I was in a meeting recently with military officials and their tame human rights advisors while doing the political work which is an essential part of our accompaniment project (in my opening blog post I think I described this as being awkward and giving people a headache). In this meeting, one of the human rights lawyers took a line of attack on the Comunidad de Paz (CdP) I hadn’t come across before; “Why”, he asked me, “do they call themselves the Community of Peace?” His line of questioning rested on the assumption that by calling themselves a Peace Community, they were implying the rest of Colombia did not want peace, and if the CdP want peace why won’t they help the army achieve peace? “I am not a member of the CdP”, I answered, “nor am I its spokesperson, I accompany and support them”. However, the question made me think about the way the CdP is positioned in relation to the Colombian state and it’s armed forces, and why the state and its forces take such a hard line against what is in effect a small farming community attempting to remove itself from violence.
Legitimate Violence and Its Defenders
In Max Weber´s “Politics as Vocation”, he describes a “state” (the political unit) as defined by its monopoly on “the legitimate use of force” (i.e. a monopoly of violence). This force is carried out by state actors (Police, Military), or is sanctioned by the state (self defense laws, private security). Armed revolutionary movements challenge the power and monopoly on violence of the state through force – force deemed “illegitimate” by the state. The Colombian state actively utilizes this dichotomy of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence in its discourse over “BACRIMS”, “terrorists”, and “internal armed conflict” (just don’t call it a civil war).
A process of delegitimization happens when a state´s use of violence is widely believed to be excessive – for example when police officer Lt. John Pike pepper sprayed protesting students at the University of California Davis, there was popular and media outcry. Legal and political moves were made to portray Lt. Pikes actions as anomalous and isolated (despite widespread evidence to the contrary), therefor protecting the status of the Police as legitimate purveyors of state violence. The state’s monopoly claim on “legitimate” violence provides the basis for the state’s very claim to existence as a functioning government.
The Comunidad de Paz and Nonviolence
The CdP´s internal rules explicitly ban arms, the use of violence, or any supportive role in the violence in favour of any participant in the conflict – including state forces. In this way the CdP has established a space, both physically and figuratively, where the state’s violence is delegitimized. In rejecting the states use of force, and refusing to condone or participate in it, even tangentially or indirectly, the CdP denies the state’s armed forces, and thus its governing structures, legitimacy.
Furthermore, the rules of the CdP implicitly place state sanctioned (“legitimate”) violence on an equal plane with the (“illegitimate”) violence of the other armed actors. State discourse surrounding various left-wing guerilla movements, paramilitaries and ´bandas criminales´ is a reaction to the challenges they represent to the states monopoly on violence (and therefore political control). The CdP’s rules reflect the state’s discourse back on itself, rejecting all violence as equally illegitimate within the CdP, with implications for the legitimacy of the state itself.
Defending “Legitimate” Violence
This constitutes a direct challenge to the states existence, which I´ll admit initially sounds farfetched, but the state’s reaction to the CdP reinforces this analysis.
A common form of response to the CdP is an attempt to discredit, either through generalized denunciations questioning their motives or their status as a peaceful protest movement, or through directly linking the CdP to the FARC. An example: at a festival in San Jose de Apartadó (the town where the community were displaced from), the Mayor of Apartadó made a speech declaring, “this is the real San José, not those 40 families” (despite a large number of the attendees not actually being from San Jose, but having been bussed in to make up numbers).
A better example: the head of state, at the time President Uribe, in the aftermath of a massacre in the CdP in 2005 called CdP leaders “guerrilleros” and said its leaders, sponsors, and supporters were “aiding the FARC, and wanted to use the community to protect this terrorist organization”. Uribe has repeated these claims since leaving office.
In both these examples state officials, not even military officials, have attempted to delegitimize the CdP – its identity, as “real” representatives of Colombia (in the case of the Mayor) and as a peaceful protest movement (in the case of the President), explicitly linking the CdP to a terrorist (read: illegitimate violence) organization. Uribe’s statement attempts to undermine too the agency of the CdP, suggesting it is being unwittingly manipulated to aid a violent armed group. These statements were explicit attempts to nullify the CdP’s rules, the same rules which call into question the legitimacy of the states use of force*.
In addition to these denunciations, you have the direct use of force by the state against the CdP. This not only includes the persecution of CdP members at army roadblocks and veiled and explicit threats made by soldiers hiding their nametags and the like, although these are commonplace. More revealing is the tacit and overt collaboration between state forces and paramilitary. The 2005 massacre, the aftermath of which I referred to above in connection with ex-President Uribe, saw the slaying (and mutilation) of 5 adults and 3 children by members of the Colombian National Army and the paramilitary group the AUC. 84 members of the Army were linked to the massacre in the subsequent investigation, although tellingly only 15 soldiers were arrested, none over the rank of Captain. This is another example of the state reacting to outcry by attempting to isolate “illegitimate” violence committed by “legitimate” forces as an anomalous incident, as happened in the case of Lt. Pike.
Again, this is only one example of state-paramilitary collaboration, and other examples could be used.
When the state collaborates with non-state and officially “illegitimate” armed groups in an attempt to wipe out and terrorize the CdP, it is using “illegitimate” violence to bolster its monopoly on “legitimate” violence. And in this way, ironically, the state is diluting its claim to being the legitimate purveyors of political violence, further displaying the weakness the CdP exposes in its pacifist regulations.
Conclusions
In the end then, the frankly idiotic questions of the aforementioned “human rights advisor” employed by the Colombian National Army, has lead to the following conclusions:
- If the state’s governing structure rests on its monopoly on “legitimate” violence (following Weber), the CdP´s internal rules reject that violence as illegitimate and calls into question the states legitimacy as a governing structure.
- By rejecting all violence equally, the CdPs rules equate violence the state would deem “legitimate” with violence the state would deem “illegitimate”.
- The state responds to this by attempting to undermine the CdP in a number of ways (verbal and physical attacks, occasionally in collaboration with other groups), but in doing so only succeeds in demonstrating the falsehood of its claim to “legitimate” violence.
What I hope I have demonstrated is that the CdP, simply by existing and living by the rules it does, represents a fundamental challenge to the Colombian state and its security forces by undermining its claim to “legitimate violence”. That the state obliges and repeatedly demonstrates its precarious position in its attempts to diminish the CdP, only confirms the importance of the CdPs stand on nonviolence in Colombia. The CdP embodies an alternative, and consequently rival, political structure to the state, which explains the constant and seemingly overblown antagonism of Colombian state and military officials toward this small and peaceful community.
As I mentioned to the aforementioned moron, I am not a member, nor spokesperson, for the CdP, and I can’t imagine for a second the CdP would describe their struggle in these terms. This ramble was just an attempt to look at the oppositional positioning of the CdP and the state from a political point of view, and highlight why the nonviolent and emblematic struggle of this Comunidad de Paz is nationally and internationally important.
*Nor are these the only examples of state officials attacking the community in this way. Repeated statements by army officials of the public medium of radio here in Urabá use this line of attack, the same line that is used in private conversations with state, particularly military and police, officials regularly.
** I would be really interested in hearing peoples opinions on this argument, so please leave a comment
Links:
http://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/uribe-mancillo-honra-apartado/344798-3
All quiet on the hillside 