A tender way to treat armed militias

As violent organized crime spreads more widely across South America, events in two countries – Ecuador and Colombia – illustrate how the region has become a laboratory for divergent approaches to peace and security.

In Ecuador, voters overwhelmingly endorsed expanding military and police powers in a referendum last week to quell the country’s worst cartel-fueled violence in a generation. A few days later, in neighboring Colombia, something more modest happened. The country’s new attorney general suspended arrest warrants for a handful of paramilitary commanders due to their agreement to talk peace.

Asked by the magazine Cambio Colombia if she agreed with easing up on violent guerrilla leaders in exchange for dialogue, Luz Adriana Camargo said, “It has nothing to do with whether I’m open to it or not. ... It’s the law that permits that.”

Ms. Camargo’s response underscores an important distinction separating the two approaches and the futures they portend. Latin America is the world’s most dangerous region due to cartel and gang violence. It has 9% of the global population but one-third of the world’s homicides, according to the World Bank. Kidnapping and extortion are on the rise – and affecting a wider stretch of places.

The trend is driving a turn toward increasingly militarized solutions. El Salvador, for example, has incarcerated some 75,000 people – nearly 2% of its population – in recent years on suspicion of being involved in gangs. Such mano dura (“strong hand” in Spanish) tactics are gaining regional popularity by all but erasing murders. Children can play in public parks again.

Yet such measures have eroded democratic norms like a presumption of innocence for the accused. Most of those incarcerated in El Salvador have not been formally charged. A new law allows 900 suspects to be tried at once. In Mexico, meanwhile, deploying the military to combat organized crime has had the opposite effect. From 2018 to 2022, according to national statistics, arrests fell by an order of magnitude while cartel activity expanded.

In Colombia, by contrast, exchanging the threat of arrest for dialogue is a key part of the government’s painstaking strategy of negotiating peace simultaneously with some 20 armed factions to end 60 years of conflict. That process, known as Paz Total (“total peace”) and launched less than two years ago by President Gustavo Petro, has been marked by reversals and unintended effects. But a key distinction lies in its emphasis on both empathy and the rule of law. It depends on building communities and the democratic institutions that they require, such as courts to resolve land disputes.

The strategy’s first example of “restorative incarceration,” launched earlier this month, shows how. In exchange for admitting guilt for violent acts and seeking forgiveness from victims and the families, 48 military and former guerrilla leaders are now serving “sentences” by planting trees and helping heal the communities they once dominated through fear. “We’re going to sow life to try to make amends and build peace,” Henry Torres, a former army general, told Le Monde.

Few observers think Mr. Petro will achieve his goal in the single four-year term allowed by the constitution. But he may be laying a foundation. Peace requires patience, said Juan Manuel Santos, a former president who negotiated a 2016 peace accord with Colombia’s main guerrilla faction that still serves as a template for Mr. Petro’s broader peace plan. “You need to convince, to persuade, to change people’s sentiments, to teach them how to forgive, how to reconcile,” he told The Harvard Gazette.

Or, as Colombia’s new attorney general put it, “our mission will be ... a mission for the dignity and well-being of our people.”