Common Sense Latest Victim of Colombia Peace Talks
Last edited Tue Feb 12, 2013, 04:19 PM - Edit history (1)
February 12, 2013
Politiqueria vs. Program
Common Sense Latest Victim of Colombia Peace Talks
by CHRIS GILBERT
Caracas, Venezuela.
The most recent victim in Colombia’s conflict, in spite of ongoing conversations between the government and the FARC-EP guerrilla that began last year, seems to be common sense itself. With the government declining to enter a two-part truce at the conclusion of the insurgency’s unilaterally assumed cease-fire on January 20, the war naturally resumed its course. Yet now acts of war on the part of the insurgency – recent attacks on the police, the taking of war prisoners, and the destruction of infrastructure – are declared “attempts against the peace process” or “provocations.” These are terms which the guerrilla never applied to the Colombian Air Force’s bombing of its camps and assassination of its combatants during its Christmas cease-fire.
In fact, the government’s puzzling outcry about a situation that is essentially of its own making (“dialogue in the middle of the war” is the very formula advanced by president Juan Manuel Santos) only makes sense in two possible circumstances: Either (1) the insurgency is not a belligerent political force, but rather a group of lawless bandits with no right to engage in war; or (2) the peace process is simply a logistical matter of organizing the guerrilla’s rendition. Yet both of these possibilities are belied by the government’s own decision to sit down at the negotiating table with the insurgency, as it is nowdoing in La Habana.
Of course the real issue is that a sizable dose of “mediatic irrationality”and what Latin Americans call “politiqueria” interferes with the minimal political intelligence that the government manages. The government’s situation is a complicated and contradictory one; it confects a solution of the same order. That is to say, pressured by mass movements and business sectors that would benefit from peace, yet also answerable to the semi-fascist position of Uribism (position the Colombian establishment has long fueled through mediatic intoxication), the essentially bonapartist regime of Santos employs a “knuckleball” policy of contradictory impulses and spins.
In contrast, the guerrilla has shown much steadfastness and political maturity: a conception of politics that includes respect for collective processes and democratic decision-making (to say nothing of their Clausewitzian conduction of the war which works in consonance with rather than against long-term political objectives). Hence the guerrilla has dutifully updated its historical program based on inputs from the United Nations-sponsored Agricultural Development Forum held in Bogotá last December, which was one of the few concrete results of the dialogues last year.
More:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-frank-honduras-drug-war-20130212,0,1104889.story
= new reply since forum marked as read
