THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ANDDEADLY CONFLICT

COLOMBIA

Four years after the government’s peace accordwith the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia(FARC), the country may be watching its tentativebut hard-won progress toward peace start tounravel. Well before authorities detected the firstCOVID-19 case in Bogotá in March, armed andcriminal groups were consolidating their influencein the areas hardest hit by conflict before 2016. Indoing so, they took advantage of delays in fulfillingthe accord’s terms, especially as regards measuresto remedy the sources of violence in Colombia’scountryside, among other things, by stimulating

the development of legal commercial activity to create alternatives tothe drug trade and other illicit economies that fuel conflict. Thepandemic has laid these shortcomings bare while offering spoilers the

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This commentary is part of our Watch List 2020 -Autumn Update.

COMMENTARY / LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN 30 SEPTEMBER 2020

Colombia: Peace Withers amid thePandemicThe COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare shortcomings in the implementation of the FARC peaceagreement. In this excerpt from our Watch List 2020 – Autumn Update, Crisis Group urges the EUand its member states to continue pushing for full implementation of the 2016 accord andencouraging the government to pursue a humanitarian ceasefire with the National LiberationArmy (ELN).

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pandemic has laid these shortcomings bare, while offering spoilers the

chance to exhibit their growing power. The country’s largest remainingleftist guerrilla movement, the National Liberation Army (ELN), FARCdissident groups and organised crime have all expanded their territorialreach in the past year.

A national COVID-19 lockdown has tightened the armed groups’ gripand, in some places, made them quicker on the trigger. The year 2019saw 36 massacres (ie, killings with three or more victims), the highestnumber since 2014. Yet 2020 had already surpassed that total by mid-August, including several mass killings of young people at socialgatherings, mostly by armed groups, and at least one of which appearedto involve the enforcement of informal lockdown restrictions. As of 2September, 225 ex-FARC combatants had been killed since the peaceaccord was signed (including 52 in 2020), including by armed FARCdissidents seeking to pressure ex-combatants to take up arms onceagain. Meanwhile, pandemic-related health concerns have slowedimplementation of the 2016 accord yet further, putting on hold manygrassroots peace accord projects aimed at boosting rural economies andimproving public services. As conflict resurges nationwide, the borderwith Venezuela has also become a hotspot for clashes.

To help halt these worrying trends, the European Union andits member states should consider the following steps:

Continue leading international efforts to push for fullimplementation of the 2016 peace accord, with anemphasis on tackling extreme poverty in ruralareas through the Territorially Focused DevelopmentPrograms (PDETs) and support for ex-combatants indeveloping new livelihoods. Press the government to encourage voluntary coca cropsubstitution rather than apply forced eradication. TheEU could use its experience supporting legal economicalternatives to drug production to strengthen theNational Integral Program for Substitution, which isfraught with delays, and help design supplementaryapproaches that include a wider set of coca growers. Work closely with Colombia’s Attorney General’s officeto strengthen criminal investigations into killings ofsocial leaders and ex-combatants, as well as massacresof civilians. The EU’s financial support for the AttorneyGeneral’s special investigation unit is vital to chippingaway at prevailing impunity.

Encourage the government to pursue a humanitarianceasefire with the ELN aimed at alleviating pandemic-related hardships. Despite mutual distrust, the ELN inJuly signalled a willingness to negotiate a bilateral pauseto fighting during the health crisis, following their ownunilateral one-month ceasefire in April.

Two ominous patterns marked Colombia’s start to 2020: sluggishgovernment efforts at carrying out the 2016 peace accord, paired withthe accelerated advance of armed groups into former FARC-controlledterritories. Weighed down by reservations that the 2016 accord was toolenient with the former rebels, the two-year-old government ofPresident Iván Duque has pursued its implementation at a ploddingpace. The accord’s primary vehicle for bringing economic growth torural areas, the PDETs, also aims to bolster the state’s feeble presencein districts that suffered most during Colombia’s half-century ofguerrilla warfare. Yet, according to a congressional oversightreport released in August, it will take 40 years to finish establishing thePDETs at the current rate of progress. In the south-western province ofCauca, officials told Crisis Group that municipalities where securitydramatically improved as the FARC laid down its arms, and which wereincluded in the PDETs, are today inaccessible to many state agenciesdue to violent feuds between various armed groups.

Indeed, many of the country’s historical war zones have slid back intodiscord. These new conflicts for territorial control are notably morelocal and less ideological than the conflict with the FARC. The peaceagreement ended the FARC’s insurgency, but its aftermath spawneddozens of new armed groups, including nearly 30 FARC dissidentfactions, while also empowering the country’s other main guerrillagroup, the ELN. Criminal groups, which emerged from the remnants ofdemobilised right-wing militias fifteen years ago, have also grown instrength and number. Across formerly FARC-controlled areas, thesevarious armed outfits exert power over residents while also seekingdominion over illicit economic activity, including cocacultivation, extortion, human trafficking, mining and logging. To cornerthese black markets, and to achieve monopolies in legal commerce,criminals seek to control territory and those living in it while preventingrival groups from doing the same. Most gain this control by imposingregulations on everything from movement to behaviour in public.

Indicators of violence that fell following the FARC accord have begun torise again. Civil society groups that track killings of social leaders, forexample, count nearly double the number of murders in 2020 so far asi ll f 2016 h th d i d d tifi d N f f

A New Wave of Violence

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in all of 2016, when the accord was signed and ratified. New forms of

violence have also emerged, such as forced confinement within“invisible borders” across which rival groups restrict movement. Nearly50,000 people – 65 per cent of them women and children – havesuffered this maltreatment in 2020 so far, up 226 per cent from the firsthalf of 2019 according to statistics from the state Ombudsman’soffice (which is responsible for overseeing the protection of civil andhuman rights in Colombia).

The pandemic has made the strangulation of rural communities yetworse. Between 24 March and 1 September, the government prohibitedinter-municipal travel, leaving residents with poor or intermittenttelephone connections even more isolated and unable to shareinformation about threats they faced. In July, three quarters ofhouseholds nationwide told the national statistics agency that theireconomic situation was either worse or much worse than the previousyear, while unemployment rates doubled from 10 to 20 per cent. Armedgroups across the board seized upon the health crisis to intensify theircontrol, imposing additional social restrictions under the guise ofquarantine regulations, and in some cases limiting movement to localsupporters while harshly penalising rule-breakers. The ELN, forexample, declared a “total” lockdown in its stronghold communities insouthern Bolívar department from 3 to 17 August, advising thepopulation in a 30 July communiqué that they should supplythemselves for the entire period as “no type of vehicle” would beallowed to transit during the two-week period. The quest to imposesimilar rules at whatever cost appears to lie behind the killing of eightyoung people at a social gathering in Samaniego, Nariño on 15 August.

Restrictions on movement have also prevented communityorganisations and the government from carrying out some programslinked to the 2016 accord. Recently demobilised ex-FARC members areparticularly disadvantaged by the lockdown and deep economicrecession. A total of 30 per cent of former combatants have receivedsupport for livelihood alternatives, but the pandemic has disrupted halfof these projects, according to the UN. Of these, projects led by womenin urban areas were the hardest hit of all. Coupled with the stubbornlyhigh rate of murders of former combatants, many attributed todissident factions seeking to coerce ex-members to take up arms again,the economic slowdown has raised questions as to the sustainability ofthe peace accord’s one indisputable success: the demobilisation of thevast majority of FARC fighters.

“ Bogotá attributes the fresh violence exclusively to drugtrafficking and criminality, rather than also pointing tothe deep seated rural poverty and the almost complete

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The government has responded to rising insecurity mainly by targetingarmed groups with military force and forcibly eradicating coca plants.Bogotá promises to honour the peace accord, but it views the agreementas extraneous to its security strategy. It attributes the fresh violenceexclusively to drug trafficking and criminality, rather than also pointingto the deep-seated rural poverty and the almost complete absence ofeffective state institutions across large swathes of territory, which allowillegal markets and alternative providers of law and order to thrive.There is little to suggest the government’s strategy of taking out thearmed groups (which tend to proliferate in these conditions) oreradicating the coca trade (which saw an increase in cocaineproduction last year, notwithstanding an acreage decline, indicatingnew efficiencies in the refining process) will be successful unlessunderlying issues are effectively tackled. That is why the 2016 peaceaccords emphasised crop substitution as a mechanism for easingfarmers away from the coca crop and building new licit economies.

But the Duque administration does not see it this way. It has blamedthe massacres on a recent bumper coca crop and it has attributed thesize of that coca crop to a 2015 government decision to end aerialfumigation. Rather than moving to complete crop substitutionprograms for around 100,000 coca-growing families that signed up, thegovernment has stressed the need for forced eradication and vows soonto restart aerial fumigation. It has not met its promises to help cocafarmers find new crops and has left the programs underfunded, even asthe enrolled areas continue to suffer consistently high rates of lethalviolence. While there was a roughly 15 per cent drop nationwide inhomicides between March and August, coinciding with the lockdown,largely attributable to the impact of stay-at-home orders, violence ratesin conflict-affected areas remained high.

Moreover, enhanced eradication alongside additional militarydeployments has other downsides. For one thing, it risks exacerbatinghumanitarian needs. For example, in August, theUN documented severe food insecurity among 200,000 people in thetraditional coca-growing hub of Putumayo; this resulted from acombination of forced confinement at the hands of armed groupsand/or the loss of coca crops – their only source of income – to forcederadication For another thing eradication programs can erode trust

the deep-seated rural poverty and the almost complete

absence of effective state institutions across large swathesof territory. ”

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eradication. For another thing, eradication programs can erode trustand create friction between the government, on one hand, and cocafarmers and the communities where they live, on the other. This wasillustrated by a mid-September incident in Policarpa, Nariño, where theOmbusman reported that FARC dissident factions pressured thecommunity to insist that a military eradication unit leave their area.

Coca also contributes to insecurity along Colombia’s 2,200km borderwith Venezuela, with the frontier state of Norte de Santander nowhosting the country’s largest concentration of coca crops according tothe UN, but there are also other dynamics at play. Even though officialcrossings between the two countries have been closed during thepandemic, with some humanitarian exceptions, contraband and people,as well as drugs, continue to move via informal crossings knownas trochas. Control of this illegal commerce is fiercely contested. TheELN now enjoys the strongest single hold on the frontier’s various illiciteconomies, but Crisis Group field research suggests that post-paramilitary groups and corrupt police on both sides of the bordermaintain lucrative niches of their own. Bogotá and Caracas frequentlytrade accusations that the other is stirring up bilateral hostilities byoffering support to armed proxies along the border. On 19 September,for example, clashes broke out between the Venezuelan military and,reportedly, a FARC dissident faction, leaving at least four soldiers andfifteen fighters dead. With cooperation between the two states at aminimum, tensions sparked by armed group activity or other mutualsuspicions could heighten rapidly.

The window is closing on the deep reforms promised in the 2016 peaceaccord. The European Union has been among the agreement’s strongestproponents, and the bloc should remain focused on its implementationin spite of the health and economic emergency facing Colombia.Funding is a key area to watch. With budgets stretched by the pandemicand recession, the government might be tempted to reassign resourcesallocated to satisfying commitments in the peace accord. The EU and itsmember states should urge Bogotá to prioritise funding andimplementation of territorially focused development projects, thePDETs, which are intended both to stimulate economic developmentand prevent conflict by easing entrenched rural poverty and isolation.In addition, targeted assistance to the Attorney General’s Office –through the EU’s fast and flexible conflict prevention and peacebuildinginstrument – can help reduce the persistently high rates of impunity forviolent crime, including massacres and assassinations of social leaders.Just 60 perpetrators of 415 such homicides have been tried andsentenced since 2016; in some cases, they are hired guns, not themasterminds. With limited risk of prosecution, groups and intereststhat rely on terror are unlikely to relent.

A Role for the EU and Its Member States

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The EU should use its wealth of experience working to assist farmers inconverting from illicit crops to help modify Bogotá’s current focus oneradicating coca and eliminating drug trafficking. There is broadpolitical consensus in Colombia that in its current form the cropsubstitution program is flawed and impossibly expensive. The EU couldhelp authorities think of different ways to expand substitution moreefficiently, while maintaining existing commitments to coca producers.For reasons of cost, participation in the program was capped despitegreat interest, although in a few areas – particularly where forcederadication or fumigation would prove difficult – the government ispiloting local agreements with additional coca growers to tradevoluntary eradication for aid. The EU should encourage Bogotá to scaleup these efforts instead of relying on forced eradication and restoringaerial fumigation. More urgently, the EU can suggest that thegovernment halt forced eradication during the pandemic so as to avoidratcheting up humanitarian need in many rural areas.

With the same end in mind, the EU should support efforts to secure ahumanitarian ceasefire by the ELN for the duration of the COVID-19crisis. The ELN observed a unilateral ceasefire in April that significantlyreduced violence, particularly in Chocó along the Pacific coast, andoffered to do so again in July if the government reciprocated. Bogotácould agree to ad hoc humanitarian talks in order to rekindle thegroup’s willingness to negotiate a bilateral pause in fighting, withoutguaranteeing that it would lead to formal political negotiations, which itmight make subject to the guerrilla’s behaviour over a certain period oftime. Steps to peace by the ELN would also help calm tensions along theVenezuela frontier and might even inspire closer cooperation betweenBogotá and Caracas over the shared health and security crisis in theborderlands. Having strongly backed humanitarian relief for Venezuelaas well as for its migrants and refugees, the EU should support thedevelopment of confidence-building measures between the neighbours,along the lines of the communication channel established between thetwo countries’ health ministries in April. Easing mistrust across theborder will be crucial to controlling the risks of a violent flare-up ordisease transmission.

“ The EU should use its wealth of experience working toassist farmers in converting from illicit crops to help

modify Bogotá’s current focus on eradicating coca andeliminating drug trafficking. ”

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