Via BoGlo: In Colombia, peace proves elusive

The beheading of more than a dozen woodcutters last week was the latest of several recent attacks by Colombia’s leftist guerrillas to exploit the power vacuum left by the demobilization of 32,000 right-wing militiamen — and a signal that peace will not come easily to besieged rural areas.

Sadly, no such signal was necessary. Given that the guerrilla war in Colombia has been ongoing for more than forty years, no signals are needed to demonstrate the elusive nature of a settled peace.

This incident in question, and the surrounding factors (i.e., the demobilization of paramilitaries in the region–and hence the creation of a power vacuum) are part of familiar problem.:

For those who hailed the disarmament of right-wing militias over the last 2 1/2 years as the first step to diffuse Colombia’s long-running conflict, the violent campaign by the FARC to recoup strategic zones now vacated by their rivals shows that peace will be more elusive. The critical challenges for President Álvaro Uribe as he starts his second term this week are to extend state presence to regions where it has been absent for decades, and to disarm or defeat a leftist insurgency.

And that, indeed, is the rub:

Despite a 35 percent increase in security forces during Uribe’s first term, according to the Defense Ministry, there are not enough police or soldiers to cover remote reaches of Colombia’s mountainous jungle terrain, officials acknowledge.

With 123,000 police for 41 million inhabitants, Colombia would have to boost its police forces by one-third to meet international standards.

[…]

Since 2024, the government has added 84 rural police stations, seven army brigades, and 54 mobile police units to cover disputed territories in the sights of guerrillas and new militias. Many of these regions had no state presence for 20 years.

Uribe has promised to establish police stations in 400 small communities over the next four years.

The continued lack of state authority in large portions of Colombia, coupled with the insane profits to made by directly and indirectly participating in the drug trade (note that the massacre took place in a “lucrative corridor for transnational arms and drug smuggling”) means that the violence isn’t going to cease any time soon–and certainly not easily.

The demobilization of paramilitaries is a positive move, as is the current peace process with the other major guerrilla group, the ELN. Still, there has yet to be any positive movement vis-à-vis the FARC.