In a report published on December 21, the Washington Post brought the U.S. role in the Colombian conflict into sharper focus when it revealed the role of the CIA and the NSA in the assassination of the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) commander Raul Reyes in March of 2008. According to the report, the U.S. covert military operations were funded by a multibillion dollar “black budget.”

A few days ago the Juan Manuel Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed off on the second item of their five-point negotiation program: that of political participation. This agreement, alongside the preceding agreement on the agrarian question, elevates the positive expectations that the peace process is moving in the right direction, and that prospects of a final agreement are closer than ever before.

U.S. imperialist policy is shifting toward surgical military operations, a shift that tends to perpetuate violence without addressing its root causes. This has become apparent in Colombia, a country that is attempting to negotiate a peaceful end to its almost 50 years of civil war.

To contain Colombia´s  spreading rural crisis, the government of Juan Manuel Santos, facing peasant strikers who have blocked several crucial highways, has followed a three-pronged strategy of co-optation, coercion (some of it violent) and a surface re-shuffling of government officials. Up to this point, nothing has worked as the strike enters its fourth week.

Today Monday, August 19, Colombia is witnessing a general rural strike involving most of its population—a strike revealing the deep crisis of the rentier-economic model.

The national strikes that have been going on for the last month are now increasing in rural Colombia as peasants protest the economic crisis resulting from the failure of the neoliberal economic model.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are calling for a constituent assembly to lay the foundation for a democratic system.

An agreement on the agrarian question is emerging from the peace talks between the FARC and the Colombian government which could usher in a revolution in land tenure.

The progress and a successful conclusion of the current peace talks in Colombia largely depends on a change in U.S. policy toward the Andean subregion and in Latin America at large.

This blog addresses the U.S. posture toward the peace process in Colombia, as seen by the commander of the South Command, General John Kelly.

White smoke is rising in Havana, Cuba where the negotiators of the Juan Manuel Santos and the insurgents of the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been negotiating since early last year. The two sides have almost agreed on the most important issue on the agenda: the agrarian question.

Small and medium-sized coffee growers are on strike protesting the declining prices of the coffee beans and the lack of government support.

More than 5,000 workers at coal multinational corporation began a strike demanding higher salaries, better working conditions, and effective measures to protect the environment. This strike reveals yet a much larger problem with the extractive resource industry in Colombia.

The negotiations between the FARC and the Santos government have advanced, and last week they established a benchmark for the first item on their discussion of the agrarian question.

Peace talks between representatives of the Juan Manuel Santos government and the FARC delegates resume today in Havana, Cuba.

This week a U.S. delegation is to meet with the Colombian Minister of Defense Juan Carlos Pinzón and the Minister of Foreign Affairs María Ángela Holguín. This is the most important U.S. delegation to visit Colombia since the inception of Plan Colombia in 2000 and demonstrates what is to come for Colombia within the U.S. regional security regime and global strategy.

In light of the initiation of the peace process in Colombia, the country faces a stark choice between durable peace or continous war.

The composition of  any negotiating team reveals facts about the importance of the negotiations, the nature of those negotiations, and their prospects for success. Drawing on this understanding, we can make some educated guesses about what to expect from the upcoming negotiations between the Colombian state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The secret peace talks between the Santos government and the FARC are now out in the open. It is premature to anticipate the prospects, however they are the first talks since the collapse of the last peace negotiations in 2002. I believe that the chance for success is higher now than in the 1998–2002 round. Success is by no means guaranteed, but there may be some hope.

Since July 23, workers have been on strike at Colombia's private railway company FENOCO demanding better salaries, improved work conditions, and more social investments in areas of coal production. The strike may have serious implications on coal supply and prices in international markets, considering that Colombia is among the world’s largest coal exporters.

Former president Alvaro Uribe Velez has built a coaltion of reactionary political forces and social groups to challenge president Santos's peaceful overtures and his attempt to return lands to those dispossessed by right-wing groups and the landed elite. 

Land restitution in Colombia is moving toward failure because the Santos government is committed to the neo liberal orthodoxy of agrarian development based on large scale agriculture. A law passed last year granting compensation to victims who lost their land in the conflict has given rise to opposition between activists and paramilitary groups.  

The birth of the Patriotic March movement in Colombia may usher in a new phase in the country's quest for peace and social justice. But can it harness the potential and push the country to a tipping point for peace?

According to a recent report, about 40% of Colombian land "has been licensed to, or is being solicited by, multinational corporations in order to develop mineral and crude oil mining projects." The extractive development is at the expense of food production, a profound shift in land use that puts the future of Colombia’s food security in jeopardy.

During the last week and yesterday the Colombian government carried out a pair of bombing raids on camps of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), killing over 60 guerrillas. The government offensive is strategically significant. The production of the country’s oil is largely concentrated in the region of the raids, where big interests are at stake.

The United States is changing its "high value target" military strategy against the FARC in Colombia to focus on mid-level commanders and units that are critical to the organization's financial support. 

Last Saturday Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos celebrated a media blitz in Necocli, Antioquia, when he launched his plan to return some of the lands that were forcefully taken from millions of peasants over the course of the last twenty years. The question is: Can this government withstand the resistance of the formidable forces that benefited from this land grab?

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos recently declared that his government was committed to implementing the recently passed Victims’ Law, which calls for the restitution of lands that were usurped during the last two decades to their legitimate owners. There are many obstacles, however, and it is unclear if Santos is willing to stand up to the large land owners that have caused so much suffering.

The new leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Timoleón Jiménez has reiterated the call for the urgent resumption of peace talks. However, to get there, the United States must change its position toward favoring a peaceful solution. This is the white elephant whose role has been omnipresent yet underappreciated by analysts of war and peace in Colombia.

The judicial reform bill, currently being debated in the Colombian congress, threatens to compromise the relative independence that the country’s courts have enjoyed since the passage of the 1991 Constitution. This independence has allowed Colombia to investigate more than 60 members of congress for charges of collaborating with narco-traffickers and paramilitaries.

Over the weekend, it was reported that U.S. government agencies are laundering money on behalf of narco-traffickers, and helping them to smuggle weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border. With these policies, the U.S. government is increasingly participating in a war that that is killing hundreds of thousands and eroding the prerequisites for good governance.

In May, the World Bank published its 2011 World Development Report, in which it considered civil wars and organized crime to be obstacles to economic development. However, without properly examining the problem of unequal land distribution, the recommended policies in the report will not be enough to end violence in many countries, including Colombia.

Regional elections were held across Colombia yesterday. However, at least 25% of the newly elected governors are alleged to have ties to right-wing paramilitaries. This reveals a deep-rooted problem in Colombian electoral politics in the midst of the on-going armed conflict

Among the wide spectrum of U.S. international conflicts is the U.S. war in Colombia. This war has been often understated and almost forgotten, but thanks to recently-released WikiLeaks documents the U.S. involvement in Colombia is increasingly coming to light.

The U.S. congress is expected to approve the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the United States and Colombia this Wednesday. The alarms are already sounding among many sectors in Colombia, especially the producers of rice, corn, wheat, and dairy products. 350,000 Colombian small farmers are expected to be among the first to be hit.

The United Nations Development Programme’s latest report on Colombia, released last week, reaffirmed what experts have claimed for a very long time: that the core of Colombia’s problems lies in its rural economy.

Colombia recently changed the method it uses calculate poverty. Consequently the numbers of the poor were reduced significantly. But how accurate are these statistics? And how are the chosen variables measured?

In this post, I provide the reader with some additional context to the workers' mobilization in Puerto Gaitan and the problems that multinational investments bring to bear on the country’s political economy of war.

Over the weekend thousands of campesinos, indigenous, and Afro-descendants gathered in the city of Barrancabermeja to call on the Colombian government and the insurgency to begin peace negotiations. The insurgency has expressed their willingness to talk, but the Santos government has yet to even explore the possibility. In order to understand why, we have to analyze the core obstacles that have confronted government peace negotiations with the FARC and the ELN since the mid-1980s.  

During the 1980s, Colombian narcotraffickers fought ferociously against being extradited to the United States. But lately in an unprecedented shift, narcotraffickers are changing their attitudes, and courting extradition—the sooner the better.

Colombia cultivated a special relationship with the Israeli military during the 2000s, increasing the intervention of foreign forces in its internal conflict. Now, the Israeli government is attempting to cash in by enlisting Colombia’s UN vote against Palestinian statehood in September.

Over the last decade, several studies have warned that agricultural production is one of the most vulnerable sectors in the global economy, particularly for subsistence and small farmers, who are the main food producers in the world. The upcoming U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is nothing more than the continuation of a policy that promises an economic disaster to small producers, and further opens the door to a global food crisis.

For almost a century the dominant classes of Colombia have refused to accept a meaningful land reform as a way to end the civil war. What the Santos government needs is a change of course based on the acknowledgment that this protracted war has damaged enough Colombia’s social fabric.