A Relational Approach to Peace Initiatives in Conflict situations

The tool presented by CINEP will be applied to a specific peace initiative. This initiative is the ’’Educational Citadel’’, a project promoted by local community leaders, teachers, and several partner organizations in the 7th Commune of the city of Barrancabermeja, in the Magdalena Medio region of Colombia.

The “Educational Citadel” was founded in 1996 as a grass-roots initiative to gather communities, schools, partner organizations, the private sector, and State actors; at the local, regional, and national level. This was done with the goal of constructing a public high school in the 7th Commune, given that local youth were one of the groups most affected by conditions of marginality and violence. Although creating the high school has always been the project’s cornerstone, the “Educational Citadel” was conceived of as an integral peace initiative with the intention of offering a range of benefits to the local youth. This initiative consisted of academic and technical training, protection from violence, the implementation of community-strengthening efforts, and promotion of economic projects. The objective of these trainings was to strengthen the community’s capacity to negotiate with State actors, the private sector, and the international community. The initiative will be discussed at length in one of the steps of the tool being applied.

Step 1, 3, and 4 of the tool have been applied by CINEP to obtain an account of the context, results, and of the overall “Educational Citadel” initiative, independent from the perspective of local actors. Step 2 was carried out through a participatory analysis with those involved in the initiative that enabled the identification and understanding of key relational episodes that could not have been carried out without the voices of those involved.

General Context:

Magdalena Medio has historically been a peripheral region, having only recently – albeit partially– been inserted into the institutional and economic structures that define the more ’integrated’ territories of the Colombian Nation-State. Peasants fleeing from exclusion and violence colonized regions like Magdalena Medio throughout the first seventy years of the 20th century. In the mid 1960s, Marxist-Leninist guerrillas like the FARC and the ELN emerged in these agricultural frontiers, and maintained strong territorial and social control for nearly three decades.

The city of Barrancabermeja is the so-called capital of the Magdalena Medio. It is a geopolitically important city with complex cultural and sociopolitical characteristics, which has grown around the oil industry and is the location of Colombia’s main refinery center. Made up of two different worlds – that of formal laborers in the oil industry and that of slums of displaced families coming from diverse rural areas – Barrancabermeja’s northeast has been characterized by a precarious State presence. The location of this region on the edge of the State has led to conditions of marginality, a history of armed actors, and a rich tradition of civil and political activism.

Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune, one of the areas most affected by poverty and violence, has approximately 20,000 inhabitants. It was established through land occupations between the 70s and the 90s, and influenced both by political parties and the guerrillas. Its inhabitants have both built ties with ,and suffered at the hands of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, and State forces.

Throughout the Colombian armed conflict, in its different historical and regional manifestations, there have been:
– Massive and systematic human rights violations
– Infractions of international humanitarian law by all parties involved (guerrillas, paramilitaries, State forces)
– High levels of penetration of the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres by armed actors.

Step 1: Description of the moments of conflict and the types of violence found in Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune (with historical perspective):

With regard to the armed conflict, Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune has experienced different moments of conflict:

Throughout the 80s and earlier due to being completely marginal to the city’s institutional life and economic growth these neighborhoods witnessed the phenomenon of non-ideological armed gangs who frequently murdered community members under the code they imposed.

During the first half of the 90s this part of the city was controlled by the ELN and FARC guerrillas, during which time the State police and army had only a precarious presence. Although the guerrillas’ territorial and social control did infringe on the communities’ liberties and rights and threaten their lives, these armed actors also contributed to community goals such as land occupation.
All in all, while episodes of direct violence did take place, one could say that between the 80s and 90s the armed conflict in Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune went through a phase of latency dominated by social conflict within the context of State abandonment, followed by a phase of undisputed control by the guerrillas.
The “Educational Citadel” initiative, founded in 1996, emerged during the transition between this phase of latency and the escalation of conflict.
Through a series of massacres beginning in May of 1998 right-wing paramilitary groups disputed the control of the 7th Commune for approximately three years, seeking to expel the guerrillas and impose a new cultural, socioeconomic and political order in the entire Magdalena Medio region. This means that between 1998 and 2000 paramilitaries and guerrillas fought openly, murdering or displacing community members who they regarded to be sympathizers of the other side. Due to the complex ties between the guerrillas and the community (ties which in some cases were a survival and not just an affinity to the guerrillas’ political project) and the paramilitary’s community infiltration strategy (inducing sympathizing families from other regions to move, rallying community members that had been particularly affected by the guerrillas, supporting economic and social projects, etc.), this dispute took a heavy toll not only on active combatants but on the community as a whole.

As a result between 1998 and 2000 the 7th Commune experienced an escalation of the armed conflict characterized by appalling levels of human rights violations and infractions of humanitarian law. This dispute resulted in the takeover and transformation of the city of Barrancabermeja by paramilitaries.

From 2001 onward Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune has been tightly controlled by paramilitary groups, a phenomenon tolerated and even supported by different State actors. As with the guerrillas’ control in the 90s, the paramilitary order has both deeply harmed some community members (civil and political local leaders in particular) and been in the interests of others (performing ‘social cleansing’ tasks that have ‘resolved’ theft, fostering commerce, and allowing for the presence of State military and civil institutions). An emblematic example of the paramilitary order between 2001 and 2006 was the blatant involvement of police forces, oil-industry employees, and a large percentage of community members in the theft and trafficking of gasoline by means of damaging the oil pipes.

Since 2001 the 7th Commune has experienced a de-escalation of conflict, in the sense that the coexistence and control negotiated between paramilitary groups and State forces made the use of mass violence unnecessary, although violations of civil, political, economic, and social rights continued to be rampant. However, in addition to the territorial and social control they enjoyed, paramilitaries continued to enforce sporadic and selective violence against community members. In other words, this relative de-escalation of conflict was not the result of peacemaking (a negotiation between the different actors of conflict), but rather of the consolidation of the ‘order’ imposed by one or more of the parties involved. This low-intensity phase of the conflict took place as the National Government imposed a ‘post conflict/ transitional justice’ agenda. This involved a Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintergration (DDR) process and legal framework that has been very limited in its ability to guarantee victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition guarantees amidst an ongoing armed conflict.

In the last five years an incomplete demobilization process has produced an atomization and reconfiguration of paramilitarism. This was the result of the negotiations between the National Government and most of Colombia’s paramilitary commanders (2003 – 2006), which did not include dialogues at the regional level. In places like Barrancabermeja this has led to disputes between neo-paramilitary groups over the drug and gasoline traffic circuits and the persecution of ex-combatants who do not want to be ‘recycled’ into the war. Communities suffered from an increase in human rights violations and infractions of humanitarian law committed by State forces, especially between 2006 and 2008. In the last couple of years the inhabitants of places like Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune have suffered from a resurgence in violence against specific social sectors, victims and human rights activists among them. Therefore one can identify a new phase of escalation of conflict in the last five years.

It is essential to underline that in each moment of the armed conflict (latency, escalation, de-escalation, escalation) between the 80s and the present, structural, cultural, and direct violence have always been present in Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune.

A second point worthy of emphasis for the purposes of this case study, is that local youth have perhaps been the sector of the population most vulnerable to these three types of violence. Up until 2003 the lack of opportunity for either education beyond primary school or employment, combined with a context of structural, cultural, and direct violence, meant that the youth of the 7th Commune were particularly vulnerable to becoming victims of or involved with armed actors and drug trafficking circuits.

Finally, it is key to recognize that although the inhabitants of the 7th Commune have been harmed by all kinds of armed actors, their relationship to the latter has been complex. This is due to the deep penetration of cultural, socioeconomic, and political life that the armed actors have achieved. The above has taken place in a context, like many others in Colombia, in which the process of State-building has been late, and mediated by de facto powers such as patron-client networks and irregular armed actors, which has resulted in negotiated forms (between institutional and non-institutional actors) of control.

Step 2: Identification of actors and key ‘relational episodes’ regarding peace efforts

The following are the main actors involved in the social and armed conflict taking place in the 7th Commune over the past three decades:

Of the above actors, only political parties have had influence in the 7th Commune since the 70s.

The following are three episodes, identified by local actors, whose effects on the relationships between the different actors holding a stake in the 7th Commune have been particularly pertinent to peace efforts:

In 1996, a group of Colombian and foreign entrepreneurs engaged with different leaders of the 7th Commune as part of their plan to build a gas-energy transformation plant (which was to be operated by the company MERIELÉCTRICA) in the area. Given that at the time the 7th Commune was still heavily controlled by the guerrillas, and State forces had a very limited action capacity, the investors knew that supporting community goals would be crucial to ensuring that the inhabitants would support and protect the energy plant. Inside the community there were diverse opinions on the issue, while some celebrated the possibility of a large company investing in the community and becoming a source of employment, others (representative of the radical political culture that has historically characterized Barrancabermeja) were critical of the intervention of profit-seeking foreign capital in the Commune. Despite having enough local support to carry on with the construction of the energy plant, MERIELÉCTRICA nevertheless decided that having the community as an ally was not enough to guarantee the safety of the American engineers that were needed for the installation of the plant. Therefore they hired a private security company, and planned to build military bunkers along with making an agreement with the Colombian Army in order to help protect the American engineers. This proposal frightened the inhabitants of the 7th Commune who knew that this would unleash an all-out war between the guerrillas and the State soldiers in charge of protecting the Americans.

The PDPMM entered the 7th Commune that same year with the goal of offering local youth education and training that would protect them from violence and strengthen the local community’s capacity to negotiate with the State and the private sector. They therefore offered to act as a mediator between the different stakeholders behind the energy plant, State actors, and local community leaders.

Throughout a year-long series of negotiations facilitated by the PDPMM and the local Church, MERIELÉTRICA and its associates agreed not to build military bunkers or have private and State armed actors protecting the company’s personnel. Instead, in addition to hiring locals for the blue-collar jobs in the plant, MERIELÉCTRICA, along other private actors, agreed to help finance the construction of a public high school in the area, something which had already been established as a priority by the community. The Colombian Ministry of Defense, which owned some land in the 7th Commune, agreed to donate the land for the high school, whilst the municipal government consented to guarantee its operation. In turn, although this was not explicitly stated, the community leaders and local priests took it upon themselves to speak to guerrilla commanders and convince them to allow the construction and implementation of the energy plant, due to the benefits that this would bring to the 7th Commune. Throughout the community had to secretly negotiate with the Army on the one hand, and the guerrillas on the other. In general terms, all parties fulfilled their promises, which allowed both for the operation of MERIELÉCTRICA and the construction of a public high school (the cornerstone of the ‘Educational Citadel’ project, which will be discussed shortly) in the 7th Commune.

As mentioned above, the dispute between guerrillas and paramilitaries over places like Barrancabermeja’s 7th Commune took the lives of dozens of its inhabitants and ripped apart its already fragile social structure. Through infiltrating the guerrillas’ ranks and a community tired and hurt by a decade of strong guerrilla control that had not resulted in significant improvements of living conditions, the paramilitaries were very effective in penetrating the 7th Commune. The tactics they used were a combination of the unabashed use of violence and a very accurate understanding of the inhabitants’ susceptibilities.

In the context of massacres, persecution, and forced displacement that enveloped the 7th Commune for more than two years, the relationships between the different actors in the local community were deeply transformed. In contrast to the ‘order’ that comes when a particular actor holds hegemonic control over a community, the brutal takeover of Barrancabermeja by paramilitaries gradually reconfigured local power relations and collective vision. People seeking vengeance, survival, or the possibility of improving their life conditions turned in their neighbors to the paramilitaries as guerrilla militants or supporters; teachers who had been trying to protect their students from being targeted or recruited by the guerrillas saw them become paramilitary commanders; and the police and army, present in the Commune’s life as ‘forbidden’ actors were now collaborators of the armed actor in control.

In addition, where the guerrilla-imposed social order had been characterized by an aversion to official institutions (civil and military) and to types of ‘progress’ associated with capitalism, the ‘paramilitarization’ of the 7th Commune was different. It involved negotiated control between the State and the paramilitaries, a fostering of commercial life and other activities associated with ‘economic growth’, and a declaration of war against all individuals and organizations representing ‘alternative’ socioeconomic and political interests. At the cultural level paramilitaries imposed conservative social values; their ‘social cleansing’ project resulted in the persecution of drug addicts, indigents, prostitutes, homosexuals and youth involved in theft or belonging to gangs and ‘urban tribes’, etc.

Since 2001 Barrancabermeja’s peripheries have been controlled by paramilitaries, with whomthe inhabitants have developed relationships as complex as the ones they built with the guerrillas in the 90s.

This means that the 7th Commune like many places in Colombia, is a place where the lines between State and non-State control; illegal and legal economic activities; and the public vs. the private sphere are rather blurry. It is frequent to encounter perpetrators who have also been victims and vice versa, and community members who have suffered from all kinds of violence but also are linked to and legitimize the ‘social orders’ imposed by different armed actors.

By the mid 1990s, when both the PDPMM and MERIELÉCTRICA entered the 7th Commune, the local community had already defined the establishment of a public high school as a priority. Following the 1996-1997 negotiation that guaranteed the site of the school, the neighborhood presidents and other community leaders active in this process created a “Steering Committee” to be the driving force behind the implementation of the school and integral initiative that would come to be known as the “Educational Citadel” project. Between 1997 and 2000, the “Steering Committee” consisting of grassroots leaders with various relationships to the different armed actors (opposition, victimhood, complex ties, etc.), worked together with a CINEP consultant and the PDPMM on the different aspects of the “Educational Citadel” project (education, economic projects, health, culture, sports and recreation, environment, and communication).

The context of complex relationships between armed actors and the community described above the “Steering Committee” was one of many local actors that entered into deep crisis during the paramilitary takeover of the 7th Commune. With some of its founders displaced from the Commune due to alleged ties with the guerrillas, the “Steering Committee” was fractured due through a lack of trust amongst its founders and towards actors such as local youth and teachers.

Later on, in 2000, given the emphasis that the CINEP consultant placed on community organisations and empowerment, the “Steering Committee” played a very important role in the elaboration of the “Community Educational Plan”. This plan, according to the needs identified by local leaders and the PDPMM, determined that the “Educational Citadel” project was to be structured along three strategic lines: education, the strengthening of the community’s social fabric, and productive economic processes. It also contained a pedagogical model for the desired high school, although none of the committee’s members had formal experience in education. In contrast, the directors and teachers of the various primary schools in the 7th Commune were not involved in the construction of this plan, which alienated the educational sector from the “Educational Citadel” initiative in its first years. Nevertheless, this plan quickly became obsolete as a law passed on the national level that same year (Law 715) demanded a general process of educational restructuring throughout Colombia.

In 2000 the PDPMM also obtained international funds for the building of the Citadel’s community center. Unfortunately, it was the funder’s and the PDPMM’s criteria rather than the community’s that determined the construction of the building.

In parallel to the “Community Educational Plan”, the “Steering Committee”, supported by CINEP and the PDPMM, worked on the elaboration of a “Partial Plan for the Recognition and Territorial Distribution of the 7th Commune”. This plan was intended as a public policy proposal on issues such as the use of land, roads, housing, and public services, including the local high school, and a first step towards the legalization of the Commune, established through illegal land invasions.

Overall the year 2000 was a time of generalized human rights violations and social crisis that engulfed the entire 7th Commune and all invested actors. There was institutional crisis afflicting the PDPMM and CINEP; fragmentation between the “Steering Committee”, its different advisers, and other local actors; and a crisis within the local educational sector due to a national education reform. All of this occurred within the context of the brutal guerrilla – paramilitary dispute over this and many other places in Colombia.

Beginning in 2001, local schools spearheaded the process of planning the 7th Commune’s public high school according to the demands of Law 715, while the “Steering Committee” remained crucial in the community – PDPMM – private sector – State negotiations that were still needed to make the “Educational Citadel” a reality. Meanwhile, a new CINEP consultant tried to alleviate tensions between the purely educational and the community interests behind the different actors involved in the “Educational Citadel” initiative.

In 2003, thanks to the lobbying done by the “Steering Committee” and its allies, the “Magdalena Medio Educational Citadel School’’ was approved by the regional government despite the municipal government’s attempt to impede it. Shortly afterwards, the adoption of the “Partial Plan for the Recognition and Territorial Distribution of the 7th Commune” as a municipal public policy finally secured the local government’s commitment to the “Educational Citadel” high school.

However, with the school’s political and economic viability assured, the “Steering Committee” once again lost ground in the “Educational Citadel” initiative, given that the PDPMM hired a technically qualified team to design of the school and plan the Citadel’s community-strengthening and economic projects.

In any case, by 2004, the newly founded high school was in operation with approximately 500 students. Today, the “Educational Citadel” is one of the top two public schools in the city of Barrancabermeja, with about 3,500 students. However, since the high school was approved in 2003, the “Educational Citadel” project, intended as a peace initiative has become almost purely educational. This has meant that the “Steering Committee”, with its aims of working on the six fronts mentioned before, no longer has a clear role in the project. This is because issues pertaining to the school are dealt with by: its own personnel, the municipal government’s secretary of education, and a Jesuit inspired school which since 2003 has been the project’s advisor at the pedagogical level.

Step 3: Account of the main results of the “Educational Citadel” peace initiative (1996 – 2010)

The following can be highlighted as the “Educational Citadel’s” main results:

The 1996 - 1997 negotiations not only helped prevent an all out war in the 7th Commune, but established a dialogue between very different sectors around a hitherto marginal community. This dialogue allowed all parties to identify the implementation of a public high school in the 7th Commune as compatible with their interests. The investment of different actors in the 7th Commune has given it a visibility which has made the State and other actors more accountable to its inhabitants.

The 1996-1997 negotiation gave rise to the “Steering Committee”, a local actor which despite its limitations and conflicts with different actors is a group of empowered community leaders with significant capacity to negotiate with diverse kinds of actors. The “Steering Committee” has been an interlocutor with a variety of actors that hitherto either ignored or imposed their will in the 7th Commune.

Besides the “Steering Committee”, the “Educational Citadel” initiative has united various youth, women’s, and other grassroots organizations around culture, family well-being, and urban agricultural projects among others. However, these have reached only a small percentage of the 7th Commune’s general population and have had a rather limited impact in terms of building a ‘Culture of Peace’ due to lack of interest and resources; a weak social structure; and persistent conditions of marginality and violences.

The “Educational Citadel” school offers a high quality academic and technical training, and athletic and cultural activities to around 3,500 high school students. Thanks to the construction of this local public high school the number of students of the 7th Commune enrolled in the official education system has doubled in the last six years.

The existence and quality of the high school is of course the most tangible achievement of the “Educational Citadel” project. It has made local youth less vulnerable to armed actors, guaranteed their educational rights, and given them different types of skills (cultural, productive, political). In doing so, it has increased their possibility of building life paths separate conflict and marginality, giving them the possibility of becoming citizens able to construct the community and the State that they desire.

Step 4: Analysis of the pertinence, integrality, and limitations of the “Educational Citadel Initiative”:

Using the previous steps of describing the conflict, identifying and analyzing key episodes with the local peace initiative, and accounting for the initiative’s main achievements, all within a relevant historical context has helped us establish valuable elements to evaluate the “Educational Citadel’s” pertinence, integrality, and limitations.

Given that the “Educational Citadel” emerged right before one phase of maximum escalation of armed conflict in the 7th Commune, and has recently experienced another it is important to look at the initiative’s impact on the containment of direct violence. On this front, one can say that the “Educational Citadel” has had a significant impact in the protection of local youth: being enrolled in a context-sensitive educational system has made local youth less vulnerable to persecution and/or recruitment by armed actors.

In contrast, although the “Educational Citadel” initiative brought greater visibility to the 7th Commune and strengthened the relationships between its inhabitants and various power holders, this achievement did not translate into a containment of direct violence against the community. This can be seen in that in 1996-1997 community leaders successfully negotiated with several armed and unarmed actors, but that this was followed by three years of atrocious levels of violence perpetrated by paramilitaries and guerrillas. Likewise, the increasing institutional presence in the 7th Commune over the last decade has not significantly protected the local community from the resurgence of direct violence that has taken place the last five years.

Looking at the de-escalation phase of conflict experienced in the 7th Commune (2001-2005) allows one to see that this decrease in direct violence was not the result of peacekeeping or peacemaking efforts, but rather of the consolidation of control by one armed actor. The phases of latency (pre guerrilla-paramilitary confrontation) and de-escalation of the armed conflict have corresponded to the hegemony of an armed actorrather than through the absence of armed coercion or changes made by armed parties interested in exploring dialogue.

This means that one can affirm that although the “Educational Citadel” has involved several set of successful negotiations for the implementation of the project, these negotiations have not been “peacemaking” actions as none of them have involved intentions to put an end to the armed conflict. Instead, these negotiations have sought to advance socioeconomic goals desired by the community with the consent of the armed actor(s) in control.

This leads us to examine the “Educational Citadel’s” peacebuilding advances, of which the main one has been of course the fulfillment of the educational rights of around 3,500 local youth and the improvement of their opportunity to living in dignified and non-violent conditions. In contrast, it is not clear that the initiatives that have been articulated around the “Educational Citadel” involving different community members have had a significant impact on the structural and cultural violence that has afflicted the 7th Commune since its inception. The “Educational Citadel” initiative has definitely contributed to the empowerment of community leaders and the strengthening of their capacity to negotiate with the State and other actors resulting in the 7th Commune becoming less marginalized over the last ten years. However this fact has neither substantially improved the living conditions of the majority of the local population, nor changed the fact that armed actors and other un-democratic powers such as patron-client networks and trafficking cartels continue to have a strong influence on the local collective imaginary, socioeconomic and political life.

In other words, the “Educational Citadel”, despite its efforts to promote a culture of peace, has not been able to substantially alter the relationships between the local community and other de-facto powers that were described in the first step of this tool. Instead, direct, structural, and cultural violence continue to be pervasive in, and even partially legitimated by a significant percentage of the 7th Commune’s population. The latter can be seen in the fact that the vast majority of local inhabitants continue to have strong ties to neo-paramilitary groups, vote for political candidates associated with paramilitarism or corrupt patron-client networks, be involved with drug or gasoline trafficking circuits, and approve of or personally display violence as a means of responding to inter-personal or social conflict.

In the eyes of the CINEP consultant that advised the project between 2000 and 2002, the initiative’s impact regarding the promotion of a culture of peace will only be substantial in the long run. This is through the view that if there is a possibility of reducing the level of cultural violence amongst the population of the 7th Commune it lies in the future children of the students currently enrolled in the “Educational Citadel” school.

Finally, a word is due on how the “Educational Citadel” been implicated in the complex relationships between armed actors and the local community. The PDPMM decision to work with any actor interested in partaking in the “Educational Citadel” initiative is a reflection of one of the institution’s convictions: that to re-build regional societies and States in conflict-torn areas implies working with all actors having a stake in that particular context (inhabitants, State actors, private sector, churches, all kinds of NGOs and international organizations, etc) in order to reach agreements that allow for more inclusive social orders. The PDPMM decision is preceded by the acknowledgement that the “the community” is not a monolithic, passive entity purely victimized by vertical violence, and that, as explained previously, many of its members partake in complex relationships with armed actors that go beyond victimhood (family or friendship ties, economic relations, being part of the group’s ‘social base’, etc.) The PDPMM deciding to work with community leaders and other actors with complex relationships to armed groups regardless of the former’s willingness to work on altering their relationships with the latter is in contrast to organizations that decide to work only with those community actors that have outright resisted the armed actor’s control and only participate in the imposed social order in self defense. This approach has meant that the PDPMM was able to foster relationships amongst diverse actors and promote projects that would never have been achieved by a radical civil resistance approach. However it has also severely limited the “Educational Citadel” initiative’s capacity to offer community members incentives to transform their relationships with armed actors and overcome the cultural violence that that has permeated their lives.