Are These People Worth Talking To?

A man examines destruction in a rural school, allegedly
destroyed by the FARC, in Caqueta. (Foto: El Tiempo)

Yesterday, the FARC guerrillas blew up a schoolhouse. A few days ago, they murdered several policemen, decapitating them. Before that, they violated their own self-declared Christmas truce.
I have one simple question about the ongoing negotiations with the FARC guerrillas: Can we trust these characters enough to talk to them?

We've long known that the FARC were vicious and unscrupulous. They've kidnapped children, murdered and displaced civilians and planted landmines. (I've talked to campesinos who've suffered all of these rights violations at the FARC's hands.)



In this cartoon from El Tiempo, a FARC leader exclaims:
'We left more than 60 children without their school?
We must provide those children with an alternative.
Recruit them!'



But, as El Tiempo columnist Salud Hernandez pointed out recently, the Colombian government isn't negotiating with the FARC because the government admires the guerrillas' economic ideas, human rights values or plans for agricultural development. The government is talking to the guerrillas for the same reason that a family talks to their father's kidnappers: the FARC are holding hostage Colombia's prospects for peace and economic development.

Still, bargaining with such a vicious group may be a necessary evil to end the armed conflict which has cost so much money and so many lives.

But if the guerrillas are so unprincipled (or have so little control over their own fronts) that they won't honor any agreement, then what's the point?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours