A 50-Year Civil War That Killed Over 250,000 and Devastated Colombia Has Finally Reached a Peace Agreement

On Monday, in Cartagena, Colombia, the government of Colombia and the rebel leadership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ended one of the longest running civil wars in modern history. Over fifty years of battle between the FARC, the government of Colombia, the right-wing paramilitary groups and an assortment of bandas criminales is now over. Or at least the battle is over until Sunday, when the Colombian people will vote on a referendum for or against the agreement. If they vote against it, then there will be pressure on the government to renege on its commitments. That would restart the bloody civil war, which has killed more than a quarter of a million people.

Tension sits heavy across sections of Colombia. Polls suggest that the majority of the population will vote to ratify the peace deal. Exhaustion is the mood. Colombians want the war to end. This was not a war with a frontline necessarily, although there were frontlines between the FARC areas and the government zones. This was a war across the country, with precious resources squandered in the battle and fear pervasive even far from the battlefield.

Such atmospheric violence is not unknown in Colombia. The civil war that ran for the decade from 1948 is called La Violencia, The Violence. It could be the name of Colombia’s past century, where the elite in this South American nation tried to hold onto the advantages of slavery and colonial rule long after the liberation of the continent from the Spanish.

Terrible histories are mirrored in Colombia’s national flag, the top half of which is yellow for the country’s gold, its riches, while the bottom half is shared between the blue of the sea, which defines its borders, and the red of the blood that has spilled inside the country. There is no green here, even as the FARC fought over questions of land reform and rural democracy. Part of the agreement between the FARC and the Colombian government is to set aside three million hectares to distribute to landless peasants and smallholders. Another part of the agreement will share the State’s powers with the people of the countryside. The initial way that this will occur is for FARC to gain reserved seats in Congress and funds to transform it into a political party. Rural localities will be allowed to form their own mechanisms of political rule. These developments out of the agreement will create new symbols – not gold or blood, but perhaps land and freedom?

‘The horrible night has ceased’, said Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, who, as the previous Defence Minister, had prosecuted the war against the FARC. It is now Santos who was the peace maker, pushed by circumstances to avoid his own political history and to reach for the olive branch. He was met at the other end by the FARC’s Timoleón Jiménez, who said to the gathered dignitaries in Cartagena, ‘Our only weapons will be our words’. It is significant that Jiménez apologized unequivocally for the FARC’s hand in the violence. ‘On behalf of the FARC’, he said, ‘I ask for forgiveness to all innocent victims that were drawn into the war’. Both men had led their sides to war, and now both used a pen made of spent bullets to sign the agreement.

It has been a long time in the making. Pushed by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the FARC and the Colombian state decided to seriously engage each other. In 2008, Chavez had said, ‘The guerrilla war is history. At this moment in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place’. He wanted the FARC to come above ground, contest elections and push Colombia out of its conservative rut. That is what the FARC now hopes it could do.

But there is no guarantee that the referendum on October 2nd will pass. Santos was the Defence Minister under former President Álvaro Uribe, who left office in 2010. Uribe is leading the charge against the deal. He is now a Senator, whose Democratic Centre party hopes for a defeat of the referendum. Uribe believes that the Colombian state should not negotiate with the FARC. Amnesty for fighters should be off the table, and indeed, the full force of the Colombian army – backed by the United States – should crush the FARC. Uribe shares a great deal with Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa, who prosecuted a war unto the death against the Tamil Tigers. Rajapaksa set aside the peace process in Sri Lanka that began in 2002. He then turned to his military to destroy the Tigers. The UN Report on the Sri Lanka’s government’s war showed that it was almost genocide. It makes for difficult reading. It is what Uribe hopes for Colombia.

‘Considering all the challenges and the reactionary forces aligned against it’, Professor Teo Ballve of Colgate College told me, ‘a winning yes vote is crucial for the accords to have any chance at actually being implemented’. Ballve is from Colombia and a historian of the country’s painful past. He suggests that this is the best agreement possible, and that his fellow Colombians should vote positively for peace. Any other alternative is unimaginably bad. ‘Peace is hard work’, said US Secretary of State John Kerry, who was at the signing on Monday. Part of that hard work is to resist the immense jingoism of Uribe, who is bent on inflaming families of victims of the violence (his father was killed by the FARC).

But Uribe’s Colombia is that of the past. It does not define the present. Dr. Luis Eslava of Kent Law School (UK) tells me that Colombia is in the midst of a process of great transformation. This began with the 1991 Constitution, which was the outcome of a wide-ranging debate in the country against the entrenched oligarchy. Movements of Afro-Colombians, the Indigenous, LGBTQ, the feminists, the students, workers, peasants, the self-employed, the community mother’s groups, the neighborhood associations, the underemployed and the unemployed ‘have shown that their dignity cannot be taken away that easily, or at least not without marches, blockades, and informal protests on the streets’. The FARC will see, Eslava says, that the ‘country is already full of progressive energy’. It will have to join this energy and build upon it.

Leaders of the FARC seem aware of this dynamic. Victoria Sandino, a commander who was part of the peace negotiations, told me that she is ready to build the new Colombia. The war had exhausted her and her comrades, although they are ready to come out of the jungle only because the framework of the peace suggests the possibility of a better country. ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence’, Sandino told me. ‘We took up weapons because we tried to resolve the land question through democratic means, which was violently responded to by the state. Violence was imposed on us’. If the State truly withdraws its violent reaction to progressive politics, there is no reason for FARC to hold fast to the gun. It seems fully prepared to engage with democratic currents. There is no other way.

October 2nd is Gandhi’s birthday. It is a fitting day for the referendum. If the Colombian people vote No, then they would not only have voted against the peace deal but against the possibility of a new kind of Colombia. A vote Si–Yes–would signal that Colombia, as Eslava said to me, is ‘ready to stand on the right side of history’.