Mass protests against chronic state neglect in Buenaventura in 2017 paralysed the port for three weeks and only stopped after the government pledged a further $3.5 billion for local development. The FARC peace accord added to these pledges the promise of economic investments based on public consultations, as well as a voluntary coca crop substitution scheme. Successive governments have recognised the ongoing failings in the state’s approach to the Pacific, promising local development, infrastructure improvements and expanded public services. At the same time, locals have been exposed to the country’s highest rates of homicide and forced disappearances, due mostly to the city’s growing drug trade. Buenaventura port, which handles 60 per cent of goods coming into and out of Colombia, has undergone extraordinary modernisation and expansion, becoming a major source of tax revenue. The region has, however, transformed rapidly in one respect. Afro-Colombian communities, and to a lesser extent indigenous peoples, make up most the Pacific population, while the state’s reach and public services remain feeble: only 0.4 per cent of school students in the region go to university, compared to 30 per cent nationwide, and even then local public universities are oversubscribed. The Spanish colonial state, whose representatives were primarily located in the country’s Andean highlands, long neglected the Pacific and handed it over to mining interests reliant on imported slave labour. High murder rates, mass displacement or forced confinement of populations, sexual violence and the murder of community leaders show few signs of abating. A largely Afro-Colombian and indigenous population, already enduring some of the country’s highest poverty rates, has borne the cost. Since the FARC peace accord, myriad other groups – successor schisms of the guerrilla movement, the ELN, local outposts of the Gaitanista drug cartel and other criminal clans – have exploited local people’s grievances toward political elites, provided opportunities in the drug trade or other illegal businesses, and deployed raw firepower to co-opt and coerce communities. Places such as Tumaco, a waterside town in Colombia’s extreme south-west, the port city of Buenaventura or the department of Chocó have become synonymous with the grisly peaks and troughs of hostilities among armed factions.
Establishing a stable and trustworthy police and state presence, demobilising these groups, fulfilling the peace accord’s promises and enhancing educational opportunities are critical steps to stopping the treadmill pushing young Colombians into armed violence. This approach has led to the killings of several wanted leaders, but has not addressed the conditions that drive underemployed men to criminality or armed groups. For President Iván Duque’s centre-right government, the most fitting response to armed violence in the Pacific and elsewhere has been to toughen law enforcement. More than any region of the country, the Pacific states have seen the 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) sullied and spoilt by dissident ex-guerrillas, a resurgent National Liberation Army (ELN) insurgency, and a booming drug trade rooted in huge concentrations of coca and easy access to ocean trading routes.
Executive SummaryĬolombia’s Pacific is struggling to cope with conflict and violent crime festering amid extremes of poverty, squalor and neglect. What should be done? Instead of depending on a counter-insurgency strategy or a “kill/capture” policy to dismantle armed groups, the Colombian government should prioritise building a stable, trustworthy civilian police and state presence, demobilising combatants, fulfilling its peace accord promises on local development and coca substitution, and furnishing educational opportunities for local people. Why does it matter? Long one of Colombia’s poorest and most peripheral regions, the Pacific’s struggles highlight huge difficulties in improving security without addressing economic and political roots of armed group recruitment and the co-option of communities by organised crime. New and old armed groups battle for control over communities, territory and illegal business, triggering ongoing displacement and low-intensity warfare. What’s new? Violence, coca production and drug trafficking have spiked along Colombia’s Pacific coast since the 2016 peace agreement between the government and FARC guerrillas.
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