Is peace in Colombia possible?

Unexpected events sometimes change intractable situations. The spectacular rescue of Ingrid Betancourt –hostage by Colombia’s FARC, the oldest guerrilla in the continent –by a military command operation may be a case in point. For more than 50 years a civil war has bled the South American country, sometimes to the advantage of the insurgents, other times favoring a wiggling democracy.
The nature of the conflict, however, has not been the same. Originally a social and political conflict, it became a confrontation over the FARC’s attempt to guarantee the civil war spoils: deals with illegal drugs groups, kidnappings, blackmailing oil companies, and so on.
Two major attempts to end the conflict failed. In 1985, the peace conditions were not respected by the army, which supported a bloodbath of most combatants abandoning the conflict to enter civilian life. After the peace deal promoted by President Belisario Betancourt busted, the number of casualties from former combatants and other social leaders was estimated between 3,000 and 5,000. In other words, Colombia’s civilian establishment blew the prospects for peace.
The second attempt was led by president Pastrana after his election in 1999. This time it failed because the FARC estimated they had a chance to overturn Colombia’s democratic regime by force. The best symbol of the peace failure occurred in 2002, when FARC’s founder, Manuel Marulanda (alias “Tiro Fijo” or sure shot, who died in March 2008) did not show up in El Caguán, a broad portion of the territory cleared of military for the peace dialogue.
This brought Alvaro Uribe to the picture. Running on a Democracy Safety argument he changed the strategy from defensive to offensive, strengthening the army and going after the guerrillas. During 2007 and 2008, prior to Ingrid Betancourt’s rescue, FARC suffered a chain of political and military defeats. Cornered by the armed forces, with ravaged command and control of the rebel army as a whole, and unable to strike important military objectives, the FARC may be weighing the odds of a peace settlement when there is still time. Having lost the support of neighboring countries like Venezuela and Ecuador, for them peace might be the only solution for survival.
This possibility, however, requires the Uribe administration (or the one to follow) to articulate a very sophisticated internal and external strategy requiring high diplomatic skills in order to break the barrier of intolerance that has become the name of the game for too many years.