Cover Picture:\u00a0A man places a flower on a Colombian national flag during a march along the streets of Cali, Colombia, on July 15, 2016, in support of the peace talks between the government of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas (AFP Photo\/Luis Robayo)<\/p>\n
By\u00a0Ollantay Itzamn\u00e1<\/p>\n
We watched with astonishment the announcement of the peace agreement between the Colombian state and military with FARC, as contagious joy spread through Latin America\u2019s officialdom. Then we watched the widespread frustration after the \u201cunexpected\u201d results of the vote.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Renowned Latin American scholars assumed that \u201cpeace for Colombia\u201d meant \u201cpeace for Latin America.\u201d From this perspective, the result of the October 2nd<\/sup> vote was interpreted as, \u201ccatastrophic polarization of the country\u201d and \u201ca lost historic opportunity for the pacification and reform of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How did they come to these illusory conclusions?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Their first fallacy<\/strong>. It is not true that \u201cNO\u201d won the vote in Colombia, a country mired in permanent conflict. It was ABSTENTION that won again, with more than 60% not voting. Only 18% of the electorate voted \u201cNO\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Their second fallacy<\/strong>. It is not true that the result of the vote shows polarization. Only one in three eligible Colombian voters went to the polls to vote. The \u201ccatastrophic tie\u201d of this one-third of the electorate does not represent the country, much less the country\u2019s supposed polarization.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Their third fallacy<\/strong>. It is not true that the peace accords would end the internal war in Colombia. To believe this is to confuse FARC-related violence with the totality of violence in the country.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The current Colombian violence has an infinitude of perpetrators: the state\/military, drug traffickers, assassins, insurgents, organized crime, plantation owners, the extractive industry, etc. FARC may lay down their arms, but the others will continue to prey on the public, and with yet more intense truculence. Guatemala signed its own peace accords in 1996, and Peru \u201cdefeated\u201d its guerrillas in the 90s, but these and other \u201cdefeats\u201d for guerrilla movements did not lead to \u201ceras of peace\u201d in these countries. Today in Guatemala, twice as many people die violently daily than did during all but the most violent years of Guatemala\u2019s 36-year \u201cinternal armed conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Their fourth fallacy<\/strong>. Peace in Colombia would not mean peace for Latin America, not only because \u201cpeace\u201d would not be the effect of the \u201cpeace agreement,\u201d but also because this supposed peace would strengthen a reinvigorated neoliberal economic system. Now, yes, the agents of the reified neoliberal economy have carte blanche to continue to pillage the country\u2019s peoples without having to worry about the inconvenience of guerrillas in the hills that occasionally kidnap them. We see, again, the case of Guatemala, in which, two decades after its lauded peace accords, 60% of its people live in poverty, while the few old rich and the few new rich few hoard almost all of the country\u2019s wealth. This \u201cpeace\u201d we do not want in Latin America.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An important truth: With insufficient citizen participation, the liberal Colombian elites with the blessing of the US government managed to sign a peace agreement to reach every bit of Colombia\u2019s territory in search of its wealth. These avaricious interests sweetened their appearance by speaking of peace. And many of us, especially the emasculated pacifists, drank this Kool-aid. Where in history have band-aid \u201cfixes\u201d to social structures that exclude and pillage actually worked to lift those they\u2019re supposed to assist? We believed in it again anyway.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In any event, after having celebrated with joy the \u201cdefeat\u201d of the guerrillas in Peru (Sendero Luminso and MRTA), and later enduring the horrible consequences of neoliberal dictatorship for decades, I keep myself from thinking and feeling conventionally about this Colombian surrealism. Indeed, I can\u2019t from this Guatemala that accelerated its violent march toward social disintegration and government malfeasance, even with more \u201cleftist\u201d neoliberal policies, thanks to its lauded \u201cPeace Accords.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cover Picture:\u00a0A man places a flower on a Colombian national flag during a march along the streets of Cali, Colombia, on July 15, 2016, in support of the peace talks between the government of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas (AFP Photo\/Luis Robayo) By\u00a0Ollantay Itzamn\u00e1 We watched with astonishment the announcement of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[453,424,414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-frontpage-en","category-politics","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2832,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2831\/revisions\/2832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}