Paz Total: From Total Peace to Total Uncertainty
In 2022, Colombia elected its first avowedly left-wing President, Gustavo Petro, on the back of deep public discontent and frustration with the country’s continued inequality, corruption, and rising conflict. For decades, Colombia has been plagued by war between leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitaries, trafficking groups, and the government. The undercurrents of this deeply rooted history of armed conflict remain, and continue to grow increasingly more complex, posing a threat for both the people of Colombia and any incumbent president who faces the challenge of tackling it. Upon taking office, President Petro cemented his priority on achieving an agenda of Paz total – total peace – in a bid to end this violence once and for all. Just two years on however, any prospect of total peace appears shakier than ever – avoiding total failure may be Petro’s best bet.
The story of Colombia’s fragmenting conflict traces back to a brief period of relative peace. Following five decades of bitter infighting between the government and leftist guerilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and a further four years of peace talks, the landmark 2016 Peace Agreement marked a significant milestone towards achieving peace in Colombia, earning then President Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Peace prize for “bringing the worlds longest civil-war to an end”. This process of demobilisation of the FARC oversaw the reintegration of over 13,000 rebels back into society, a substantial decline in violence, an ongoing process of transitional justice, and the liberation of roughly 22% of previously FARC controlled Colombian territory.
This period was however just that – brief. Failure of authorities to seize control of these newly liberated territorial strongholds left a gaping power vacuum, which spurred the emergence of mutating dissident factions such as Estado Mayor Central (EMC), and Segunda Marquetalia, competing with paramilitary, and criminal groups, notably Gaitanistas, racing to fill this gap. After this, it did not take long for violence to resurge. New actors operating in a post peace accord context contributed to the evolving complexity of the nature of this conflict. Previous ideological motivations of these armed groups were supplemented with a stronger emphasis on control over lucrative illicit markets, including not only narcotrafficking, but also arms, mining, and migrant smuggling, for which competition between these groups is rife.
This increasingly unstable security situation only worsened under the premiership of Iván Duque, who favoured slowing already stagnant implementation of key provisions set out in the peace accords to stabilise control of these territories, such as land reform and rural development, taking a military based approach instead, which only exacerbated violence in these areas. With the dominance of these armed groups already on the rise, the pandemic only added fuel to the fire. Lockdown provided them with the perfect opportunity to deepen their control, particularly in rural areas with decreased state presence, and recruit new members with the promise of a stable income – a logical fallback for those whom the pandemic had left economically devastated, and with few other options of livelihood. With children out of full-time education for over a year, and poor state funding for virtual education, it is no coincidence child recruitment in particular is reported to have rocketed in the years between 2016-2022, according to figures from the Colombian government’s child welfare agency. By the time Ivan Duqué, Petro’s predecessor, left office in 2022, he is said to have been the first president in over two decades to leave the country in a higher state of insecurity than he found it.
Assuming presidency against this backdrop of heightened instability and violence, Petro, himself a former member of M-19, a nationalist guerilla group, set out to make Paz Total a cornerstone of his administration from the get-go. In doing so, he took on the ambitious aim of essentially rewiring how Colombia approached its endemic conflict. In stark contrast with his predecessor, he approached tackling the problem from the root up – favouring emphasis on social programmes aimed at tackling rural poverty, over military power.
The method was simple, or so he had hoped. Learning from decades of government efforts which have demonstrated that merely destabilising one group only bolsters another, he concluded negotiations for ceasefires with all armed groups – guerilla, paramilitary, and criminal alike – in an attempt to bring about simultaneous demobilisation. As Colombia knows all too well however, this process is anything but simple.
Just two years on, and halfway into Petro’s first term, the initiative has lost momentum. Progress has been slower than envisioned, and as prospects of success deflate against a rapidly closing window to deliver these promises, so too has public support, plummeting in the last year with recent polls showing 66% of Colombians feel dissatisfied with the policy’s progress, and 85% claiming the country’s security is worsening.
While Petro was able to secure some early wins under his belt, they were mostly followed with setbacks. Initially harnessing support from a broad coalition of the political spectrum accounted for the swift congressional approval of Ley de Paz Total – legislation setting out legal boundaries for formal talks between government and criminal groups without affiliation to a certain ideology. Historically, government's ability to negotiate with criminal insurgencies had been contingent upon a group’s characterisation as a political identity, which posed problems for realising this goal of extending inclusion in dialogues to all types of armed groups. Passing this legislation was hugely important, in particular for enabling dialogue between the government and the Gaitanistas, Colombia’s richest criminal group, with current control over a sizable portion of the northern countryside, and the majority of drug trafficking and migrant smuggling routes.
Despite this, and progress in some more local-level peace talks, most notably in Buenaventura, most of the policy’s early successes have largely unravelled in the time since, with increasing instances of government and armed group peace talks stalling or breaking down completely in some cases. Early attempts to establish ceasefires with five armed groups at the beginning of 2023 were followed by costly missteps, for which the government is still paying the price. Rather than a step towards progress, ceasefires were characterised a “tactical gift”. Groups took advantage of this respite from military offence, which most didn’t consider their primary adversary in the first place and exploited the opportunity to direct all their energy and resources towards further expanding territorial control without fear of military pushback and infighting against competing groups.
Unfortunately, 2024 has not provided the government, or Colombia, with much more hope. Since the start of the year, two of the main negotiation efforts of Paz Total have also stalled, resulting in Petro suspending ceasefires with ECM in Cauca, Valle del Cauca, and Nariño, in March. While maintaining some dialogue with a small number of these factions, not wanting to repeat the backfire of previous ceasefires, the government shifted tactics, restarting full blown military operations to apply pressure on the rest, in hope of pushing them towards the negotiating table. This has had terrible consequences for the livelihoods of civilians of these three departments, which have experienced intensified violence, forced displacement, and confinement as a result.
Arguably the greatest challenge yet to achieving any semblance of total peace came in August, with the break-down of Petro’s most successful, and longest lasting peace talks to date, with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), Colombia’s largest active insurgency group. Talks ended in a standstill after ELN rejected government pleas for a renewed ceasefire, and in the months since tensions between the two have continued to escalate. On the one hand ELN has accused the government of failing to meet agreements laid out in the ceasefire, claiming it was withholding financial incentive and engaging in dialogue with dissident factions. On the other, the government has condemned ELN for continuing to impose taxation on people living in areas under their control, and ransom kidnappings. If any prospect of reconciliation between the two was not already an increasingly distant pipe dream, ELN’s attack on a military base in Arauquita, leaving two dead and dozens injured, was surely the coup de grace. If this is so, given ELN’s pervasiveness, it is increasingly unlikely there will be anything ‘total’ about whatever peace Petro leaves Colombia with at the end of his term.
There are some promising signs, with recent talks continuing between ex-FARC dissident group Segunda Marquetalia, guerilla organisation Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada, and the Gaitanistas. Military operations consisting of a joint effort between security forces and rival armed groups have had some success in destabilising the Segunda Marquetalia in particular, supplemented with government provision of legal loopholes for members who defected from the 2016 Peace Accord to be eligible for transitional justice, in an attempt provide further incentive to see through peace talks.
Surprisingly, last year Colombia’s national homicide rate of 25.7% also declined ever so slightly from 2022, likely as a result of initial ceasefire efforts. Aligning however with 2022 trends, departments with the highest homicide rates remained those home to prominent drug trafficking groups and migrant smuggling routes, notably Valle del Cauca, Antioquiam and Cauca - with still some of the highest rates of violence in Latin America. InSight Crimes analysis behind these stats found confrontations between ex-FARC factions to be the main driver of this violence, with increased attacks on both state forces and civilians in the Cauca department in particular, controlled by ELN, to maintain and exercise control over illicit economies in the region. Human rights indicators are particularly troubling; according to Fundacion Ideas de Paz figures show since the start of Petro’s administration in 2022: over 84 signatories of the 2016 Peace Accord have been murdered, occurrence of both masacres, and mass displacements have surged, and 68% of the provisions laid out by the peace accord have not been fulfilled. Consensus among observers to the causes for the failure of total peace have pointed towards a lack of comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the particularities of each group: its capacities, purposes, evolving structures, and shifting emphasis centred around illicit economies.
Total peace appears out of the question, but for Petro and his government to avoid total failure, they will need to act quickly, to generate real change. For the remainder of his term, Petro should tailor his approach to a focus primarily on negotiations at a regional level, rather than exhausting efforts going back-and-forth with national-level groups fragmented by their own internal infighting and division. His best chance of success lies in dialogue, common ground, and stronger military response towards groups who exploit methods of negotiation to further their own ends. As demonstrated in the aftermath of 2016, this approach is not without its own risks. Thorough implementation is fundamental for regional deals to have any meaningful longevity, and failure to do so risks opening the very territorial vacuums that exacerbated violence in the first place. The alternative however, Colombians fear - a relapse to all-out war.
Reducing this violence and achieving total peace has been a priority of Petro’s administration, which now finds itself in a race against the clock to prove partial peace remains tenable for Colombia.
Image courtesy of USAID via Wikimedia, ©2022. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
