Colombia’s rebel zones find peace deal a deadly illusion
In the far north of the Colombian Andes, where for decades Marxist rebels controlled cocaine production and battled the army, a widely praised 2016 peace accord was supposed to change everything. It has — for the worse.
Promises of new security measures and crop substitutes have gone unfulfilled. Where once there was brutal — but clear — rebel rule, there is today a cacophony of drug-trafficking mafias, each charging farmers so much protection money that coffee, cattle and even cocaine are barely profitable. Former guerrillas are re-arming, the homicide rate is skyrocketing and hundreds are flee- ing, emptying schools and businesses.
“What’s happening is a criminal reconfiguration for the control of territory and illegal economies,” said Ariel Avila, a political analyst at the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation in Bogota. “No one counted on the govern- ment being so slow in arriv- ing in this area.”
The government spent four years negotiating an agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, earning outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Prize. But then the state effectively abandoned Ituango and other FARC zones. President-elect Ivan Duque, who takes office Tuesday, is fac- ing record cocaine production, a countryside overrun by private armies and a spreading FARC dissidence.
Duque says that coca, the raw material for mak- ing cocaine, is an “existential threat” to the nation, which he will combat using aerial spraying with herbicides and by forcibly digging it up, as well as with substitution pro- grams. This is music to the ears of the U.S. government but will deprive many local families of their only source of income.
Key pledges in the peace accord were never put into action. As soon as the FARC stepped back, paramilitary groups entered Ituango, moving through farms and ham- lets in groups of a dozen or more. Not a single coca shrub has been dug up here under the promised crop-substitution program. Projects meant to create work for former guerrillas haven’t materialized.
“They left us with nothing but our underpants,” noted one former guerrilla, who said that both the dissidents and a drug cartel have tried to recruit him. The cartel offered him 800,000 pesos ($280) a month, he said.
The government said that the peace deal would boost growth by at least half a percentage point per year, but so far there’s been little sign of any such “peace dividend.” Colombia’s economy expanded last year at its slowest pace since the global financial crisis.
A former FARC fighter call- ing himself “Rogelio” gave up on the peace process and left a United Nations-moni- tored camp for demobilized FARC fighters and set up a new guerrilla force at the end of last year. Rogelio is one of more than 1,000 of some 13,000 FARC members who took part in the peace process that have now taken up arms again, and their ranks have also been swollen by new recruits. The re-appearance of the guerrillas in the region triggered a frenzy of violence from the cocaine-trafficking group known as the Gulf Clan, or Gaitanistas, which is murdering anyone suspected of helping the dissidents.
“We decided to continue the struggle due to the government’s failure to comply with the peace accord and due to the murders of ex-combatants and social leaders,” a member of Rogelio’s group, who identified himself as alias “Picino,” said in reply to written questions.
Rogelio, who walks with a prosthetic limb after losing his leg to a mine, declined an interview, saying the intensity of the fighting made it impractical. A separate FARC dissident faction led by alias “Cabuyo” also operates in the region, as well as at least one other drug cartel, according to police.