Plan For Colombia: Day 2b

LAWMAKER HAS PAID FOR PEACE

BOGOTA - He might easily be mistaken for an American high school teacher:
tall, rail-thin, middle-aged, with large-lens eyeglasses, pale blue eyes
and a tweedy sport coat. But Antonio Navarro Wolff, 52, is Colombia's
"walking wounded," a metaphor for its turbulent political life.

He is the walking wounded because he sometimes limps a little, and he
sometimes limps a little because the lower half of his left leg is a
prosthesis. The limb that it replaced was blown off in 1986 while Navarro
was negotiating for peace in Colombia's guerrilla war.

Navarro was a guerrilla leader, attacked during formal talks with the
government.

A former engineer and university professor, he had gone to the jungle
after, he said, Colombia's 1970 presidential election was stolen from the
retired Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, a populist who had been the country's
military dictator from 1953 to 1957.

Colombia was at the time operating under an unusual agreement whereby the
Liberal and Conservative parties alternated the presidency. Rojas founded a
third party to challenge them.

"The electoral process failed to provide democracy, so we had no recourse
except to arms," Navarro said.

The guerrilla movement was called M-19, after the date of the controversial
election, April 19, and it drew support from Colombians of all walks of life.

For 16 years, the quiet-spoken engineer fought for a revolution that would
never gain much ground, despite having a popular leader and a centrist
political stance.

"The M-19 was not Marxist," Navarro said. "We read Marx and Lenin, but our
approach was more Colombian."

Peace talks with the M-19 and several leftist guerrilla movements began in
1984, under the government of Belisario Betancur. When the negotiations
were concluded six years later, Navarro's guerrilla army surrendered its
arms to the government and asked that their barrels be melted into a statue
for peace.

M-19's leaders tried to reinsert themselves into civilian life by running
for office, but most were assassinated on the campaign trail. When the
guerrilla's former chieftain, Carlos Pizarro, was shot dead on an airliner
as he traveled to a stop in his 1990 presidential campaign, Navarro took
his place as a candidate. He polled 12 percent of the national vote; his
chief accomplishment was that he survived.

In 1991, with the M-19's electoral strength up to 27 percent, Navarro was
elected co-chairman of the committee that wrote Colombia's current
constitution. The M-19's political party soon expired, a casualty of
assassinations and infighting. But Navarro became mayor of his home city,
Pasto, in the southern state of Narino, and then, as an independent, won
election to his present post as a congressman from Bogota.

Today, he is a partisan of that country's peace process - one who believes
in strengthening the Colombian army. "The guerrillas can't win the war," he
said, "because the government now has unlimited resources. The trouble is
that the FARC doesn't understand this yet, and it is not going to sign a
peace treaty while it thinks that it can win a war."

The "unlimited resources" to which Navarro referred come from the
American-backed Plan Colombia and from recent decisions by international
banking institutions to extend credit to Colombia.

But it is one thing to build up the Colombian army, Navarro said, and
another to do it through Plan Colombia, which, he predicts, will complicate
efforts to persuade the FARC to give in.

"The American Plan Colombia," Navarro said, "is a plan to, as we say in
Colombia, kill two birds with one shot. It is to get rid of coca
cultivation and to take away financing from the armed groups, to weaken the
guerrillas. But the result could be very different: a big replanting of
coca, or increased recruitment by the guerrillas. We've been fumigating
coca fields for 15 years, and instead of diminishing, the fields are
increasing."

Navarro is closely allied with a group of some 100 municipal, business and
church leaders from Narino and Putumayo states who in September signed a
declaration alleging that "Fumigation is the repetition of a failed policy
that ... promotes the shifting of (coca) fields to virgin lands,
aggravating environmental impacts."

Though his long-term perspective is optimistic - like most Colombians, he
believes that forging a peace will take years - he thinks Plan Colombia is
counterproductive.

"Plan Colombia is only a down payment, part of an escalation of the war
that will only create the need for more assistance," he said.

The United States, he alleged, wants to pose Colombia as a "counterweight"
to Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez is seeking to distance himself
from American power. Any increase in American funding for Colombia, and any
boost in American influence, Navarro argued, will distance the country from
its neighbors.

Navarro's leg was blown off, the whole country knows, by a grenade that was
thrown into a negotiating session by an army sergeant.

But Navarro said he has never thought about filing charges against the man,
or seeking any punitive action.

"Why should I?" he asked. "We were at war, after all."

"Things like punishing war crimes are a big deal to civilians," he
explained, "but among the combatants, it's not like that. As the peace
process develops, I think that people are going to learn that guerrillas
and soldiers forgive each other more readily than civilians can."

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n145/a07.html