6/14/17 Anastasia Moloney on FARC’s disarmament and its implications for Columbia

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Alright, introducing Anastasia Maloney.
She's written this thing for Reuters.
An update on, hey, some good news.
Peace breaking out in the world for once.
As Colombia's FARC disarms, rebels enlisted to fight deforestation.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks.
Good to be here.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here and happy to interview somebody about something good happening for a change here.
So the FARC, they're basically, for what, a generation or more, they fought a Marxist rebellion in the jungles of Colombia against the American-backed right-wing government there.
And then last year they made a peace deal.
It took a couple of referenda to get it ratified, but apparently it's sticking.
And the war really is over, huh?
Yes, it is sticking in the sense that the ceasefire has definitely been adhered to by both parties, by the government and the FARC rebels.
And yesterday there was a big news here in Colombia because the FARC gave up another 30% of their weapons.
So in total, 60% of all the weapons that the FARC have, including the AK-47 rifles and the other pistols they've been using, they've actually been handed in a public ceremony yesterday to officials from the United Nations.
So as far as handing in the weapons and the ceasefire, yes, it's going well.
It has been delayed, but there were really good news coming out of Colombia yesterday that the FARC are continuing to hand in their weapons, which is basically the basis of any peace agreement.
And so, I mean, what we're talking about here is their demilitarization, but are they disarming so much that they're basically leaving themselves helpless to their former right-wing paramilitary and government enemies, or they're actually going to have their rights respected and so it's OK?
Yeah, well, that's the big question at the moment.
To what extent, as you say, can the government guarantee that they will be safe once they give up their weapons?
And in fact, that was part of why the peace negotiations took almost more than four years to try and lay down the rules, if you like, of how the government is going to ensure their safety.
There have been problems with community leaders, for example, in parts of Colombia, particularly on the Pacific coast, who have supported the FARC, who have been empathetic to their cause.
There has been a rise in murders against those people.
And the FARC is saying that definitely the government needs to do more to ensure that when they leave their demobilization camps, where they are right now, that they won't be attacked by other criminal gangs.
And that still remains to be seen and it is definitely a concern.
But at least the government seems like they want to try to live up to it.
They don't seem like they're looking to take advantage of the situation and backstab them.
No, not at all.
No, if anything were to happen, it would come from other criminal groups who are working to fill the vacuum left behind by the FARC.
So there are criminal gangs involved in illegal gold mining, the cocaine trade, and they are the ones that the FARC will have to watch out for when they demobilize and go back home, because there is definitely a bit of a turf war going on to see who's going to pick up the spoils of the FARC's business.
But at least in terms of their relations with the central government seems to be honoring the deal and they seem to mean to want to continue to honor it, you're saying?
Yes.
And in fact, that's your report here is that they're getting government jobs.
Correct.
Yes, that's definitely as far as the government of Juan Manuel Santos.
You know, he bet his whole political legacy on getting this peace deal.
And it's basically the only thing that he's done in office.
It's the most important aim of his government.
And so the government and the president are very much behind this peace deal.
And they officially, as far as what they say officially, are doing everything they can to stick the timetable.
The two sides have agreed and make sure that the FARC give up their last remaining weapons.
And as I say in this piece, give them jobs, which is the most important thing to make sure that the violence doesn't continue.
The story that I was talking about is one initiative which hopes to give jobs to former FARC rebels as forest guardians.
And they would ultimately be employed in the future by government environmental agencies, for example, or by national parks.
So that's just one of the initiatives that's being put forward at the moment to try and make sure they have jobs to go back to.
So this is in the rainforest.
This is basically publicly owned government controlled land, national park land, or it's it's reserved for the preservation of the rainforest.
It's not supposed to be at least homesteaded and turned into farmland, at least at this point.
And that's their job is keeping people from from cultivating it.
Correct.
Yes.
So the area where I was is in the south of Colombia.
It's been basically the epicenter of the conflict and a FARC stronghold for more than 50 years.
And the conflict has actually protected the rainforests because they've been too dangerous for companies and farmers to go into.
So there's there's the forests have almost been no go zones for years and in such a way they've been protected.
So the fear is that once the FARC, as they have, they pulled out from their stronghold areas, that companies, extractive industries like oil, coal, loggers will go in because it's safer to do so.
And so the hope is, is that if the FARC are trained how to monitor illegal logging, how to report it, how to verify forest cover, then the forests and the rainforests are more likely to be protected in the future.
And we're talking about protected areas, national parks and also farmland so that the agricultural frontier doesn't expand more and more.
And so how much of this has to do with higher caste Spanish descended whites versus Indians?
The conflict with the FARC rebels is a conflict, I would say, between the guerrilla movement and their ideals, their Marxist ideals.
They were fighting for greater land redistribution.
They're fighting against inequality against the elite white central government.
And that's been going on for five decades.
However, there are other tensions between indigenous communities and Afro-Colombian communities in Colombia about the rights to their land.
And they have constant battles with people who are trying to exploit their land.
And that's another side of the conflict.
But the FARC and the government was Marxist guerrilla war, hoping to topple the government and take over power.
That's what they wanted to do.
I mean, I know it's all these are all overlapping Venn diagrams and categories and things.
So sometimes some of these distinctions may matter more than at other times, even within the same groups and that kind of thing.
But generally speaking, though, the lower castes, I mean, is it correct that they basically are the Indians?
Yes.
However, as far as inequality, who suffers inequality most as far as access to education, health, indigenous groups?
There's over 30 different kinds of indigenous groups in Colombia.
And as I've just said, the big communities of Afro-Colombians, particularly on the Pacific coast.
And both those groups are more likely to be poor, out of school, illiterate, unemployed.
And that's the big inequality that Colombia has and many other countries in Latin America.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's just the way they were portrayed in the media, especially, I guess, when we're talking about the rainforest and stuff is, you know, here's all this potential wealth and in all of this rich land for all of these desperately poor people.
And yet we don't want them to cut it down for we want them to cut it down.
It's for beef or our McDonald's, but we don't want them to cut it down for their own gold mining or for their own subsistence farming or whatever it is, because the rest of the world needs that oxygen.
And so we have these government programs to keep them from putting the land into production.
And there's legitimate interests all around.
Right.
Just it's a it seems like a big a mess of contradictions and therefore has continued to be part of an engine of all this disagreement.
Who has access to what land and how hard they're willing to fight over it.
Right.
Exactly.
I think you've just summed it up, basically, that the roots of Colombia's conflict has been precisely that question over land, who owns it, who controls it and who has access to it.
And that has been the history of Colombia for many, many years.
And one of the reasons why the FARC started as a guerrilla movement was precisely because they wanted farmers or campesinos, the normal people outside the capital in the rural areas.
They wanted them to have land titles and greater land.
And part of the peace accord is a long document, 300 page long document.
A big chunk of it focuses on land redistribution and land reform.
And so the idea is in the future, if all goes well, if the law are passed and the money's in place, then there will be land titles given to thousands and thousands of farmers, landless farmers at the moment.
And they hope by doing that, that they can attack and combat the key, one of the structural causes of the conflict, which is land ownership.
When we're talking about undeveloped rainforest, that's left is still the size of all of Great Britain and Germany combined.
So it seems like there ought to be plenty to go around, especially when we're talking about, again, mostly indigenous people who've owned this land all along in the first place, right?
Correct.
Yes.
And the big question in the future is a lot of that land, the rainforest, as I was saying earlier, hasn't been developed.
It's basically an untapped frontier, particularly for oil companies.
And Colombia is very well aware, and so are the oil companies, that precisely where the conflict was concentrated, where the war went on, is exactly where the oil is.
And so the big question is, how is Colombia going to sort out those rights to the land and also the right to exploit oil to drive the economy?
So there's going to be lots of conflict, I think, in the future, particularly south of Colombia, with local Colombian and international oil companies coming in, exploring and drilling.
And we're going to probably see a lot of conflict between them and indigenous and local communities about exactly, again, this question of who has the right to do what on what kind of land.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about this with us.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That is Anastasia Maloney writing for Reuters as Colombia's FARC disarms rebels enlisted to fight deforestation.
And there's more to it than that, too.
Very interesting piece there.
And she's writing for the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
And the website is news.trust.org.
It's a project of Reuters there.
That's Scott Horton's show.
Thanks, you guys, for listening.
Check out the full archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
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