Víctor Ricardo, High Commissioner for Peace
I wish to give thanks for the opportunity to appear in this forum where important analysts of American and Latin American life come together to speak on issues of peace and human rights. I wish to title my presentation "Peace for Colombia: A Great Alliance Against Crime."
The Colombian crisis is a summation of crises that have gone unresolved throughout our history. Colombia has known peace and security only for brief periods, and is characterized instead as a country of high levels of violence and human rights violations. The Colombian political process is markedly behind in matters of both mechanisms for political participation and the democratic distribution of opportunities. An important factor in this backwardness is a regional disparity resulting from both contemporary obstacles and the weight of history....
The primary guerrilla force in Colombia is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. They have achieved considerable development to the point that many consider them a true army. The sustainability of the Colombian insurgency is explainable to a great extent by its irregular war practices. These include kidnaping, providing armed protection for narcotics growers (though one cannot justify identifying the guerrilla as a drug cartel), hold-ups of regional development banks, and extortion of periodic payments (the so-called "vacuna") from cattle ranchers, farmers, and businessmen. Besides these, there are other material causes of the conflict that sustain the insurgency and which we are only just beginning to recognize and to accept.
The current pattern of social and political development is a result of electoral processes highly contaminated by corruption and government agreements that later receive legitimacy through favor and heavy ideological manipulation in certain media.
The FARC are a peasant guerrilla movement. They began as an association of 64 peasant families asking for work, housing, credit, education and land for their children.... FARC commander Manuel Marulanda, aka "Tirofijo," says, not without irony, that the FARC would likely not exist today if the families' petition for land and credit had been met.
The agrarian problem remains unresolved in Colombia and gives the guerrillas a banner. Efforts by peasant farmers to organize have been met by violence on the part of landowners, some of whom hire mercenary armies to expel small and medium peasants. These mercenary armies are further implicated with narcotraffickers who, making use of terror and violence, have provoked the monstrous phenomenon of displacement, which today has produced more than one million displaced people.
President Andrés Pastrana was elected by the largest majority ever in Colombian history. The country was tired of the scandals of drug corruption in politics; of the violence emanating from various sources; of the plundering of public resources and the loss of the country's economic potential. Asked to choose between continuity and change, the electorate chose the latter and gave President Pastrana a clear mandate for peace. The first 55 days of this mandate have been marked by acts of peace. Chief among them has been the meeting of President Pastrana with the FARC secretariat in the secluded mountains of Colombia, followed by further dialogue with the FARC in the same location by myself, as High Commissioner, as well as other meetings with the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the commander of the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), currently detained in a Colombian jail. And energizing institutional entities that have provided several fora for the participation of Colombian society, such as the Commission of Conciliation and the National Peace Council.
The President and the High Commissioner have made an effort to construct a peace that is serious, discrete, and responsible. This begins with taking the guerrillas seriously, with all of their nuances, as an opponent whose political agenda could make a contribution to change in Colombia. It also requires that there be a single score for peace on the part of the state, with the sole spokesperson the president, or in his place, his high commissioner. This does not mean unanimity or a prohibition on differences of opinion. It means simply that the obligations incurred by the government in the course of any dialogues must be endorsed by the president, who in turn counts on consultants at the highest levels.... Some countries, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Mexico, Spain, and Costa Rica, have provided and continue to provide highly effective bilateral cooperation.
The Colombian legal structure is not adequate in the search for peace.... As the process moves forward, the instruments of international law and international humanitarian law applicable to internal conflicts recognized by Colombia can provide an alternative framework for these advances and any agreements worked out. It won't be easy and a constant effort will be necessary to convince the country, I mean Colombia, of the need to negotiate with organizations and individuals outside of the law in order to achieve peace and the reconciliation of all Colombians. To negotiate with an insurgency that challenges the constitutional order of a nation requires patience, audacity, and indeed a certain amount of creativity.
President Pastrana's announcement of his intention to establish a zone of distension comprising five municipalities, as requested by the FARC to renew peace talks, is the most momentous political decision of recent Colombian history....
The dialogue we are about to begin will be between the government and the insurgency. But as it progresses, it will involve all Colombian society. Through these dialogues we will design a great alliance against crime, against narcotrafficking, against the cultivation of drug crops, against corruption, against terrorism, against the violation of human rights, against the pillage of public resources, against exclusion and against inequality. For many years we have confronted each other and bled over abstract themes--over ideologies, models, fundamentalisms. Now we hope to join over concrete development goals, over the incorporation of immense areas given over to narcotics plantations into legal production. Towards this end, towards the reconstruction of a Colombia freed from the scourge of narcotrafficking and interminable violence, the government of Andrés Pastrana is seeking consensus over a great Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Colombia which requires a generous foreign contribution in financial, technical and cultural terms.... This plan imposes the challenge of ambitious infrastructure projects, territorial reorganization, and political and institutional reforms. We, the government, and important members of Colombian society, have examined the programmatic proposals for change endorsed by the insurgent groups. With the exception of a few accessory matters, they have been found to contribute to the creation of a third alternative for true democracy, which is what the nation and the international community are expecting.
Our main efforts in these brief but intense days of activity have been to build confidence and move to a dialogue without constraints. It is likely that the peace under construction will be a precondition for the defense, protection and promotion of human rights in Colombia, among which, perhaps the most important, the right to life, has been violated to atrocious degrees by our internal conflict. Today more than ever Colombia needs the understanding, solidarity and generosity of the international community to achieve peace, coexistence and a peaceful entry into the 21st century. Meetings such as this, which examine our past and present and especially the internal conflict we are experiencing, and future relations with our country, are a necessary point of departure for enriching the actions and decisions to be taken by the Colombian state.