The peace, "bad business" for Colombia

The "war on drugs" is the "main staple" of the Colombian economy ...

 

Wikipedia defines "Peace" as "... a state, on social or personal level, in which things are in equilibrium and stability, the parts of a unit. It also refers , to the mental tranquility, of a person or society; Defined in a negative sense, it is the absence of restlessness, violence or war."

This "peace" is the favorable condition for jumpstarting developmental projects, such as attracting investment, creating jobs, infrastructure, construction, and finally, the welfare state.

 

In the Republic of Colombia, things aren’t like that. The drug war has been "vital to its economy" in such a way that anything that seeks to "eliminate the business" will be met with failure. Therefore, the powerful national and international factions, which benefit from the chaos, make everything, even the impossible, to destroy the Havana Accords of 2016. Whether it be with the election of sworn enemies of those agreements, like Iván Duque, to "dynamite" them, with the arrest, of amnestied guerrilla commander , like Jesús Santrich, under s legal subterfuges, or attempts at reform, such as the one carried by the Jurisdiction Special for Peace (JEP), which are the central axes, on which those agreements rest.

 

 

During the civil, irregular and subversive war of 50 years, the elements were put in place for the foundation of the large underground economy based on production and drug trafficking, as well as the billionaire arms trafficking on the side.

 

The scourge of drugs originated in the Battalion Colombia involved in the Korean War, from 1951 to 1955, whose soldiers "exported" to their country narcotics with which suppressed traumas, acquired during that conflict. Criminal clans, taking advantage of the chaos of the civil war, during the 70s, migrated from Chile and Peru, to settle in the jungles of Colombia, whose size is equivalent to the "Iberian Peninsula" of Spain and Portugal, operating with impunity, without being bothered, thanks to its great territorial dimension, and inhospitable jungle, outside state control.

 

These mafias, not only found an excellent refuge, endowed with natural strengths. But also a national situation which allowed them to permeate much of the Colombian social structures, whether at governmental or military levels, creating their own paramilitary groups, and even merging some of them into the guerrilla itself.

 

The drug trafficking business generates annually about 15,500 million, equivalent to 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Much more than 1%, which generates the cultivation and export of coffee, its main ruble, which by itself is more than the economies of Haiti and El Salvador, whose annual incomes are below those figures.

 

 

To these figures, we add the money generated by arms trafficking , be it for the Armed Forces, paramilitary groups, insurgent groups or drug gangs . Only in "security and defense" were invested 9,713 million dollars ( 3.1% of GDP ), during the year 2017, which means that the armed groups "outside the law" had to invest, approximate figures.

 

 According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Colombia ranks second in America, and 24 in the world on the investment in arms department.

 

 

The numbers generated by the "war on drugs" are too attractive, creating direct revenues in the millions for drug kingpins, the "warlords" of the military industrial complex, politicians. And so many thousands of millions of dollars of indirect profits  destined to small, medium and large entrepreneurs, which have a sector within their economy, with large incomes, to whom they offer their products, goods and services.

From these premises, is that all attempts to achieve peace, have "failed", as it happened with the Agreements of the Uribe (1978-1990 ), the subsequent negotiations of 1991,1994, the Caquetania Agreement (1998-2002) . Along the same path goes the Havana Agreement (2016).

 

Without counting the aspect, political "of the business". Which we will deal with in future related articles.