 |
| Alfredo Molano, Colombian
writer and journalist, talks about the Colombian conflict. |
"Explaining
the Linkages between Colombia's Guerrilla Organizations
and Drug Trafficking: A Sociological Approach"
Chris
Cardona, Department of Political Science
In his appearance at CLAS,
the Colombian journalist and historian Alfredo Molano offered
a detailed and sociologically rich set of explanations for
the peculiar intransigence of Colombia's guerrilla organizations
and their connection to drug trafficking. Molano's account
centered on peasants: their involvement in land invasions,
their displacement by armed conflict, and their interaction
with nascent guerrilla organizations, at first around the issue
of agrarian reform, and later through the drug trade. Although
his assessment of the current situation was not optimistic,
he did provide valuable insights for understanding some of
the social, political, and economic sources of the current
conflict among the state, guerrillas, and paramilitaries.
Andrés Alvarado of the
Colombia Working Group welcomed the audience, describing Molano
as the second of five planned speakers for the Spring 2002
series of "Colombia in Context." Beatriz Manz, Professor of
Geography, introduced Molano, citing his abiding interests
in two major themes: "colonización," or land invasions
by peasant squatters, and "desplazamiento interno," the
internal displacement of citizens by armed conflict. For many
years a journalist, commentator, and advisor to institutions
as varied as the Colombian peace negotiators, the El Espectador
newspaper, and the World Bank, Molano has written a dozen works
chronicling both the situation of "desplazados" and the histories
of "colonización" in the provinces of Colombia.
This latter topic, being
of central importance to the mid-century development of the
Colombian countryside and hence the emergence of guerrilla
organizations during this period, was the focus of Molano's
presentation. Rather than reading prepared remarks, he responded
extemporaneously to questions posed by Alejandra Torres on
behalf of the Colombia Working Group. The original intention
of this design was to follow these up with questions from audience
members on an ongoing basis, but Molano's answers to the Working
Group's first two questions were so involved that they only
left time for a brief Q&A section at the end. Molano's impressive
display of historical knowledge and storytelling ability nonetheless
kept the audience riveted for a full two hours. In summarizing
this rich set of remarks, the depth and detail of his presentation
should be acknowledged even as we seek to condense it.
The first question asked
Molano to elaborate upon the analysis of "colonización" in
his work Desterrados by discussing some of the causes for the
phenomena it describes. Molano responded by relating the process
by which he came to write the book, one of his first. During
the 1980s, he began to interview participants in the civil
conflict known as "La Violencia," which had taken place
in the 1940s and '50s. The testimonies of these people led
him to the issue of "desplazados," and he became interested
in the Llano del Orinoco region, to which many of these former
combatants had fled. Part of this story involved the entry
of cocaine into Colombia through this region, and he began
to investigate further the links among "desplazamiento," "colonización," and
drug trafficking. As to analyzing the causes of these phenomena,
Molano's style is to allow the testimony of participants to
speak for itself. "The argument is the lives of the people
themselves," he affirmed.
In response to the second
question, however, Molano did begin to develop an argument
and explanation for the emergence of drug trafficking in certain
regions of the country. In his work, Trochas y Fusiles,
Molano investigated the culture of the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia, the principal guerrilla organization).
The second question posed to him was how he would extrapolate
from this experience to comment on the FARC's perspective on
current issues like drugs and the paramilitary. Again, Molano
began by describing how he came to write this particular book.
He was working in the La Macarena region of northern
Colombia near the Sierra Nevada mountains, a region that had
been invaded by peasants, who had undergone a struggle with
the state in the 1980s. As he studied this case of "colonización," he
found that the guerrillas were organizing peasants. Seeking
to interview guerrilla leaders, he discovered that a college
friend was one of them, and used this contact to gain access
to this secretive world.
Molano's presentation was
particularly interesting in that it revealed the working methods
and thought processes of a journalist and historian. From his
story of gaining access to the FARC, he moved directly into
a discussion of the historical processes that led to the emergence
of this group. He placed special emphasis on the 1930s, a period
in which the Liberal Party government undertook tax, labor,
political, educational, and agrarian reforms. The Conservative
Party abruptly halted this broad set of initiatives in 1946,
a year that Molano identified as the start of "La Violencia." At
first, this conflict was partisan; the Conservatives organized
private armed groups as a way of enforcing counter-reform,
and Liberals responded in kind. The conflict began in the Cundinamarca
and Tolima regions and quickly spread to other parts of the
country.
As it spread, the conflict
evolved from a political to a social one. By 1956, Molano noted,
purely partisan groups had been shut down, but non-party groups
continued fighting, this time over access to economic resources.
Military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla had come to power in
1953, and by 1955-56, the state had declared war on the guerrillas,
partially as an effort on Rojas Pinilla's part to ingratiate
himself to the United States as an anti-Communist. During this
period, known as the War of Villarica, the "guerrillas" consisted
of an amalgam of many different armed groups, including combatants
who had been involved in the struggle over agrarian reform
and "colonización." As state forces gained the upper
hand, the guerrillas retreated to the eastern plains region
known as the Llanos and began recruiting more former "colonos" into
their ranks. Thus, the conflict between the state and the guerrillas
became intimately connected with the struggle between landowners
and "colono" peasants through the confluence of the
two oppositional groups, "colonos" and guerrillas.
Rojas Pinilla was deposed
in 1957, and the two political parties, Liberals and Conservatives,
reached an agreement, known as the National Front, to end partisan
conflict. Despite this settlement at the national level, peasant
organizations in the countryside did not disappear, as the
struggle over land distribution remained unresolved. (The groups
did begin to disperse, however, with many of them joining the
retreated guerrillas in the Llanos region. Not at all coincidentally,
this region was where the FARC was granted a demilitarized
zone from 1999-2002 under the administration of President Andrés
Pastrana.) In Molano's view, it was the unresolved status of
agrarian reform that led to continuing instability in peripheral
regions of the country even after the formal cessation of partisan
hostilities.
During the 1960s, the economic
strategy of import substitution industrialization had entered
a period of decline, and jobs were scarce. These economic pressures
led to an increase in land invasions and the development of
a national peasant movement. The latter culminated in a 1977
national strike, to which the response of the state was outright
repression. This military action pushed organized peasants
out of the lowland areas they had invaded and into the mountains,
including the Sierra Nevada range in the north. It was these "desplazado" peasants
who discovered the marijuana trade in the Sierra Nevada at
the end of the 1970s.
This discovery, in combination
with the ongoing links between the "colonos desplazados" and
the guerrillas, would set the stage for the transformation
of the guerrilla movement by the drug trade in the 1980s. Marijuana
was, ironically, the gateway drug to cocaine. Able to be cultivated
easily by peasants, marijuana was a crop vastly more high-yield
than anything the peasants had worked with before. For the
first time, Molano explained, their work was generating income. "Colonos" gained
access to consumption, and became, in Molano's terms, addicted
to it, feeding an "accumulated hunger." Guerrillas, who had
previously set up a system of "taxing" local peasants, saw
their "tax" revenues increase dramatically as the marijuana,
and later coca, trade flourished.
This growing mutual interest
among peasants and guerrillas - and local authorities - in
the success of drug trafficking contributed to a fundamental
shift in the priorities of the guerrillas during the 1980s,
from agrarian reform and entry into the political system to
arms build-up and reform of the military. The FARC's attempt
to field a political party, the Unión Patriótica, was murderously
repressed by right-wing paramilitaries. In addition, the end
of the Cold War changed the relevance of a Communist ideological
commitment. As the political option became less viable, increased
militarization became more attractive. Revenue from the drug
trade fueled an arms race with the government, generating a
vicious cycle of delegitimation and marginalization. As ideological
commitments faded into the background, the central issue of
contention with the government became not agrarian reform,
but the role of the military, in particular its sponsorship
of right-wing paramilitary groups. However, this was the one
issue the government refused - or was unable - to negotiate.
Military reform was not included in the 1991 constitutional
convention, or in any of the peace negotiations during the
1990s. Yet the FARC will not, according to Molano, accept the
possibility of surrendering their weapons without fundamental
changes in the military. "Unfortunately," he concluded, "I
think we have a lot of war to make before we get to a point
where the two sides can be sincere about their interests."
An active question and
answer period ensued. Audience members asked about the consequences
of Plan Colombia (Molano believes it will lead to environmental
devastation in the effort to promote alternative forms of cultivation),
parallels to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the involvement
of the US is making things worse), and the possible role of
civil society (to push for a negotiated, political solution
to the armed conflict). Although Molano did not provide easy
answers, he pointed toward a new set of questions that will
improve our understanding of the Colombian conflict.
