Although the Colombian government’s peace negotiation with the FARC is widely expected to miss its purported March 2016 deadline, there is now nearly no doubt that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will achieve what many before him have wanted but failed at: ending the insurgent war that has consumed Colombia since 1964. It has been the world’s longest-running conflict.

Speaking in Washington, DC on February 3, 2016, Pres. Santos was clear as to why this round of negotiations is different from previous efforts. “In previous efforts, the FARC thought they could win the war. Now they are clear they cannot.” The Colombian government had to militarily defeat the FARC with better intelligence (somewhat derived from the AUC DDR process, see below) and the Blackhawks and training it got from the US under Plan Colombia.

Negotiating peace is inherently complicated, Santos concedes; it entails finding the right balance between justice and peace: “Some people want more justice; some people want more peace.” Santos says he is putting victims’ rights at the center: rights to non-repetition, rights to reparations, rights to criminal justice. The FARC was initially reluctant to be the first guerrilla insurgency to agree to put itself through the criminal justice system as part of the peace deal; Santos said to them: “Times have changed.”

He expected the victims to be the ones who wanted the most justice, but he has learned that victims are the ones most prone to forgive, the ones who want peace the most, the ones who have given the peace process the most legitimacy.

Santos also recognizes that the government needs to invest more in the rural poor. That was the first bit of policy negotiated as part of the FARC peace deal.

They are now negotiating the terms of DDR: disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. I spent time traveling around Colombia in its previous DDR efforts, with the AUC paramilitaries. I wrote about it in detail for The Weekly Standard in 2010.

“Colombia is a country that got accustomed to war… Most Colombians have not experienced a single day of peace. They are afraid of peace, like a prisoner who has always been in prison and is told he is going to be set free. He is afraid of being free. But I say to them: ‘Peace will be marvelous.'”

Colombia is well-versed in the requisite mechanisms for transitional justice into peace. Colombia has already reintegrated 53,000 fighters through the DDR process set up for the paramilitaries, based on the 2005 Peace and Justice Law. In 2006, the approach of DDR was expanded from “reinsertion” to “reintegration.”

Despite being the world’s #1 cocaine supplier, Colombia cites as a success that it has 100,000 hectares less planting coca, but at Asymmetrica we know that plant genetics have also improved crop yield per hectare. Colombia has also stopped fumigating (it was the only country doing so), because it saw diminishing returns (coca was planted amongst legal crops) and it caused carcinogenic damage to human health and grave damage to the environment.

Drug trafficking remains a major and challenging aspect of the peace negotiation with the FARC. Since the FARC claim that they are not drug traffickers, but just benefit from the taxing of cocaine (patently untrue for some of the FARC’s fronts), the Santos negotiators (assisted even by Harvard University professors of negotiation) responded to the FARC that if this is true, then they expect the FARC to assist in the dismantling of Colombia’s cocaine trafficking networks. The FARC have told Santos that this can be accomplished because they have good command-and-control over their troops, but Santos remains skeptical — and for good reason.

This is Colombian government’s “biggest challenge” in the post-peace deal era: government presence to interdict demobilized FARC from getting back into drug trafficking as bacrim, short for bandas criminales, criminal gangs. There are many criminal organizations excited about the prospect of taking over the FARC’s cocaine trafficking business. Pre-eminent amongst these is what the Colombian government refers to as the Clan Úsuga — better know on  the streets of Colombia as the Urabeños, named for the lush coastal region of Uraba, near the border with Panama, which has been a smuggling corridor for decades.

“We can’t be naive and think that drug trafficking will end with FARC,” said Gen. Jorge Rodriguez Peralta in an article yesterday in The Washington Post. Rodriguez Peralta is the commander of a police special forces division targeting the group. “There’s too much money to be made,” he said. All indications are the the Urabeños are poised to take over: in 2015, authorities seized 15 tons of cocaine from the group in Uraba alone, worth $150 million, according to police statistics, equal to about 10 percent of all the cocaine confiscated annually in Colombia.

The Santos government is taking their threat seriously and militarizing its response early. Colombia knows all-too-well how a criminal network can easily become an insurgency. It is what Mexico is experiencing now. Based on this stitch-in-time approach and applying the ferocity that Santos oversaw against the FARC when he was Uribe’s Defense Minister, in late 2015, the Colombian military carried out airstrikes on two Urabeño jungle camps near the border with Panama late last year, killing 17 suspects with satellite-guided bombs.

Úsuga’s Urabeños are expected to absorb those demobilized FARC, who will agree to relinquish their insurgent aims and instead re-enter criminality. Úsuga knows first-hand how this works: he himself is the product of failed previous attempts at government-negotiated disarmament. As a young man he joined the People’s Liberation Army (EPL), a small leftist guerrilla group that agreed to lay down its weapons in 1991. When units from the much larger FARC moved into Uraba and hunted the group’s former members, Úsuga joined a paramilitary “self-defense” movement to drive out the guerrillas.

The shift from terrorist or insurgent with the stated cause of redressing a grievance to a transnational criminal in the plain pursuit of money and the power to move that money, is what I call in my upcoming book for Macmillan on crime-terror pipelines the grievance-to-greed paradigm: first the crimes are there to raise the money for the weapons, but soon enough the weapons are there to guard the money. Yet even in the shift from grievance to greed, the grievance narrative remains important to the recruitment of supporters from point of production, to corrupt enablers and distribution. A prime example is the former head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, El Chapo Guzmán.  A Mexican friend told me recently how she and other Mexicans thought he was a Robin Hood hero; they would proudly wear T-shirts with his image, like some latter-day Che Guevara. “I had no idea he was such a murderer and vicious criminal,” she said to me after I lent her a book on the life of El Chapo. 

It will be interesting to see what story the Urabeños and other drug trafficking organizations concoct to justify their criminality when the FARC and the smaller ELN are sidelined by the peace agreement and enter the political system. Education about the truth will be key to eroding their support.