On August 11th 2001, three Irishmen were arrested in Bogotá’s international airport. Suspected of training left-wing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels, their trial, flight, and subsequent conviction made headlines in Ireland, but was soon forgotten in Colombia as the country’s bloody internal conflict dragged on.
Almost 15 years after the arrest of the Colombia Three, and after numerous failed efforts to end the war, a peace deal between the government and FARC now seems to finally be around the corner.
Keeping up with the Colombian media has at times been quite interesting as an Irish person living here. All sides in the conflict have looked to examples of successful peace processes worldwide, with Northern Ireland being one of the most commonly referenced.
In early 2014 Martin McGuinness visited the country and met with president Juan Manuel Santos. Many other representatives of both the unionist and nationalist communities have also come to give their perspectives. The FARC has often spoken favourably about the power-sharing structures of the Good Friday Agreement. Even the main opponent of the peace process, former president Alvaro Uribe, has used the Northern Irish peace process as part of his rhetoric, claiming the British government never offered the IRA terms as generous as those being offered to the FARC.
However, the Colombian conflict is very different to our euphemistically-named “Troubles”. It began as a struggle by left-wing peasants against a corrupt government, a cause very different to the ethnic and sectarian violence which took place in Ireland.
Despite its bloody history of political strife and drug-trafficking, Colombia has never experienced serious violence on national or religious lines. This might explain some of the wildly inaccurate reporting I’ve seen in the Colombia media, from descriptions of Bertie Ahern as prime minister of Northern Ireland, to claims of a war between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, or that the majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted to secede from the UK, it seems no error is too ridiculous for Colombian journalists.
This ignorance goes both ways however. The Colombian peace process has received amazingly little coverage in the international media, and most Irish people I speak to seem completely unaware of it or of anything in Colombian history they didn’t see in the heavily-fictionalised Netflix series Narcos.
I was guilty of this myself, having known little of the conflict in Colombia or the peace process before moving here two years ago. Living in Bogotá, I am also very far-removed from the mostly rural violence, and it took me a long time to appreciate how entrenched the war is in many areas of the countryside.
While there have been many problems along the way, the peace process has mostly been successful, and Northern Ireland has come a long way since 1998. The continual references towards it in Colombian politics and media are testament to this.
Right now, it remains unclear whether the country’s own peace process will be a success; many plan to vote against the agreement and many supporters are not confident it will last. A previous round of peace negotiations in the early 2000s ended in complete failure. Nevertheless, I, like many others, hope that next year will see a lasting peace and end the violence which has plagued this beautiful country for so long.
