Ambiguous political change is not easy to grapple with. Scholars of politics, often dealing with cases of either dramatic change (e.g., revolutions) or enduring stability (e.g., long-term authoritarian regimes), have come up with robust theories to explain a wide range of political and economic outcomes of change and non-change.1 Puzzling cases like the one of Colombia, however, wherein a critical juncture such as the peace talks opens up an opportunity for distributive change but at the same time this change does not materialize as expected, are harder to account for. Exploring this ambiguity requires studying the interaction between long-term power structures, the specific political dynamics of peacemaking, and intricate policy decision-making processes.
In this book I tell the story of the recent window for rural policy change that opened in Colombia as a result of the peace accord negotiated by the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), but also of the process through which, almost at the same time, this window rapidly began to close. From a political economy perspective, the book shows how, on the one hand, the peace process created an exceptional opportunity to push for land distribution and rural development. On the other, it explains how long-standing and arising political constraints from within and outside government were at odds with the reformist peace agenda. The framework I develop to make sense of these events may be useful for other countries that have undergone—or may undergo—a negotiated transition addressing profound socioeconomic rural inequalities.
The Story
On November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the left-wing guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced the Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace, putting a formal end to one of the most protracted and deadliest armed conflicts in recent history, lasting over 50 years and leaving almost nine million victims (Unidad de Víctimas 2020). The comprehensive peace accord reached was the outcome of a five-year negotiation process in Havana, Cuba. Besides facilitating the FARC’s laying down of weapons and conversion into a political party, the deal included substantive measures around key conflict-related issue areas: rural development, citizen and political participation, illegal drugs, and transitional justice (see Appendix 1 for a timeline of the peace talks). Over the course of the negotiations, however, Colombian society deeply divided over the merits of the settlement, in great measure reflecting the political elite’s division between President Juan Manuel Santos, whose administration led the negotiations, and his predecessor Álvaro Uribe, who rejected them. Although the agreement was widely applauded by the international community2 and its robust design and provisions are now being studied as examples of successful peacemaking (e.g., Bell 2016; Herbolzheimer 2016; IFIT 2018), domestically a strong right-wing sector that came to power in 2018 has undermined the agreement by delaying implementation and empowering political voices who are opposed to the accord. More than three years after its implementation phase began, with violence against social leaders, human rights defenders, and former FARC combatants increasing in rural areas, major concerns remain about the transformative potential of the agreement (United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia 2019). While the public has focused mostly on the controversial topic of transitional justice (Bakiner 2019; Freeman and Orozco, 2020), the far-reaching effects for sustainable peace rest on the agreement’s ambitious rural development reform roadmap, which is crucial to transform the socioeconomic and political conditions that have facilitated the persistence of violence.
The political opening for addressing historical rural inequalities began in August 2010, when Juan Manuel Santos arrived in power with the idea of seeking peace with the FARC. Former president Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010) chose Santos—the Minister of Defense at the time—as his protégé for the 2010 presidential elections, with the expectation that he would preserve his legacy, especially the hardline stance against guerrilla groups. During his tenure, Santos had led the most ferocious military confrontation by the Colombian state against the FARC. However, relations quickly soured between the two politicians. Santos immediately adopted a more conciliatory approach, signaling that he would seek a peace deal with the FARC. Uribe had successfully adopted G. W. Bush’s post-9/11 global war on terror to frame guerrilla groups as terrorist organizations threatening the state, leaving either military defeat or unconditional surrender as the only alternatives. Santos saw things differently. During three years as Uribe’s Defense Minister he had restored in great measure government control over Colombian territory and weakened the FARC to a point of strategic military defeat. By the time he reached the presidency, Santos had realized that it was the right time and the reasonable next step to seek a settlement. This meant, as governments in the 1980s and 1990s had done, recognizing that the internal armed conflict could be solved politically. A negotiation, from this point of view, was a far better way to end a war that, even with the FARC debilitated, could last indefinitely and continue exacting a high human and economic toll. Based on this rationale, which included dropping the designation of the FARC as a terrorist group, Santos put in place the various legal, diplomatic, political, and operational building blocks of what would later become the Havana peace process.
From a long-term perspective, making peace with the FARC represented a reasonable step in Colombia’s state-building project (López 2016). Starting in the 1980s, through a piecemeal approach, the Colombian state had signed peace deals with nine different illegal armed groups representing almost 40,000 people in arms. The 13,000 FARC combatants that demobilized in mid-2017 as part of the peace accord implementation signified continuity in a gradual process of the state’s monopoly of coercion, taxation, and justice administration. Ceasefire and laying down of weapons were not the only aspects contemplated in the 2016 agreement. Peacemaking efforts in Colombia have gone hand in hand with attempts to expand the state’s legitimacy not only through the monopoly of coercion of force but also by enabling the exercise of citizens’ rights and creating economic opportunities for marginal populations (CNMH 2016). In the transition away from the bipartisan violence of the 1950s, the government implemented regional development programs to tackle poverty and the effects of war (Karl 2017). Also, in the late 1980s, the government carried out development programs in conflict-ridden towns as a direct outgrowth of the peace process with guerrilla groups (López 2016). This time, the negotiating agenda included as well substantive provisions aimed at promoting political and socioeconomic inclusion of rural areas, satisfying victims’ rights, and ensuring the non-repetition of violence.
Colombia’s sustained economic growth since the 1950s did not generate acceptable living conditions across large swathes of its rural areas. Rural poverty today measures twice as much as urban poverty (DANE 2020). Social spending, institutional capacities, public and private investment, and developed markets are concentrated in major urban areas in the Andean region. Rural areas—especially those affected by illegal armed groups and illegal economies—have lagged behind, and their inhabitants remain largely excluded from the country’s economic gains and democratization (UNDP 2011). Moreover, land and agricultural policy have been historically biased against peasants. The allocation of resources has mostly favored large landowners, who have had historically a disproportionate influence over sectoral policy. Attempts to address the concentration of land made by liberal governments during the 1930s and 1960s largely failed, worsening peasants’ access to productive land. The 1991 Constitution also sought to address this situation by including constitutional provisions on land access and supports to peasants. However, the intensification of the armed conflict, together with economic liberalization, the coca boom, and the weakening of state institutions in the following two decades, counteracted these efforts (Reyes 2009, 2013). During Uribe’s administrations rural inequality deepened. In this period, illegal armed groups massively dispossessed lands from peasants who could not count on state protection, and agricultural supports were mainly allocated to big landowners and agribusiness firms (Gutiérrez Sanín 2010).
The Santos liberal administration shifted away from Uribe’s most regressive rural policies. As the grandnephew of former liberal president Eduardo Santos (1938–1942) and member of a traditional wealthy Bogotá family that owned the most renowned newspaper in the country, Santos fully belonged to the political and economic elite of the country. During his campaign for the presidency, Santos’s commitment to neoliberal ideas and close ties to Colombia’s large economic groups were evident. When Santos was elected president in June 2010, it was only too reasonable to expect that his rural policy would reinforce the status quo, favoring powerful interests in the energy and agricultural sectors. In fact, his government’s development plan privileged large-scale oil, mining, and agricultural projects. Yet, at the same time, impelled by his administration’s transformative approach to peacemaking, early in his government Santos adopted a parallel reformist rural agenda that championed peasants’ land rights and livelihoods.
While this policy shift was not radical, by the standards of long-standing regressive policy and particularly of Uribe’s measures this new approach did represent a significant change. In August 2010, Santos, without any ties with the landed elite, set the stage for his rural reform by appointing Juan Camilo Restrepo as Minister of Agriculture, a long-time member of the Conservative party who had opposed Uribe’s plebiscitarian drive to concentrate power in his first term, and who championed land distribution and agricultural supports to the peasantry. Restrepo, who would become in 2016 Santos’s chief negotiator for the peace talks with the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN), another guerrilla group at war with the state, rapidly developed a rural policy roadmap that clearly differed from that of the previous government in significant ways. Bringing renowned experts in rural development with no political ties into the ministry, Restrepo changed the policy goals, focusing attention on problems of violent land dispossession and land informality, scarce rural public goods provision, and poor living conditions of rural dwellers. The reformist path adopted by Minister Restrepo ended up facilitating the opportunity to negotiate with the FARC in Havana and influencing the government’s conceptualization of the rural development item during the talks.
In August 2012, the government and the FARC announced that, after six months of secret talks, they had reached a General Agreement that established the design, agenda, rules, and procedures for a formal Negotiating Table that had Cuba and Norway as guarantors. This framework agreement represented a major breakthrough in peace talks with the FARC, as the three previous attempts had failed due in great measure to the lack of a well-defined roadmap for the negotiations themselves. First, this framework made a clear-cut distinction between putting an end to the conflict and building peace, setting forth from the outset that the purpose of the negotiating table was not to discuss every major problem of Colombian society, but rather to agree on specific measures directly linked to the armed confrontation that would facilitate reaching a definitive ceasefire. If these were to succeed, talks in Havana would be followed by an implementation and peacebuilding phase in Colombia with the participation of society at large.
Second, this agenda explicitly mentioned the FARC’s laying down of weapons (dejación de armas). This meant putting an end to the armed confrontation if an agreement was reached and the rebel group’s transition into legal politics. At the same time, by including the other substantive issues, the agenda went beyond the FARC’s disarmament and conceived the end of the conflict as an opportunity for carrying out major socioeconomic and political transformations that would ensure the non-repetition of violence. Overall, the agenda showed that both parties had the intention to move forward into a serious negotiation that would prove to be a crucial window for enacting rural policy change.
The Negotiating Table was officially launched in October 2012 in Oslo, and a few weeks later the formal sessions of the talks began in Havana with the item of rural development. In May of 2013, less than a year later, the parties announced the partial agreement on rural reform called “Toward a New Countryside: Comprehensive Rural Reform” (CRR). The CRR included ambitious provisions to improve land access for landless peasants, agricultural supports, and public goods provision in rural areas, prioritizing those most affected by the armed conflict and illegal coca crops. Reaching common ground on the CRR at the table was not easy, as each party had very different starting points on the issue.
Drawing on its long-standing “agrarian program” (Programa Agrario), the FARC viewed this issue at the heart of its own armed struggle calling for a massive expropriation of unproductive lands. For the guerrilla group’s delegation in Havana, this agenda item had to be ambitious enough to reflect their historical aspirations for land reform and thus serve to justify to their own rank-and-file members their decision to lay down weapons. The government, for its part, did not accept the FARC’s “objective conditions” argument as their justification for taking up arms and rejected also their radical approach to land reform. Yet, upholding that poor living conditions in the countryside had facilitated the persistence of the conflict, the government considered that rural development was essential for peace. A major reform was needed to close the wide urban–rural gap and materialize at last the social and economic rights of the 1991 Constitution in peripheral and conflict-ridden rural areas. After many months of getting nowhere the parties made progress into the CRR by centering the discussion not on the general interpretation each had of the agrarian question, but rather on the specific measures needed to elevate the living standards of rural dwellers. This was a goal that both parties, at least rhetorically, shared as part of the peacebuilding agenda.
The CRR crystallized in a single document and gave force to civil society’s proposals to empower historically marginalized rural areas and communities. Moreover, various of its measures derived from, scaled up, and expanded policy initiatives that were already underway, such as the land restitution policy. By translating these proposals into a comprehensive and highly detailed set of provisions, the CRR bestowed political weight and concrete policy obligations to this distributive agenda.
After negotiators produced the CRR agreement, in Havana talks moved on to other agenda items, while in Bogotá the government began to prepare for the implementation of the agreed-upon provisions on rural issues. Santos and his peace negotiators did not want to raise expectations about a peace process that was just beginning, and which had left its thorniest issues for the end—transitional justice and disarmament. Moreover, the government wanted to avoid the publicity and media of the previous Caguán talks (1998–2001), which had put on a show from the outset while discussions made little substantial progress. After the Caguán talks with the FARC failed, the public was disillusioned and since then highly skeptical about any attempt at a peace dialogue. This time Santos’s approach toward the negotiations was incremental. The negotiating table, physically distant from Colombia, was intentionally separated from the political developments of the country, and the government proceeded with business as usual. At the same time, however, thinking ahead to the possibility of reaching a final accord, internally Santos instructed key officials in his administration to start making the institutional, legal, and financial arrangements required to put into practice the CRR’s commitments. A significant outcome of this effort was Santos’s agricultural institutional sector reform in 2014 and 2015, which led to the creation of the National Land Agency, the Rural Development Agency, and the Agency for Territorial Renovation.
As preparations to implement the CRR gained momentum and with the negotiating table still underway, Santos campaigned for reelection in mid-2014. The presidential election brought the peace process front and center in national politics. Former president Uribe, who since 2011 had become Santos’s main opponent, argued that Santos had betrayed his legacy. Uribe campaigned with his newly chosen candidate on a platform highly critical of continuing with the negotiations. Santos, who had decided not to center his government’s political narrative on the peace process, intensified his peace disc...
