peace negotiations

Colombian Government Trying to Buy Support for Peace Talks?

Cross-posted with Public Diplomacy Musings

Recent revelations about Colombian taxpayers’ money being spent on publicity for the country’s ongoing peace talks with the FARC guerrilla group have raised questions about whether the government is trying to buy support for the slow-moving and controversial negotiations.

According to Latin Correspondent, “David Barguil, the president of the Conservative Party, shared a document on Twitter [last week] that appeared to show a government contract worth 480 million pesos (about US $200,000) awarded to an NGO called Corpovisionarios. The contract was for ‘creating a citizen mobilization that promotes societal support for the conversations being carried out between the government and the FARC in Havana and thus strengthening the faith and willingness of civil society to affirm that peace is a collective construction that applies to everyone.'”

“Right-wing politicians and Uribistas — supporters of hard-line former president Álvaro Uribe, who has been quite vocal in his opposition to the dialogues  — have seized on the document as proof of government corruption in the dialogue process and accused the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos of needing to pay to appear to have popular support,” writes author Natalie Southwick.

Uribe also accused the government of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a private media company owned by Santos’ nephew for “services for the realization of pedagogical activities that allow the generation of spaces of reflection and regional discussion about building peace in Colombia” as well as hundreds of thousands more for the “transmission of advertising, special mentions and other forms of communication of the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace” to another media company.

Yet Adriaan Alsema at Colombia Reports notes that the vast majority of the government’s spending on public diplomacy is not aimed at promoting the peace process. Additionally, the sums of money spent on media promotion, including those related to the peace negotiations, are relatively tiny compared to the overall revenues of the large media corporations to which they were made. As Alsema writes, “the $1.3 million spent on for example RCN TV is not close to one percent of the approximately $300 million made by the Colombian television giant that year.”

Nevertheless, this will not stop Uribe from claiming, as he has, that the government is trying to buy support for its policies. Whatever one thinks about the ethics of government money going to a media outlet owned by a close relative of the president, it certainly does not appear that the Colombian government needs to pay for public support of the talks.

As I mentioned last week, some 70 percent of Colombian citizens support a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the FARC. Thus, contrary to the suggestions of the Uribistas, the comparatively small amounts of money spent on promoting the peace talks reflect the Santos government’s confidence in public opinion, not its lack thereof.

If the government thought Colombian citizens wanted an all-out military assault on the FARC, it’s not unlikely the government would follow that policy. In fact, that is exactly what Santos did when he served as Defense Minister under then-president Uribe from 2006 to 2009. The campaign crippled the FARC, who have demonstrated a genuine desire to find a peaceful settlement to the fifty-year old conflict.

Having won re-election largely based on his support for the peace talks, Santos does not feel a need to bring the Colombian or international public on board with the talks. Rather, he is concerned with convincing constituencies with opposition to or reservations about the final outcome of the process. And there is some evidence he may be succeeding. Last week a group of retired military servicemen who had previously supported Uribista presidential candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga announced they would put their weight behind the peace process.

This latest twist in a long-running saga may ultimately have little effect on the final outcome of the negotiations, but it nevertheless remains an insightful example of the public diplomacy strategies on display throughout the process.

Colombia: Is War Really More Popular than Peace?

Cross-posted with Public Diplomacy Musings

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine last spring, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos lamented that his “rivals have been quite effective in sowing the seeds of skepticism around the peace process” that is currently underway between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels. “Waging war is much more popular than negotiating,” Santos said. 

However, according to a recent survey, only 28 percent of Colombians believe that the best solution to the conflict lies in a purely military defeat of the rebels. The rest believe the end of the conflict should come through a negotiated resolution (41 percent) or a unilateral disarmament by the FARC (30 percent). Despite the relative lack of support for the former option, these hard-liners played a prominent role in Colombia’s most recent presidential election, nearly costing the incumbent Juan Manuel Santos a second term in office.

Former president and current Senator Álvaro Uribe, along with his right-wing Democratic Center (CD) party colleagues, have been among the most outspoken opponents of the peace process, viewing it as a negotiation with terrorists. In addition, they have long claimed that they are victims of political persecution by the moderate ruling government, and have implied that the peace process is an underhanded effort to bring the far-left FARC members into the mainstream political sphere in order to increase the representation of leftists in congress.

Adding weight to (and at the same time casting doubt upon) their claims is the fact that the former head of the country’s intelligence service under Uribe has been charged with spying on Uribe’s political opponents while he was president, and Uribe himself is being investigated for his connection to a mass murder carried out by paramilitaries in Antioquia in 1997 while he was governor of that state.

However, Uribe has another problem. Almost everybody except he and his cohort support the peace process. The UN, the OAS, the U.S., the pope, and the vast majority of Colombia’s citizens support a definitive end to the half-century old conflict. The major sticking point is not the negotiations themselves, but rather the structure of the final agreement that they could bring about.

Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC in a botched kidnapping attempt in 1983, has been making his case against the peace talks to the Colombian and international public for years. But despite his status as former head of state, a current senator and one of the country’s most popular political figures – not to mention his 3.5 million Twitter followers – Uribe’s anti-peace message has by all appearances failed to persuade anyone who didn’t already agree with his stance.

As I mentioned in my first post on this blog, “Good policies are easily sold. On the other hand, selling bad policies or ameliorating the damage they cause to diplomatic relations, seems to be the main concern of public diplomacy.”

Uribe’s public diplomacy campaign against the peace negotiations isn’t exactly well-thought out – in fact, it seems to be largely in the service of his own political career and those of his allies – but when compared with the Santos government’s similarly weak and discombobulated messaging about the talks, it points to my earlier conclusion that good policies (like the peace talks) almost sell themselves.

Uribe and a gaggle of CD politicians are currently attempting to travel to the U.S. and meet with American officials to make their case, but if Uribe hopes to derail the peace talks and plunge the country into what President Santos predicted could be “another 20, 30 or 40 years of war,” he’ll have to seriously step up his public diplomacy game at home first.

Colombia Officials Continue to Signal Major Changes in Drug Policy

On August 22, in the first of ten drug policy forums to be held around the country, Colombian Justice Minister Yesid Reyes expressed his belief that the nation must find “more efficient” policies than prohibition and imprisonment to deal with drug use. “The evaluation that should be made is how much has imprisonment affected the control of drug use and the answer seems to be that its impact is minimal,” he said…

Read this piece in its entirety at Security Assistance Monitor.

New steps forward in FARC peace process as conflict continues

When Colombians elected President Juan Manuel Santos to a second term on 15 June 2014, many attributed his victory not to the voters who supported him, but to those who opposed his rival, Oscár Iván Zuluaga. In fact, Santos lost the first round of the election process to Zuluaga on 25 May 2014. Surveys indicated relatively low rates of voter participation, signifying apathy and complacency on the part of Santos supporters…

Read this piece in its entirety at Southern Pulse.

Colombia’s Presidential Election and the Prospects for Peace with the FARC

Colombia has been at war for over 50 years. The internal armed conflict between the government and the Marxist guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC after their Spanish acronym, originated in the aftermath of a bloody period of political violence during the 1950s known as “La Violencia,” or “The Violence…”

Read this piece in its entirety at Truthout.