Colombians Take Bold Steps on Road to Peace

Shouting “No more!” to war and violence, millions of Colombians took the first steps toward change by marching for peace on a drizzly Sunday morning.

For the first time in 35 years of civil war, the civilians victimized by the conflict became the protagonists. Mothers of soldiers held by Marxist rebels, peasants driven from their homes by right-wing private armies and middle-class professionals afraid to take their families for weekend drives in the country united that day late last month into a peace movement.

The gathering and other grass-roots efforts mark the rise of a social movement that promises to change this country as profoundly as antiwar protests altered the United States three decades ago. By crossing class lines and geographic boundaries to demand a say in Colombia’s future, the marchers fundamentally altered the mentality of a nation where survival has dictated developing a thick veneer of indifference bordering on cynicism.

“We demonstrated to the violent, armed groups that they are not the people, that they should not usurp the right to speak for us,” said Clara Marcela de Ayerbe, spokeswoman for UNICEF, one of more than 100 local, national and international groups that helped organize the nationwide march. “This country belongs to us.”

The march was the most visible expression of that attitude, which has been building for the last three years and is increasingly being manifested by local communities and civic groups in their contacts with leftist guerrillas, right-wing private armies and even the government. With everyone from wealthy kidnapping victims to police cadets marching against violence, to demand peace is no longer subversive.

Mogotes, a town of 15,000 people about 150 miles northeast of Bogota, the capital, was honored last month with the National Peace Prize. The award, given by Colombia’s most prestigious media, recognized the town’s success at nonviolently repelling an attempted guerrilla takeover.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, this nation’s largest insurgent group, abducted the mayor in December 1997, killing three police officers and two town hall employees in the process. They announced that he would be “tried” for corruption, a common occurrence in areas under guerrilla influence.

But unlike other towns, Mogotes did not accept the rebel interference in its community affairs, even though residents themselves had complained about the mayor’s antics. Villagers demonstrated two or three times a month, marching through the streets to community Masses, until the mayor was returned 76 days after his abduction. Then he resigned and they elected a replacement.

Across the country on the Pacific Coast, the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca also has taken a stand for peace and autonomy from the rebels. The council has offered to host a national assembly to present a civilian proposal for resolving Colombia’s armed conflicts.

“They think that they are wise and that we Indians have to follow their orders,” Inocencio Ramos, a council member, said of the guerrillas. “They do not represent us and they, as outsiders, have no reason to try to solve the internal problems in our communities.”

Such resentment also found an outlet in the march on Oct. 24, the same day that government and FARC negotiators began discussions on a broad range of topics that will decide Colombia’s future. Many of the marchers were glad that talks to end the fighting were resuming, but they were also furious that 15,000 rebel fighters presumed to be speaking for them.

The insurgents tried to cloak themselves in the peace movement, hanging banners with the slogan “No more” throughout the town where the talks took place that day and reciting a litany of “no mores”--no more corruption, killings by police, divestitures of government companies--in their inaugural speech.

But the rebels have not acceded to any of the demands to halt kidnappings--a major source of guerrilla revenue--or to shield civilians from the war.

“The armed groups cannot just keep thinking that they are acting against a defenseless, apathetic population,” said Angelica Gutierrez, program development consultant at Up With Citizenship, a civic group that backed the march. “This is a first step, but an extremely important step.”

March organizers are trying to find ways to build on the momentum of an event that could mark a turning point in the nation’s history of violence and apathy.

Colombia has been at war, in one form or another, during most of this century and constantly during the last 50 years. Political parties, Marxist guerrillas, drug cartels and cattle owners with ranches the size of counties have violently carved out and controlled rural fiefdoms. In the last decade, an estimated 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and 35,000 have been killed.

At the same time, Colombia’s urban islands developed a culture that gave the world great artists such as Fernando Botero, and a sophisticated legal system that, for example, guarantees that citizens can sue the government to protect their rights.

A Collection of Parallel Societies

Disingenuous espresso drinkers only knew about the other Colombia of massacres and poverty from characters in the novels of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The best-informed citizens read the works of a new class of social scientists called “violentologists,” who tried to explain the savage subcultures of assassins, insurgents and drug and emerald mafias.

Colombia became a collection of parallel societies that never touched, violentologist Maria Victoria Uribe said. That allowed most individuals to go about their daily lives despite the violence around them. However, it also meant that they had no incentive to stop it.

“The majority of the population had been spectators to the conflict,” explained Camilo Gonzalez, a representative of the Institute for the Study of Development and Peace, a civic group in Bogota and one of the early organizers of the peace movement.

The only time violence noticeably reached the cities was a decade ago, when drug barons launched a campaign of terror to halt extradition to the U.S. They assassinated presidential candidates, blew up skyscrapers and kidnapped prominent journalists, including Francisco Santos, one of the leaders of the budding peace movement.

The government capitulated. Extradition of Colombian nationals was constitutionally banned in 1991 and not reinstated until two years ago, after the major drug cartels were dismantled.

Stopping the aggression of the guerrillas and right-wing private armies has not been as easy. Armed groups now control about 40% of the nation’s territory. Their turf fights have led to massacres that wiped out villages and campaigns of terror that all but emptied entire provinces, such as Choco in western Colombia, from which 2,500 peasants fled three years ago.

The roots of the peace movement are in those dispossessed people driven from tiny farms into sprawling urban slums. Three years ago, youngsters displaced by the conflict or sympathetic to the plight of other young war victims organized the Children’s Movement for Peace. Through schools and organizations to protect children, such as UNICEF, they conducted a massive vote of young people for peace.

A nationwide mandate for peace followed in October 1997, when a quarter of Colombia’s 40 million people voted in a referendum to end the fighting. Last year, President Andres Pastrana was elected on a peace platform.

But what really gave the peace movement impetus was a tactical blunder by the guerrillas. “They democratized kidnapping,” said Santos, the journalist. “Anybody can be kidnapped now.”

Mass Abductions by Warring Sides

In the first half of this year, the National Liberation Army, or ELN--the nation’s second-largest guerrilla group--abducted churchgoers in the city of Cali, passengers on a domestic airline flight and vacationers near the Caribbean port of Cartagena. Rebel roadblocks went up on highways throughout the country, and motorists became kidnapping targets.

Rebels looking for ransoms have long been a major cause of Colombia’s 2,000-plus abductions a year. But large-scale abductions made the kidnapping rate soar, even by Colombian standards.

In the first nine months of this year, 2,283 abductions were reported--more than during all of 1998, according to Pais Libre, a support group for kidnapping victims and their families.

At the same time, right-wing paramilitary groups abducted prosecutors who were investigating human rights violations.

That brought Colombia’s well-organized anti-kidnapping and anti-disappearance organizations, such as Pais Libre, into the peace movement. They began with 44 marches in towns across Colombia from June to September, to protest abductions and forced disappearances, then broadened their goals to launch a nationwide march in cooperation with antiwar groups.

“Working with Pais Libre gave us the potential for other types of activities,” said the UNICEF’s Ayerbe. Pais Libre, founded by Santos nine years ago, can carry out sophisticated campaigns with the support of an advertising agency that donates its services.

Just as important, the anti-kidnapping groups include professionals and wealthy Colombians as well as the families of abducted soldiers and police officers. The family of army Lt. Raimundo Malagon, 25, who was captured by rebels 15 months ago near Uribe--ironically, the site of current peace talks--has made three trips to insurgent-held territory to seek his release.

“You waste a lot of time, and the answer is always the same: They won’t cede until the government gives way on certain points,” said his sister-in-law, Gladys Ropero. The rebels try to persuade families to pressure the government for a prisoner exchange, she said.

Fed up, the Malagon family joined the peace movement. Linking up with relatives of kidnapping victims created an organization that cut across social class and geographical lines and undermined the myth that the peace movement was itself subversive.

“We have a convergence of business owners and union activists, Indians, peasants and urbanites, the relatives of policemen kidnapped by the guerrillas and of disappeared guerrillas,” said Claudia Reza of the Peace Network, an umbrella group for peace organizations.

Such a movement is possible, said Uribe, the violentologist, because “the war has now touched all social classes, and that is new in the past two years. . . . We have finally come to the moment where our paths cross.”

“This is absolutely fundamental in the long run,” she added. “It is the only ray of hope for Colombia.”

Now organizers are trying to reach a consensus on how to keep that ray of hope alive. Santos advocates writing letters to warring groups insisting on the need to respect human rights and reach a peaceful solution. The Peace Network is continuing its vigils for the missing and lobbying for stronger laws to protect civilians. Mogotes residents are offering to help other towns learn from their experience.

Keeping such a diverse movement together will not be easy, organizers acknowledged. But Santos wryly noted that the movement can count on unsuspecting allies.

“The guerrillas and the paramilitaries make so many mistakes that they are going to keep feeding people’s fury,” he said, adding: “People are becoming politically conscious in a way that was not possible five years ago.”

Organizers are convinced that the peace movement is the beginning of a less violent, more concerned Colombia.

“We are giving birth to citizen participation,” said Reza of the Peace Network. “It is painful, but it is going to generate new life.”