A gentle but firm rebuke of Chavez

A letter from William Ospina to Chavez, proof that sanity is still not lost.

http://www.cipcol.org/?p=527#more-527

Here is a translation of a piece that several people have e-mailed to me over the past few days. It is an open letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez from William Ospina, a noted Colombian writer and poet. It ran in Sunday’s edition of the Colombian magazine Cromos.

Ospina’s message is that Chávez has committed a grave error by seeking to confer political legitimacy on Colombia’s guerrillas without first demanding dramatic changes in their behavior. Coming from a messenger who recognizes that social injustice is very real in Colombia, distrusts �?lvaro Uribe, and even claims to admire Chávez, Ospina’s gentle but firm message is several times stronger than any rage-filled speech from President Uribe.

A Letter for President Chávez

By William Ospina
Cromos magazine, January 20, 2008

Mr. President:

I have always thought, unlike the Colombian government, that Colombia has an armed conflict that must be resolved through a political negotiation.

I have always thought - without erasing the many crimes they have committed and continue to commit - that the guerrillas had, at their start, a political reason for their insurgency.

I have always believed that the Colombian state’s management of this conflict was wrong from the start. Even the current government, through the voice of the President of the Republic, has admitted that one of the causes of the guerrillas’ existence was the state’s irresponsibility, its lack of commitment to guarantee the community’s rights, the lack of state presence in many regions of the country.

I believe that many decades of exclusion, lack of opportunities, and a regime of privileges for some sectors and vulnerability for others favored a climate in Colombia in which violence was a recourse to settle all kinds of conflicts.

The current government has repeated many times that it is making a serious effort to correct everything that its predecessors did not know how to confront during so much time, and I think it is true that there is an effort on behalf of authority, administration, and justice. Today, nobody can deny that violence, kidnapping and massacres have diminished in Colombia, and that state forces’ presence is felt more firmly throughout the territory.

However, we are far from having achieved a democracy like the one we truly need. In the regions [that is, away from major cities], the electoral system is still captured by all kinds of pressures and violent actors. Many supporters of the current government have also been supporters of paramilitarism, which produced a genuine holocaust during the last twenty years in Colombia. Many more are complicit in vast, intricate phenomena of corruption.

For this reason, I believe that we are in no condition to say that ours is an exemplary democracy, or that there are no reasons to criticize it. In fact, in his own discourse the President of the Republic himself has undone many things that his political philosophy claims to support. He has shown himself capable of using words like “guerrillas�? and “bandits�? to describe members of Congress elected by popular will, who are doing nothing but exercising their right to oppose him politically while respecting constitutional norms.

Under these conditions it is fair for one still to doubt whether the Colombian state has been able to reform its old exclusionary and corrupt practices, which have even included open resort to violence to persecute and silence the opposition. None ignore that the National Front [a power-sharing arrangement between the Liberal and Conservative parties, 1958-1974], which gave Colombia peace for fifteen years, was later taken away for thirty because it incubated many of today’s evils. By closing off democracy, it stimulated the growth of insurgent forces, cleared the way for corruption, turned the state into a bipartisan collusion free of oversight, and once again stimulated - as in the times of La Violencia - the practice of privatized justice through support for self-defense groups that degenerated into all sorts of paramilitary phenomena.

There are important intellectuals who think that in moments when the state is undergoing a transformation, it must be helped along by silencing criticisms and celebrating each and every one of its advances. I think that is a mistake. When the evils have been so many and have gone on for so long, democracy will only go forward if every citizen understands that democratic advances are not generous concessions from the state, but rights that have been delayed for too long. It is more necessary than ever to point out errors in order to help the community’s knowledge of its rights to ripen.

For thirty years, since the beginning of the National Front, Colombia did nothing more than accumulate problems that nobody resolved. The guerrillas of the FARC, ELN, EPL, and M-19, narcotrafficking, corruption, and paramilitarism were the outcome of that era of passable administrative activity but total political ineptitude when it came to confronting problems and finding democratic solutions.

The first priority of political solutions is to guarantee the greatest possible citizen tranquility. Here, instead, war was seen as the only mechanism for managing problems that have objective causes, which had - we could say - a primitive political justification. Who today can deny that all these guerrillas were born from an exclusionary state and an authoritarian society in which some did not stop believing in citizens’ rights, and in which union members’ rights were denied, as were the students’ arguments and the campesinos’ demands, which were all stupidly and gratuitously dismissed as “agitation�? and terrorism?

Through these means, many sectors were pushed into succumbing to resentment, and the hatred that these campesinos and rebels feel toward the state grew worse. Even more serious: decade after decade the hatreds were fed by reciprocal distrust, until some minor conflicts turned into a gigantic war, which has not ceased to exist just because some people refuse to call it by this name.

The Colombian government affirms that in the past five years, between 50,000 and 70,000 illegal fighters have demobilized. Shouldn’t this make us Colombians think that we have been living through a conflict, that in fact we have passed through a very deep crisis, and that some of the elements that motivated that crisis have still not been removed from the scene?

And now, in the past few days, and moved - I’m sure - by your willingness to help Colombia overcome its problems, you, Mr. President, have made two affirmations about which I think it is necessary to think deeply. First, you have said that the existence of the conflict must be recognized, and even that the FARC’s and ELN’s character as insurgent armies must be recognized. Maybe this is true, because I think that only by recognizing them as political adversaries is it possible to have a political negotiation with them. But it is clear that the guerrillas themselves must take the first step, by freeing all the hostages whom they are maintaining in subhuman conditions, and by demonstrating that they will follow - not as an external imposition but as an intimately held conviction - the norms of International Humanitarian Law.

Your second declaration, Mr. President, is more debatable. You have said that the FARC have a Bolivarian political project that is respected in Venezuela. There I see myself obliged to disagree. If you call your own political project “Bolivarian,�? it seems to me that you are committing a serious mistake by comparing it with the FARC’s project. Because as far as I can tell, Venezuela’s Bolivarian project has always been a democratic project, which has not exercised violence against Venezuela’s state or society. The FARC and ELN are indebted to Colombia for too many dead and too many kidnapped, too many attacks on villages and too much cruelty and senselessness, to be viewed as equivalent to a political project that is much more respectful toward society and the community, such as that of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

I can’t say whether you and your movement are succeeding in transforming Venezuelan society for the better. I know that you have tried to do so through legitimate means, appealing to majorities, without attacks and violence, and that deserves all of my respect.

Perhaps if the guerrillas changed their methods and their proposals, they could someday aspire to be recognized as a political alternative for our society. But I cannot view the guerrillas today as projects of civilization. I feel that four decades of struggle have hardened them, have debased them, and have distanced them too much from popular sensibility. In fact, their main victims have been the popular sectors.

If I think that the Colombian conflict must be resolved through a political negotiation, this is not because I somehow think that the FARC are an alternative for civilizing Colombia. It is because I know that their military defeat is improbable, and that Colombia would have to invest a considerable part of its labor and its production, a vital part of its wealth, to spend decades combating a guerrilla group that is in no condition to take power but is clearly able to impede the community’s progress, weakening investment in education, health, roads, modernization, and protection of nature.

In addition, I would dare to say that many of those who keep insisting that the alternative against the guerrillas is war without quarter - without dismissing that some ingenuous people actually do believe in the possibility of victory - in reality are people and sectors interested in seeing the Colombian state keep wasting all of its resources on a sterile war, so that it is unable to confront other evils that eat away at us and exhaust us; narcotrafficking, for example. To say it with all of its syllables, I think that there are people who benefit from the war, people who like to fish in turbid waters, and who are those who do the most to feed the fire of a conflict that could be resolved through other means.

Colombia’s is not an unresolvable religious conflict like in the Middle East, it is not a cultural conflict like that which vaguely feeds the terror of ETA, it is an economic and political conflict with a cultural substrate that is perfectly correctable in the framework of a negotiation that includes education, social promotion and integration, and the spreading of citizen values. In fact, I believe that negotiations are necessary precisely because I know that 20,000 armed men cannot take power over a nation of 40 million people who have placed their hopes on other personal and social projects.

Almost any truly patriotic and pragmatic negotiation will be less ruinous, in economic and political terms, than an interminable war.

That is why I think that you must not be confused. You, Mr. President, can mediate so that a political negotiation can take place. But I don’t think it is to your advantage to place on the shoulders of your peaceful and democratic movement all of the inexplicable crimes of a hardened and insensate guerrilla movement. Your discourse must be based on more reflection. A project like that of the Bolivarian Republic, which so far has been characterized by its peaceful vocation and its democratic spirit, need not wear the same chains with which the guerrillas hold their hostages in the jungles. If you are truly to help Colombia overcome a conflict that is nearly half a century old, you must be totally clear on this point.

Cordial regards from a Colombian who respects and admires you.

By Sr Tertius on Jan 26, 2008, 10:38 in Politics & the war.

fecherklyn says on Jan 27, 2008, 15:04:

Inspiring. Thank you for posting it Sr T. I hope it gets wide diffusion as, besides diplomatically calling Chavez to order, it possess calm and reasoned logic, arguing an alternate route to those ordained by the more extreme, enflamed factions.

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rocinante says on Jan 27, 2008, 15:11:

"seeking to confer political legitimacy on Colombia’s guerrillas"

Who cares. If no one takes him seriously what are all you goofballs worried about? I still don`t get it.

Can someone write a sentence using the following structure and answer my question? Is Chavez that powerful and that noteworthy that he can do anything harmful. Educate me WITHOUTpasting in a link to some stupid web article.

I want your words, one sentence, change everything I typed in upper case....

If Chavez (does something) CONTINUES DOING WHAT HE IS DOING, (cause) CAUSING POCKETS OF THE WORLD TO CONSIDER THE FARC LEGITIMATE, (effect) MEANING THAT HIS GRAN COLOMBIA PLAN WILL SOMEHOW GET IMPLEMENTED (net result) RESULTING IN MANY COLOMBIAN LIVES BEING RUINED BECAUSE FARC WILL RUN COLOMBIA.

"World economic indicators point to a democrat winning 2008. It will surely be Obama. Peso 1400 by November" Feb 5, 2008

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rocinante says on Jan 27, 2008, 15:15:

Do people think Chavez is to be taken seriously? So what a few Europeans wear Chavez and FARC shirts. BFD.

Does anyone think that Uncle Hugo is NOT being watched like a hawk? If Hugo makes one false move, like attack anyone in South Am or try anything to re instate Gran Colombia there will be a three day war and he will be DONE.

All you folks worried sick over Hugo WORRY ME!

"World economic indicators point to a democrat winning 2008. It will surely be Obama. Peso 1400 by November" Feb 5, 2008

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Mr. Hollywood says on Jan 27, 2008, 16:31:

"Sanity is not lost"

Well, it might very well be lost of the person that letter is ostensibly addressing.

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Sr Tertius says on Jan 27, 2008, 20:11:

I'm sure Chavez and Uribe are both quite sane people--they just enjoy too much their own histrionics. It's the people cheering a bit too enthusiastically for them that worries me.

"When the finger points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger" (Chinese proverb)

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