Uribe, Unable to Make Progress Against the FARC, Turns to the ELN

Colombia’s next presidential elections are only nine months away, and the country’s Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether current president Álvaro Uribe Vélez will be allowed to run for reelection (the Colombian constitution currently forbids this but through a series of political dirty tricks Uribe has won support for the change in Congress). The optimistic Uribe is shifting more every day into campaign mode, looking for ways to ensure a victory if reelection is indeed approved.

And so Uribe, who seems to think that his games of language and semantics have the power to define reality in Colombia, has offered to change that reality in exchange for a peace agreement with the guerrilla insurgents of the National Liberation Army (ELN in its Spanish initials)… For some time now Uribe’s favorite rhetorical trick has been to insist that “there is no armed conflict in Colombia, only a terrorist threat to democratic institutions.” This, like the U.S. government’s refusal to officially declare war on the Iraqi insurgency, provides justification for Uribe and the military to do many things outside the commonly accepted “rules of war”. If there is no armed conflict, a person cannot claim to be “neutral” (as many rural communities have done who do not support the guerrillas but also reject the even more violent and oppressive forces of the state have done), as that word suggests that there are two legitimate sides to decide between.

But if there was ever any doubt that these strange Uribista semantic tricks were more about manipulating public discourse than actually attempting to accurately describe the situation Colombia is living through, that doubt is gone this week. In several public appearances this week, Uribe has offered to drop this rouse and start calling the war what it really is, in return for a peace deal with the ELN.

“If the ELN accepts a cease-fire, I will acknowledge whatever it wants,” the EFE new agency quoted Uribe as saying at a speech on Tuesday in Bogotá. “If that moment comes I will say: for the higher benefit of the country I put aside my personal convictions, and in the name of the institution of the presidency I accept that there is a conflict.”

Beyond these arrogant pronouncements dressed up with Uribe´s usual garnishes of self-sacrifice for the good of la patria, is another tacit admission. As the 2006 Colombian national elections draw closer (now only nine months away), Uribe needs something to show for his time in office. His escalation of the war against the guerillas and all other opposition to the state has shed a lot of blood, but the supposed payoff has not come. Colombia’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) are essentially holding their ground against larger and larger military offensives, taking the lives of many Colombian soldiers in the process. And attacks on the army are likely only to increase as the election draws closer.

And so Uribe is, in his offer to change the reality of Colombia’s violence with a few magic words, putting up a lot of political capital for some kind of agreement with the ELN – the second-largest guerrilla group – before election day; something to show for his time in office. But the recognition of the existence of an internal armed conflict only addressed one of the five obstacles to dialog that the ELN has listed in recent days. From an August 26 interview with ELN leader Antonio García by journalist Elizabeth Yarce of the Medellín daily El Colombiano (posted on the “ELN Voices” website):

The ELN has always been disposed to a process of dialog. The difficulty has been that the current government worked up a strategy of war, and to top it off said that there was no war or conflict in Colombia. So why have a peace process if there is no war? This is one of the main obstacles to be resolved… In the recent Encounter for Peace that was held in the city of Cali, we pointed out five obstacles in the way of peace, and while these continue, a political solution that overcomes the war will be very difficult. The obstacles are the following:

1. The denial of the social, economic, and political causes that originated the conflict, and as such, the lack of acknowledgement of the necessity of making reforms and transformations in those aspects.
2. The blocking of society’s participation in the building of peace.
3. Denial that the conflict has produced a profound humanitarian crisis among the most impoverished sectors of society that needs to be given priority at the same time that we work for a political solution.
4. The current government’s denial of the existence of the internal conflict.
5. The government’s false negotiation with the paramilitaries, as there has never been a war between them; there has always been rather cooperation and coordination. Also, the badly-named “Justice and Peace Law” is the crudest instrument of impunity, one that rewarded the victimizers and punished the victims.

Even many who do not support the guerrilla would agree that these problems exist and need to be overcome for Colombia to move forward. But as long as Uribe looks at this process in terms of scoring political points instead of making real changes to the war-torn nation, the war will go on.