Alfonso Cano, peace or war ideologue?

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Marulanda died and Colombia starts to get used to it. After the euphoria of the Uribista hawks who, headed by Interior Minister Holguín, came out to preach the enemy’s total extermination, everything will return to normal. The FARC are not over, and peace is not so close either.

The first thing should be realized is that Marulanda died because he was old. That simple. To claim victories or fabricating bombings lets a lot to be desired. He simply died because he was sick of the prostrate and it was his time now. That usually happens when you’re pretty old (78 years-old) and don’t have President López Michelsen’s genes to last until 93.

It does not make any sense to invent a telenovela about Cano. Deducting that his election is a victory of the political wing over the military wing shows crass ignorance. Alfonso Cano was chosen because of his seniority (31 years in the FARC), which is a Secretariat’s rule. With Reyes dead, Cano was the third in the row. Expecting something else is wishful thinking.

Now, it is curious the crossword puzzle some people are inventing, as the one stating that Marulanda was the one keeping the organization united and his death will irremediably divide it. Marulanda was important, of course. He was a symbol. But FARC have never worked around messianic men.

Its collegiate direction and the decisions taken by consensus are its advantage. And though it is true that Cano does not have Marulanda’s influence, the Secretariat brings itself together around him and when it comes to describe his position, you could use the British Prime Minister simile: first among equals.

Peace is another part of the telenovela. Cano will not make things easy because he studied anthropology, comes from an urban background or had become FARC’s ideologue after Jacobo Arenas’s death. He will negotiate as far as he can achieve some advantages for his, postrated and anything you want, but still important and dangerous organization.

Preaching his “softness” as a peace hope is far from reality. Cano is the only Secretariat’s member so far to be sentenced by Colombian justice for the murder of 40 of his own men, after torturing them, because of “fouls” as eating too much. The bodies were found in 11 common graves, in La Uribe municipality’s La Gaucha vereda, between March and April 1991.

As for his commitment with the truth, several doubts can be cast. The episode of the deputies’ death is one of them. Whereas Timochenko supported the FARC to assume its responsibility toward the country, Cano wanted to disguise it by proposing to attract military units to the area, in order to create a confusion enough to blame them.

His political bias does not call into optimism. He is convinced that FARC should go international. His leading role in the creation and consolidation of the so-called Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (Bolivarian Continental Coordinating Board, CCB), whose second congress held last February in Caracas summoned 800 delegates from all over Latin America, should be a call to reflection.

The CCB movements are all convinced that the only way to seize power is through the arms. And if Cano assumes a pragmatic attitude, for example, releasing the kidnapped, there is the uncertainty that he will do that to open some political spaces for peace or just to improve FARC’s battered image.

Perhaps having suffered the failures of the peace conversations during Belisario Betancourt and César Gaviria administrations, and the extermination of the Patriotic Union, a political party which sought to open spaces for FARC’s reintegration to civil life, may have influenced his mood.

Is armed way a FARC’s “fixed” position? Does Uribe administration really want peace? It is up to the answers to thse questions the duration of the conflict, because peace cannot be built in one day. It is a long, complex process which begins by establishing confidence between the parties and drops “exterminations”, “combinations of way of struggle” or hidden cards behind the table.

Peace does not need warriors but statesmen. Will FARC Secretariat and President Uribe this willingness?

This article was originally published 29 May 2008 on equinoXio. Translated by Carlos Raúl van der Weyden Velásquez

Tags: Alfonso Cano, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Colombia, Colombian politics, FARC, FARC Secretariat, guerrilla, Guillermo León Sáenz, Juan Manuel Santos, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, Pedro Antonio Marín, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Sureshot, terrorism, Tirofijo

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