Book Review War, Peace, and Human Rights in Colombia by William Avilés Jasmin Hristov Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Gary Leech Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. Winifred Tate Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Josefina Echavarría In/security in Colombia: Writing Political Identities in the Democratic Security Policy. New York: Manchester University Press, 2010. Virginia M. Bouvier (ed.) Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009. Conventional wisdom among the mass media, U.S. policy makers, and quite a few academics has often reduced Colombia’s internal war to one fought by a weak democratic state against “narco-terrorists” financed and driven by the drug trade. Colombia’s people are often presented as victims of the terrorist activities of the insurgency. The five books under review here collectively challenge these popularly held views not only by illustrating that Colombia’s war cannot be reduced to the challenges of drugs and terrorism but also by presenting Colombians as actively engaged in democratizing their society and initiating different experiments in the peaceful resolution of their internal conflict. In these works, the role of the state and paramilitary actors in perpetuating human rights violations and frustrating peace efforts is highlighted, in contrast to the popular narrative that emphasizes “narco-guerrillas” and/or “narcoterrorists” as the only real perpetrators of violence. In addition, the Álvaro Uribe Vélez administration (2002–2010), lauded by several U.S. governments for its “security” achievements, is presented as a government that has aggressively undermined democratic norms, polarized Colombian society, and largely embraced an alliance with murderous right-wing paramilitary groups despite their record of brutality. These books all ask us to question the dominant perceptions of Colombian society and politics and consider some of the individuals and groups that have too long remained outside of our understanding of this country.

WAR, REPRESSION, AND CAPITAL Jasmin Hristov’s Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia and Gary Leech’s Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist directly challenge the belief that William Avilés is a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and an associate editor of Latin American Perspectives. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 182, Vol. 39 No. 1, January 2012 140-146 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X11423220 © 2012 Latin American Perspectives

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“narco-terrorists” are laying siege to Colombia’s weak democratic state. For Hristov the responsibility for Colombia’s decades of political violence rests squarely upon a Colombian state that has been and remains an instrument of economic elites seeking a business environment to facilitate greater capital accumulation. Her focus is upon the state’s coercive apparatus, its state-sanctioned and paramilitary arms, and its role in fulfilling this mission. In her view, analyses that stress factors such as the weak state or the influence of the drug war or the “terrorism” of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—FARC) obfuscate the central driver of the violence, the state’s coercive apparatus. Paramilitary groups have been centrally responsible for the mind-numbing number of human rights violations, including massacres, assassinations of labor leaders, the elimination of the leftist Unión Patriótica party, and the internal displacement of millions (109). Despite this criminal record they have increasingly complemented their repression with formal access to the Colombian state, financing political candidates and corrupting municipal governments throughout the Uribe administration. Hristov is not simply interested in the paramilitary phenomenon but also seeks to give a voice to these statistics through the words of some of the perpetrators and victims of human rights violations (see Molano, 2005, for a similar rendition). No one reading her book can fail to be moved by the injustices that have long been committed against Colombia’s organized left, its rural and urban poor, and the country’s ethnic minorities. Hristov asks how North American governments can directly or indirectly support the central perpetrators of mass murder and torture in Colombia. She answers this question by emphasizing economic motivations, including the need to control land and precious resources and the security of the investments of transnational corporations. She largely dismisses or ignores other potential explanations for this violence, and this detracts from the ultimate effectiveness of her thesis. Maurico Romero (2003) has argued, for example, that the expansion of paramilitary groups in the 1980s was largely a consequence of the increasing strength of the FARC and the failure of the state to provide adequate protection in specific regions of the country. Hristov’s description of this period (64–66) is consistent with this, but the role of the FARC in the overall behavior of the state's coercive apparatus is largely missing from her analysis. The 1990s and 2000s (decades that are central to her analysis) correspond with the greatest increase in FARC membership and military power. Between 1990 and 2000 the FARC grew from under 8,000 to approximately 18,000 members, while annually averaging more than 1,000 offensive military actions between 1996 and 2003 (as contrasted with 500 a year in the 1980s) (Nasi, 2009: 44–47). It is not clear to me why this shift in the power of the FARC is not relevant to the state's coercive apparatus and paramilitarism. It is of course important to demonstrate that state repression and paramilitary brutality are not simply a reaction to the FARC’s insurgent struggle, but this is not the same as saying that the FARC’s armed struggle is irrelevant to this brutality (see Richani, 2002, for an analysis that incorporates the role of the FARC in understanding state repression). With this important caveat, Hristov’s work is worth reading for a real and sometimes raw understanding of the violence that has been associated with Colombia’s internal war and the Colombians who have disproportionately suffered its consequences. This is also a worthy goal of Gary Leech’s journalistic diary. Leech’s Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist is an interesting look into his life as a journalist traveling through the rural regions of Colombia where most of the war’s victims and protagonists live and operate. The book is divided into 11 chapters, each chapter representing one hour that the author spent in the hands of the FARC as a detainee in August of 2006. Each chapter starts with an update of his detention, and this is followed by stories about massacres and coca eradication and reports on meetings with peasants, taxi drivers, military officers, and guerrilla commanders. Along with Hristov, Leech has concluded that the depiction of the Colombian conflict in North America is distorted, blaming most if not all of the violence on the FARC and/or

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the drug traffickers and exhibiting little empathy for the rural poor who have borne the brunt of the conflict. The major media either ignore the victims of paramilitary groups or accept the government’s claims of their involvement with drug traffickers or guerrillas at face value. Reading Leech’s and Hristov’s explanations of the various omissions in media accounts reminds me of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s (1988) now classic propaganda model, in which the U.S. media regularly highlight the plight of victims of official U.S. enemies while ignoring or playing down the experiences of those victimized by U.S. allies. Leech’s book illustrates the application of this model within the same country, with U.S. policy makers and the U.S. media generally choosing sides in their coverage of the war and in their specific attention to victims. Leech’s work also highlights other missing parts of the “Colombian story,” including the benefits that North American–based multinationals have received from this political violence (e.g., the assassination of labor leaders, as in the case of the Drummond coal mining company, or the paying off of paramilitary groups, as in the case of Chiquita Banana (194–197). Finally, and probably most important, Leech’s narrative illustrates the abandonment of whole regions of Colombia by the Colombian state— regions in which no real public infrastructure, schools, medical clinics, or judicial institutions exist and in which people’s only experience with the state has taken the form of repressive soldiers, military bombardments, and/or coca fumigations. Reading Leech’s narrative it becomes clear why some of these places would turn to the FARC to provide some of the institutions associated with the state and/or the opportunity to be part of something outside of their marginalized communities. Both books are essential antidotes to the dominant view of the Colombian war and should be read along with the popular narratives of state weakness and drug cartels that continue to guide the understanding of academics and policy makers interested in the Colombian case.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACEFUL ROUTES? While the Leech and Hristov books illustrate how state and parastate actors and transnational corporations have consistently worked to promote and/or profit from the use of repression, Winifred Tate’s Counting the Bodies: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia and Josefina Echavarría’s In/security in Colombia: Writing Political Identities in the Democratic Security Policy are largely dedicated to other obstacles to a just and humane resolution to Colombia’s internal war. The title of Tate’s book comes from the belief of some human rights activists that their jobs have been reduced to “counting the bodies,” the thousands of victims of human rights violations. Tate’s ethnographic analysis explores the use and development of human rights by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civilian agencies within the state, and the Colombian defense ministry during the 1980s and 1990s not only as a tool for protecting the civilian targets of such violations but also as a tool for strengthening the impunity enjoyed by state actors. The author illustrates the evolution of human rights activism among the NGO community in Colombia, which gradually shifted from a “politicized” discourse demanding radical social change in the 1970s to a data-collecting focus stressing individual rights over collective demands. The violent assault upon all forms of leftist or critical dissent left little room for the public support of radical change, while the idea of human rights and institutional democracy gained greater international and domestic legitimacy. The rhetoric of the Carter administration, the activities of Amnesty International on the international level, and the creation of a number of human rights laws and institutions within the Colombian state were indications of this growing legitimacy. By the end of the 1990s an array of human rights NGOs was operating in Colombia, while institutions such as the Defensoría del Pueblo and human rights units within the

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Attorney General’s office and the Defense Ministry were embedded within the state. Tate finds, in the case of the NGOS, that while many have obtained greater expertise in the collection of accurate data about human rights crimes,1 there remain important divisions between groups operating in Bogotá and regional organizations as well as competition over relatively scarce resources provided by international donors seeking to influence positive change in Colombia. State institutions, while staffed by dedicated individuals, seem more symbolic than substantive. They tend to lack the funds necessary to investigate or prevent human rights violations by state or parastate actors or the coordination required to avoid duplicating their efforts. In fact, the coexistence of various agencies dedicated to human rights on the national and regional levels has also allowed the shifting of responsibilities to different state actors with little progress on their central goals. Impunity continues despite the array of actors dedicated to ending it. It seems that these agencies do represent important public relations for a U.S. audience, helping to soften criticisms from certain sectors of the U.S. Congress concerned about human rights while providing the State Department with enough justification to renew annual military assistance despite a worsening human rights crisis (as it did throughout the late 1990s and 2000s). This has been most important for the Defense Ministry, which has used its human rights training classes and human rights offices within military battalions throughout Colombia to counter much of its “negative publicity” while attempting to use human rights as a tool in its war against the FARC, meticulously documenting the various human rights crimes that this group commits (257, 266, 278). Tate’s book is a fascinating study of how and why the idea of human rights has gained such currency in Colombian society and politics. Through her own experience working with human rights NGOs in Colombia and the United States and through scores of interviews with Colombian activists and government officials from different generations, she effectively pieces together a picture of human rights work in Colombia. One thing that I kept thinking of while reading Counting the Dead was the relationship between the fact that Colombia’s human rights situation grew worse during the same period that the state and NGOs were extending a human-rights infrastructure throughout the country. On one level the focus of NGOs and the creation of different state offices was a reaction to this increase, but displacement, political assassinations, and massacres continued after the importance of human rights became established (for example, each military battalion had received its human rights office by 2000). Tate writes throughout about the inadequacies of human rights NGOs and state offices, but viewing the state of human rights in Colombia almost three decades after the beginning of this shift raises serious doubts about the relevance of these institutional changes or the power of the NGO community. One important reason these institutions and NGOs have had mixed success in their efforts may be the nature of elite discourse, a subject that is at the center of Josefina Echavarría’s In/security in Colombia: Writing Political Identities in the Democratic Security Policy. Echavarría examines the discourse of Uribe’s democratic security policy, deconstructing the idea that peace can be achieved only by the expansion of the state’s coercive apparatus in order to force the surrender of the FARC at a future negotiating table. Echavarría rejects this idea, not only citing the violation of human security and democratic rights that has been the product of the policy but stressing that such rhetoric can fundamentally divide Colombian society. In particular, she shows how Uribe’s military project has been tied to legitimizing the idea of “good Colombians” and “bad Colombians,” with “good Colombians” being urged to work in solidarity with the Colombian state in its war against the “terrorists.” Echavarría’s work is not simply a reflection upon the democratic security policy but an interrogation of specific concepts. For example, she questions the almost axiomatic belief that the state is essential for security, writing that “any discourse about security necessitates insecurity, dangers,

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the uncanny, the strange and the unknown. Without insecurity, there is no security” (4). Security needs insecurity to have any meaning, and the existence of the state itself rests in part on its ability to defend society from the “threats” that the state itself defines. After chapters establishing the book’s theoretical context and Colombia’s sociopolitical context, including popular explanations of Colombia’s ongoing conflict (the greed of illegal armed actors, the influence of the drug industry, social/economic inequality) Echavarría focuses upon specific security policy initiatives and their justification by Uribe and officials within his government through speeches and public documents. She points out not only that Colombians are divided by Uribe’s discourse but also that the responsibilities of “good Colombians” reflect long-standing inequalities. The rural poor are recruited to sacrifice their bodies as front-line soldiers in the Colombian army or as special “peasant soldiers” protecting their communities, while wealthier Colombians in urban centers are expected to spy on their neighbors or ensure that their private security companies are cooperating with domestic intelligence (150–158). For Echavarría, Uribe’s security policy directly undermines efforts by Colombians to seek alternatives to war, visualizing guerrillas as potential interlocutors as opposed to terrorists simply to be condemned (99). However, Echavarría does find hope in the actions of at least some Colombians who have resisted Uribe’s security discourse and even been able to engage so-called terrorists without condemnation. In particular, she highlights the rhetoric and tactics of the Paeces of Cauca, who have rejected violence and refused to allow the presence of armed actors, including representatives of the state, in their communities. Dialogue, nonviolent marches, and exchange are their responses to the various threats they face, and “arms are symbols of death” (210). Echavarría presents an important analysis of the discourse/consequences associated with the democratic security policy. At times the work is theorized, but on balance it succeeds in showing how the Uribe administration used its power to establish new boundaries for Colombian security policy. In addition, the theoretical explorations of such core concepts as “the state,” “sovereignty,” and “security” clearly demonstrate the degree to which these are contested concepts. Unfortunately, as do many postmodernist/poststructuralist analyses the text suffers from a failure to link its critique of Colombia’s in/security discourse with policy proposals that would lead to successful resistance to it. For example, Echavarría writes of a potential “route” that would involve Colombians in conflict to engage in peaceful encounters that would help create a more “inclusive” politics (218). It is not clear what this means. A new round of peace negotiations on the national level? Or reforms of democratic institutions that would create a setting for the political involvement of the FARC, thus allowing for these encounters? Given the dominance of the in/security discourse, how can Colombia as a nation employ the tactics of the Paeces? The collection Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War, edited by Virginia M. Bouvier, provides some answers to these questions. The collection is described in the introduction as a “veritable encyclopedia of experiences in peacemaking and peacebuilding” in Colombia, and it very much merits this classification. The book is broken up into five parts with a total of 23 chapters written by social scientists, human rights activists, and former participants in Colombian peace processes. Chapters address Colombia’s history of national-level negotiations with the armed insurgency as well as regional and local initiatives in which mayors, governors, or indigenous communities have taken matters into their own hands in seeking a degree of peace within their regions. The role of international actors in promoting or undermining peace is also addressed. For example, James Jones makes an effective case that the United States acted as a “spoiler” during the Pastrana administration’s peace process with the FARC (1998–2002), while Jennifer Schirmer explores a Norwegian-supported effort that has facilitated “off the record” encounters between

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military officers and representatives of human rights NGOs and even some demobilized guerrillas (402–403). Schirmer finds that the project has exposed these officers to ideas and arguments that have challenged their conceptions of the conflict while engaging in democratic exchanges, creating “precursors of engagement” that could be useful in future negotiations that undoubtedly will involve the military leadership. In effect, the Norwegian model seeks to weaken the potential spoiler role that, according to Marc Chernick and Carlo Nasi, the military has often played in national-level peace processes. The book assembles a wealth of data for researchers interested in exploring questions related to nonviolent resolution of the conflict and demonstrates that Colombians are not just victims or perpetrators of violence but peacemakers. While the diversity of efforts is enlightening, Bouvier emphasizes the importance of communication between different sectors in civil society and government to reinforce their individual efforts. As Christopher Mitchell states, “at the local level it’s hard to talk about ‘conflict resolution’ in the absence of a national level effort at peacemaking. At best we are dealing with ‘conflict mitigation’”(430). The various peace experiments and initiatives represent exciting possibilities, but one is left with a lack of clarity in the direction of all of these efforts. The issue of national commitment that Mitchell refers to speaks to the issue of state power, indicating that civil society cannot resolve these intractable issues without wielding power within the national state. This is illustrated quite well in Isacson and Rojas Rodríguez’s chapter on the Colombian peace movement during the 1990s, citing the “national political context” as a determining factor in the influence of this movement (20). Furthermore, the power of the United States, in my estimation, is crucial to this process. U.S. “drug war” policy and the various economic interests that this policy furthers, as amply demonstrated by Hristov and Leech, acts as an important impediment to the success of a peaceful resolution. This is the case even with the scores of NGOs in the United States that are valiantly seeking to humanize U.S. Colombian policy while remaining divided over whether strengthening the Colombian military is a prerequisite for peace. Thus, any dialogue that takes place within Colombia among its many peace activists must include transnational strategies for coordinating U.S.-based NGOs toward substantively changing the United States’ free-market, militarized drug-war Colombian policy. While I am ultimately pessimistic about overcoming the many potential spoilers, perhaps these many peace experiments will pave the way for a future resolution with social justice. Ultimately, these five books all seek to contribute to a broader understanding of Colombian society and politics with the clear aim of either raising people’s consciousness about the concealed realities of Colombia’s war or devising the tactics necessary to bring this conflict to an end.

NOTE 1. In fact, both the Leech and the Hristov book rely on much of the work done by some of the NGOs examined in Tate’s study, especially the Center for Grassroots Education and Research (CINEP) and the Regional Corporation for the Defense of Human Rights (CREDHOS).

REFERENCES Herman, Edward and Noam Chomsky 1988 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Molano, Alfredo 2005 The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Nasi, Carlo 2009 “Colombia’s peace processes, 1982–2002: Conditions, strategies, and outcomes,” pp. 39–64 in Virginia M. Bouvier (ed.), Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Richani, Nazih 2002 Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Romero, Mauricio 2003 Paramilitares y autodefensa. Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombiana.