There were hints, seen in retrospect--for instance, Santos' public advocacy of drug legalization, and his promise to restore lands to the FIVE MILLION peasant farmers who have been displaced, mostly by the U.S. trained/funded Colombian military and its rightwing death squads.
Hints that he was different, that he was not Uribe (former president and mafia boss of Colombia--a major criminal with ties to the death squads, drug trafficking, etc.), that--though Santos is certainly an architect of U.S. "free trade for the rich," a "neo-liberal" project that is being built upon the murders of thousands of labor leaders and other advocates of the poor--he may have some good motives, such as creating a more decent government than Colombia has been used to.
But no, I didn't think peace was feasible--though, God knows, I could see that the ONLY way to stop a 70 year civil war is to STOP IT. No more killing. Period. Fini. End it, now! It is very like Ireland/England and Israel/Palestine. Seemingly intractable bloody conflict, with no much family/tribal bloodshed over the years--bloodshed within close quarters--that peace is no longer even imaginable by the participants.
When Santos announced the peace talks, I was quite surprised, and, frankly, I still don't trust the process. The last time the FARC disarmed and tried to enter the political life of the country, some 5,000 of them were murdered by rightwing death squads. It's a worrisome precedent.
Also--and most importantly--Colombia is now the linchpin of the U.S. "circle the wagons" region--Central America and the Caribbean--against the leftist democracy movement that has swept most of South America. Within this "circle the wagons" region, we have seen a U.S.-supported fascist/military coup d'etat in Honduras, the godawful, U.S. "war on drugs"-caused horrors and the new drive for "neo-liberal" privatization in Mexico, and the Pentagon busily expanding its "footprint" in Honduras and Colombia, and in the Caribbean with the reconstitution of the U.S. 4th Fleet, as the military protector for this "free trade for the rich" zone and as a "forward operating location" for wars in the Global South. Their "enemy"? The leftist governments of South America--Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina are the main leftist axis; Chile will likely re-join them this year (with the election of socialist Michele Batchelet)*.
These governments have banded together with common goals of social justice and independence from the U.S. And the U.S. is trying to band together client states in the intervening region, to maintain and expand U.S. transglobal corporate resource and labor exploitation. Colombia is one of those client states--the biggest, the richest in resources and the most overrun by the U.S. military and other agencies.
In any case, one of the Honduran coup generals stated it explicitly when he said that their coup was "intended to prevent communism from Venezuela reaching the United States." By "communism," this general means good wages/benefits, strong labor unions, education and health care for all, pensions for all, use of a country's resources such as oil for the benefit of the people who live there, fair taxation, honest elections, a "level playing field" in the marketplace (rather than transglobal corporate monopoly), public services controlled by the elected government (not by private corporations), and so on.
Our corporate rulers don't want us to get any ideas from these reforms and they don't want us to even hear about them. They print/broadcast only negative stories about this remarkable leftist democracy movement in South America.
As the linchpin of this U.S. "circle the wagons" strategy, it is doubtful whether Colombia can cede much land back to peasant farmers or make other peaceful gestures that would potentially empower a leftist political movement in Colombia. U.S. policy has been the opposite--to support the murders of advocates of the poor and to support vast displacement of peasant farmers and land grabs by the rich and the corporate. It has been an extremely punitive, and corrupt, and murderous policy. Can Santos change this? Does he really want to? He is a rightwinger--would he really permit a leftist democracy movement to arise in Colombia? Perhaps more importantly, would the fascist forces in the military and among the rich elite, with ties to the rightwing death squads, permit it? And would the fascist forces HERE permit it?
Our General Betray-Us just announced HIS plan for Colombia, which involves re-empowering crime boss Alvaro Uribe, and larding him with more U.S. taxpayer billions to re-install his criminal organization at the top of the Colombian government, and start murdering peasants and labor leaders again.
http://colombiareports.co/former-head-cia-describes-colombia-model-hope-world/
posted here by Judi Lynn: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014603267#post11
As you can gather, I am not terribly optimistic. But then, I never expected to see peace in Ireland. So it CAN happen, even in the most intractable of conflicts. And there are A LOT of people involved in this Colombia/FARC peace effort, officially and unofficially. I would say that ALL of the leftist governments are putting enormous pressure on the FARC to end armed conflict and are acting as guarantors of the peace. This is NEW. There was no such leftist coalition back when the prior peace effort failed.
It appears that Obama and his people favor peace but they may not have a lot to say about in the end.
The issue may turn on whoever ES&S/Diebold favors for the White House in 2016, or--more nuanced guess--whoever is behind ES&S/Diebold, telling them whom to (s)elect. (Did you know that our current Sec of Defense, Chuck Hagel, founded ES&S, which bought out Diebold and now controls 75% of U.S. vote counting systems, all run on 'TRADE SECRET' code, and half of them with NO AUDIT AT ALL? Some deep shit going on, for sure.)
Will the peace, if it is finalized, hold--or will we see some kind of repeat of the past, with the U.S. and local fascists determined to wipe Colombia's leftists, armed or unarmed, off the face of the earth? Will the hidden factor--the enormous drug trade that permeates Colombian society, and in which I am sure our own agencies and many U.S. malefactors are involved--lead back into warfare?
Dunno the answer to a lot of these questions. Time will tell. But the least we can do--as the inadvertent funders of so much horror--is to get informed about where our tax dollars are going, and try to regain control of our own democracy, so that we have a say in these policies. We don't now. It's up to our corporate rulers whether they think they can make more money and gain more power through, for instance, drug legalization and disarmament in Colombia, or whether the faction with those post-war, "free trade for the rich" plans can curb the faction with the huge military contracts--the faction that needs war and foments war. I think that's an accurate outline of the basic conflict that will determine what happens in Colombia.
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*(Peru elected a leftist government, but it is a bit iffier than the others (hogtied by Bush era "free trade for the rich" agreement). Paraguay elected a leftist government, but it was overthrown by a rightwing political coup d'etat, probably with U.S. support. Chile will elect Batchelet this year. She was Chile's president during the rise of this continent-wide leftist movement, and, notably, was the first president of Unasur, the new South American organization that helped defeat the U.S./Bush Junta-supported white separatist insurrection in Bolivia, in 2008; she was termed out in Chile, but able to run again, now, and is WAY ahead in the polls. Note: Central America has two main leftist governments--Nicaragua and El Salvador. Both of them must be very nervous about the U.S.-supported coup in neighboring Honduras. Honduras was the U.S. stepping stool for aggression against these neighbors during the Reagan era.)
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