AMY GOODMAN: Greg, the significance of the former defense minister of Uribe, now president of Colombia, Santos, saying he wanted to improve relations with, well, Venezuela, also Ecuador?
GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, well, I think that he’s caught between a rock and a hard place between pressures from within Colombia that have mitigated against establishing good relations with Venezuela. I mean, if we step back and we look at the beginning of this conflict back in 2007, 2008, Chávez actually had good relationships with Uribe. He had offered to mediate, and he was mediating the release of hostages held by the FARC. There was incredible pressure placed on Uribe within Colombia by the military, by the oligarchy, and by the United States, not to allow that to go forward, not to kind of showcase Venezuela’s role as a mediator. And he broke relationships with Venezuela, and Venezuela was kind of left hanging out there. And that’s where all the accusations came from, over exaggerated intelligence reports or falsified intelligence reports about Venezuela’s relationship with the FARC, and relations deteriorated. And these are both pragmatic men, Santos and Chávez, in their own way, and I think that they have a lot invested in trying to reestablish good relations. We’ll see how long it lasts.
AMY GOODMAN: What would you say is the legacy of Uribe, and if you do hold out hope for Santos?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, that’s the question. Uribe’s legacy is basically four things. One is massive civilian deaths—14,000, 15,000 civilians killed during the war, thousands killed under this false positive in which—practice, in which the military would dress up civilians as guerrillas in order to raise the body count in terms of how many guerrillas were killed. They just found a mass grave of 2,000. There’s massive internal displacement. Colombia has the highest internally displaced population in the world, over two million. It’s an enormous tragedy. But more important, more structurally, is, Uribe presided over what could be understood as the kind of normalization of paramilitary politics, in which paramilitaries weren’t so much vanquished as they went legit. They took over local municipal governments. They moved into particularly biofuel production. There’s been a massive land grab under Uribe. Ten million acres of land, half of the arable land in Colombia, is now seized paramilitary land. That’s not going to change.
This is the kind of legacy that Uribe has left to Santos. And Santos, the question is if he’s going to continue it or if he’s going to try to change it. The big challenge for Santos is that the Uribe model is unraveling. People hold up Uribe as a model, or the Plan Colombia as a model, of success, for having brought down the FARC, having brought down violence in key urban cities, like Bogatá and Medellín. Over the last year, year and a half, that’s been unraveling. There’s more FARC activity. Crime in Medellín has gotten—homicide rate in Medellín has skyrocketed. And the hope that—or the attempt to normalize paramilitary politics by bringing them into government on the local level, that’s also unraveling. There’s factions within paramilitaries. They work with what’s called “mini-paramilitaries” that are spinning off, that are now fighting with each other over spoils. And Santos, this is the kind of mess that Santos has inherited, when, outside, politically, it has a reputation as being a success, but internally, there’s a lot of strains.
