Colombia in the balance

Colombia has just taken a giant step toward peace. Or has it? It looks like a case of glass half empty or half full, depending on your point of view.

Last week the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government agreed on the second point of the peace talks in Havana: the incorporation of the guerrillas into legal political life. The government negotiators and President Santos - and the guerrillas too - see the glass half full by necessity. Meanwhile, the discordant third party, former President Uribe, who considers the whole Havana palaver high treason, may also fear that the glass is half full, but who firmly asserts it is half empty; that it is a ruse on the part of the FARC, who do not really want peace, and of the government, who are deceiving the Colombians, merely so that Juan Manuel Santos can be re-elected in 2014.

Both the state and the guerrillas were in need of some good news to raise the morale of the people, among whom the rising "threat" of Uribism is looming for the legislative elections next May: the government, because it is staking everything on the negotiation to end a war that has dragged on for 50 years; and the guerrillas, because, while Uribe himself cannot run again, a Congress full of Uribe's adherents, and an Uribe-clone president bent on wiping them out with fire and sword, would be very bad news for them.

The (temporary) solution was to reach formal agreement in the most abstract terms they could invent. This was not difficult in Colombia, home of articulate circumlocution. The magazine Semana says they are terms that it is "almost impossible not to agree on." They wrote up a road map so vague that nobody knows just what it means. The FARC wanted eight seats in the upper and lower Chambers, while a great majority of Colombians want (at least) those responsible for atrocities to go to jail. The text mentions "curules" - a term used in Colombia for parliamentary seats - for the FARC in areas especially devastated by the guerrillas, but demands that these compete at the polls with other candidates; speaks at length of an "airing" of the system, which involves the conversion of social movements into political parties, as the guerrillas wanted; while encouraging new political parties by lowering the three-percent minimum required for access to parliamentary representation. But no electoral law is specified. The crowning touch is a "statute of opposition," which is to guarantee the viability of dissidence (although nobody knows how).

The irony of it all is that these reforms might have been carried through years ago for the good of democracy

It seems likely that the talks will go on until the legislative elections in May - so that war and peace will be an electoral issue. The common interest of guerrillas and government is for Havana to generate encouraging news at about that time. May of this year saw the passage of an agrarian reform on landholding, providing land for millions of idle hands to work. But there are still four points to clear up: 1) Eradication of drug trafficking, given that the FARC are protectors in the coca regions; 2) Termination of hostilities; 3) Reparation for the victims, involving a parallel demand that administration of justice be equal for all; and 4) Ratification via a referendum of the peace accords. Capping it all, a sine qua non condition: nothing will be signed, until everything has been signed.

The irony of it all is that these reforms might have been carried through years ago for the good of democracy, without need of insurrection in the picture. And only this new, imaginary Colombia could have brought this into being. If that country existed, the FARC could never have gathered the material wherewithal for war, and nothing less than such a recasting is what is expected of the peace process.

So the glass is neither half full nor half empty, but both at the same time. Full, because both parties want to end the conflict; and empty, because the manner of ending it is still a mystery.