COLOMBIA: Rebranding the road to peace?
When the three top honchos of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (the AUC) spoke to the Colombian Congress recently, they ditched their camouflage fatigues for business suits -- standard procedure for men of the gun trying to show that they're walking the road to peace.
It was a clear sign that the AUC -- which made its mark by massacring civilians and trafficking drugs -- is engaged in ''rebranding,'' the ad-industry term for a corporate overhaul when the brand is losing its appeal. The AUC rebranding scheme, however, may be less about building support and more about AUC members justifying their careers to themselves.
In early June I watched one of the paramilitary comandantes who later would appear in Congress do a little test-marketing of the new brand.
Iván Roberto Duque, 45, was wearing standard field attire: fatigues, and a pistol on his hip. But this veteran of the far right was talking like someone in the midst of a political makeover.
First, the setting: Duque was meeting with a half-dozen nonparamilitary community leaders. The encounter took place at a a plastic picnic table under tarps strung between trees in a clearing in the hill country of Colombia's mid-Magdalena River valley. Some 30 paras stood guard, wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles. A couple of troopers with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and one with a heavy machine gun rounded out the unit.
Departing from the standard paramilitary line, Duque described his forces as fighters for social justice in the countryside -- a cause that the government was betraying. ''This so-called democratic peace,'' he said referring to the government's peace initiative ``can be seen only in the streets and on the highways where the bourgeoisie travel. I fear greatly that we are going toward a process in which weaponry counts more than schools and hospitals.''
The subtext to those comments was that Carlos Castaño, who had been the public face of the AUC, had vanished in April after urging the AUC to cut ties with the drug trade. Castaño had dismissed Duque's views as trafficker propaganda, Duque disclosed.
Except for a couple of remarks about battles with ''the subversives,'' meaning the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Duque could almost have passed for a FARC commander, so insistent was he on his role as the peoples' champion. More precisely, his talk carried echoes of the rhetoric of Colombia's second-biggest guerrilla force, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
Emulating Che Guevara
The tilt is pronounced. Duque's reverence for one of modern Cuba's official icons wouldn't have been out of place at an ELN war council. Like virtually all paramilitaries and guerrillas, Duque has a war-name -- in his case, Ernesto Báez de la Serna. Ernesto, of course, was the first name of Che Guevara; de la Serna was Guevara's maternal surname. This is no coincidence.
If Duque was looking for a response to this from the community leaders, he didn't get one. They had asked for the meeting not to discuss political theory but to request that Duque and his men back off from imposing themselves on local politicians and on civilian society in general. How widespread is that control? One resident of Aguachica told Du que: ''The people need to be allowed to speak.'' (All the civilians asked that their names not be printed).
Duque, a lawyer and politician before taking up arms, listened attentively. He said that the paramilitary division that he commands had given up trying to control elections. But he wouldn't stop from exercising his influence on mayors and other officials. ''This is a war whose essence resides in the conquest of civil authority,'' he said.
Colombia's warring parties can rebrand their organizations endlessly. Civilians won't be able to breathe freely until the killing stops. No one has yet been able to rebrand war into peace.
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