Rare success

I’m no expert on Colombia, but you don’t have to be one to welcome the ceasefire negotiated with Cuban mediation between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC) after 52 years of rebellion. The Economist gives an excellent overview of the accomplishment and the problems that lie ahead.

I would just signal the capital importance of preventing FARC cadres from going the way of rebels in El Salvador and Guatemala. In the aftermath of their civil wars, which ended in the 1990s, criminality has remained a major problem and even grown dramatically in El Salvador. Colombia has had significant success against its once rampaging drug cartels, but demobilization of the guerrillas will increase the challenge. Thousands of unemployed youth with few talents other than avoiding the authorities and handling a gun constitute a serious problem. Nor will their commanders miss an opportunity to organize protection and smuggling rackets, especially if they don’t do well in the post-war political competition.

Colombia has a neighbor to the east, Venezuela, already in desperate straits. Its left-wing Chavistas have wrecked the country’s economy, despite sitting on what are arguably some of the world’s largest, albeit low quality, oil reserves. They have also made a hash of the government’s institutions, which include a parliament now controlled by the opposition. The power struggle there and its consequences may well boil over to Colombia as Venezuelans flee economic implosion, straining Bogotá’s capacities just as it embarks on the challenge of implementing a complicated and for some people not very palatable peace deal.

A slowdown in Colombia’s economic growth will likely worsen in the aftermath of Brexit as the world slips into recession. The government will have trouble anteing up all the resources needed to implement the peace deal, which includes commitments to rural development among other things. The US has spent about $8 billion on Plan Colombia, one of Washington’s more comprehensive efforts to strengthen a fragile state and help it block both drug cartels and leftist guerrillas from damaging US national security. While criticized on human rights grounds and for its efforts at drug eradication, the Plan appears to have contributed a good deal to Colombia’s current success.

Sustainment will not be automatic. A special tribunal and disarmament, as The Economist reports, will be particularly important to the Colombian public. Jobs and political inclusion will be important to the guerrillas. Colombia is the third most populous Latin American country, with 50 million people (only Brazil and Mexico are larger). It needs to make at least as much success of its post-war transition as it has already made of its internal wars. Success in negotiating the end of a rebellion is rare, but success in managing the post-war process is even rarer.