Violent Contest Between Pre-Columbian and Colombian Civilisation

Violent Contest Between Pre-Columbian and Colombian Civilisation.

During Colombia’s first century of independence (~1820 to 1920) the basis for political identities coalesced around two poles: European versus Indigenous identity. Coalesced around the former were all citizens who were and or desired to be European, Caucasian, and/or Capitalist. Coalesced around the latter were all citizens who were not and did not desire to be European, Capitalist, or who supported a multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual body politic. Under this imperfect categorisation, economically successful mestizo families could and did align with the European colonial elite, while criollo politicians and Catholic priests could and did align with social-reform oriented movements that sought to transfer wealth and ownership to indigenous and mestizo farming populations.

These two imperfect labels reflect the attitudes and worldviews of the bodies of their adherents which underly the political alignment and associated labels of conservative-right against liberal-left. In developed societies, these labels are associated with social policies, however in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, they are more often associated with ethnic and cultural identity.

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The European identity pole was and is characterised by conservative Catholicism, loyalty to the state, egocentric families, free-market orientation, and acceptance of private ownership and exploitation of natural resources. In our next report we'll describe the outlines of this Eurocentric worldview in opposition to the electoral gravitational shift of the existing sociopolitical structure in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

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The Indigenous identity pole was and is characterised by mixtures of catholic-animism, tolerance to the state, sociocentric families, collectivised-market orientation, and belief in the public ownership and preservation of natural resources. It is called Quechua Pacha and, in its raw form, is unpalatable to the Eurocentric identity of Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Peruvians. In our next report we'll describe the outlines of this indigenous worldview in opposition to the existing sociopolitical structure in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

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The graphic pictorial map in figure 1 overlays Colombia’s terrain with its natural resources and the locations of the FARC-EP and ELN. At the height of their strength in 2007, the FARC had an estimated force of over 18,000 men and women under arms. The Andean Mountain ranges dominate the western half of the country, and the cities, valleys, and slopes therein are notably cooler in temperature than the Amazonian plains below. The significance of this is that most of the European colonial settlers clustered either in the cool highlands or along the coastal pacific regions, leaving the rich soiled farmlands with large rainfall to the indigenous and growing mestizo population segments. Most of Colombia’s petroleum and natural gas fields were also under those areas and the larger deposits of gold, emeralds, and nickel were often located under indigenous lands and or lands claimed by the mestizo peasants. The post-colonial European elites of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru would normatively buy and sell lands under grants of colonial governance without regard to the indigenous or peasant populations within. Indigenous and mestizo peasant identity is fused with the land in a manner that is emotionally charged and a critical driver of violence. Legal titles to Vivienda and finca, home and farm, consume most of the conflict resolution energy of countering violent insurgents on both sides of the Euro-Indigenous identity poles. The discovery and extraction of natural resources underneath these tribal and private lands continues to fuel violence and the rise of self defense militias.

Figure 1 illustrates the overlay of rural Colombian life with the location of its natural resources. During our years spent advising the Colombian Government and COLAR in its battles against the FARC and, to a lesser extent, the ELN, our focus was on winning the hearts and minds of the indigenous and mestizo peasant communities whose sons and daughters provided the labour and popular support that kept the revolutionary movement going. We found there to be a significant difference between our tasks to demobilise and dismantle the FARC-EP and the ELN. To be clear, the FARC and ELN revolutionary forces were (in varying degrees) against the European conceptualisation of life in Colombia. In opposition, the counter-revolutionary ideas of the right-wing paramilitaries involved the reinforcement of European, free-market, and Caucasian superiority. Between the beginning of our tour as a combat advisor in Colombia in early 2006 and the eventual peace treaty in June-August 2016 that formally disbanded the FARC-EP, our work resulted in the surrender or defection of tens of thousands of young men and women and their families from the ranks of the armed movement. After the Colombian parliament approved the peace agreement, the demobilised FARC families were resettled into newly built towns and farms as peaceful Colombians, while the FARC-EP transformed from a revolutionary army to a political party registered as COMUNES. Former leftist guerrilla members and leaders began running for public office after the peace accords and parliamentary approvals of reintegration of the demobilized guerrilla fighters. In 2022, a former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, won the presidency of Colombia, with his running mate, Francia Marquez, is the first Afro-Colombian elected to the vice-presidency. The evolution of Colombia’s government from right-wing Euro-nationalist to multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual was decades long struggle.

American Army Special Forces personnel would spend nearly their entire careers working to build trust with their Colombian counterparts as a precondition to turn their search-and-destroy orientations to one of winning hearts and minds through social action programs at all levels of government. The Special Warfare Journal article attached to this research report is part of the historical record of countering the FARC-EP, ELN, M19, and other leftist insurgent groups under the United States’ Plan Colombia over the last 30 years. The article illustrates the lengths to which Plan Colombia had to go to break the popular support for the FARC and related insurgencies and return Colombia’s rural departments to popularly elected governance. The efforts of Plan Colombia were both heralded and derided by both sides of the conflict but is essential to understanding the ongoing violence in Colombia even after the demobilization of the FARC-EP and ELN as leftist armed social movements.

The warnings of our work in Colombia to undermine the appeal of the armed leftist guerrilla movements presented in the earliest days of our efforts, with stiff resistance from senior police and military officials in the various departments. Then president Uribe and his successor, Santos, provided us support with numerous personal visits and transferring of our host nation partner, Accion Social, to the direct control of the office president. These and other initiatives helped to reinforce the authority of the elected governors whose base of electoral voters we were trying to wrestle away from the FARC. Doing so was easier said than done and in one case, the voters of the town of Puerto Rico, elected one of the active guerrilla leaders of the FARCs Teofilo Mobile Column. One of the most serious warning signs was in the areas of land reform, ownership, and titles, especially between individual families versus large corporations based in Bogota as described in the attached journal article. While the structural reforms were necessary to rebalance life in the rural areas as a means of undermining popular support for the FARC and ELN, an even greater warning sign was the conflict over the European versus Indigenous understanding of Colombian society. The pictures shown here in figures 4 and 5 illustrate the core of the social conflict in Colombia, as well as Ecuador, and Peru: post colonial ethnic and cultural warfare.

Under the United States’ PLAN COLOMBIA and Colombia’s Acción Social, the strategic assumption was that if we were able to remove popular support for the FARC-EP and ELN movements by rebalancing social power and access, those armed organisations would collapse, and the formative motivations of the right-wing paramilitaries would dissipate as well.

Even more than the political labels of communism or fascism wielded by political opponents, cultural, ethnic, and historical identity is central to understanding the context of the growing conflicts in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the Northern Triangle.

Without this perspective of Latin American Eurocentric society’s resentment and resistance of indigenous and non-European identity, it is difficult to comprehend their subsequent resurgence after the leftist revolutionary military organisations were (mostly) dismantled. During Plan Colombia, we made a concerted effort to have these types of white Eurocentric symbols removed to abide by the new Colombian draft constitution that President Uribe pushed into legislation – that the Republic of Colombia is a multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious nation.

Many of the military and diplomatic team members of Plan Colombia carried around that early draft and subsequent iterations of Colombia’s constitution as we pushed back on notions of white, christian, European nationalism that hampered the sort of social rebalance necessary to end the 50-year insurgency. Only recently, these efforts have begun to be rolled back by the proponents of the Madrid Forum, or Foro Madrid, an international effort based in Spain’s right-wing conservative party, Vox. While neither Vox, nor Foro Madrid are responsible for the rise of right-wing paramilitary violence in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, the ideology emanating from these organisations provides the logic of violent action under the guise of protecting historical patrimonies of postcolonial power.