The Undecidable Concept of Peace in Colombia

Since the beginning of the peace negotiations in Colombia, two main discourses were articulated around peace in the public space. One was the discourse of peace negotiated between the government and the FARC-EP, which crystallized in the first “Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace”. The second main discourse was promoted by the former president and senator of the Democratic Center (CD, Centro Democrático) Álvaro Uribe, who stood out as the main leader of the opposition. The former president had denied the existence of an internal conflict in the country during his two terms (2000-2010) and implemented a militarized strategy to put an end to the FARC, considering them ‘narcoterrorists’. Therefore, since Santos, who has been Uribe´s Minister of Defense, announced the peace negotiations in 2012, Uribe campaigned against the political solution to the conflict and against the Final Agreement when this was submitted to a plebiscite on October 2, 2016. In turn, when the agreement was rejected in the plebiscite by a small margin and it had to be renegotiated, Uribe was one of the main actors proposing reforms, and later on not recognizing the new version because it still keeps the political participation of the FARC, the transitional justice system, and the connectivity between the conflict and the drug trafficking crimes. These three positions – the government, the main opposition party, and the leadership of the FARC – had a privileged power and institutional positions to influence the peace negotiations. These hegemonic discourses (and practices) will be compared in turn with the alternative conceptions of peace, mobilized bottom-up through grassroots social movements. Many organizations and social movements of peasants, indigenous and Afro-descendants that supported both earlier agreements complained for the lack of participation of their communities and the lack of attention given to their demands during the negotiations. Most of these social-based organizations came together under the “Agrarian Peasant, Ethnic and Popular Summit” (Cumbre Agraria Campesina, Étnica y Popular), which advocated for deeper structural reforms in the country and questioned the keeping of the neoliberal model based on the exploration, exploitation, and export of the natural resources of the country (oil, gas, coal, gold, and nickel, among others). Under the umbrella of the Agrarian Summit and other regional and national organizations, the social movements asked the government to go deep into the concept of peace, proposing a territorial peace that includes social and environmental peace.