Adam Ward, Director of Studies, IISS
We would now like to make a start on the Third Plenary session of the day. In this Third Plenary session we want to turn to a question that we feel ought not to be neglected in what otherwise has been a fairly state‑centric approach to our discussions so far, namely the nexus by which state and non‑state actors work upon each other in international security affairs; the place that non‑state actors are taking in the emerging dispensation of redistributed power that we have been talking about; the evolving capacities of non‑state actors and the sophistication and intricacy with which they pursue their objectives – their modus operandi in other words; and the complex relationships that they have with states. Sometimes they are lone adversaries of a state, sometimes they are proxies of a state, and indeed in some cases, they begin to acquire some of the attributes of states in terms of the breadth of their agendas and the missions and activities that they prioritise for themselves.
In this session we want, in the first instance, to focus on two case studies: the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, FARC, and then Hezbollah in the Middle East. In those discussions, we want to possibly tease out some broader implications concerning these very specific cases and what we can learn from them. To do this, I am very happy to call on two key members of the IISS research staff who are leading projects at the Institute. I will invite Nigel Inkster to make his way to the podium.
Nigel will talk about the Latin American case. Nigel Inkster is Director for Transnational Threats and Political Risk at the IISS. He joined the Institute after a full career in the British Secret Intelligence Service - MI6, if you like - latterly holding the position of Assistant Chief and Director of Operations.
Nigel Inkster, Director for Transnational Threats and Political Risk, IISS
Thank you, Adam. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As an Intelligence Officer, I made a long career out of bringing bad news to policymakers, and I am not about to depart from that practice today. As Adam said, I want to talk about the relationship between FARC - a classic Marxist‑Leninist revolutionary group which has been seeking the overthrow of the Colombian states since the mid‑1960s - and the impact that this organisation has on the regional security of the Andean region. To start with a statement of what that renowned British hotelier Mr Basil Fawlty would call ‘the bleeding obvious,’ counterinsurgencies are lost or won in the countries where they take place, but the international dimension of these insurgencies can often be very important. In such conflicts, both sides will typically seek to convince others of the rightness of their cause, to discredit the other party, and to seek political and material support from wherever they can. FARC is very much not an exception.
For the last decade at least, FARC has had a unified strategy aimed at securing external support for its cause. It has done so on a global basis. The results have been variable and have undoubtedly often fallen short of the expectations of FARC’s leaders. But I would argue that they have not been insignificant, at least in terms of the impact that they have had on international opinion.
But the main focus of this activity has been directed towards Colombia’s principal neighbouring states of Ecuador and Venezuela. In the case of Ecuador, to limited effect; but in the case of Venezuela, what we have witnessed - certainly since the accession to power of Hugo Chávez in 1999 - can be characterised as nothing less than an official policy of state support for FARC.
This relationship is long-term, resilient and strategic in nature. It is a relationship which has carried significant political risks for Hugo Chávez, both domestically and internationally, and he has managed it accordingly, proving often willing to put relations with FARC on hold for reasons of expediency. But looked at over the course of time, this relationship has grown in depth and substance. Whenever Chávez has publicly urged FARC to lay down their arms and abandon the armed struggle - as he has done on a number of occasions - the record suggests that he has only ever done so in order to deflect international pressure, and that privately he has continued to provide consistent levels of support for the movement.
So what has been the nature of this support, and what strategic effect has it had? Firstly, and obviously perhaps, is the question of safe havens. FARC were in the border regions of Venezuela before Hugo Chávez came to power, and Venezuela’s security forces have little option but to achieve a pragmatic modus vivendi with the presence on their frontier regions which was disruptive and destabilising. But since the arrival of Chávez in power, FARC have been able to use Venezuelan territory safely and with minimal constraints. They have been able to use the territory as a refuge from Colombia’s security forces; to provide their operatives with health care and R&R; they have been able to use Venezuelan territory as a corridor through which to redeploy their forces to different regions of Colombia; they have used Venezuela to export cocaine, import weapons, and to meet a range of third parties, including international humanitarian organisations and foreign terrorist organisations such as the Provisional IRA and ETA.
Again, the record suggests that Chávez has only ever taken cosmetic action against FARC. The recent Colombian demarche to the Organization of American States has been instructive in this regard because there is no evidence that, to date, the Venezuelan authorities have taken any action against a FARC presence in Venezuela, which amounts to some 1,500 operatives - about a fifth of the total strength of the movement - deployed around some 40 locations within Venezuela. But that statistic, significant though it is, does not really begin to convey the political and wider strategic importance of Venezuelan territory for the FARC.
Then there is the political dimension. As I mentioned before, FARC have worked tirelessly to seek international legitimacy, to de‑legitimise their opponent, the Colombian state, and to promote conflict between Colombia and its neighbours. Since the mid‑1990s, FARC have had an officially sanctioned border policy, the main import of which is that FARC forces will not engage in actions against the security forces of neighbouring states in which they happen to be located as a way of burnishing their image in these countries and encouraging the governments of these countries to adopt a position of formal neutrality, promote the recognition of FARC as an officially recognised belligerence, and to oppose Colombian objectives.
Venezuelan territory has been a key factor in efforts to exploit a peace process which, in my view, never was, insofar as all the evidence suggests that the FARC leadership were never serious about a political settlement, and only ever envisaged displacing the Colombian regime by force, and the associated humanitarian mitigation of the conflict, including humanitarian exchanges, in which Hugo Chávez sought vigorously to involve himself.
FARC’s efforts in this regard have not always been successful. But again, looked at over the course of a period of time, relations between Colombia and Ecuador and Venezuela have undergone a fairly continuous process of deterioration, and FARC can undoubtedly claim its share of the credit for this. Then thirdly, there is the question of material aims, specifically money and weapons. Here, FARC have not been notably successful. During the 1980s, they made systematic efforts to persuade what they believed would be ideologically like‑minded regimes – the Soviet Union, China and North Korea – to provide them with significant quantities of material and money, and none of this came to anything.
The same is broadly true of Venezuela, whose support for the FARC has been much more in kind than in cash. But in 2007, it does appear that Hugo Chávez promised the FARC financial sponsorship on a scale which had the potential to alter the strategic balance within Colombia. It does not appear that this sponsorship has yet been provided, but equally it has not been withdrawn; it appears still to be on the table. It is hard to say in categorical terms to what degree various kinds of Venezuelan support have affected FARC’s military performance, but I would argue that the totality of this support has been significant.
Since 2002, former president Alvaro Uribe’s Plan Patriota, which, stripped to its essentials, is a classic clear, hold, build counterinsurgency strategy, has significantly reduced FARC’s strength in Colombia and has pushed the organisation to the periphery. Since 2008, FARC have suffered severe setbacks in the form of two secretariat members and other senior operatives killed or captured, and the humiliating circumstances in which the Colombian armed forces achieved the release of Ingrid Betancourt and most of FARC’s other high-value hostages. Much residual FARC operational capacity is now focused in the border areas between Colombia and Venezuela, in particular in the department of Arauca. I would argue that continued Venezuelan support for FARC constitutes a moral boost which is encouraging the organisation to persist in its objective of securing a military victory and discouraging it from thinking of serious engagement in a politically negotiated solution. So Venezuelan support is going to be important in terms of whatever end game there might be for all of this.
Militarily, the likelihood of FARC obtaining game-changing capabilities such as MANPADS, which would erode Colombia’s air supremacy, is not high, but equally it is not inconceivable. The gains of Plan Patriota are very real. The security situation in Colombia is much improved, but these gains are still fragile, potentially reversible and critically dependent on the maintenance of air supremacy. Much of rural Colombia remains socially fractured, militarised and permeated by a drugs economy. So with Venezuelan support, FARC continues to pose a strategic threat.
What is in all of this for Hugo Chávez? It is strategy, but it is not just strategy. There is evidence that Chávez has a genuine, almost emotional fascination with FARC as the one Latin American revolutionary movement which has survived the end of the Cold War. But there is also a very real perception of threat from domestic and international conspiracies involving the United States and Colombia. There is, in my view, no question that Hugo Chávez really believes in the possibility of a US invasion and sees FARC as one of a range of asymmetric capabilities upon which he would rely in that event. Politically and ideologically, the two are not perhaps as closely linked as it might at first appear, but there is a degree of political approximation, particularly around a shared narrative of the need to emancipate Latin American states from the influence of foreign imperialist powers and neo‑liberal economic policies. Whatever Chávez may have said in relation to Colombia over the years, I think the evidence suggests that he has harboured malign intentions towards Colombia since the beginning.
At the moment, the Colombian government is in a relatively good position. Levels of security are palpably much improved. The Colombian population, to the extent that they were ever enchanted with FARC, are manifestly disenchanted with them now, sceptical about the possibilities of a political resolution of this conflict, and seemingly willing to assume the high costs of continued counterinsurgency operations which leave Colombia with a defence budget consuming some 4% of GDP. 11 September 2001 has also had an impact, as a consequence of which FARC was proscribed internationally as a terrorist organisation. But FARC has done the one thing that insurgencies absolutely have to do. It has survived in the hope of better times to come, and events could yet turn again in its favour.
Within Colombia, the security gains of Plan Patriota are beginning to bump up against diminishing returns, as they were sooner or later bound to do, and the Colombian government has been acutely aware of the need to turn its attention away from security towards economic development. This has been very much the focus of the newly inaugurated President Santos’s approach. As memories of 11 September 2001 slowly start to fade, there has to be a risk that FARC begins to regain some of the international credibility that it has either lost or, in the case, I would argue, of Western Europe, never entirely lost. There are parts of Western Europe I think in particular which have proven very susceptible to the FARC version of this conflict as a struggle against a repressive right‑wing oligarchy.
This, I think, all raises questions about the likely depth and durability of the current rapprochement between Colombia and Venezuela that has taken place since the accession of President Santos.
We have been here before. President Chávez started out his relations with two former Colombian presidents – Andrés Pastrana and Alvaro Uribe – in much the same way, and these relationships rapidly deteriorated in the face of events. While President Chávez may want to seek a better relationship with Colombia to help rescue an economy which is manifestly in serious trouble, I see no evidence to suggest that he will, in the process, abandon support for FARC. Indeed, it is noteworthy, as I mentioned earlier, that in spite of the very compelling evidence presented at the Organization of American States, no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against FARC within Venezuela.
As an intelligence officer, I was also told the one question you always have to answer is, ‘So what?’ and I will end here with the so what. We have a situation where a military victory by the Colombian state is made much harder by the fact that FARC continues to benefit from significant state havens and other forms of state support. It seems inconceivable, given the deficit of trust, that the United States might in the foreseeable future be able to play any kind of role in the resolution of this conflict. This then, to my mind, raises the question of whether Latin America will be able to step up to the plate and deal with it itself. Many of you will have read this week’s Economist, which talks about the emergence on the world stage of a very different Latin America from that of recent popular imaginings, and that is true. But at risk of committing lèse majesté by appearing tocriticise a venerable institution like the Economist, I would suggest that the one thing missing from an otherwise very impressive coverage was the question of a need for Latin America to start to develop quickly the kind of embryonic security capabilities that we have seen emerging through UNASUR and the Military Council. It seems to me that therein lies the challenge as to how and whether this conflict can be resolved. Thank you.
Adam Ward
Nigel, thank you very much indeed. I think Ed Carr, the foreign editor of the Economist, is in the audience somewhere. I will leave it to him to decide whether the reference to the Economist was a compliment or a slur and you can take it up with Nigel outside, as it were.
Nigel Inkster
I apologise unreservedly.
