With the recent announcement that the Colombian government is going to begin formal peace talks with the FARC this coming October, USIP's Virginia Bouvier reflects on USIP's contribution to the country's pathway to peace. 

Much of USIP's Colombia work for the last four years has focused on generating lessons from past peace processes that might be helpful for future talks.

On September 4, President Juan Manuel Santos announced that peace talks would open in October in Oslo and continue in Havana. In the week leading up to the announcement and again on Sept. 4, Santos gave guidelines about what was to come. His first point was that this time Colombia would learn from the lessons of the past.

USIP has worked to shape a context where talking about these lessons would be possible and fruitful.  The experience of the last peace talks in San Vicente del Caguán, in particular, left all sides embittered and without a resolution to the conflict. Each side used the period to speak of peace while they prepared for war. Human rights abuses, guerrilla violence, and especially paramilitary violence soared out of control in that period. The increased violence shifted public opinion toward backing an all-out military solution.

Since the talks ended in 2002, Caguan has become a taboo subject, a symbol of a failure never to be repeated. The hopes then as now were high, and many felt betrayed by the parties' failure to finalize a peace accord. The idea of a political solution fell into disfavor in part because no one wanted to repeat the experience of Caguan.

For the past few years, I have been engaged on behalf of USIP, in helping to generate dialogues around what Colombia's many peace processes—both successful and unsuccessful—have to offer future peace talks. Our work has tried to salvage the notion that peace talks need not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Since 2010, we have supported a series of conferences and workshops on this topic with different select audiences:

In 2010, USIP supported the work of CINEP, a Colombian nongovernmental organization, to generate lessons from Colombian mediators at the local, regional, and national levels. USIP facilitated one of these workshops and conducted its own interviews on the topic with past mediators. The CINEP workshops led to the Spanish publication of a book, "Lecciones para la paz negociada: Retrospectiva histórica en Colombia," or "Lessons for a negotiated peace: A historical Retrospective in Colombia," edited by Fernando Sarmiento Santander and published by CINEP in 2011.

In November 2011, USIP convened a workshop with CINEP and the Universidad de los Andes that brought together some 30 academics for an off-the-record discussion to face down the taboos associated with Caguan. This two-day workshop helped a key group of influential thinkers prepare for making contributions to debates that had not yet begun about the experience of Caguan.

In January 2012, USIP was invited to provide guidance for a small closed meeting of Colombian policymakers and academics meeting at the new Center for U.S. Studies at the Universidad de los Andes on the role of the international community in peace processes.

The following month, on February 15, 2012, to mark the 10-year anniversary of the end of Colombia's last peace talks—and as secret talks with the FARC were about to start in Havana, Cuba—USIP, along with colleagues from CINEP, Universidad de los Andes and Georgetown University, released a document that summarized 10 of the lessons we had culled from some of these earlier dialogues. The five-page document was issued in English as "10 Years After Caguan: Lessons for Peace in Colombia Today" and in Spanish as "A los diez anos de Caguán: Algunas lecciones para acercarse a la paz." It got wide press coverage in Colombia, with all the major media picking it up, and Semana magazine reproducing it in full.

These documents were intended to help open the possibility of revisiting dialogue and a political solution in Colombia. They provide frameworks for generating the discussion and ideas that a national peace process will require; as such, they are relevant to today's discussion.

Read the "10 Years After Caguan: Lessons for Peace in Colombia Today."