The Battle for Peace: The Long Road to Ending a War With the World's Oldest Guerrilla Army by Juan Manuel Santos

Author:Juan Manuel Santos [Santos, Juan Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Biography
ISBN: 9780700630660
Google: EQPbzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 56200564
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2019-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

* An animal similar to the capybara, but smaller, also known as lapa or guartinaja, to be found in the Vaupés jungle. It is an endangered species, and its flesh is very much appreciated by consumers.

LESSON 4

It’s the Peace, Stupid!

In the course of the 1992 presidential election in the United States, which was being fought between the sitting president George Bush and the governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party’s campaign adviser, James Carville—whose advice I also had the privilege of receiving in my 2014 campaign, completely ad honorem, for he is a good friend—coined a phrase that ended up being a symbol of the winning strategy that brought Clinton to the presidency. The phrase was “It’s the economy, stupid!” This catchphrase served to remind Clinton and his campaign team, and his opponent too, that over and above ideological discussions or debates on foreign policy, the population’s main concern was economic, since this was a time when the pockets of American families had been hard hit by the 1991 recession, a fact that had a negative effect on the popularity of President Bush. In other words, the message is: focus on what’s really important.

This recommendation can be applied to the agenda of a peace process. When negotiating and designing the agenda, you must keep in mind that the objective is to end the armed conflict and to establish the rules and conditions that will make that possible. That’s how clear and simple it is. A peace process cannot pretend to change a country’s political and economic paradigms or modify its system of security, because if you do that, you will have brought about not a peace process but a revolution by decree.

It is to achieve profound changes of that kind that democratic processes exist. The essence of a peace process is to lead a group that has illegally taken up arms against the state to demobilize, put aside their weapons, and be incorporated into democracy, where they can defend their ideas and proposals in the political arena on a par with any other legal party or movement. It’s a question of exchanging bullets for votes, of replacing the brutal power of arms with the peaceful force of the word.

And so, whenever someone wants to include in the agenda for negotiations the big questions of the economy, politics, security, or international relations, it’s a good idea to bring that person down to earth by insisting, “It’s the peace, stupid! Let’s concentrate on stopping the war, and then, in democratic forums, we’ll begin to debate the other problems.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in popular sayings. And one very common saying is “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

What must be avoided are maximalist agendas that, more than an agenda for negotiating the end of a conflict, seem like a government program. In fact, the agenda for the Caguán process was based on a program for government approved by the Farc in 1993. It encompassed so much, it achieved nothing.

To expect

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