Colombia at a Crossroads

A conversation with political scientist Oliver Kaplan on the country's pivotal election and the hard lessons of over half a century of conflict

This post is an interview with Oliver Kaplan, a political scientist at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies and one of the leading scholars of armed conflict, civilian protection, and peacebuilding in Colombia. He is the author of Resisting War (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which documents how Colombian civil society has pushed back against armed groups for decades — often without waiting for Bogotá to act — and draws lessons about when and how ordinary people can carve out spaces of peace in the middle of conflict. With Colombians heading to the polls this Sunday to choose between far-left candidate Iván Cepeda, who would deepen the outgoing government's "total peace" negotiations with guerrillas, paramilitaries, and criminal organizations, and far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, who has promised to scrap those negotiations and pursue an iron-fist approach, I turned to Oliver to understand what more than half a century of conflict has done to Colombian society, what the historical record tells us about when peace deals succeed and when they fail, what each candidate's vision would mean for Colombia's long and unfinished effort to leave its conflict behind, and what is happening at the community level that no election result can undo.

1) Colombia has been in some form of conflict for over half a century. How would you describe what that experience has done to Colombian society — and what does it mean to try to build peace in a country that has known so little of it?

Colombia has had one of the world’s longest-running conflicts, really since the 1940s while interspersed with a few periods of relative calm. This means that almost all Colombians have been affected in some way, either personally or through the victimization of a friend or relative. Millions have been forcibly displaced over the years. This has spurred several reactions. Many Colombians have a sense of conflict fatigue and skepticism about whether conditions will change, and skepticism toward peace initiatives and the government. Many feel like their country is still mainly known for conflict and drug trafficking and Pablo Escobar. More optimistically, many people are committed to promoting peace and have been working to change conditions and perceptions (not to mention a thrilling World Cup win yesterday!). Both regular people and politicians have pushed for peaceful solutions and pathways of hope and change. I think they offer a lesson in persistence despite challenges, looking for solutions outside the box, and that it is possible to dialogue and change minds.

2) Colombia is a country of striking contrasts — a well-functioning bureaucracy alongside persistent conflict, a sizable and educated middle class alongside extreme inequality, sophisticated public policy that is also piecemeal and deeply contested. How do you make sense of those contradictions, and what do they tell us about the challenges any government faces?

I think these dualities of Colombia—ones present in many countries—are one of its most surprising features. How could a place known for conflict also have a functional government (though with limited reach)? I think the roots of this are partly found in inequality, the urban-rural divide, and particularly the concentration of power in the country’s large cities. And, to be clear, the U.S. and other countries are not immune to these trends. I often think back to a news story about “Two Colombias” and often recommend it to people trying to understand these divides.

But I would argue there are actually more than two Colombias. There are at least three, since there are those who are really on the margins, either geographically or in terms of poverty; there are those in the middle, often in smaller towns (or urban neighborhoods) that are just within the reach of the state but contested and at risk of being targeted by non-state armed groups; and then there are the better-off, those who have stability and live more insulated from security concerns.

There is certainly governmental neglect and exclusion, and the country is also vast, with challenging terrain. Recent government policies and the 2016 peace agreement have been focused on closing some of these divides. Going forward, it is clear that there are many different needs and constituencies that any future government will have to address. With limited resources, there are often difficult tradeoffs, such as should policy support workers through increasing minimum wages if it might also make products and services more costly for the poor? Do you fund an urban metro to solve transportation needs or provide scholarships for higher education, potentially at the cost of agricultural assistance for rural farmers? One logic has been that if government attention can be channeled to the conflictive areas of the countryside it might help to solve the conflict, which would lead to economic benefits for all.

3) You’ve spent years studying how civilians caught in the middle of armed conflict try to protect themselves and carve out spaces of normalcy. What has that research taught you about what ordinary Colombians actually want from their state — and how different is that from what politicians tend to offer them?

My view on this—informed by extensive travels and interviews—is that civilians’ needs and concerns are pretty clear and simple. Even in some of the most conflict-affected areas, and even in areas that suffered harm at the hands of state forces, people usually want the same thing: they want state presence and services and don’t want to feel neglected. But this is key: they want state presence with accountability and respect. They would welcome the police or the military so long as they have a steady presence, enforce laws, and respect human rights. Many civilians in neglected areas who have lived through the cross-fire often have perceptions of local and national corruption, whether it is mayors skimming from community projects or national level misspending or issues such as arbitrary killings of civilians by the military in order to inflate alleged guerrilla body counts. Politicians have offered some responses to these issues, and the government has some strong controls over corruption and features several accountability agencies. But there is still more to do. A criticism of the 2016 peace agreement is that there has not been sufficient military presence to fill in the gaps left as the FARC (the country’s main guerrilla group) demobilized and as local social leaders have been targeted with assassination. So there are ongoing demands for increased security.

4) The current president’s “total peace” strategy builds on the 2016 peace accords and has meant negotiating simultaneously with guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and criminal organizations. The right argues this rewards violence and emboldens armed actors; the left argues that forceful approaches have been tried for decades and failed. How would you evaluate those competing claims against the actual Colombian historical record?

In some sense both of the claims coming from the right and the left are correct. But they are both also missing something.

Negotiations with the so-called right-wing or criminal successor groups such as the Gulf Clan (aka the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces, AGC, or now the Gaitanista Army, EGC) and other paramilitary successors are seen by some as rewarding their rearming after the Ralito peace deal of 2003 with the AUC paramilitaries. But the same could be said for today’s FARC dissidents who shied away from the 2016 agreement, some of whom are now exploring benefits through peace talks. On the other side of the equation, almost no groups in Colombia’s history have been defeated militarily. So military campaigns alone are likely to struggle, especially against a multiplying number of armed groups.

Colombia’s experience with negotiations suggests that conditions have to be ripe for peace. This could be the case when a form of coercive diplomacy exists. The 2016 agreement suggests military pressure kept FARC at the table and showed them the alternative of fighting would be worse than peace terms. The current total peace seems to bear this out, with limited military pressure and talks throughout outgoing president Gustavo Petro’s term yielding few results. These different conflicts involved different groups who were gaining new territory and resources as the FARC demobilized and withdrew from territories. And the military presence was not sufficient to fill these gaps and keep the pressure on. There has been a lot of talk but few clear agreements.

The lesson is that in some sense these approaches have to be combined. The agreements of the early 1990s with the smaller guerrilla groups EPL and M-19, with paramilitaries in the early 2000s, and later with the FARC show that negotiation can succeed. But the conditions have to be there, and the armed forces have played a role in boxing these groups in. And, despite its difficulties, there is a logic to the Total Peace approach: if all groups can be engaged at once, they may have more incentives to disarm without fear of reprisals from their rivals, and there will be fewer groups left to fill new power vacuums. But the challenge now is that with the fracturing and proliferation of armed groups it is both challenging to carry on multiple complex negotiations simultaneously while also conducting coordinated military campaigns.

5) Colombia faces a consequential election this weekend pitting a far-left candidate (Iván Cepeda) who would likely deepen and extend the current president’s “total peace” approach against a far-right candidate (Abelardo De La Espriella) who has promised to scrap negotiations and take a much harder line against armed groups. The last time Colombia elected a president on a peace platform, it produced the landmark 2016 peace accords — but also a fierce backlash, a razor-thin plebiscite defeat, and years of contested implementation. What is at stake in this election, and how do you think the result will shape Colombia’s long and unfinished effort to leave its conflict behind?

The reigning media narrative during this campaign in Colombia is that the country is polarized and the candidates represent the extremes of the political spectrum. However, this does not mean the candidates are similar in their supposed “extremism,” or that they would have the same consequences for the country. The candidates represent two starkly different visions of the future for Colombia.

The winner of the first round, an outsider right-wing candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, proposes an iron fist approach to security issues along the lines of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. De la Espriella has suggested he would undo the government’s peace implementation architecture, build mega prisons, and resume aerial spraying to combat coca cultivation. This vision assumes military force is the only option to defeat armed groups and drug-traffickers. It is hard to say at the moment whether his approach would shift to become more pragmatic if in office – would he come around more to pursuing negotiations if conditions become ripe, or instead try to battle all of these groups to the ground, as he has suggested?

Iván Cepeda comes from a human rights and victim advocacy background. As senator and leader of the government’s peace table, he was the face—one of the faces—of Petro’s Total Peace negotiation effort with groups like the ELN. He will likely take a more comprehensive approach to peace, and he has said he will continue negotiations. This vision posits that there are deals to be made, and it is a matter of persuasion, persistence, and landing on the right terms. He also would continue community-focused development and peacebuilding programs. But would he continue negotiations frivolously if conditions on the ground are such that there is little pressure on armed groups to cut a deal?

There is also more to each candidate than their positions on the conflict. Cepeda has been a senator and comes from an institutional background. De la Espriella is a complete outsider, and it is much more unpredictable how he would reshape the government. There are also some signs that Cepeda has moderated some of his positions after coming in second in the first round election. He has reached out to centrist politicians, released a more detailed program, and scrapped earlier suggestions of revising the constitution. Cepeda would elevate conflict victims and continue with peace- and development-focused policies, but these policies could mean a continuation of conflict if ineffective. De la Espriella would pursue more military operations along the lines of former President Álvaro Uribe’s policies when he was in office. That would likely escalate the conflict, at least in the near term. Whichever candidate comes out on top, it is clear that the Total Peace effort has stalled, and new peace policy approaches will be needed to notch further negotiation successes.

6) Whatever happens on election day, are there things happening at the community level that suggest Colombia has genuinely changed — or does the arc of the peace process still depend almost entirely on whoever holds power in Bogotá?

With many fractured and dispersed groups, both nationally-led negotiations and military actions are challenging. As I show in my book, Resisting War, Colombian civil society has a long history of pushing back against armed groups and advocating for peace. And as I documented in more recent research, local actors can have influence over even some of today’s more criminally-minded successor groups, especially with support from humanitarian actors.

Today in Colombia, there are ongoing risks of killings of human rights defenders and social leaders, increasing drug production, and new emerging forms of drone warfare. There is also a risk of pinning hopes on a national savior in the form of a president when the conflict issues are long-running, dispersed, and localized. At the same time, nonviolent community movements have also grown and strengthened over the years. For example, membership in the Indigenous Guard has grown to tens of thousands across the country, and the model has been adopted by other communities, including the Afro-Colombian Guardia Cimarrona and even the Guardia Campesina. These models are promising, but today they are also up against violent and less political armed groups. Although the 2016 agreement was a harbinger of peace, armed conflict has persisted and re-emerged, and these community groups are continuing their important and hopeful peace work at the grassroots level.