Notes from Colombia

Last Sunday, the 2nd of October, in a vote that defied predictions, Colombians voted in a referendum to reject the peace deal that had been negotiated between their government and the FARC guerillas. Many people were stunned by the outcome. My Facebook feed was full of people typing “WTF?” and similar, utterly uncomprehending that a people could vote for the continuation of this ancient and apparently pointless war. What follows is my own, inexpert take on things, based solely on the fact that I was there for the vote as an international observer and have had an opportunity to talk to some Colombians about what happened (albeit English speaking ones with liberal views). So read what I’ve written with that in mind.



On Thursday 29th September I was sitting on a Lufthansa flight to Bogota, Colombia and wondering what the next few days would bring. A few weeks previously, I had been asked whether I’d be interested in being an international observer for the peace process referendum that aimed to put the seal of popular approval on the peace deal struck between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC and to put an end to a conflict that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives over the past half century. (And indeed is the successor conflict to several other brutal bouts of bloodletting in Colombian history.) I was acutely conscious that I was not particularly qualified for the task. I’d never visited the country before, my Spanish is sub-elementary, and I’d read some books and got to know a few Colombians. I also had no experience in the business of election observation, but had — at the suggestion of a friend who has done it multiple times — taken an [online course](http://www.odihrobserver.org/) provided by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

My reading had been a quirky introduction to Colombia by Victoria Kellaway and Sergio J. Lievano, *Colombia, A Comedy of Errors*, Tom Feiling’s recent *Short Walks from Bogota* and then Steven Dudley’s *Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia*. Feiling’s books is a great read, but Dudley’s is both harrowing and highly relevant to the current situation. It recounts the experience of the FARC’s attempt to enter the political arena in the 80s via the Unión Patriótica, a legal leftist political party, and what happened next. What ensued was that the paramilitaries and the narco-gangs, backed by state agencies, killed them all, literally thousands of people, politicians, supporters and voters. The lesson the FARC drew from this experience was that there was just no point in entering the democratic process because doing so would just get you murdered. Not an unreasonable conclusion perhaps. Still, the hope with the recent peace agreement was that the ex-guerrillas could be integrated without violence and murder on scale of the 1980s and 90s. The FARC are, in any case, not what they were, not a power able to threaten the Colombian state but a much reduced force driven back to inhospitable terrain. They have run out of options.

Arriving in Bogota and whisked to a very nice room in a Marriot hotel, it was hard to think of this as a country at war. Much, but not all, of Bogota is a bustling modern city. There are areas that make London’s Knightbridge look a little down-at-hell. Lots of people drive smart modern cars on the overcrowded roads, and there’s a rather spendid fast bus system with special stations. Shops are full of the latest goods, advertising slogans flash from signs and hoardings, and many people look and act just like they would in Western Europe or North America (actually, somewhat smarter). On the other hand, the rich are simply more visible than the poor and there’s plainly a great deal of poverty and you see some pretty desperate people on the street (though the same is true of San Francisco, come to think of it). The divide between the haves and the have nots also seems to have a racial component: the working class and poor in Bogota often have a distinct mestizo appearance, whereas President Santos and his ministers would not look out of place in France or Spain. Bogota’s setting, surrounded by mountains, also generates a sense that this is somewhere disconnected, and that if there’s a war on, it is happening somewhere else. What on earth have the FARC, nervously scanning the sky for attack aircraft in their jungle hideouts, got to do with what’s going on here?

The disconnection and incongruity of modern urban life somehow co-existing with guerrillas in the jungle elswhere is matched by other paradoxes of Colombian life and history. This is a democracy, and one with a long history. There has only been one dictator, back in the 1950s, and he was hardly in the Pinochet or Videla league. And Colombia has a constitution, jam packed with rights and guarantees for the citizen, together with a modern legal system and lots of lawyers. It is a reminder to anyone who will look that constitutional principles are insufficient to ensure that human beings are free of violence, fear and unfreedom. For much of modern Colombian history there has been a great deal of violence. Looking only at the postwar period there was brutal savagery following the assasination of the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 and from the 1960s onwards, a range of different guerilla groups (M19, ELN, EPL, FARC) took on the Colombian state, with varying degrees of success, and were attacked in their turn by right-wing paramilitaries often sponsored by narco-gangs. Though the violence is now at a much lower level than it was, Colombia is still a dangerous place to be a trade unionist or to stand up for social justice.

It was a great honour to be asked to participate in the election observation mission and I can say that my experience of visiting polling stations, talking to the citizens who staff the voting tables, and observing the process was very positive. The citizens who do this are chosen randomly, rather like jury duty, and consist of three principals and three alternates, although in practice there were usually the full six sat at each table which is responsible for around 500 voters. The number of tables at each polling station varied, some had over twenty, others as few as eight. A constant stream of people walked in and it was all very relaxed and good-humoured. At none of the polling stations we visited, in a range of districts in Bogota from fairly comfortably-off to more working-class, was there any evidence of there anything untoward. I know that other members of the mission were sent out of Bogota and I heard no reports of anything going wrong elsewhere, which doesn’t mean there weren’t any such reports. As observers, we had very little preparation about what we should do and the criteria we should apply, although some of us had sought to mitigate this by preparing in advance. So my direct experience was of a free, fair and impartial process, but I cannot speak to the experience of others in other places. All in all the observation was very rewarding, you really got a sense of democracy as a festival, of people coming together to decide something of great importance.

When we arrived at the count in Bogota it became clear very quickly that things had not gone as expected. The piles of papers on the counting tables were just much closer in height than we thought they would have been. Sure enough, as the partial results fed through, it started to look neck and neck. At first I felt reasonably sure that YES would edge it, but then NO started to build a tiny lead which looked insurmountable as the proportion of total votes reported passed 90 per cent or so. My Colombian friends and interlocutors present at the count looked grim, some were tearful. This was not the result they wanted or expected. Having experienced the sense of deflation and numbness when a result goes against you twice over the past couple of years, with the Tory victory of 2015 and the Brexit referendum this year, I had some sense of how they were feeling, though obviously nothing in British politics compares to the serious violence that Colombians have lived through and hoped to put behind them. It soured the day for me too — though my role was focused on the fairness of the process — because that sense of democracy as joinging and unifying simply evapourates in the face of a result that pointed not to unity but to deep and enduring division, a mess. Not pleasant.

What explains the result? I think on one level it is just the fact that referendums are dangerous and unpredictable devices, liable to blow up in the face of politicians who call them, and that voters will use them not necessarily to answer the question they’re given, but to give the government a kicking. The areas most deeply affected by the conflict favoured YES, often by large margins, but voters in the centre of the country seem to have been guided more by negative feelings about President Santos and to some extent by identification with his predecessor, Uribe. I don’t want to push the Brexit parallels too far, but there’s a similarity here with the utter indifference of English voters to the implications of Leave for the Northern Ireland peace process.

Since the result, I’ve also seen US leftists blaming Human Rights Watch for the outcome, since they had opposed the deal on the basis that those who had committed serious crimes should answer for their actions. The sheer narrowness of the result lends a tiny bit of plausiblity to this, since it is necessarily true for any of a host of factors that, had they been different, they might might have changed things (if the strong winds on the Atlantic coast hadn’t blown? if the morning rain in Bogota had been less heavy?). But though I disagree with the HRW decision to put accountability before peace, and think they should be critized for that, fixating on HRW is mainly typical US narcissism: thinking that what happens in the world is basically a function of US choices and that they are causally and morally responsible for everything that happens in the world. No Colombian mentioned HRW until I brought it up in conversation, and internal Colombian politics, not the statements of US NGOs, is the main story.

The key part of that internal politics is ex-President Uribe, who cannot now stand because of term restrictions and who is fiercely critical of President Santos, who previously served as his defence minister. Uribe is a deeply divisive figure, often and not unreasonably described in places like the Guardian as far-right. When I’ve seen him interviewed on TV, I’ve found him pretty disturbing. His government brought a degree of peace and security to Colombia whilst showing a lack of squeamishness – to put it mildly – about human rights. Some pretty nasty stuff happened during Uribe’s term of office — but remember Santos was part of this too — including episodes such as the “false positives” scandal in which the army responded to a incentive scheme for killing guerillas by killing ordinary poor young men and dressing them up in guerilla uniforms. But making it relatively safe for people to travel across the country without getting kidnapped, or to drive a truck full of imported goods to the cities without being held up, is not nothing. People are grateful for that improvement in their lives and whilst Uribe is loathed by many people, he also has the loyalty of many others for whom Hobbesian order trumps justice. When Uribe set his face against the peace deal, there were always going to be a lot of voters who would follow his lead. Several Colombians I spoke to put this kind of attachment to Uribe (and associated loathing for Santos) at the heart of their explanation for the victory of NO.

What does the future hold? I suspect that endless war will not be the outcome. Both Santos and the FARC leader Timochenko seem committed to maintaining a ceasefire and there is already talk of involving the Uribe faction in talks to improve the agreement despite the NO vote. It is going to be hard to get past this point in the process, but FARC realistically have nowhere else to go. People I spoke to were nervous and uncertain, but after initially being incredibly fearful and anxious, were more optimistic within a day of the vote. But even if war is over, the NO vote suggests that the future will be difficult, because it is a barometer of the political balance of forces within the country. Many people believed it showed the strength of the Uribe faction and that his presidential candidate was likely to win next time. Those associated with the rejected peace deal, on the other hand, are unlikely to find electoral favour. That means that the election of any government that might do something, even something modest, about Colombia’s inequality, or about other aspects of its violent politics, such as the high number of murders of trade unionists, is unlikely.

2016 has been a pretty difficult year all round, and one of its central lessons has to be that the politician who calls a referendum is a fool. They can transform careers in a day, as Santos, like David Cameron, now knows. US politics has that same binary character and is an opportunity for disaffected and angry people to hit out. After Brexit and Colombia, it would be unwise to discount the chances of a Trump Presidency.