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On March 30, Los Urabeños, Colombia’s largest right-wing paramilitary group, distributed leaflets across the north of the country calling for a “pacific strike.” The next day, the streets of many towns and cities were virtually deserted. Businesses and schools were closed, and people stayed home for fear of violence. Their concerns were warranted. Paramilitaries staged dozens of attacks on security forces, injuring several police officers, and in the days that followed they mounted assaults in neighborhoods across the country, including Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. If there was any doubt about who controls much of the nation’s territory, the “pacific strike” dispelled it: right-wing militants, not the Colombian state, have the monopoly on violence in significant swaths of the country. That worries the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP), the militant group currently in peace talks with the government after decades of waging armed struggle against the Colombian state. In a country where leftists have often been assassinated by state forces, paramilitaries, or cartels, FARC members say they’ll meet the same fate if they put down their guns and the paramilitaries remain armed. The government claims that all paramilitaries have demobilized and that the remaining groups are nothing more than “criminal bands” who will not receive a peace deal. The paramilitaries’ show of force in March did, however, stall negotiations between the government and the FARC. With the talks nearing a conclusion and separate dialogues with smaller group ELN about to begin, further disruption could be disastrous.

Spokes in the Wheel of Peace The Colombian armed conflict is extremely complex. First launched in 1964, the leftist insurgency began as a struggle for land redistribution and political representation. But the battle lines and objectives grew fuzzier and fuzzier. Various guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and the Colombian state fought one another in a series of shifting alliances. In recent decades, the conflict has largely devolved into an internecine struggle for control of the drug trade, with the Colombian people suffering atrocities at the hands of all combatants. For many years the Colombian military and the largest paramilitary group (The United Self-Defense Forces, or AUC) waged a joint campaign against the guerrillas. Both were implicated in terrible massacres, sometimes torturing and murdering entire villages. Colombia became the world’s most dangerous country for trade unionists. The AUC officially demobilized between 2003 and 2006. But many dissident AUC members have formed new groups that remain active in the drug trade. And like the AUC before them, they’re both Colombia’s largest human rights violators and the chief impediment to peace in the country. In the first two weeks of March alone, twenty-nine members of Colombia’s left were killed. “These are the spokes in the wheel of peace in Colombia,” declared Aida Avilla, leader of the Patriotic Union (UP) political party. “The enemies of peace don’t want it to be signed, or there to be peace.” The Colombian left — from the moderate Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA) to the more radical UP — generally supports the peace process. Prominent left-wing politicians even endorsed the leader of the peace negotiations — right-wing incumbent Juan Manuel Santos, the latest incarnation of the oligarchical Santos family — in the second round of the 2014 presidential election.

Government Silence Yet however supportive of Santos’s negotiation efforts, groups like PDA and UP fiercely oppose his right-wing economic agenda. That conservative approach has been on full display over the past year. In response to an economic downturn, the center-right governing coalition has enacted harsh austerity measures that, in combination with rising energy costs (the result of privatization) and an already insufficient minimum wage, are threatening to drive millions into poverty. Meanwhile, the 2012 and 2013 free-trade agreements with the United States and European Union — which prompted massive protests and a nationwide strike by agriculture workers — have depressed manufacturing and agricultural exports and harmed the livelihoods of workers in these sectors. In some parts of the country this toxic cocktail of economic decline and government indifference has generated a humanitarian crisis. In the northern department of Guajira, at least twenty-five children have already died of starvation this year. Angered by these developments, frustrated by previous broken promises from the government, and tired of the nation’s regressive tax and pension systems, Colombian workers held a national strike on March 17. Thousands of students, farmers, truckers, and other workers took to the streets of major cities. In Bogotá over fifteen thousand people marched from all corners of the city before assembling in the historic Bolívar Square. The strike was peaceful compared to 2012 (when dozens were killed by police) but the ESMAD riot police unit was out in force, brutalizing protesters. Dismantling ESMAD is one of the demands made by the striking workers, along with: increased regulation of the financial sector, nationalized healthcare, increased minimum wage and transport subsidies, support for farmers, and emergency aid measures for the north. So far the government has failed to respond to any of the protesters’ demands, leading the president of the Central Union of Workers to declare, “If the government silence continues, the strike could be indefinite.” Soon after the march seven thousand “community mothers” (child welfare workers) went on strike to protest the withdrawal of vital services.