This past January a policy directive of Colombian President Uribe outlined the National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory (Plan Nacional de Consolidación Territorial). The short, assertive and results-oriented memo instructed Colombian national, local, military and civilian authorities to work together to attain a stronger grip over strategic swaths of land, recovered from guerrilla control, within a period of 18 months. Two objectives of the strategy include an increase in confidence by Colombian citizens towards their own government and the reassurance to investors about their economic interests.
This consolidation initiative was conceived to tackle
the instability in several areas including southern Cordoba, located in
the northern part of the country and considered the cradle of
paramilitary groups since the mid-1980s. A few years ago, paramilitary
leaders there negotiated a deal with the Colombian government to
disband the militias through the demobilization of their foot soldiers
in exchange for mild jail time for the leaders. At the same time,
aggressive military operations and aerial fumigation of illicit crops
have pushed guerrilla forces to more remote locations.
During my visit to southern Cordoba last October, one of many in the
last five years, the situation appeared surreal: I could not reconcile
the astonishing contrast between the official government version of the
situation with what I saw and heard from several interviews with
displaced groups and the local population. Authorities state that
security is fully reestablished, the old paramilitaries are all
demobilized and only small, disconnected criminal gangs are still
trying to benefit from limited production and smuggling of narcotics.
This assessment would indicate that generalized insecurity had been
overcome and that the Presidential strategy has seen reasonable success.
But the reality is quite different. Middle and low ranking members of
the “old” paramilitary group “Autodefensa Unidas de Colombia” (AUC)
have regathered, enlisted youngsters and mushroomed into different
groups. These new groups are competing with each other for control over
the drug business and to fill the vacuum left by the AUC. Their
activities also include making business deals with the guerrillas, and
there is alleged widespread corruption amid the lower echelons of the
National Army and police. Finally, many reports indicate that economic
and mining interests have contributed to the increasing competition of
land control and acquisition, often at the expense of displaced
farmers.
Here is the real overview: the number of homicides in Cordoba has been
increasing every year since the demobilization of the AUC, with 512
victims in 2008 and already 431 from January to September 2009. Six
evangelical religious leaders have been assassinated, often because of
their reluctance to submit to extortion or because of their work with
community leadership. Forced displacement remains a serious consequence
of the violence with more than 120,000 people forcibly displaced out
of a population of 1.5 million people. Hundreds of families fled into
Montelibano and Tierralta just in October and November of this year.
So, who is benefiting from the new Consolidation strategy? Definitely
not the rural farmers who are forced to flee the violence and abandon
their lands, nor the displaced people who have attempted several times
to regain control of their lives and return to their lands, just to be
forced to abandon them again. Not the community leaders, likely the
most dangerous “profession” right now in Colombia. The strategy seems
to fall short in building state credibility for the people, but it
might provide opportunities for not-too-scrupulous investors, blessed
by large amounts of abandoned land, wide cattle grazing properties and
international and national mining businesses.