How to Make Peace with the Forest: Development and War in Colombia

Oct 26, 2016 | Hannah Meszaros Martin
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On September 26, the Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP was signed with a pen made from a bullet, while the Air Force “fumigated” the colours of the Colombian flag over a crowd all clad in white. These planes are all too similar – if not the same – to the ones that up until very recently sprayed down chemical herbicides over vast areas of the Colombian countryside.

Six days later, in a referendum designed by the Santos administration to be the final form of approval for the agreement, 51.2 per cent out of the Colombians who turned out to vote, a mere 38 per cent, issued a ‘NO’ to the agreement. The difference was 55,651 votes.

The divisions that have separated the ‘no’ from the ‘yes’ are much deeper than the current Uribe vs. Santos model that the media is now spinning. In fact politically, ex-president Alvaro Uribe and the current, Juan Manuel Santos, who was Uribe’s minister of war during his presidency, are not actually that different.

But the fractures in Colombian society are historically entrenched. Since its independence and the formation of the modern state, Colombia has had six civil wars largely caused by divisions along class lines and political ideology. In particular, around land ownership. What the referendum has made increasingly obvious is that these divisions  – at the same time geographical, ecological and social – cannot be repaired by a closed Peace Process between the government and a single armed group, a process by definition excluding the participation of wider civil society.