I was presented the book of prose and poetry by victims of violence who had attended a workshop, En Vuelo del Fenix: de Las Cenizas al Fuego de la Palabra (In Flight of the Phoenix: From the Ashes to the Fire of the Word, 2017). The Phoenix project intends to transform anyone with a personal story of violence into a writer and liberator, so that the work of healing begins. The “phoenix” aptly captures the victims’ overcoming their victimhood and their advent as agents of their own destiny in Colombian society. In this event, we had conversations that continued long after the time we had booked the room.
I left Amalfi with mind-blowing reflections and a deep sense of belonging. I took many notes that I am going to develop into the ideas of my next book on the subject. My companions and attendees to my talks were generous, kind, and attentive to my many questions.
The next morning, Maria Cristina Rengifo and David Builes took me to central Medellin to present in a bright and beautiful room with large, exposed bricks in a nineteenth-century building (a Municipality government’s building), to present to the public servants. This one was by Unidad Especial de Paz in cooperation with the Municipality’s Secretaría de la No-violencia. Here, I spoke of my concept of “institutional violence” that I had developed in my 2019 book. I knew that the attendees were advocates of nonviolence and I wished to convey the dynamics of institutional work and the cautionary note about how institutions, as they grow sclerotic in responding to the changing needs of diverse publics, deploy procedures that violate the populace. My emphasis was on the power of the institutional staff and how they can significantly contribute to the process of critical assessments of institutional processes and procedures. The lively questions and comments were around the practical ways in which the needs of subaltern groups such as women, indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, and other minorities can be brought to the institutional agendas. The precondition for having institutions that wish to reduce institutional violence, my audience said, was for society to learn and promote nonviolence.
The struggle for nonviolence was a national one, as my Colombian friends often pointed out.
The Last Tear
Amalfi had suffered immensely by the conflict. The campesinos were hit hard by the paramilitary. The town’s new mayor, I was told, was a former (demilitarized) paramilitary commander. One Amalfian told me that this town was the (a?) birthplace of the paramilitary. I was told about vehicles called La Última Lágrima (the last tear): these were paramilitary cars that would stop at the homes of the activists to take them away in front of their family… and disappear them.
I often read about the atrocities of the (right-wing) paramilitary in Colombia, and the Colombian Truth Commission has spoken of them extensively. But having witnessed the particular complexities of Colombian reality, I suspected that there was more to this picture. I spoke to Colombians who told me that in the beginning the paramilitary were self-defence groups in the rural areas that protected the estates of landowners against encroaching guerrillas who often kidnapped them to extort money. Consequently, the paramilitary units were paid by the landowners and businessmen as a protective force. A young woman reminisced that at some point in the past they could not go to the beach or on a road trip unless they would join an army convey. Imagine that!
I understand that for FARC, this was all about class war. At the same time, though, it was not a winnable war. In a way, FARC inevitably produced its own dialectical negation: the paramilitary. As society was sliced into zones of interests and control, and as the civil war polarized the country, the spaces of everyday life shrunk for ordinary people. Lost, disappeared, and damaged lives gradually became statistics. Civil society was hit the hardest, with thousands of activists and union members killed and disappeared, while the ordinary folks, the poor, and the vulnerable bore the brunt of the conflict.
Iran, October 2022: the Revolt of Dignity
While I am writing these lines, dignity’s revolt by the courageous young women and men in Iran is going through its first 40 days despite the brutal suppression of the theocratic regime of sclerotic cavemen, their parasitic cronies, and demonic henchmen. The movement of “woman, life, freedom” – a women’s revolution that has captured the world’s imagination and garnered vast international support for the movement – goes strong for the liberation of Iranian peoples. Society is increasingly polarized: a vast majority, led by young, high school and university students and supported by all walks of life – workers, teachers, retirees, and business owners – stands up to a brutal regime and its instruments of repression. The state discourse increasingly stresses ruthless action against protesters. By the time I write these words, over 300 people were killed, at least 31 of them minors, as young as 7 years old. The regime’s forces drive armoured vehicles into elementary schools. Imagine that! Thousands are arrested, and the regime is releasing common criminals to make room in prisons for protesters.
Liberation requires polarization. One cannot remain neutral: revolution requires the decision (not) to join the movement. For the young people of Iran, the continuity of the Islamic Republic is not an option: it represents a grindingly painful and slow death. May Iranian people soon embrace their liberation in joy!
Liberation and Attrition
Following a long, transnational tradition that went strong in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the FARC launched its guerrilla warfare in the early 1960s for the purpose of liberating ordinary Colombians from imperialist plundering of their resources and the concomitant political oppression.[4] The process of liberation, a lá Frantz Fanon, inevitably necessitates polarization. There is no doubt about that. The problem arises when polarization does not lead to emancipation, when the objectives of revolutionary war of liberation are exhausted in a stalemate. Revolutionary violence, as Irving Wohlfarth argues, represents “a violence to end all violence.”[5] This moment, as I observed in my work, stands out as a messianic break in history that leads to justice. Because of its outcome – justice – this liberatory violence in fact sparks with nonviolence.[6]
But the Colombian reality was far from this abstraction. The messianic moment never arrived. And this is when society is left with warring factions in autonomous regions of control and engaged in an unsustainable war of attrition whose price is paid by ordinary people and civil society activists. As far as the revolutionaries are concerned, this is also how revolutionary values of dignity and respect are gradually eroded: FARC is responsible for thousands of kidnappings for ransom, an unthinkable act for most revolutionaries of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. Although they have been flatly denying it, FARC also engaged in narco-related activity, the extent of which remains debatable, to finance the organization. FARC had no hesitation to cause environmental damage, if it served its tactics.
It seems that when the vista of revolutionary victory grows dim, everything becomes permissible.
For me, the question is this: where is that unique point at which emancipatory action degenerates into self-righteous participation in a “war of all against all”? Are we equipped with that knowledge in advance? This, it seems to me, is fundamentally an epistemological question.
An offshoot of radical student movement of New Left and influenced by Black Power, the Weather Underground in the United States was founded in the late 1960s and launched armed struggle, in the context of the Vietnam war, with the intent of “bringing the war home.” The group, organized in urban guerrilla fashion of autonomous chapters, bombed federal buildings, held up banks, and arson attacked the home of a New York Supreme Court judge, among other things. The FBI was frustrated with this hermetically sealed group and unable to dismantle it. Then, on 6 March 1970, a massive explosion in one of the Weather Underground’s bases in Wilkerson left three members dead. This was the beginning of the group members’ rethinking their group’s raison d’être. Many left the group and found refuge in anonymity (this includes one “Weatherman” who settled in Vancouver and died of natural causes in 1997). Others had their lawyers negotiate surrender in exchange for reduced sentence. The explosion provided a moment of reflection: they faced violence and recognized its logic: with no prospect of emancipation, violence would only turn into a vicious cycle.[7]
Did FARC, ELN, and other groups ever experience that moment? Did they ever seriously reflect on violence? I really don’t know. But this is only half of the story. The state, with its proclaimed monopoly of violence, would leave no space for dialogue or negotiation. The fact of stalemate and the fact that the previous failed peace negotiations go back many years do suggest that the warring parties had realized the viciousness of violence. And yet they continued on the old ways for decades to come.
One Way to Demilitarize
Luckily, I got the chance to attend a book launch of Colombia’s refashioned communists in Medellín. The book was Petro y Francia, written by professor Juan Guillermo Gómez García. The book’s publisher was CEPDIPO, a sort of think tank of ex-RARCs. The party, Comunes, was founded in 2017 by FARC ex-combatants. Held in historic neighbourhood of Prado (in one of the two headquarters of Comunes), the event was modest and the attendees represented a balanced mix of older generation and younger people. Among the attendees, I was told, were a couple of ex-commanders and former urban guerrillas. Personally, the event filled me with a distinct nostalgia for my time with Iran’s leftists and our events back in 1979-1981. The signature leftist camaraderie and friendship, and of course unrelenting criticism of each other’s positions, filled the air. Peace Agreement allows 5 seats in the Senate for Comunes (ex-FARC) representatives. Other than that, my friends suggested, the party is too small electorally to have had a measurable impact on the electoral victory of Petro-Francia.
Still, the process of integration of ex-combatants has been anything but smooth. The provisions in the Peace Agreement, under the auspices of the United Nations, for the transition of combatants through re-education and re-socialization camps was indeed a fantastic step forward. And yet, as David Builes and Diana Jerez related, being an ex-combatant bears a stigma, and as such, after completing their reintegration process, the thousands of rank-and-file ex-combatants who return to civic life prefer to remain anonymous. There is also the problem of paramilitary that still can and do “disappear” the ex-FARC upon identifying them. This has resulted in the problem of “in-transit publics” (la publación flotante): the envisioned settlement of ex-FARCs resulted in many cases only in their unceasing displacement.
Scholarly Talks
I also delivered three academic talks. One was delivered to the “student leaders,” and this one was the probably the most attended of my talks. Many of these students were also activists of civil society and came to my talk with an abundance of concrete experiences. My talk was titled, “Imagining Nonviolence,” and I wished to speak about how difficult it is to imagine nonviolence in this violent world that we share. I spoke of the privative or negative in non-violence which alludes to something curious. Peace is the opposite of war, and both words have referents and even some substance attached to them. What is the opposite of violence, other than the negation of violence? Why is it that we cannot name the opposite of violence? There are common acts that we categorically identify with nonviolence: love, care, artistic creation, and so on. The audience’s feedback was profound: a reflection of Colombian reality. Activists are already tired, even after the Peace Agreement, of the extent of everyday violence that they encounter. They all agreed that the state was too violent, to the extent that it had an impact on the civil society’s way of thinking nonviolence. I was told that when activists in communities try to create change, violence against them only increases. Rural Colombia suffers the most, and in most cases, help (e.g., government programs) never gets there on time, if it gets there at all. A teacher spoke about the power of words that carry love and care, words that need to be spoken and taught to the young minds, if a nonviolent future for Colombia is possible.
One of the staggering things about Colombia, as I repeatedly said to my Colombian interlocutors, was the resolute and unrelenting presence of civil society and grassroots activism. Despite all adversity, despite the fact that still today the activists disappear, civil society, in its rainbow diversity, is going strong, being a continuous watershed for change. In fact, as my friend David Builes observed, Petro’s leftist government was pushed into political victory by grassroots social movements and civil society associations that collectively deemed that it was no longer possible, after the Peace Agreement, for Colombia to function on status quo. The nation needed to change the syntax of its engagement.
As the present Iranian uprising goes on (while I am writing these lines), I regret witnessing how the Iranians have been effectively deprived of a viable civil society by their theocratic-totalitarian state. The cunning ruling clerics had recognized from the beginning that civil society was, and in the long-term would stand, opposed to their power. The destruction of civil society, which had flourished admirably in the first couple of years after the 1979 Revolution, leaving behind fascinating yet unstudied and forgotten experiments, began in the 1980s with the massacre of activists of my generation and closing down on all potential organizations. The reformist president Mohammad Khatami (in office: 1997-2005) provided a space for and encouraged the expansion of the badly battered civil society by mobilizing youth in his attempt at “democratizing” the Islamic Republic, but he did not have the substance, the backbone, to stand up for the people against the ruling hardliners. Not only did he and his reformism lose momentum, they left thousands of civil society activists at the mercy of the brutal regime. Once again, civil society was crushed, and with it the hopes of an entire generation were lost.
The topic of my talk to the graduate students was the three types of violence: structural, institutional, and hubristic. The talk was meant to bring awareness to the shifting and deeply connected modalities through which violence phenomenalizes itself. I wanted to show how human action and activities are connected to violence and nonviolence. Once again, the students’ engagements were sharp and observant. A main concern that I consistently encountered in my talks was the issue of how to socialize nonviolence in Colombian society. A sense of frustration was felt, especially among the younger generation, regarding the ongoing violence despite the Peace Accord and the government’s funding of programs that promoted peace, nonviolence, reintegration, and healing, all being a part of restorative justice programs in and following the Peace Accord. The global perspective of graduate students was interesting as they connected the Colombian experience to various aspects of politics of USA, Iran, and Sweden.
My last talk was delivered to the faculty associates of Unidad. I spoke of two types of politics that I had developed in earlier works: politics of immanence and politics of transcendence. I wanted to relate these general types of politics to the Colombian experience and offer a way of looking at Colombian reality through the lens of two fundamental and opposing (and abstract) political grammars. The main critique of my model was that in Colombia any actor sees their adversaries as enemy and this has been at the cause of many conflicts. It is therefore hard to reach consensus on issues, since the latter requires negotiation. I think the key question, as an interlocutor pointed out, is whether peace can be a violent process. I believe it can. We have at least one recent theoretical study of how in the works of some philosophers peace is perceived only as an intermission between wars, and thus, it has no substance of its own.[8]
Is Negotiation the Opposite of Violence?
In “Critique of Violence” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt), Walter Benjamin speaks of negotiation as an alternative to violence. He asks, “Is any nonviolent resolution of conflict possible? Without doubt. The relationships of private persons are full of examples of this.”[9] The affirmative, for me, stands at odds with the rest of his influential thesis. He continues, “legal and illegal means of every kind that are all the same violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones as unalloyed means.”[10] Benjamin speaks of “conference” as an example of “civil agreement.” “For in it not only is nonviolent agreement possible, but also the exclusion of violence in principle is quite explicitly demonstrable by one significant factor: there is no sanction for lying.”[11] This last condition requires that, first, the agreement should stand outside of the law, and second, the nonviolent conference should be kept out of the reach of violence. The Colombian Peace Accord did indeed observe these two aspects.
While various engagements with this view, within the context of Benjamin’s own framework, are possible, and as regards my Colombian experience, it primarily strikes me as being odd for a Marxist to simply stay within the ambit of the law (-making or -preserving modes of violence) and not speak of the material conditions of the agreement. Peace Accord in Colombia was indeed a moment of nonviolence finally overriding the rampant logic of violence in the country, but one must not forget that the roots of violence, in my view and without trying to be reductive, was the continuous decline of the conditions of life for the populace and the concomitant disenfranchisement of the masses and civil society from the political process that had been, until the 2022 Petro-Francia administration, monopolized by an exclusive elite that had historically arisen to power in the process of colonizing modernization and maintaining power through imperialist connections. The Peace Accord was a momentous undertaking and it has given momentum to future peace accords. And yet, what has led to these negotiations had been militant, violent resistances to the political elite and their ancillaries in military and paramilitary. There is power-play in all negotiations. I wonder if negotiation can be deemed in its own right at all, detached from the violence and the conditions that contextualize and thus call for negotiation. There is an uncanny dependency of nonviolence on violence. After all, it seems to me, every negotiation on this scale is an outcome of violence, a blessed outcome notwithstanding. It is never too late to turn to nonviolence, although peace and nonviolence never come soon enough.
The Last Word: Social Justice
The enormous challenges Colombians are facing today have made many of my interlocutors to have doubts about the prospect of a nonviolent homeland. I noticed that the hope that was born with the Peace Accord and was then spread by the Petro government has also accentuated the expressed frustration of the people. Colombia needs peace and nonviolence, but neither can be built without addressing the fundamental issues relating to social justice: rampant poverty, the issue of land and campesinos, gendered violence and violence against the LGBTQ communities, the struggles of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian minorities for improved socioeconomic conditions, illicit drugs and criminal violence, healthcare and employment, security and safety… to name just a few. Nonviolence is not a “thing,” a package or a state of being, that can be owned and achieved. There is no permanence attached to nonviolence, because it is a process that starts with the shapeshifting violence enacting itself. Nonviolence remains the loyal companion of justice and social justice and as such peace and nonviolence only emerge through practicing them and through socializations that make such practices desirable. Addressing the issues of social justice need political will and a vibrant civil society, and Colombia is blessed to have them both at this historic junction.
I returned from Colombia with hope, a hope that was in the air, a hope that is fragile and thus, despite all adversities, needs continuous caring and love.
Victoria, British Columbia
25 October 2022
Notes:
[1] Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (London: Seagull Books, 2008), 201-208.
[2] Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey: State, Secularism, Democracy and the Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (Syracuse University Press, 2010).
[3] David E. Builes M. & Federico Vélez Vélez (eds.), Objectividad, subjetividad y vida cotidiana: A 50 años de la aparición de La construcción social de la realidad de Peter Berger y Thomas Luckmann (Manizales, Colombia: Universidad de Manizales).
[4] See Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 199-288.
[5] On the subject of “the violence that ends all violence,” I invite the interested reader to the trilogy essays relating to Walter Benjamin and RAF by Irving Wohlfarth: “Entsetzen: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One.” Radical Philosophy 152 (2008): 7-19; “Critique of Violence: the Deposing of the Law; Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2.” Radical Philosophy 153 (2009): 13-26; “Specters of Anarchy: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three.” Radical Philosophy 154 (2009): 9-24. The reference to this quote is in Part 2, p. 23.
[6] Peyman Vahabzadeh, Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites (University of Toronto Press, 2019), 74.
[7] On this particular episode of the Weather Underground, see Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (University of California Press, 2004), 173-183.
[8] Murad Idris, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018).
[9] Waltern Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings Vol 1, 1913-1926, ed. M. Bullock & M. W. Jennings (Belknam Press, 1996), 244.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.