Plan Colombia and Beyond

(This is a continuation of yesterday’s post about the FARC hostage crisis and the humanitarian accord negotiations.)

2. The U.S. Congress members’ offer to meet with FARC was generally well received.

“Mr. Congressman, are you going to meet clandestinely with the FARC in the jungles of southern Colombia?”

Believe it or not, Colombian reporters asked Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) that question – or variations of it – on several occasions during his January 11-15 trip to Bogotá.

The question was a bit surreal; McGovern’s response was sober, but its first nine words surprised many.

“I would be willing to meet with the FARC only if I thought it would achieve something positive and tangible. I’m not interested in being used for propaganda purposes. I’m only interested in seeing these hostages returned to their loved ones.” (Hear the quote here; that’s me struggling to translate.)

The story behind this begins in September, when Colombian opposition Senator Piedad Córdoba – who was then the Colombian government’s chosen facilitator for hostage-for-prisoner exchange talks with the FARC – paid a visit to Reps. McGovern, Gregory Meeks (D-New York) and Bill Delahunt (D-Massachusetts) in Washington.

At that meeting, she showed a video of her recent visit to FARC leader Raúl Reyes somewhere in Colombia’s jungles. Reyes made plain that the FARC was interested in meeting with members of the U.S. Congress to discuss its history and its “proposals.”

Reyes’ message came six months after seven Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives had sent a letter to three European governments. That letter endorsed the Europeans’ plan for a small zone in which humanitarian-exchange talks could take place.

The video carried an implicit offer that these U.S. legislators play some role in the discussions that Córdoba and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez were facilitating at the time. Reyes expressed his belief “that they [the members of Congress] can contribute to this objective of an exchange.”

In response to this and other indications that the FARC were interested in meeting, the three members of Congress have maintained a consistent position: the one outlined in Rep. McGovern’s response above. We will meet with the FARC, they said, as long as we don’t emerge from such a meeting empty-handed.

The FARC are on the U.S. and European terrorist lists, and they kill hundreds of civilians each year. The FARC produces and sells cocaine, and holds at least 700 people hostage.

For a member of the U.S. Congress, to meet with the FARC is to run an enormous political risk. To come out of such a meeting with nothing tangible – to be forced to say little more than something like “we feel we made progress toward a framework for talks” – would be disastrous.

A meeting that gives the FARC access to members of the U.S. Congress in exchange for nothing would be guaranteed to be the last such encounter. Its well-meaning U.S. participants, badly burned politically, would be angry. They would vent that anger both publicly and in advice to their colleagues in the Congress.

In exchange for the members of Congress taking such a politically risky move, they ask that the FARC provide something concrete that shows evidence of progress and goodwill.

Some Colombian news outlets have erroneously reported that the members of Congress had asked that the FARC bring a hostage, preferably a U.S. citizen, with them to any eventual meeting. The call for “something positive and tangible” has never been that specific, though such a gesture would certainly qualify.

Nobody with whom we met in Bogotá dismissed this idea out of hand. Some even offered words of encouragement. But this is all hypothetical. The offer to meet, under those conditions, is on the table. And that is where things stand now.

3. Some sort of demilitarized zone seems inevitable, but the FARC will have to yield a lot. The guerrillas’ main pre-condition for holding prisoner-for-hostage exchange negotiations has been a demand that the Colombian government first pull the security forces out of two municipalities (counties), Florida and Pradera, near Cali in southwestern Colombia. Talks could occur in this 800 square-kilometer zone (about the size of all five boroughs of New York City, with about 100,000 people) for forty-five days.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has refused to meet this pre-condition. Uribe rose to national political prominence as perhaps the most outspoken critic of his predecessor, Andrés Pastrana, who had pulled troops from a 42,000 square-kilometer zone for a failed 1998-2002 peace process. After years of savaging Pastrana’s decision to allow a demilitarized zone, Uribe was not about to agree to pull troops from Florida and Pradera.

Over time, though, Uribe has agreed in principle to the idea of a troop pullout. In December, he signed on to a Catholic Church proposal to hold prisoner-for-hostage exchange talks in a 150-square-kilometer zone, with international observers, which would be free of Colombian troops. Two years earlier, he had given similar approval to a European plan for a 180-square-kilometer zone with international observer presence.

It is becoming ever more apparent that some sort of zone is going to have troops pulled out so that talks can occur. This zone – in both size and conditions – will be larger and more guerrilla-dominated than President Uribe would prefer. But it will also be more restrictive, and perhaps smaller, than the FARC would prefer.

It has never been clear whether the FARC are demanding that Florida and Pradera be demilitarized without conditions. During the 1998-2002 talks, the FARC did get a zone without conditions. The guerrillas were the only party allowed to carry weapons, there were no outside observers or verifiers, and the zone’s expiration date was repeatedly extended.

The resulting abuses left most Colombians bitter about the experience. While this degree of freedom is clearly what the guerrillas would prefer, it will certainly not be repeated.

While some sort of zone is highly likely, then, the two sides will have to compromise somewhere between the two extremes of Uribe’s “encounter zone” and the FARC’s “despeje (clearance) zone.” It may be a bit smaller than all of Florida and Pradera. It may have restrictive rules regarding who can carry what kind of weapons in what zone. International and national observers may maintain a significant presence. The proposed 45-day deadline is likely to be hard and fast.

Experts and participants with whom we met in Bogotá seemed to be nearing a consensus that a compromise could be in the offing. President Uribe would be pressured to give a bit more ground, some speculated, out of concern for his legacy. “Uribe doesn’t want to go down in history merely as the leader who restored security to the big cities and a few other zones,” one interviewee speculated. “There has to be something more than that. He has to make progress on peace as well as war.”

We heard speculation that the FARC, too, may feel some pressure to give ground. The hostage crisis has taken a toll on the guerrillas, and may be becoming a burden.

• Holding so many hostages is expensive – it requires that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of guerrilla fighters be tied down as wardens and perimeter guards, a task that grows more difficult as the Colombian military’s operations increase in remote areas.
• In the past year, the hostage situation has yielded episodes revealing the guerrillas to be embarrassingly inept and uncoordinated, such as the still-unclarified murder of eleven departmental legislators in June; the capture of messengers holding proofs of life in November; and of course the humiliating “Operation Emmanuel” at the beginning of this month.
• The proofs of life and freed hostages’ testimonies, which have been uniformly horrifying and heartbreaking, have made negotiations more urgent, but they have also done further harm to the FARC’s already battered international image. Why in the world would a civilized country remove the “terrorist” label from a group that “punishes” non-combatant captives by chaining them in a room with poisonous snakes?

Both sides, then, have incentives to find common ground on some sort of demilitarized zone for talks to take place. This zone will not be satisfying to either side, but that is what compromise is all about.

Reaching a compromise, however, requires fluid and open lines of communication. Settling procedural questions and agreeing on conditions for talks cannot be done in public, through declarations and press releases.

They cannot be done in private either, though, if messages, proposals, and counterproposals take weeks or months to receive responses. Facilitators acceptable to both sides must be able to ensure that people with decisionmaking power are quickly able to interact back and forth.

Only with these facilitators’ help will it be possible to agree on the details of the “zone” – whatever it is ultimately called – so that the actual humanitarian exchange talks can go forward, directly, between the government and the guerrillas.

Who might those facilitators be? How could they work? In a post tomorrow, I’ll discuss some of what I heard in Bogotá on these topics:

4. All serious facilitation efforts should be allowed to go forward until one, or a combination, is acceptable to both parties. There are many possible actors to choose from.

5. Before any talks begin, discreet professionals must do a lot preparatory “staff work” out of the spotlight.

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