I was in San Francisco for the past few days, attending the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Many panels (some good, some boring), themes, encounters, exchanges. One theme that stood out in the panels I went to and participated in, was the question of how anthropologists should be engaged with the world surrounding us and in which the human cost of progress is denied and disregarded.
In a panel on the war in Iraq, anthropologists reflected on what we knew about Iraq in 2003, before the invasion, and why is it that anthropologists were not able to make their voice heard, and their knowledge made relevant. Were anthropologists missing in action? Nancy Scheper-Hughes made a compelling intervention, describing the normalization of Berkley University, an icon for free speech and resistance, and called colleagues to civil disobedience. That is, not to be timid, but having the courage of fearless speech - as Foucault would call it. Anthropology has as its mission to speak truth to power.
This was also the core of my presentation, when I intervened as a discussant on a panel in which illustrious colleagues who shaped the field and the anthropological reflection on human rights, presented their reflections. Referring to my own research in Colombia, I spoke about the need for anthropologists to study relationships of power and its effects on those whom writer Eduardo Galeano called the nobodies. Who are today the nobodies? and why are they nobodies? Expenditure, progress and development might be the predominant discourse in a continuum of the modernity’s dream which is deepening its paradoxes and contradictions. But we need the full picture. That is, we need to be aware and to expose the human cost of progress, which comes inevitably with destruction, if we are to explore an alternative paradigm and not to continue observing, as horrified Angelus Novus, the catastrophe that keeps piling in front of his feet.

Today I thought I woke up in Obama’s Land. Was I dreaming? As usual, this morning I engaged in one of my early rites of the day: reading newspapers. First my attention was caught by an Op-Ed of the New York Times focused on Colombia. I was pleasantly surprised when I read that the Op-Ed strongly recommends President Uribe to resist the temptation to go after a complete military defeat of the FARC guerrilla and to search instead for a negotiated solution. I can’t agree more, and not because I am a naive peace-lover, but because at the root of Colombia’s perpetuated armed conflict there is a lack of democracy. Here is what the New York Times wrote:

Colombia has seen more than enough of bloodshed. And Mr. Uribe has a strong enough hand to insist on the FARC’s complete disarmament and an end to the drug trafficking and extortion that long ago replaced politics as the group’s main mission.

Insisting right now on disarmament will bring us no where with the FARC (or the ELN, for that matter). Disarmament will eventually happen, as it happened in Northern Ireland with the IRA. But disarmament is not the decisive point right now. What is decisive for peace in Colombia and the region is to start bringing about the conditions for some negotiations (beginning with a humanitarian agreement that will free FARC hostages–among them 3 American citizens). Eventually it will be a peace process that will allow to resolve the grievances that are still fueling the conflict. I am not an idealist in affirming this. This is today quite a realist perspective. Therefore the New York Time’s editorial is very welcome in underscoring the shift in strategy that is needed right now in Colombia. The second editorial that caught my attention today is Eugene Robinson’s column in the Washington Post on U.S. foreign policy on Cuba. He is not shy in adjectives when he defines current America’s policy as “incredibly stupid,” “childish,” “counterproductive,” and “insane.” Quite some loaded language. Robinson writes:

The United States can attempt to influence any changes that eventually take place in Cuba, or it can harrumph from the sidelines. Several of Cuba’s leading dissidents have urged the White House to end the decades-old trade embargo and the draconian restrictions on travel to the island. Bush pays no attention to those on the front lines of this struggle.Stubbornly sticking with a policy that has achieved nothing in nearly 50 years is a pretty good definition of insanity.

The New York Times calls for a negotiated solution to the Colombian conflict, and the Washington Post urges the United States for a radical change in policy towards Cuba. Have these prestigious newspapers being infected with the “appeasement” virus? In other times their positions would have been quite common sense, but today, in an era where isolation is preferred over engagement, their writings sound quite radical. This is how reality got skewed. More then everything, the Op-Eds to me resonate as an invocation to go back to common sense in foreign policy. Ojala… as they say in Spanish.

In the last few days two events caught my attention; the meeting of former president Jimmy Carter with leaders of Hamas and the talks of the governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson with the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez. During the dark era of the Bush administration, we have not been used anymore to these acts of enlightened diplomacy. We have being taking it for granted that to be strong and powerful means only tough talk and preventive war. As an effect, we retrieved more and more in solipsism, only embracing ourself in fear and increasing solitude. To stretch out your hand and meet with your contrary looks now revolutionary. To some, the initiatives of Carter and Richardson might just look like that. The most extreme and radical ones might call them friends of the terrorists. In truth, what they exert is the art of diplomacy, which shows its strength in the capacity for honest and straight dialogue (which is also the readiness and the ability to listen).
These two events show also what a change of administration could bring to the United States and to the world. It will represent a shift from autism to relationship, from preventive war to preventive diplomacy. As a result, we would live in a much safer world.

I am at the airport in Miami waiting for my flight to Colombia. I am en route to the concert that Colombian rock-star Juanes called last week. It will be a concert at the border between Colombia and Venezuela, and it will be a call for a peace without borders.

It was in the death of night, after his concert in New York at the Madison Square Garden, that Juanes, talking to a Colombian journalist, launched the idea. The next morning the news was in the air, and the enthusiastic response from many corners was just overwhelming. While having breakfast at the hotel where he was staying in New York, Juanes was just beaming about all the positive response he was getting. “I would like to do it right there, right on the border between Colombia and Venezuela,” he was sharing to his friends.

Now the idea becomes reality. And it is definitely an interesting reality, since the idea was conceived in the deepest moment of the diplomatic crisis between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. When everyone was scratching his or her head in search for some good idea to get the situation out of the tunnel, Juanes’ idea came unexpected and in few hours had the power to gather a massive support. It was the support of normal citizen who were not willing to be at war with each other. Juanes’ intuition was simple (but not simplistic) and therefore powerful (and deep): we are one people, therefore there is no reason to be at war!

After the marches of last July, February and March, will this event be a step further in the coming together of a civic movement for peace in Colombia? Stay tuned, I will tell you all about from the border between Venezuela and Colombia!

Today, the online edition of the journal NACLA published an article I wrote on the peace process with the ELN. I concluded the article observing:

One of the more fundamental obstacles in the negotiations involves the opposing and polarized perspectives that the Colombian government and the ELN have of the actual negotiation and its objectives. For the Uribe administration, the talks are merely a tool for a forced resolution to the conflict. On the other hand, for the ELN the peace talks are part and parcel of their strategy to advance the structural transformation of Colombia. Indeed, for the insurgents the peace process is the vehicle for generating consensus on the transformation of society: not only between the ELN and the government, but also within the totality of Colombian society.
For now, these opposing visions of peace seem irreconcilable.

This upcoming Sunday, invited by Colombian rock-star Juanes, many Latin American artists will convene in Cucuta, at the border between Colombia and Venezuela to call for they leaders to work for a negotiated solution to the armed conflict in Colombia…. Stay tuned.

I spent some time with Leon Valencia during my recent trip to Colombia. Leon is today a well known and respected opinion leader and is committed to peace in his own country. In the 1980s, he was a member of the ELN Central Command. He demobilized and reintegrated in 1994. Here is what he wrote about the current crisis between Colombia and Venezuela. It is worth reading:

The two neighboring countries have mobilized their troops in our borders and President Chavez has uttered a clear and forceful public threat. He has said that if there was a situation in the long border that divides the two countries like the one that happened in the Ecuadorian borders last Friday, he would immediately attack Colombia.

And it is not impossible that this type of skirmish in a border of 2,200 kilometers, with a big presence of guerrilla, drug-dealers and paramilitary. If at any point a group of ELN or the FARC clashes with the Armed Forces and during the persecution both go beyond the frontiers or affects Venezuelan interests, there will be the needed pretext to start a movement from Venezuela to Colombia.

It can also happen in Ecuador. The atmosphere along the borders is even tenser due to last Friday’s events. Any new real action, or any misunderstanding, within Ecuadorian territory can awake violent reactions against our country.

The guerrilla might have a high interest in having tensions and incidents. In case there is a sign of military confrontation eventually, they would benefit from it. These forces would immediately join the military of Venezuela and Ecuador.

They would receive weapons, training, economic support and they would move to a rearguard territory. Nothing could be more attractive. The insurgency would come out of their isolation and would have support from all these neighboring countries, one of them having big capabilities and huge economic resources.

But the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador would also benefit from this situation, because in a war it is an advantage to have your own forces fighting in your enemies’ rearguard. This scenario is terrifying. The internal war in Colombia would escalate to intolerable limits.

We ask ourselves how we have arrived to this regrettable situation with our neighbors. The majority of people ascribe all responsibilities to Chavez’s madness and to the perverse intolerance of the Ecuadorian President. But we should recognize that the origin of a 60% of these tensions with our neighbors is the Colombian armed conflict.

Let’s talk about the most recent news. It was the invitation to Chavez to mediate in the humanitarian agreements and his later expulsion what started a spell of verbal aggressions from the Venezuelan mandatory and what brought his government to compromise with the FARC agenda. And it is the decision of entering the Ecuadorian territory, to kill Reyes, what keeps us in this argument with President Rafael Correa.

Coming back from Colombia, I wrote up an analysis of the negotiation with the ELN with the goal of identifying the missteps and the missed opportunities of this process that currently reached a death end. A Conflict Resolution Brief will be available on my website by the end of this week.

Why did the negotiation fail so far? In the past, many claimed that the ELN was never committed to serious negotiations. They were probably right. But this time the majority agree that the chances to get to a cease-fire agreement were real. The draft of a framework agreement produced after almost two years of hard work by the negotiaion teams of the Colombian government and the ELN is sound and comprehensive. It is a very good document. Last June, members of the ELN negotiation team addmitted that a process had never gone so far.

So, why did the parties not sign? The general argument is that they were not able to find a mediation on the proper way to monitor a cease-fire. The government wanted the ELN to concentrate in one or more delimited areas of the country, and to identify its members. The ELN judged this proposal as suicidal is accepted, and vigourously rejected it.. At the end of August, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe requested the assistance of his Venezuelan colleague Hugo Chavez. Last November the top leadership of the ELN displaced to Caracas and Chavez was able to produce some progress. Then, Uribe abruptly called off Chavez’s mediation. Since the relationship between the two countries have worsened and so has the peace process.

The disagreement around the monitoring of the cease-fire, I argue, is only one of the external circumstances that provoked the crisis of the negotiation. There is a more deep and ideological reason, which is the different idea of negotiation that the Colombian government and the ELN share.

President Uribe won his election in 2001 and his reelection in 2006, on the promise to defeat militarily the guerrillas. Uribe embodies the tough guy, with an iron fist, that the Colombians right now want to have as a head of state. As a consequence, for the Colombian government a negotiation aims at subjugating the enemy to the legitimacy of the state. It is imposed and forced upon the enemy.

For the ELN, a negotiation represents a moment of a larger strategy to create a vast and large consensus within society that addresses and removes the root causes of the armed conflict in Colombia. The negotiation, runs their argument, should not involve just the government and the insurgency, but society at large. It is this fundamental ideological difference that, despite two years of negotiation, did not allow the parties to gain the sufficient trust to sign an agreement.

Certainly Chavez in not helping right now, and he is a spoiler making the equation of a solution even more complex. The negotiation with the ELN has been lacking the role of a trustworthy third party, who is able to hold the parties together, clarify their demands, exolore solution, and make progress. Unless some third party steps in to facilitate the dialogue (negotiations have officially not being called off), Chavez will be more and more the ELN object of adoration and the radicalization of their belligerence will be its effect.

On my flight back to New York from Bogotà on Sunday night, I started reading the latest book by Marc Chernick, Acuerdo Posible, on the chances for a negotiated solution of the Colombian conflict. In the first pages, he lists some of the “objective factors” conditioning the sixty years long conflict. Among them, social, economic and political exclusion, forced displacement, and private security in many regions of the country.

The list brought me back to the meeting I had during the weekend in Medellín with young members of a local gang that are part of a restorative justice program I am setting up in a marginal barrio of the city deeply affected by the long standing urban conflict.  I sat down for about three hours with a dozen of teenagers, members of gangs. I listened to their dreams and as more as I listened the more I realized that they were dreaming about their rights. The dream of going to school, of finding a job, of helping economically their mothers…

Didier, 15 years old, who witnessed the killing of his mom when he was only 8 and left his life slide into drugs and crime after his dad abandoned him, shared with me his desire of becoming a pilot and of learning how to play the drum. It is by looking (and working) for ways in which these rights can be at hand, that peace will come to Colombia.

I just received this powerful picture from a friend in Bogota’. It is the see of people who yesterday occupied the streets of Colombia to have their voices raised against the FARC guerrilla, against the inhuman practice of kidnapping and against violence.It is a decisive moment. For the first time in the history of Colombia there is an independent and spontaneous movement of honest Colombian citizens who take public their bold opposition to illegal armed groups; who voice their frustration for a peace that seems so difficult to reach.It is the quest for peace that is now occupying the public sphere, and freeing it from fear and terror. It is the emerging of a new powerful force; the emergence of civil society. It is the citizens who are claiming for themselves the public sphere.To insurgent groups who still pretend to be the spokespersons of the poor and the oppressed, it should by now be clear that they are despised by the great majority and do not represent the Colombians. To political leaders it should become clear that it is peace, a positive peace and not just the absence of violence, that citizens demand of them. Peace is the common good the Colombia longs.

This picture caught my attention today. It was taken in Kenya, where violence unleashed in the last few weeks. Young African men, dressed with western cloths, are holding arrows and bows. They hide behind bushes, ready to strike against the enemy.In the newspaper, the caption had only few explanatory words :”Members of the Kalenjin ethnic group battled the Kisii with bows and arrows.” Yet, there is a thick subtext behind this picture. Those men with bows and arrows reinforce the perception in the Western mind that Kenya, like many other countries is Africa, is entrenched in native and tribal violence. Those rudimental weapons suggest something primitive and those western clothes hint to an unfinished civilization. How misleading a picture can be!The picture recalled an article written by Robert Kaplan many years ago, when Sierra Leone was at war. Kaplan was envisaging the coming global anarchy that West Africa was only anticipating:The withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war.    �Not law and order, but disorder was on the march. And Kaplan added:To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war.Kenya seems just another step towards the world’s fall into an inevitable anarchy. Isn’t this what the picture with the fighters suggests?The photo as well as Kaplan’s article (in those days widely circulated among U.S. embassies around the world) are conceived in a void of history and fail to acknowledge that current political violence in Kenya as elsewhere is a consequence of the history of state formation (history on the march!) as forged by African colonialism in the post-slavery era.Mahmood Mamdani explained it meticulously in his Citizen and Subject, flashing out how the colonizers first separated the natives from the non-natives, and then dismantled the colonized majority (the natives) into several political minorities (tribes and ethnic groups). Dividid and impera. The construction of political identities (that is the production of “pure” tribes) had as a consequence the abuse of power and the generation of a resentment that today is running deep. And is now hitting back vengefully.