Peace remains elusive

TUMACO, Colombia—When President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia shook hands to end a half-century war, residents of towns like Tumaco were supposed to be relieved.

Nineteen months later, people in this gritty port on the Pacific are anything but.

True, most FARC militants, as foreseen by the peace accord, demobilized here and across Colombia, a country the size of France and Spain combined. For decades, rugged terrain and an oft-absent government had enabled the rebels to become the de-facto authority in many areas.

But Santos, saddled with a sluggish economy at the end of his second term, has struggled to ensure order of the sort the rebels, albeit murderous, once imposed across parts of the Andean nation.

Despite widespread acclaim for the agreement, including a Nobel Prize for Santos, peace remains elusive in this country of 50 million people, still the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

With the FARC disarmed, other militants, criminal gangs and paramilitary groups are jostling into the breach. They are hoisting flags, enlisting members and exacting levies and loyalty in former FARC strongholds. They are also seizing the FARC’s most lucrative rackets – from the drug trade, to extortion, to illegal mining.

“It’s like a devil’s cauldron where all manner of criminal ingredients are being boiled,” said Juan Camilo Restrepo, until recently the government’s chief negotiator in ongoing peace talks with the National Liberation Army, or ELN, now Colombia’s biggest guerrilla group. “They all want their hands on the business and territorial spoils left by the FARC.”

Over the past nine months, Reuters traveled to Tumaco and six other sites in Colombia to understand the advance of armed and criminal groups. Disrupters include splinter FARC factions, enterprising new gangs and veteran rebel rivals, like the ELN, who have used the agreement to reposition.

Among the most violent corners of Colombia is Tumaco, in the southwest, where a network of rivers provides a crucial Pacific outlet for sprawling coca plantations nearby.

Here, new guerrilla corps vie with criminal gangs for the routes. Earlier this month, a small force of former FARC fighters killed an Ecuadorian journalist, photographer and their driver because the neighboring country spurned the guerrillas’ demands that it release imprisoned comrades who had ventured across the border.

East of Tumaco, ELN rebels seized turf where the FARC relinquished an illegal gold mine. In the northwestern state of Chocó, the ELN is recruiting and expanding control of jungle there.

To win support for the deal, Santos promised to flood areas of FARC control with troops and investment.

As much as $3 billion of annual government spending over the next 15 years is supposed to improve health, education, infrastructure and agriculture in war-torn regions. A cornerstone of the plan is a crop substitution effort for farmers who rely on income from coca.

But a weakened economy makes financing difficult.

Along with tighter budgets, red tape delays the start of roads, aqueducts, schools, power lines and clinics promised to millions living without infrastructure. The crop substitution program in 2017 reached just 30 percent of its goal and is angering farmers who say the government is leaving their fields bare. The anger boiled over near Tumaco in October, when seven farmers died in a firefight with police and soldiers who pulled up their coca bushes.

“It’s like a devil’s cauldron where all manner of criminal ingredients are being boiled.”

The ascendant threats are dividing Colombians just before they vote on a Santos successor in May. Instead of an asset, the faltering peace is disconcerting an electorate also frustrated by tepid growth, weak public services and still-gaping inequality.

The government said it is doing all it can.

It already deployed 80,000 police and soldiers. In January, it launched its biggest deployment in two decades, sending 9,000 troops to Nariño, the troubled state home to Tumaco and other flashpoints along the Pacific coast and Ecuadorian border.

It isn’t enough.

Groups such as the new and little-known United Guerillas of the Pacific are establishing strongholds. “This is happening all across Colombia,” said Joan, the leader of an eight-person squad of heavily-armed guerrillas on patrol late last year in jungle south of Tumaco.

Led by former FARC fighters who rejected the peace, the group is already coercing local families for support. It is not associated with the rebels who killed the Ecuadorians earlier this month, according to government officials.

Joan, who would only give his nome de guerre, said fighting continues because “the same poverty exists and the same drugs exist” that have historically fueled Colombia’s conflicts.





