On October 2, 2016, Colombia’s referendum on the approval of the peace agreement between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Army of the People) resulted in a rejection of the agreement by 50.23% to 49.76% of votes cast (on a turnout of 37% of the registered electorate). What were the reasons for this negative result?

 I. The referendum

a) The referendum campaign of the Santos government:

The first aspect to take into account with regard to the October 2 referendum is that the “Yes” campaign became reduced to support for the Santos government. Caught in a legitimacy crisis and faced with unfavourable polls, Santos hoped to recover the initiative by winning the applause of the international community and creating favourable conditions for the 2018 presidential elections through the conclusion of the process of political negotiation via a referendum. An approval without much noise by a parliamentary majority obtained through budgetary manœuvres would not be enough. [1] In reality, the referendum mechanism was not necessary to conclude the process of approval of the agreements drawn up in Havana.

For these same reasons, Santos nominated the former president Cesar Gaviria, who had presided over Colombia’s neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s and had given the order to bombard the FARC leadership in the “Green House”, as coordinator of the campaign and as spokesperson of the members of his governmental team. [2]

The emphasis of the international campaign seeking support for the government’s policy was on the advantages that foreign capitalists could draw from the agreement for future business. The message anticipated new areas of investment for extraction and agro-industry in the zones affected by the conflict, which would supposedly improve the economic indicators of the country. [3] Colombian capitalists were offered the same possibilities and in particular the approval of a tax reform which they had been demanding for some months with the support of “international risk ratings agencies” because of the fall in oil prices. At the last Congress of the Asociación Nacional de Industriales (ANDI – National Association of Industries) Santos undertook to implement tax cuts once peace came under the pretext the modernization of the armed forces for the purposes of the war had required supplementary resources (in particular a wealth tax). [4]

Public presentations of this type led to a majority consensus among national and international business and financial elites in favour of the government’s peace strategy, while concealing the real intentions of the Santos team of legitimating a new phase of intensification of neoliberalism, particularly in the as yet unexploited rural areas. But this discourse meant nothing to the people. Santos hoped that the virtues of the peace proposal in a country that had spent decades at war, the support of the international community, the mobilization of the left and the social organizations, which mostly went along with him without raising differences, would lead to triumph in the referendum. His bet proved wrong.

b) The opposition led by Alvaro Uribe Vélez

The government’s monopoly over the “Yes” campaign in the referendum opened the field to the opposition led by Uribe (Colombia’s President from 2002-2010), giving continuity to a political conception (centre right versus right) tolerated by the establishment since Santos took the Presidency and reducing the debate on fundamental questions of society and politics to the Uribe-Santos confrontation. The Uribista campaign produced results, basing itself on:

– Using the discredit of the government linked to the economic crisis with its consequent unemployment, destruction of territory and privatizations and which forced the announcement of a new anti-popular tax reform. Uribe campaigned demagogically against the reform, claiming that the taxes on the people would be used to increase the public money being paid to the guerrillas. [5]

– Using the popular rejection of the FARC built up over recent decades and particularly during the implementation of Plan Colombia during Uribe’s term in office, when he converted this rejection into the basis of his governance. This political operation was facilitated by attacks committed by the FARC against the civilian population, amidst a worsening of the conflict. [6] During the referendum campaign Uribe maintained his conventional discourse against the FARC, demanding the imprisonment of the members of its Secretariat and adding that they had no right to political representation because of their deeds.

– Utilising the religious sentiment organized by the Catholic hierarchy and the evangelical churches which invoked the defence of the traditional family and opposed a woman’s right to control her body as well as LGBT rights, in particular the right to constitute a family. These churches distanced themselves from the Havana negotiations once the joint communiqués of the government and FARC announced that the agreements would contain a transversal view of gender. [7] Then came the incident of the circulars drawn up by the Ministry of Education on respect for a differential view of gender in the school curriculum. The response of the churches was to convene national protest mobilizations which were very well attended. From then on the alliance was sealed between the churches and the “No” campaign, which was decisive in the referendum result. [8]

The “No” campaign expressed the social content of this political current. Arising in the midst of the war through the alliance of traditional ranchers and farmers with the new landowners which emerged from the laundering of assets arising from the drugs trade and the massive displacement of peasants, combining the reactionary and traditional religious discourse which in Colombia continues to be a factor of cultural domination in the countryside and cities with the contemptible cynicism of these lumpen arrivistes who have climbed the social scale from the “underworld” the spheres of power. Effectively Uribe’s campaign was based on a chain of lies seeking to produce indignation and fear in an uninformed population terrified after decades of ongoing violence. [9]

An additional element was the effect the internal civil war had in the countryside; here, where the violence had been most intense, the “Yes” vote was strongest, supported by the victims and populaces who wanted to end the armed conflict. This was not the case in the other areas of the country and in the cities. [10] Abstention at the national level was around 60%, a percentage equal to that of the presidential elections, whereas one might have supposed that a question of this significance would have led to a higher level of voting participation.

 II. The inter-bourgeois contradictions

a) The political power of the hacienda in the history of the country

The international division of labour established by globalization implied a shift in big investments of capital to the Asian continent and in particular China. Latin America was condemned to extractivism and agro-industry and the land question recovered its relevance. In Colombia’s history the land question concerns the political and economic power of the hacienda. Configured from Spanish colonialism as the main form of organization of the economy, this power became dominant during the 19^th century through a fragile integration with international trade via the appropriation of uncultivated land by families of colonists who expanded the agricultural frontier. [11]

In the 20^th century during the capitalist modernization in the period of so-called “import substitution” this power structure was maintained by the use of systematic violence with private armed organizations (the “pájaros” and “chulavitas”) and the use in various regions of the police forces, witnessing to the weakness of a state which was the prisoner of corporate interests. [12] This power of the latifundists would become evident during the Frente Nacional – effectively, when this inter-elite political pact was set up following the Cuban revolution, US imperialism decided to implement a series of reformist policies in the rural areas of the region. To this was added the concern of a sector of liberalism (led by Carlos Lleras Restrepo) to contain migration from the countryside to the city, promising the strengthening of the smallholding economy through a “colonization directed by the state”, [13] and the punctual purchase of lands in the interior regions, a policy which was supplemented by centres of collection, technical aid and credit with the intent of co-opting the peasant movement. [14] At the beginning of the 1970s the elites concluded a pact known as the “Chicoral agreement” by which they put an end to the previous reformist cycle and enthroned the power of the latifundists.

This moment showed once again what the history of the country has shown many times, that latifundism is not just an economic but also a political power. It is associated with the regional political powers of a clientelist type which allows a political control of the territories and influence at the national level through a closed and clientelist party system which it needs for its political reproduction. [15]

b) War, territorial alliances, drugs and paramilitaries

When the FARC emerged as self-defence campaigns in the period of violence they were displaced from the centre of the county to the eastern plains by a large scale military plan (“operación lazo”) inspired and coordinated directly by the United States, initiating a process of colonization in the south east of the country, encountering “an enormous potential in the poor colonists of the new internal frontiers, opening to production around 4 million hectares…”. [16] Then they returned to the agro-industrial zones, based on an extractive economy and extensive livestock rearing. [17] Other guerrillas in various areas of the country behaved similarly. The local elites reacted by creating paramilitaries. Paramilitarism could not have emerged without the direct presence of the army, conceived by the elites as an army of social repression which then became a counter-insurgency force. [18] The paramilitary actions of the Armed Forces had a legal basis in Decree 3398 of 1968 drawn up with US advisers under the format of the military-civic actions of the period, but when in the mid 1980s, in Puerto Boyacá, the local political elites, latifundists and entrepreneurs formed a territorial coalition. [19], and appealed to Israeli mercenaries to train their troops. [20], the need for finance obliged them to resort to drug trafficking. [21]

The alliance between the armed forces and the drugs trade as part of counterinsurgency policy had antecedents. Effectively, from 1981 and as a response to the kidnapping of Blanca Nieves Ochoa, a family member of a group of known drugs traffickers in Medellín, the drug cartels came together to create a paramilitary squadron called Muerte a Secuestradores -MAS- [Death to Kidnappers]. The army participated directly in the training of its members. [22]

What followed is amply documented. Once the popular election of mayors was officialised in the 1980s the paramilitaries began to assassinate the mayors, councillors, deputies and leaders of the UP (Unión Patriótica - Patriotic Union), the party which had emerged from the negotiations initiated at this time between the FARC and the government of Belisario Betancur [23], as well as any social or political leader who challenged the local regimes. [24] Subsequently the paramilitaries received institutional recognition with the creation of the so-called “Convivir”. In 1998 the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC- Self-Defence Units of Colombia) were set up under the command of Carlos Castaño, continuing with a regime of terror that led to thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people. [25]

Under the first government of Álvaro Uribe, amidst the internal tensions generated by the killing of Carlos Castaño by the paramilitaries themselves, negotiations began which included proposals for total impunity and political representation in Congress, leading to a referendum which did not receive sufficient votes for approval. Thus the negotiation with the paramilitary leaders had to take place in the context of legal regulations and in the midst of international pressures and the legal interpretations of the Constitutional Court, and the demands for impunity were not recognised.

The paramilitary leadership took this as an affront and began to use their confessions, necessary to obtain a reduction or cancellation of their sentences, denouncing the businessmen and politicians who has financed and supported them in their criminal activities. Then Uribe opted to extradite them to the USA. [26]; but subsequently “second generation” paramilitaries emerged in various regions of the country with other names (Bacrin, Autodefensas Gaitanistas ).

c) Two different forms of wealth accumulation

The plunder of land by the paramilitaries allowed drug traffickers to launder money on a huge scale through the purchase of lands and cattle. [27], which allowed them to integrate with the local political elites. Uribismo, which emerged in the midst of the war, expressed the association of latifundists and traditional livestock raisers with emergent latifundistas originating from the drugs trade; it also expressed the political spectrum of the regional alliances which had violently won territorial control in various areas of the country. Organized from the regions towards the centre in the conventional political manner of the latifundists in a corrupt electoral system typical of a clientelist representative democracy, they ensured that people representative of their interests appeared on the national scene using the channels of the traditional parties. In 2002, following the breakdown of negotiations betwwen the FARC and the Pastrana government which opened the way to the implementation of Plan Colombia and in the midst of the imperial “antiterrorist” crusaded, inaugurated with the attack on the twin towers, Uribe became president, promising military victory and winning the support of national and international capital as well as popular support.

In contrast, Santos represented the internal fraction of the elites associated with globalized financial capital which aspired to adapt the countryside to the international standards of globalization in a country which was still far from observing them and in which there were vast areas for agricultural investment, particularly in the eastern llanos. [28] The commercial support for this globalized capital was provided by the big corporations which controlled the distribution of foodstuffs around the world. [29] The productive basis of a globalized agro-industry lay in the appropriation of space through “clusters” or associations of capital coordinated through the corporate control of the territories. (processing of agricultural goods, marketing, water, environmental sources, eco-tourism), which in the manuals of the international bodies is classified as the “New Ruralism”. [30]

Globalized agro industry allows a rotation of investment in various national spatialities without the investors being obliged to buy the land. The legal form adopted by the WTO which is included in Colombian legislation is that of “surface use contracts”, which allow long term rent of land accompanied by collateral investment such as the sale of seeds, technical assistance and the maintenance of cultivation. [31]

The Santos government has implemented an agricultural policy and developed a regulatory framework favouring this type of agriculture. Institutionalizing zones of business investment (zidres) to guarantee big capital spaces open to investment, which includes legalization of lands acquired illegally by enterprises and concessions in uncultivated lands; accepting foreign ownership of the land; promotion of production for foreign trade and the increase of agricultural productivity based on transnational corporate technology; the financialisation of agriculture and an increase in the trade in “commodities”. But the future stabilisation of this policy requires updating the rural land register, formalizing ownership according to the market, promoting the efficient use of the land, questioning the excessive number of hectares devoted to ranching, in a word, nothing less than confrontation with the bastions of Uribismo. So there is a confrontation between two class fractions with different material interests as regards the land. While Uribismo wishes to maintain the latifundist status quo and the lands which were acquired violently during the war to continue accumulating wealth through the appropriation of profits from the land, Santos and transnational capital wish to adapt to the demands of globalized investment. Also there are differences between the legal form of ownership which guarantees the accumulation of capital. Thus, while the traditional and emergent latifundists attribute their wealth to titles of ownership, the globalized investors in agriculture base it on the use of rural assets, and articulation with transnational chains of production and agricultural distribution. This is one of the keynotes of contemporary capitalism.

Initially under the Uribe government the elites, independent of their economic contradictions, decided to unite politically in support of ending the war through military victory under the coordination of US imperialism and through the implementation of “Plan Colombia”. [32] Thus Santos himself was Minister of Defence in this period.

Plan Colombia radically transformed the armed forces, giving them military technology based on the application of advances in computing technology, dynamizing the aerial combat units, improving military intelligence, restructuring the army and police and increasing their personnel. [33]

It should be added that Plan Colombia was not only about the military confronting the guerrillas but above all concerned the recovery of territorial control in areas where the state was non-existent, and thus the military strategy was combined with political and institutional adaptations focused on poverty. [34]

When Santos became President for the first time the imperial diagnosis had already established that the correlation of forces was favourable to the establishment and that it was possible to enter a phase of political solution to the armed conflict and begin negotiations. [35] Then the political unity of elites began to fissure. It was time to gather the dividends of victory.

The Havana agreements made possible the legitimation of the globalizing agrarian policy and would open new spaces for investment in the country. Thus they received the unanimous support of globalized capital. They were hailed by the Obama government which monitored the development of the negotiations with a permanent delegate, the European Community, China, the IMF, World Bank and OECD, to cite the most representative. [36] After the referendum defeat this same capital gave the Nobel peace prize to Santos, with the intention of giving him political support. [37] For the same reason, the government also invited the Uribistas to the negotiations table, something the FARC willingly accepted for obvious reasons.

 III. A new political conjuncture with the renegotiation of the Agreements

a) Uribismo wants to legalize land stolen during the war

The contradictions between Uribismo and the Santos government are reflected in the text of the Havana agreements in the section on Land and Justice. In the case of the land the FARC accepted a mixed model for rural development which would combine agro industry with a peasant economy and associative forms of agro-ecological production. [38] And in a section called “Technical aid plan for the rural sector” the use of genetically modified seeds is accepted. [39]

The mixed rural model agreed does not include the realization of an agrarian reform and in exchange creates a permanent Land Fund which will dispose of 3 million hectares for the first 10 years (which means a programme of 300,000 hectares per year) added to 7 million hectares which will be obtained under the programme of property formalisation that will be carried out mainly in the areas of colonization in which the FARC has been present. [40]

The Land Fund will dispose of:

1) Lands restored judicially for having been acquired illegally; 2) Lands legally recuperated by the state in illegally appropriated waste lands; 3) Lands resulting from the delimitation of forest zones; 4) Lands legally recovered because inadequately exploited: 5) Lands acquired with indemnification under the criteria of social interest or public utility with the proposal of promoting access to rural ownership; 6) Lands which the state obtains through donation. [41] Also the agreements recognize the Peasant Reserve Zones, an associative and solidaristic form of the peasant economy in which the extension of ownership over the land is limited and thus cannot be concentrated. For the FARC the zones constitute a key element for its social activity and at the beginning of the negotiations they demanded that they should have their own mechanisms of political decision, outside of the territorial authorities, a proposal that was not accepted by the governmental delegation.

A transversal element in the conception of Integral Rural Reform is the “polyvalent land register”, since in a country that has not updated its rural land register since the mid 1960s, it is necessary to know the legal situation of the occupiers to facilitate the programme of formalization of ownership and the strengthening of regional taxes. The land register is “polyvalent” because, in addition to setting out the limits of the land, it takes into account its environment within a perspective of territorial reorganisation. [42] Also it should serve as an element of proof in the processes of restitution of land to the victims of forced displacement.

Once the results of the referendum were known Santos and the FARC agreed to renegotiate the agreements and the government began to consult with the visible figures of the “No” campaign, a political spectrum made up of several personalities from the Conservative party. [43], evangelical pastors and the group led by Álvaro Uribe. Uribismo has presented a public document called “Bases for a new Peace Agreement” in which it opposes everything which was agreed in Havana. On the land question, it begins by rejecting the possibility of the FARC and social organizations influencing the selection of beneficiaries of the Land Fund. Then it argues in favour of the enterprises and latifundists who have illegally appropriated waste lands. [44] There were many cases in which these lands were improved and there should be a process to legalise them, it is argued. The Constitutional Court has however ruled against such legalizations arguing that the waste lands are national property and that they can only be granted by a state ruling. [45] Such an interpretation as that proposed by Uribismo means in practice that the concept of waste land and the possibility of the Land Fund obtaining this type of land is suppressed.

Uribismo also questions the process of restitution of land which began with law 1448 of 2010. [46] They argue the “good faith” of the current holders and third parties (front men) who acquire them, and add that the conditions in which they were bought should be ignored. [47] This proposal would legalise the despoliation of 6 million hectares according to the official statistics for the period 1985-2016.

Also, Uribismo opposes special treatment for the Zonas de Reserva Campesina and the “polyvalent land register” because it increases the cadastral base of estates and thus the land tax, whereas the regional political power of the latifundistas has until now kept the latter fairly low.

Two additional themes. Uribismo supports aerial fumigation with herbicides based on glyphosate, defined by the World Health Organisation as carcinogenic, in the peasant and colonised zones where coca cultivation takes places, which has led to huge damage to the peasant families who live there and has failed as a mechanism of control of illicit cultivation, whereas the Havana Agreements privilege the manual substitution of cultivation through the formalization of ownership. [48]

Also, there is the theme of the guarantees to multinational companies involved in extractivism. Uribismo proposes to reduce still further the popular consultations with the ethnic and peasant communities affected by this type of investment because the economy is damaged by such obstacles to business. In this point there is no contradiction with the Santos government which has just begun the same policy, On the other hand, the concern expressed by Uribe and his supporters on the parity committees (government-FARC) established by the Agreement for the elaboration of regional plans makes it hard to obtain the state licences needed for this type of investment, so they demand a regulation be introduced to favour them. [49]. It should be added that in the Agreement the theme of extractivism is not covered.

b) The debate on transitional justice

The Havana agreements support the creation of a Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP – Special Jurisdiction for Peace) based on the tenets of International Humanitarian Law, demanded by the FARC so as not to be subjected to the ordinary jurisdiction of a state they have confronted for several decades. Thus the directives of Geneva Protocol-2 will be observed on the subject of amnesty for rebel organizations, except where there are crimes against humanity which will be dealt with separately. In exchange, defending state terror, the government has symmetrically demanded the inclusion of the presumption of legality of the acts of the armed forces. [50] and amnesty for the crimes committed by the members of the latter and the police, [51] opening the possibility that they are included among the so-called “false positives”. [52] Both parties have agreed the elimination of responsibility of the higher hierarchies, except in the cases mentioned.

In the “Bases for a New Peace Agreement”, Uribismo proposes eliminating the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz and transferring these judgements to ordinary justice through the creation of a Special Tribunal of Judgement in the Supreme Court of Justice and the application of the law of justice and peace implemented in the negotiations with the paramilitaries which is a law subject to justice and recognises the crime of rebellion. The essential reason Uribismo wants to end the JEP concerns the theme of judicial sanctions for the enterprises and latifundistas who financed the paramilitaries. Accepting the JEP, the government recognises the standards of International Humanitarian Law that make possible the judgement of individuals under this law.

The Santos government has presented this point to the enterprises arguing that the line between individuals who were victims of extortion and those whose financing was voluntary was very fragile and facilitated impunity. It has appointed as Public Prosecutor Nestor Humberto Martínez, a lawyer trusted by big capital both nationally and internationally, who has said that the possibility of finding those responsible for this type of action was virtually zero. [53] But for Uribismo these interpretations are not sufficient. They propose to broaden “the amnesty and pardon to third party non combatants like collaborators or auxiliaries if they hand in all the military equipment they possess”. [54] An alteration intended to guarantee impunity.

In the renegotiation opened by the “No” victory, Uribe has said he has no concern for time, and that the discussion on the Agreements can continue until the presidential debate of 2018. However, for Santos time is limited, because he intends to divide the bloc of those who voted No to construct a new consensus that could make a new referendum possible. He is considering the option of implementing the Agreements through parliament, to take account of the majorities of his disposal, although he is conscious that they would then lack social legitimacy. Members of the parties who support his government talk of the possibility of international mediation. He has announced the start of negotiations with the ELN to broaden the spectrum of the discussions. For now the presidential option remains uncertain, but Santos knows he must decide before the second week in December when he makes the speech in which he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize to the so-called “international community”.

c) An institutional impasse without political alternatives

The institutional impasse of the Agreements is affecting the FARC. Complying with the schedule agreed with the government, its 10^th conference ratified the Agreements and declared its willingness to end the war and to become a political party. The schedule agreed supposed the concentration of troops for a period of six months in sites previously agreed with the commitment to decommission arms once this period was over. The guerrillas have begun the journey to these sites of concentration. On the other hand, the beginning of the schedule starts with the adoption of an amnesty law which the President should submit to Congress on condition that the referendum authorises it. There is the possibility of approving it without the presidential request. For now the FARC has accepted a protocol established between the government and themselves with representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to locate the guerrillas in areas of “pre-concentration” and maintaining the ceasefire which Santos has himself extended until December 31. The FARC is not expecting the agreements to be modified.

Amidst these tensions large scale urban mobilizations have begun, mainly of university students in the cities in support of the negotiations or against the renegotiation of the agreements. It is a long time since the squares of the big cities have been so full. They express the lassitude of the war. But the political horizon of these mobilisations is reduced to the possibility of supporting a possible agreement between the elites. The organisers repeat this incessantly. Such an agreement, although experiencing difficulties right now, can be obtained (the inter-bourgeois contradictions are not irreconcilable) and we would then face a scenario in which a new Frente Nacional would be constituted with the support of the masses.

The emergence of movements of this type has various explanations. The first results from the war itself and its relation with the social movements. In recent decades the war has been used to apply state terror to the social movements by equating them with the guerrillas. Any social mobilization which raised the most minimal demands was catalogued as a guerrilla movement and its leaders murdered or prosecuted. There were many who suffered this repression and this has consequences in social organizations. Also under the current Santos government this remains a recurrent practice. While in Havana it spoke of peace, in the streets and neighbourhoods there was killing and imprisonment. And the possibility that this reality will change with the political negotiations was and remains virtually zero. From the beginning of the conversation the government delegates laid down two “red lines” which could not be crossed – the economic model and state terror - and the negotiations took place within these limits.

Another explanation relates to the political options of the left. The President of the Polo Democrático Alternativo and presidential candidate in the last elections has entered the government as Minister of Labour in the name of the need to support the peace process and has led this party into a dead end. The majority of the left and the human rights movements support Santos under the logic of “the lesser evil” faced with Uribe. We ecosocialists participated in a front of political unity in favour of a yes vote in the referendum, supporting the victims and differentiating ourselves from Santos and Uribe. This Front was made up of organizations of territorial resistance, indigenous peoples and those of African descent, environmentalists and students. Currently we call for a political unity which ignores the inter-elite pacts and opposes the possibility of a new Frente Nacional. We also call on the popular organizations to construct an alternative political platform allowing an exit from the crisis from below. We appeal to the peoples of the world to denounce the humanitarian tragedy that Colombia has undergone in recent decades and for solidarity with the victims of the conflict, demanding truth, justice and reparation.

Daniel Libreros Caicedo

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