PETRO'S DANGEROUS GAME
Is it boldness, naivety, or is Colombia's Total Peace just a cynical PR campaign?
Another wave of killings over the weekend hit the Colombian city of Cúcuta, the main gateway on the border with Venezuela, among them investigative journalist and social activist Jaime Vásquez. He was assassinated by a gunman in a pastry shop in front of at least a dozen witnesses and security cameras, but no arrest has been made. Vásquez had been reporting on alleged corruption in the municipality’s public contracting and had received death threats before his murder. Since the government of President Gustavo Petro reopened the border in January 2023, Cúcuta has spiraled into worsening crime and violence. Vásquez’s murder comes a month after Colombia’s biggest organized crime syndicate, the Gulf Clan, accepted Petro’s invitation for “peace negotiations”.
What is underneath?
Petro came to power in 2022 with a promise to implement his Total Peace program to bring a negotiated end to the endemic violence, terrorist insurgencies and organized crime that has lurked over Colombia for generations. He promised to lay down the arms of the state and offer judicial deals for criminal armed groups in exchange for their abandonment of violence as well as their sources of profit, mainly trafficking drugs and people, kidnapping and the extortive “taxing” of local communities they control. In parallel, the government has amassed a development fund from foreign donors to fill the economic and social void left in affected local communities once the armed groups cease their activities.
So far, there have been no real results beyond words and hopeful headlines now and then. Petro put some focus on what are tenuously deemed “ideological” armed groups like the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the dissident remnants of the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). There has been some pointless to-and-fro with both, but it appears to have been tactical games at Petro’s expense without a drop of “ideology” left. The notion that either group is clinging to Marxist revolutionary ideals while they expend all their energies operating as full-freight mafias is, at this point, laughable. The fig leaf of political identity has merely given them a false sheen of nobility to justify special treatment, particularly among Latin America’s leftists.
The Gulf Clan has its origins in paramilitary groups that waged ferocious battles with the FARC beginning in the 1990s. At that time there was a right-wing ideological tint that gave strategic cohesion to their soldiers in what was essentially a battle over territory. They never got the special treatment given how the left despised their “ideology”, but no groups have actually deserved it. The only real ideology of any of these armed groups is crime and profit.
When the Gulf Clan dropped all pretenses, it built itself into the biggest cocaine trafficking organization in the world supplying the most powerful cartels far and wide. Entrenching themselves in key Colombian territories has opened up the full range of criminal enterprises for their expanding ranks, providing wealth that can leverage a great deal of power. They continue to battle the ELN in defense of their empire.
As Sergio Saffon and Sarah Garcia have reported for InSight Crime, Petro’s efforts to negotiate with about two dozen criminal groups through Total Peace has, to date, merely taken the pressure off them as many have strengthened their economic positions. This is why the Gulf Clan’s acceptance last month of Petro’s invitation to talks without any agreed framework seems like another PR stunt.
The opening of the Venezuelan border, another action Petro championed, has brought Venezuelan gangs into the competition for human trafficking profits and put Cúcuta in harm’s way. There’s no evidence that Petro gave serious consideration to this outcome when he opened the border. The prospect of more political violence in Venezuela this year as President Nicolas Maduro prepares to rig another election has led the gangs now in Cúcuta to anticipate great fortune for themselves, as more Venezuelans are expected to flee.
But Vásquez’s murder doesn’t fit neatly into Petro’s narrative of angelic community leaders caught in the crossfire of gangs. Vásquez was focused on exposing local corruption in municipal contracting on health, education, roads and other public functions. His brazen killing was a professional job done in broad daylight, with apparent little concern about the justice system stepping in. A Vásquez associate said local police who rushed to the crime scene quickly seized the victim’s phone to apparently delete evidence on it. Given the rising number of investigative journalists pursuing local corruption stories who have been threatened and murdered during Total Peace — and arrests are rare — it has the hallmarks of widespread collusion between gangs and political leaders.
Our take:
There is no doubt that Total Peace is bold in its concepts. No one wants peace more than the vast majority of Colombia’s people who are the victims of organized crime. But the widening gap between the narrative of Total Peace and the reality on the ground raises obvious questions about Petro’s program. Is he just naive about these groups and the prospect of surrendering the outrageous wealth machine they’ve built without a shot fired? Or is this just a strategic communications campaign that plays on hope and virtue to cover short-term peace deals in exchange for political power?
At this moment, the answer seems to be somewhere in the middle. Campaigning on “peace” in the 2022 presidential election was popular, even though many Colombians are skeptical of such rhetoric after the 2016 peace deal with most of the FARC had little long-term effect and required them swallowing a lot of injustice and hypocrisy.
The FARC only came to the peace table after former President Alvaro Uribe had largely destroyed it with a full-scale military campaign that had the support of the United States under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. His successor, Juan Manuel Santos, swerved into the peace deal with the support of President Barack Obama. The very notion that the FARC was a legitimate political movement has been disproven in the last decade. The political party it became when it laid down its arms has attracted little public support in elections and relies on foreign cheerleaders and political privileges it won in the peace agreement to even exist.
Petro was a left-wing guerrilla himself as a youth in the 1970s as part of the M-19 terrorist organization, and abandoned armed struggle for idealistic non-violent political activity. This bit of history makes it hard to pin down whether Petro is being cynical in providing cover for armed groups or naively believing they want peace, too. Again, probably both.
His energetic and often antisemitic defense of Hamas after its attack on Israel last October adds a layer of personal nostalgia for the terrorist ethos. This clashes with the idea that Petro is being bold out of a passion for peace. Darker impulses seem to be at play as well.
Ultimately, the PR side of Total Peace has mollified leftists and center-left political leaders around the world. The Biden Administration has proven implacable in refusing to put pressure on Petro, despite the regional disaster unfolding around Colombia’s bumper crops of cocaine that his government refuses to meaningfully restrain.
But here is the fact no one wants to admit: the idea that any of these armed groups, who have profited beyond their wildest dreams from violence and crime, will peacefully give it all up is ridiculous.
Washington should be chilled to the bone at the implications of Jaime Vásquez’s murder, like so many before him. The profits of crime are so overwhelmingly attractive that the gangs and political leaders are working together more closely all the time. That isn’t on the Total Peace song sheet that everyone loves to sing. How far up the political ladder will the collusion go, and what will the consequences be for regional security and U.S. national security? You’d be hard pressed to find an answer from Washington right now.
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