About a dozen U.S. citizens have lost their lives in this

conflict. If the war in Colombia has received little attention, journalists, academics, human rights practitioners, and conflict resolution specialists alike have paid even less attention to Colombias drive for peace and to those actors working for peace and nonviolent change. On the scholarly front, only recently have political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars even begun to analyze the role of civil society and NGOs in policymaking. xiv Colombian scholars and their protgs are known for their development of violentology, a sophisticated and influential scholarly discipline that is dedicated to the study of violence in Colombia. xv With a few exceptions, such literature as exists on peace initiatives has largely been in Spanish and has tended to focus on the governments repeated and largely unsuccessful efforts to negotiate peace, or have tended toward autobiographical accounts of these efforts.xvi initiatives as a focus of study. Human rights practitioners within Colombia and abroad, while aware of and sometimes even participants in the construction of peace initiatives, have generally focused their work on discerning the patterns of violence and abuse in the daily manifestations of Colombias conflict. Their most pressing task is to document and denounce human rights violations as well as violations of international humanitarian laws and norms governing the conduct of the armed conflict. xvii Most human rights practitioners lack the mandate or the time required to document or analyze peace initiatives, although some groups are beginning to do just that.xviii Scholars have largely ignored local and regional

Ironically, within the conflict resolution field as well there is an inherent bias against actors who have eschewed violence in the pursuit of peace. Conflict analysis generally is performed with conflict actors in mind, and these conflict actors are usually limited to those engaged in the armed struggle itself. The resolution of international conflicts has traditionally been seen as a process involving negotiations between the parties that hold the weapons.xix Thus, mediation and peacemaking most frequently involve promoting negotiations and accords between the government and the armed actors. They involve anticipating, dissuading, persuading, and getting buy-in from would-be spoilers of a peace processusually, again, those with arms. Victims and proponents of non-violent conflict resolution are frequently left outside of, or in some cases given only token representation in, peace talks. Amnesties or other bargains that let known murderers and bad guys off the hook, or DDR (demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration) programs that provide incentives to the perpetrators of violence to lay down their arms are frequently held up as the necessary cost for pursuing peace. Subsequent truth commissions, sometimes established to air the claims of victims, often fall prey to political considerations that favor reconciliation over truth or justice as they seek to appease the illegal armed actors. And while these initiatives may be important, more thought could be given to the potential role of civil society in crafting alternative solutions. In the development field, one finds that it is often the communities that are experiencing the most violence that are the targets of intervention and assistance

to the neglect of communities that may have been successful in preventing or curtailing violence. While the most violent-prone communities are often judged to be the most in need of external resources, the irony is that attention and increased resources to these communities appears to reward or create incentives for violent behaviors. This is also true with DDR programs that provide benefits to combatants who agree to demobilize, but are not mandated to assist the communities where reintegration will occur or the victims of the violence. These programs create new tensions because the benefits privilege the perpetrators of abuses while ignoring the urgent needs of the victims, including the displaced. This book challenges some of these practices. It calls for greater attention to be paid to the relationship between conflict and development, and suggests that support for development needs is a critical step forward on the path to peace. A final aspect of the relative invisibility of Colombian peace initiatives stems from the general invisibility of those sectors of the population that are often the protagonists behind peace initiatives. Women, the rural sectors in general and the rural poor in particular, youth, Afro-Colombians, and the indigenous have a history of political, social, and economic exclusion in Colombia, and much of the nascent literature emerging about women, the rural and urban poor, youth, AfroColombians, and indigenous focuses on their victimization by the war, by economic policies, and by discriminatory practices. Of the approximately three million internally displaced Colombians, one third are of African descent, more than half are women, and half are under age fifteen.xx At least 13 percent of

Colombias rural population is now displaced, and rural poverty in Colombia reached 69 percent in 2004, up from 64 percent the previous year.xxi AfroColombians (the largest minority group in Colombia, constituting about 25%-30% of the population) and indigenous communities (about 2% of the population) suffer disproportionate poverty, displacement, environmental degradation, ill health, food insecurity, and the absence of state infrastructures to promote and protect their most basic human rights. There is little scholarly research yet that focuses on the role of these groups or of the displaced-- in organizing to end the violence, to marginalize actors advocating violence as a vehicle for change (sometimes by forming peace communities), or to negotiate with armed actors to prevent or resolve violent conflicts on the ground. These marginalized groups have high stakes in the conflicts resolution and, as will be seen throughout this book, are active in many of the peace initiatives that are being carried out in the hottest conflict zones in Colombia.xxii Efforts to bring peace to Colombia have persisted nearly as long as the conflict itselfwith intermittent if impartial levels of success. National efforts, including the Rojas Pinilla amnesty in 1953 and the pact that established the National Front in 1957, led to a pause in the violence between Liberal and Conservative partisans that took the lives of some 180,000 Colombians during La Violencia (roughly from 1946-1965 and considered by some to mark the initiation of the current conflict).xxiii Since the early 1980s, Colombian governments have

alternated between strategies of war and strategies of peace in their efforts to deal with the many illegal armed actors that defy the States monopoly of force. Several governments have engaged in negotiations with guerrilla groups, some of which have led to the disarmament of at least five guerrilla groups or fractions thereof. And successive governments have, albeit unsuccessfully, repeatedly attempted to reach peace agreements with each of the two major guerrilla groups the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN).xxiv Following the breakdown in 2002 of peace talks initiated in 1998 by the government of President Andres Pastrana with the FARC, the oldest and largest of the guerrilla groups, Alvaro Uribe was elected president based on his commitment to all-out military victory over the guerrillas. And while security conditions during Uribes first administration improved in many of the larger cities and towns and secured Uribe re-election by a wide margin in 2006, the violence has continued, particularly in the countryside, where the FARC continues to control vast stretches of Colombian national territory.xxv During his first term in office (2002-2006), President Alvaro Uribe invested tremendous political capital in a controversial proposal to demobilize the rightwing paramilitary forces known as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia/SelfDefense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Following the demobilization of more than 30,000 combatants, High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo announced in April 2006 (somewhat prematurely perhaps given subsequent events), that the

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largest demobilization in the history of Colombia had been successful and the AUC was officially disbanded. The paramilitary piece of the puzzle is far from resolved, however. Dramatic revelations about pervasive links between paramilitary drugtraffickers with Colombias elected authorities in the Congress, as well as paramilitary infiltration at the highest levels of Colombias primary intelligence agency, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), have shaken the country, and the demobilized AUC, like the famed Greek hydra serpent, has generated unanticipated new configurations of criminal and drugtrafficking organizations and networks.xxvi Early on in Uribes second term, there was nonetheless hope that with the AUC officially demobilized, Uribe might turn his attention to negotiating peace with the FARC and ELN guerrillas. The Colombian government accepted a proposal by the governments of France, Spain, and Switzerland to create a small demilitarized zone in the Valle del Cauca for a prisoner-for-hostages swap, and initiated overtures to the FARC in 2006 through Senator Alvaro Leyva, a negotiator during previous peace talks, for a humanitarian accord and prisoner exchange.xxvii These hopes were dashed in October 2006, when a car bomb exploded at the war college in Bogota, injuring 23 people. Uribe immediately blamed the FARC and the talks ground to a halt. xxviii Since then, despite mounting pressures for movement on a humanitarian accord, the Uribe government has refused to dialogue with the FARC. As 2006 came to a close, military clashes

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continued between the FARC and the Colombian army, and Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos announced a new government military offensive called Plan Victory to capture or kill guerrilla leaders.xxix With regard to the ELN, progress has appeared more feasible, in part because the ELN is considered to be militarily weaker and less beholden to narcotrafficking interests. The ELN emerged in the 1960s in northeast Colombia with the support of urban middle-class students, oil workers, and priests inspired by Catholic liberation theology and the Cuban revolution, and its vision and revolutionary project reflect these origins. There have been repeated attempts spearheaded by civil societymost notably in Mainz, Germany in 1998 and in San Jose, Costa Rica in 2000 to bring the ELN to the negotiating table. After subsequent facilitation efforts lead by Mexican government officials stalled, a civil society commission created the House of Peace (Casa de Paz) in late 2005 to facilitate a consultation process between Colombian civil society and the ELN. xxx This has led to a series of formal meetings of an exploratory nature between the ELN and the Colombian government in Cuba mediated by international facilitators (namely, Norway, Switzerland, and Spain).xxxi While these talks have yet to address substantive issues such as forced displacement, a cease-fire, or amnesty for imprisoned ELN combatants, in October 2006, ELN commanders offered to cooperate on a de-mining initiative in Samaniego, Narino, and talks in Havana continued in 2007. As the reader of this book will discover, throughout Colombia, churches,

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non-governmental groups, and local and regional authorities are actively seeking peace, and they are registering success in a multitude of ways. They are designing and implementing programs that offer alternatives to violence and promote attitudes and structures that may help create a more inclusive political system capable of managing conflict nonviolently. At a local level, they have carried out delicate negotiations with armed actorssometimes under the auspices of church authoritiesfor the release of kidnap victims, to prevent the displacement of communities, and to allow safe passage of foods and medicines past armed blockades. Citizen initiatives have promoted electoral debates, addressed Peace corruption, and created institutional vehicles for local populations to contribute to the formation of municipal and national economic development plans. communities, peace laboratories, zones of peace, no-conflict zones, humanitarian zones, sanctuary churches, territories of non-violence (or peace or peaceful coexistence) are flourishing in some of the most vulnerable conflict zones in Colombia. Governors of the southern states of Tolima, Cauca, Nario, Huila, Caquet, and Putumayo have developed proposals for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, as well as an alternative development plan that proposes regional alternatives to the current fumigation policies of the central government, including crop substitution and the development of small micro-enterprises based on traditional indigenous and Afro-Colombian agricultural practices. Mayors in eastern Antioquia and in Montes de Maria are seeking paths to more participatory governance and greater community input into development decisions. With the

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assistance of UNICEF, the national civil registry office, and the civil society group REDEPAZ (Red Nacional de Iniciativas por la Paz y Contra la Guerra), millions of young people organized a Childrens Mandate for Peace, in which 2.7 million youth cast votes for peace. Inspired by REDEPAZ, 100 Municipalities of Peace have been established that are increasing citizen engagement, deepening the nature of democratic governance, and enhancing accountability in Colombia. These have led in turn to a proliferation of constituent assemblies at the municipal and regional levels. An incipient, but growing, body of recent scholarship, of which this book forms a part, is focusing attention on these and other peace initiatives. xxxii This book, and the various conferences and panels which nourished it, brings together the experiences and insights of twenty-five seasoned and emerging authors and peace practitioners. Documenting and drawing lessons from Colombias long history of peace initiatives, they yield new insights into how Colombias conflict might be resolved, and provide a veritable encyclopedia of lessons in peacemaking and peacebuilding for those seeking to transform violent conflicts in other parts of the world. The authors of this volume hail from Latin America (especially Colombia), the United States, and Europe. Contributors have been engaged in or studied peace initiatives from a variety of historical, regional, and disciplinary perspectives--including political science, anthropology, history, psychology, education, and peace and conflict studies, and they include journalists, policy analysts, church leaders, and human rights and development practitioners.

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In analyzing the kinds of initiatives that have developed in the Colombian context, I have chosen to separate the chapters into four major sections that focus respectively on national, sectorial, local/regional, and international initiatives for peace in Colombia. While these levels sometimes overlap and the divisions between them may be rather porous, this arrangement of the material lends itself to a variety of new analytical frameworks for thinking about peace initiatives, which I explore in my concluding chapter. Following this first introductory chapter, Part Two of this book begins with several chapters that analyze the successes and failures of past national peace efforts and processes. The first chapter begins with an assessment by Adam Isacson and Jorge Rojas, civil society leaders in the United States and Colombia respectively, of the evolution of a civil society movement for peace within Colombia. They analyze the origins and evolution of groups and mechanisms to promote a peaceful resolution to the conflict, the challenges the peace movement has faced in establishing a national presence, future directions that might lead toward peace, and the obstacles that remain. We then turn to official government peace initiatives. In his chapter, political science professor Carlo Nasi outlines some of the lessons to be learned from past negotiations and successful demobilizations as well as the relatively unsuccessful attempts to negotiate peace with the FARC and the ELN. Marc Chernick, also a political scientist and a USIP grantee, then considers the particular challenges that Colombian governments have confronted in their dealings with the

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FARC, the largest and most resistant of the guerrilla groups. Chernick analyzes the demands of the FARC over time, with an eye toward understanding what might bring the FARC back to the negotiating table and what might lead them to lay down their arms. Then Leon Valencia, a political analyst, journalist, and exguerrilla leader from one of the splinter groups of the ELN that demobilized in the early 1990s, reviews the efforts to bring the ELN to the peace table over the last decades and the prospects for the future. In the next chapter, anthropologist Winifred Tate takes us through the maze of issues surrounding the Colombian governments initiativeat the behest of the Catholic church-- to demobilize the right-wing paramilitary coalition known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). xxxiii Tate, a USIP Peace Scholar whose work was supported by a dissertation fellowship from USIP, discusses the evolution of paramilitary organizations into a political force in Colombian society, and analyzes the ways in which the discourse of human rights and conflict resolution has permeated their representation of themselves to the broader public. Law professor and AID consultant Arturo Carrillo rounds out this section on national initiatives with an examination of the legal mechanisms that have been established to deal with illegal armed actors in Colombia. He analyzes how Colombian norms and laws relating to truth, justice, and reparations have evolved in relation to changing international norms around issues of transitional justice and human rights. His chapter sheds light on some of the complexities surrounding the controversial Justice and Peace law approved to regulate the demobilization of the

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paramilitaries, and discusses the implications of these shifts for future negotiations with illegal armed actors. The third section of the book focuses on regional and local initiatives for peace that, like fragile orchids in a dark cellar, have persisted and blossomed in the midst of conflict. Tremendous variations in natural and human resources have shaped the evolution and nature of conflict in each region of Colombia. Peace initiatives are likewise widely varied and highly context specific, and the regional contours of the conflict shape peace-building efforts as communities seek to address particular local manifestations of conflict. Leading off this section is an overview by Christopher Mitchell and Sara Ramirez, conflict resolution specialists at the International Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) program at George Mason University, who describe the emergence and nature of peace communities throughout Colombia, and place Colombias local zones of peace within a broader context of current definitions and assumptions of the conflict resolution field. Their chapter and the USIP-supported research on which it is based, provides a comparative study of three local peace initiativesone in the department of Narino, one in southwestern Antioquia, and one in eastern Antioquia. They discuss the evolution of constituent assemblies in places like Tarso, Sonson, Mogotes, and Samaniego, where civil society has created new governance arrangements that are allowing greater participation, accountability, and peaceful coexistence in areas traditionally plagued by corruption, mismanagement, clientelism, and violent conflict.

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In the remaining chapters of this section, the authors continue to analyze the particular inflections of peace initiatives in some of the most contested and violent areas of the Colombian countryside--the Middle Magdalena Valley, the Montes de Maria region of the northern coast, Eastern Antioquia, Norte de Santander, Macizo Colombiano, Meta, and others (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Darien Caribe, Eje Cafetero, Arauca, Casanare, Valle del Cauca, and Narino). The first six of these locations have been designated as home to official peace laboratories, funded by the European Union and the World Bank and supported by the Colombian national government among others. The first peace laboratory was established in 2002 in the Magdalena River Valley, where civil society had developed a Program for Development and Peace (PDPMM) in response to the high levels of violence in that region. A second peace laboratory was established in Norte de Santander, Oriente Antioqueno, and Macizo Colombiano/Alto Patia; and a third has recently been created in Montes de Maria and Meta. xxxiv Although each of these initiatives is different, they share a number of commonalities, namely that they all build on already existing programs through the national Network of Regional Development and Peace Programs (REDPRODEPAZ), they aim to create regional proposals for peace and to support the implementation of specific accords between the conflict actors, strengthen the local institutions, support civil society actors working for peace, and encourage social and economic development in the region as a means of providing alternative livelihoods to the violence.xxxv This section examines the variation of each of these models as they develop and are implemented on the

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ground, and it also includes a chapter on Putumayo, a coca-growing region that has been one of the primary targets of the U.S. coca eradication campaigns. In his chapter, Javier Moncayo, leader of REDPRODEPAZ and a medical doctor by profession, shares a series of vignettes based on the experiences of the local Program for Development and Peace in Magdalena Medio (PDPMM), a civil society initiative that paved the way for the designation of the zone as the first Peace Laboratory. Moncayo underscores the contradictions, challenges, and contributions of civil society groups working for peace in the Magdalena Medio river valley region. This oil-producing zone has been contested by numerous armed actors. It was the birthplace of the ELN guerrillas, and subsequently also became a stronghold of the FARC (particularly in the south, in Barrancabermeja, and in the valley on the western shores of the Cimitarra river where the FARC still maintain a strong presence). It was also the birthplace of the first campesino movement of paramilitary self-defense groups (in Carmen de Chucuri), which later joined the AUC. In 2000-01, paramilitary groups violently took over the region. As Moncayo discusses the impact of the PDPMM, he observes how individuals are changing the collective culture from a culture of fear to one of greater engagement and more pro-active citizenship, and underscores the importante of local ownership of the process. We then turn to a case study by historian Mary Jean Roldan of the NoViolence Movement established by 23 mayors in Eastern Antioquia and the second so-called peace laboratory. Roldan discusses the challenges of the No-Violence

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Movement, as it has negotiated humanitarian solutions to the repeated killings and blockades of the regions towns by the FARC, ELN, and AUC, and as it seeks greater participation in policymaking on hydroelectric development, land tenure, and resource use in the region. She teases out the inherent tensions and conflicts of interest between local communities and their elected officials on the one hand, and the central government authorities in Bogota and corporate interests on the other, and ponders the benefits and liabilities of the peace laboratory model as it has evolved in Eastern Antioquia. Next Ricardo Esquivia, a Mennonite pastor actively involved in the peace movement and a leader and representative of Colombias non-Catholic religious minorities, reflects with U.S. United Church of Christ leader Barbara Gerlach on the experiences of church people, particularly Protestant Evangelicals (as nonCatholic Christians in Colombia are called), in the Montes de Maria region. Part of the third designated peace laboratory, figures for forced displacement and landmines in this area rank among the highest of any region in the country. Montes de Maria and the northern coastal region have been a battleground for many armed actors, including drug-traffickers vying for control of this important transportation corridor with easy access to the Caribbean coastand was one of the areas where paramilitary-government collaboration aimed at liquidating political opponents, social leaders, and communities occurred. In Montes de Maria, Esquivia and Gerlach tell us about a new movement that is afoot as people of faith explore their call to be peacemakers amidst the violence. xxxvi They tell us

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of how faith-based groups--including Protestants, a minority population of some five million in a largely Catholic country of 43 million inhabitants--are creating spaces for the transformation of Colombias conflict-ridden society.xxxvii Protestant Evangelical churches working in the midst of such conflict zones have established church sanctuaries of peace that have saved the lives of individuals who were detained or threatened by armed groups; these churches are developing strong links to U.S. partner churches.xxxviii They have created new institutions and organizations to engage communities in productive, income-generating activities; and they are working to nurture trust and build a culture of citizenship and accountability so that the reigning culture of favoritism might be transformed into a culture of rights. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant churches, supported by the international community, are recognizing the need to open and sustain dialogues with armed actors to diminish and prevent violence. Esquivias discussion of the Montes de Maria Development and Peace Network Foundation suggests that discussions within the faith communities and between faiths can open new opportunities for collaboration in the quest for peace. Finally, Maria Clemencia Ramirez, a Colombian anthropologist, brings us to the southwestern state of Putumayo, where the conflict and civil societys response to it have been marked by the vagaries of coca cultivation and the war against drugs. Even in this largely FARC-dominated region, where Plan Colombia had its primary focus and the conflict was highly militarized, unarmed peasants, largely marginalized and considered as criminals by the centers of power, have succeeded

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in persuading the FARC to lift armed blockades (paros armados), and have overcome FARC opposition to alternative development projects. Civil societys ability to hold the FARC accountable to its claim to represent the will of the people has created a modicum of space for negotiating at the local level. In the Putumayo region, local government authorities have joined forces with sectors of civil society, forging a precarious coalition in opposition to all of the armed actors. The fourth part of this book includes case studies of a sampling of particular sectors of Colombian society -- namely, the Catholic church, the business sector, the military, the education sector, womens organizations, and indigenous communities -- that have developed their own unique sets of peace initiatives. Msr. Hector Fabio Henao, the General Secretary of the National Social Pastoral Office and former head of the Colombian Conference of Bishops, opens this section with an analysis of the complex and longstanding role of the Colombian church in preparing the ground for peace and promoting reconciliation. With some 90% of the Colombian population nominally Catholic, the churchs impact at every level of society is pervasive. The Catholic Church, with its tremendous convening power and moral authority, is a dominant force in the country and surveys have shown it to be the most trusted national institution in Colombia. xxxix Msr. Henao analyzes the institutional goals and structures that have emerged from within the church in response to the need to transform the ongoing violence of the Colombian conflict. Behind the scenes, the Catholic bishops have facilitated peace negotiations, engaged in pastoral dialogues with representatives of each of the

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armed groups, and have sought negotiated solutions to the conflict.xl In her chapter, Jennifer Schirmer, a USIP senior fellow and former grantee, and a human rights and conflict resolution specialist, turns her attention to the Colombian military. She analyzes the historical evolution of the militarys attitudes toward peacemaking efforts by distinct governments and toward the guerrillas and how they shape the likelihood that the military will be a spoiler in any future peace process. Schirmer discusses an ongoing project of the Norwegian government to skill Colombias security forces in international humanitarian law, conflict resolution, and peace-building. Schirmer tells of carefully crafted, highly structured, confidential meetings that she facilitated between demobilized guerrillas, military leaders, and civil society. These spaces of dialogue were aimed at breaking down barriers and preparing the ground for a sustainable peace by anticipating and preventing the military from assuming its past role of spoiler in future peace talks. In the next chapter, Angelika Rettberg, a political science professor at the Universidad de los Andes, analyzes the heterogeneous nature of the business sector in Colombia, and analyzes the current and potential role of the domestic private sector in peace-building there. While the business sector has often been seen as contributing to conflict, particularly in relation to the exploitation of oil and other natural resources, in her analysis of business-sponsored local peace initiatives in four sitesthe cities of Bogota and Medellin, and the regions around Cali and the central Magdalena River ValleyRettberg highlights cases where business leaders

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are engaging in conflict prevention and mitigation efforts in order to foster a more stable business environment. In the subsequent chapter, psychologist Ana Maria Velasquez Nino and education specialist Enrique Chaux analyze the promotion of peace through education in Colombia. The potential role of education in zones of conflict has been a critical theme to peace-making and peacebuilding efforts around the globe. As scholars have shown, education is not a neutral terrain and does not exist independently of a broader social, economic, political context.xli Educational institutions and classrooms are rather microcosms of society as a whole that can promote elitism and exclusion. In the case of societies divided by class, religion or ethnicity, schools can institutionalize and encourage prejudices that perpetuate conflict, and exacerbate divisions.xlii On the other hand, education can also generate changes that promote empathy and make possible attitudinal changes at a personal level. Personal change in turn can lead to normative changes at a societal level, and that can lead to structural change, transform violent conflict, and create mechanisms and skills for conflict prevention and reconciliation. As Velasquez and Chaux suggest, educators are in a key position to intervene with youth to interrupt the culture of impunity and violence that perpetuates conflict across generations. The authors discuss current governmental initiatives to promote citizenship competencies as well as innovative active learning programs to train students in non-violent conflict resolution and civic involvement. Catalina Rojas, a Colombian conflict resolution specialist trained at ICAR,

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then analyzes the development of a womens movement for peace in Colombia, and examines the leadership roles women and womens groups have taken in negotiating accords with armed actors, and preparing the ground for peace at the local level. We next have a chapter on indigenous peace initiatives by Leslie Wirpsa, a USIP Peace Scholar, former journalist of some 20 years in Colombia, and international studies expert in natural resource studies. Working in collaboration with David Rothschild, the former director of the NGO Amazon Alliance, and Catalina Garzon, a Ph.D. student of environmental science, policy and management, Wirpsa explores how ethnicity has shaped responses to conflict by looking at indigenous traditions of resistance and mediation. The authors focus on indigenous resistance and peace initiatives in the oil-rich and highly conflictive Cauca department, a predominantly indigenous zone where communities have mobilized around ethnic identities drawing on a long history of indigenous resistance to Spanish domination and Nasa indigenous guards, wielding only their ceremonial batons, have faced down paramilitary death squads and guerrillas, and have forced drug traffickers to shut down their cocaine laboratories, and on the Planes de Vida drawn up by the Cofan peoples in the Putumayo region. In the fifth part of the book, policy analysts from both sides of the Atlantic analyze international efforts to move Colombia toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Until the government of Andres Pastrana (1998-2002), third party involvement in peace initiatives in Colombia was rather limited. Both the Clinton

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and Bush administrations have been more interested in strengthening the ability of their Colombian counterparts to defeat the guerrillas and execute the war on drugs than in supporting initiatives that would lead to a political solution to the conflict. Jim Jones, an independent consultant formerly with the United Nations task force on drugs, untangles the knotty relationship of drugs, war, and peace in Colombia as a first step to understanding the kinds of Colombian and U.S. policies that have supported and might support the path to peaceas well as those that have made peace more elusive. Neil Jeffery, formerly head of the U.S. Office on Colombia and one of the founders of Peace Brigades International in Colombia, then zeroes in on some of the dilemmas facing U.S. policymakers and NGOs as they seek ways to support peace in Colombia. German political scientist Sabine Kurtenbach then analyzes the involvement of European actors in Colombian peace initiatives, the instruments at their disposal, and perspectives for their future engagement in Colombia. Finally, development specialists Raul Rosende, Borja Paladini Adell, Juan Chaves, and Gabriel Turriago pool their collective wisdom and on-the-ground experiences working as consultants with the UNDPs REDES program in Montes de Maria to consider the international and local dimensions and dynamics of the peacebuilding process in the Montes de Maria region. Their chapter analyzes how the activities of international actors to support local and regional development activities such as those described earlier in the chapter by Ricardo Esquivia can promoteor underminethe possibilities of sustainable peace.

26

The final concluding section by the editor analyzes the scope and texture of peace initiatives presented in the volume and the variation in their goals. It suggests how these initiatives might be evaluated, and discusses some of the factors that appear to contribute to their success or failure, teases out lessons to be learned from successes and challenges, and discusses the model of peacemaking and peacebuilding represented by a greater integration of local, regional, sectoral, national and international peace initiatives. Overall, this volume offers an assessment of Colombias historic and current experiences in peacemaking and peacebuilding. It explores some of the distinct levels where civil society is engaged-- conflict prevention, management, transformation, and reconstruction; human rights protection and promotion; peacemaking (pre-negotiating); negotiating; and other peacebuilding activitiesas well as the nature of the armed conflict actors and what might bring them to opt for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The authors assess broadly the obstacles to peace, how the factors facilitating a peaceful resolution to the conflict might be supported, and what the broader applicability of the Colombian experience might be for future paths to peace. The peace initiatives laid out in this book suggest that efforts to transform the Colombian conflict are every bit as complex as the conflict itself. To continue to ignore them, however, is foolhardy, as they are an untapped resource and may contain the seeds for the conflicts transformation.

United States Institute of Peace, Summer Institute for Secondary School Teachers on International

Peace, Security, and Conflict Management, August 1, 2006.

ii

Cynthia J. Arnson and Teresa Whitfield, Third Parties and Intractable Conflicts: The Case of

Colombia, in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, eds., Grasping the Nettles: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict (Washington, D.C.: USIP Press, 2005).
iii

U.S. Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report-2005, March 2005; at

http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2005/vol1/html/42363.htm.
iv

Juan Forero, Colombia's coca survives U.S. plan to uproot it, The New York Times, August 19, 2006,

online at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/world/americas/19coca.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fNews %2fWorld%2fCountries%20and%20Territories%2fColombia&oref=slogin.

See Grace Livingstone, Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy, and War (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 2004); Russell Crandall, Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner, 2002); Robin Kirk, More Terrible than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and Americas War in Colombia (N.Y.: Public Affairs, 2003); Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001); Doug Stokes, America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia (Zed Books, 2005); Ron Chepasiuk, Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel (Milo Books, 2005); Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
vi

Jorge Rojas, president of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), talk given

at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., November 19, 2005.

vii

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The State of the Worlds Refugees 2006, at

http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/publ/opendoc.htm?tbl=PUBL&id=4444d3ce20. Last accessed August 18, 2006.

viii

Vinicius Souza and Maria Eugnia S, In Colombia, Land Mines Claim Three Victims a Day, Folha

de S. Paulo[So Paulo, Brazil], February 22, 2006; Toby Muse, Colombia Tops List of Land Mine Victims, PDT, Bogota, at www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=n/a/2006/04/04/internation...
ix

Mexico surpassed Colombia for the title in 2005. See Larry Habegger, Mexico: World's Kidnap

Capital, World Travel Watch, August 9, 2005, at http://www.worldtravelwatch.com/archives/2005/08/mexico-worlds-kidnap-capital.shtml; Amnesty International, Annual Report 2006, at http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/colombia/document.do? id=ar&yr=2006; and Letter from Olga Lucia Gomez [Director, Pais Libre Foundation] to Jorge Enrique Botero, April 3, 2006, Bogota, at http://www.paislibre.org/html/sitio/index.php? view=vistas/es_ES/pagina_108.php. Last accessed August 17, 2006.
x

Earlier levels of aid were significantly lower, reaching a high of 50 million dollars in FY2000. Levels

of aid to Colombia in 2006 and 2007, at about three-quarters of a billion dollars per year, remain on a par with 2005 levels. For exact figures since 1997, see table at www.ciponline.org/colombia/aidtable.htm. Last accessed August 15, 2006.
xi

On U.S. policy interests, see Virginia M. Bouvier, Evaluating U.S. Policy in Colombia, A Policy

Report from the International Relations Center Americas Program, May 11, 2005, at http://americas.irconline.org/reports/2005/0505colombia.html.
xii

Virginia M. Bouvier, Evaluating U.S. Policy in Colombia, Policy Report, IRC Americas Program

(Silver City, NM: International Relations Center, May 11, 2005), http://www.americaspolicy.org/reports/2005/0505colombia.html; Virginia M. Bouvier, Civil Society under Siege in Colombia, Special Report no. 114 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, February 2004), online at http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr114.html.

xiii

See Virginia M. Bouvier, Colombia Quagmire: Time for U.S. Policy Overhaul, Foreign Policy in

Focus, Americas Program (Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, Sept. 2003), at http://www.americaspolicy.org/briefs/2003/0309colombia.html; and Deborah Avant, Privatizing Military Training, Foreign Policy in Focus 7, no. 6 (May 2002); at http://www.fpif.org/papers/miltrain/box4.html.
xiv

See for example, Mario Murillo and Jesus Rey Avirama, Colombia and the United States: War,

Unrest, and Destabilization (Seven Stories Press, September 2003); Geoff L. Simons, Colombia: A Brutal History (London: Saqi, 2004).
xv

See Daniel Pecaut, Cronica de cuatro decadas de politica colombiana (Bogota: Grupo Editorial

Norma, 2006); Ruben Ardila, Violence in Colombia: Social and Psychological Aspects, in Florence Denmark and Leonore Loeb Adler, eds., International Perspectives on Violence (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004): 59-67; G. Guzman Campos, O. Fals Borda, and E. Umana Luna, La violencia en Colombia (Bogota: Tercer Mundo Ediciones, 1964); Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Penaranda, and Gonzalo Sanchez G., Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective (Wilmington: SR Books, 1992); Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia (Albany: SUNY, 2002); Cristina Rojas and Judy Meltzer, Elusive Peace: International, National, and Local Dimensions of Conflict in Colombia (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Stephen Dudley, Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (New York: Routledge, 2004); and the numerous World Bank published studies on conflict and economics including Andres Solimano, ed., Colombia: Essays on Conflict, Peace, and Development (2000); and World Bank Sector Study, Violence in Colombia: Toward Peace, Partnerships and Sustainable Development (1998).
xvi

See Socorro Ramirez V. and Luis Alberto Restrepo M., Actores en conflicto por la paz: El proceso de

paz durante el gobierno de Belisario Betancur 1982-1986 (Bogota: CINEP, 1989; Miguel Eduardo Crdenas Rivera, ed., La construccin del posconflicto en Colombia: enfoques desde la pluralidad (Bogota: CEREC, 2002); Edgar Tellez, Oscar Montes, and Jorge Lesmes, Diario intimo de un fracaso:

Historia no contada del proceso de paz con las FARC (Bogota: Planeta, 2002).
xvii

Some of the major groups documenting human rights and international humanitarian law violations

within Colombia include CODHES, CINEP, etc. International groups include Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Crisis Group, Pan American Health Organization, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization of American States, among others. See for example, Medicos sin fronteras, Vivir con miedo: El ciclo de la violencia en Colombia, April 30, 2006, at http://www.msf.org/source/countries/americas/colombia/2006/report/Vivir_Con_Miedo.pdf; Womens Commission for Refugee Women and Children, Unseen Millions: The Catastrophe of Internal Displacement in Colombia: Children and Adolescents at Risk, March 2002, at http://www.rhrc.org/pdf/wc_colombia_04.02.pdf. Last accessed August 16, 2006.
xviii

See the new database of peace initiatives compiled by the Jesuit Center for Research and Popular

Education (CINEP), available online at www.cinep.org.co/datapaz_resumenes.htm; and United Nations Development Program (PNUD), National Database of Best Practices for Overcoming the Conflict (Banco Nacional de Buenas Practicas para Superar el Conflicto), at http://www.saliendodelcallejon.pnud.org.co/banco_bpracticas.shtml, last accessed August 21, 2006.
xix

See I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen, eds., Peacemaking in International Conflict: Method

& Techniques (Washington, D.C. : United States Institute of Peace, 1997); Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, Taming Intractable Conflicts: Mediation in the Hardest Cases (Washington, D.C.: USIP Press, 2004); Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict (Washington, D.C.: USIP Press, 2001); Crocker, Osler Hampson, and Aall, Grasping the Nettles.
xx

One out of four illegal combatants are estimated to be under age 15. See Human Rights Watch,

Youll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia, Sept. 2003, at www.hrw.org; HRW, Child

Soldiers in Colombia, Sept. 2003, at http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/colombia/childsoldiers/facts.htm; Child Soldiers Global Report 2004 at http://www.child-soldiers.org/document_get.php?id=820#search= %22colombia%20child%20soldiers%22; Yvonne Keairns, The Voices of Girl Child Soldiers (New York: Quaker United Nations Office, Jan. 2003), at http://www.quno.org/newyork/Resources/girlSoldiersColombia.pdf#search=%22child %20soldiers%20colombia%22.
xxi

NotiSur, Latin American Data Base 16, no. 9, March 3, 2006. http://ladb.unm.edu; see also Edward E.

Telles, Incorporating Race and Ethnicity into the UN Millennium Development Goals, Race Report (Inter-American Dialogue, January 2007).
xxii

See Esperanza Hernandez Delgado, Resistencia civil artesana de paz: Experiencias indigenas,

afrodescendientes y campesinas (Bogota: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2004).

xxiii

See United Nations Development Program (UNDP/PNUD), Colombias Conflict: Pointers on the

Road to Peace, National Report on Human Development for Colombia 2003 (Bogota: PNUD, 2003), 25.
xxiv

These have included the EPL (Ejrcito Popular de Liberacin/Popular Liberation Army), PRT

(Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores/Workers Revolutionary Party), MAQL (Movimiento Armado Quintn Lame), M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril), and later, the CRS (Corriente de Renovacin Socialista/Socialist Renewal Group), a splinter fraction of the ELN).
xxv

Some 550 soldiers and police were killed in action in 2006. Chris Kraul, Rebels Kill 14 in

Colombia, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 26, 2006, p. A4.

xxvi

See Se calcula que hay entre 30 y 60 bandas emergentes surgidas de los grupos paras

desmovilizados, El Tiempo, Dec. 10, 2006; Cynthia J. Arnson, Jaime Bermudez, Father Dario Echeverri, David Henifin, Alredo Rangel Suarez, Leon Valencia, Colombias Peace Processes: Multiple Negotiations, Multiple Actors, Latin American Program Special Report, December 2006.

xxvii

Arnson et al., Colombias Peace Processes, 4. Proof of FARC involvement was not forthcoming however, and there was some speculation, based

xxviii

on a previous scandal, that the incident was another deception created by the military itself. See Sam Logan, Colombias Latest Problems with Corruption, Power and Interest News Report, Nov. 9, 2006, online at http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=580&language_id=1.
xxix

Kraul, Rebels Kill 14 in Colombia, A4. See Andres Valencia Benavides, The Peace Process in Colombia with the ELN: The Role of

xxx

Mexico, Cynthia J. Arnson, ed., Latin American Program Special Report, March 2006.
xxxi

See Arnson et al., Colombias Peace Processes, 5. See the new database of peace initiatives compiled by the Jesuit Center for Research and Popular

xxxii

Education (CINEP), available online at www.cinep.org.co/datapaz_resumenes.htm; and United Nations Development Program (PNUD), Banco Nacional de Buenas Practicas para Superar el Conflicto, at http://www.saliendodelcallejon.pnud.org.co/banco_bpracticas.shtml, last accessed August 21, 2006. Mauricio Garcia-Duran, To What Extent is there a Peace Movement in Colombia? An Assessment of the Countrys Peace Mobilization, 1978-2003 (Ph.D. diss., Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, 2005), provides an excellent theoretical overview and mapping of the field, as does the special issue on Colombia of Accord edited by Garcia-Duran. See Alternatives to War: Colombias Peace Processes, Special Issue, Accord 14 (London: Conciliation Resources, 2004), online at http://www.cr.org/our-work/accord/colombia/spanish/movilizacion.php. Likewise, the UNDP National Report on Human Development for Colombia 2003, available in English as Colombias Conflict: Pointers on the Road to Peace, http://www.pnud.org.co/indh2003, is a masterful synthesis of the expertise of hundreds of individuals and institutions from different regions of the country. Sara Cameron, Out of War: True Stories from the Front Lines of the Childrens Movement for Peace in Colombia (N.Y.: Scholastic Press, 2001) provides poignant narratives from children working for peace in the late 1990s in Colombia.

xxxiii

Serious concerns remained about recidivism and the formation of new armed groups in some areas.

See Secretary-General [Jose Miguel Insulza] of the Organization of American States (OAS), Fifth quarterly report to the Permanent Council on the Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia (MAPP), March 2006.
xxxiv

See Virginia M. Bouvier, Harbingers of Hope: Peace Initiatives in Colombia, Special Report, no.

169 (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Institute of Peace, August 2006), online at http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr169.html.

xxxv

See Lucy Amis, Adrian Hodges, Neil Jeffery, Development, Peace and Human Rights in Colombia:

A Business Agenda (London: The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum in association with Fundacion Ideas para la Paz and the Office of the UN Global Compact, 2006), 37-45.
xxxvi

See Cynthia Sampson and John Paul Lederach, ed., From the Ground Up: Mennonite Contributions

to International Peacebuilding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

xxxvii

Justapaz and the Commission for Restoration, Life and Peace, A Prophetic Call: Colombian

Protestant Churches Document Their Suffering and Their Hope (Bogota, August 2006), 3.
xxxviii

For a discussion of the experiences of three Church Sanctuaries of Peace (ISPs) from Colombias

north coast, see El Desafio del Desarrollo en Zonas de Conflicto, Serie Construccion de la Paz, no.3 (Bogota: JustaPaz and Lutheran World Relief, 2006); and Iniciativas Humanitarias Locales en Contextos de Conflicto Armado, Serie Construccion de la Paz, no. 4 (Bogota: JustaPaz and Lutheran World Relief, 2006).
xxxix

Jorge Londono de la Cuesta, La opinion publica colombiana frente a la crisis: Una breve

descripcion, in Colombia: Conflicto armado, perspectivas de paz y democracia (Miami: Summit of the Americas Center, Latin American and Caribbean Center, 2001), 13.
xl

See Comision Vida, Justicia y Paz, Diocesis de Magangue, Dialogos Pastorales y cumunitarios

(Magangue, 2005).

xli

See Marc Sommers, Conflict, Education and Youth: Connections and Challenges, Paper presented at

the annual Latin American Studies Association Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 17, 2006.
xlii

Kenneth D. Bush and Diana Saltarelli, eds., The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict:

Towards a Peacebuilding Education for Children (Florence: Innocenti Research Centre, UNICEF, 2000), 33.