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Alejandra
Gonzalez was born in Medellín, a city north-west of Bogotá,
and is a PhD student at the National University of Ireland,
Galway, where she is involved in research and lecturing at the
Centre for Innovation & Structural Change
(CISC). [7] She comments that in many countries in Latin
America the presence of Irish people was extremely valuable.
The Irish Republicans' struggle for a united Ireland has been
a source of inspiration for the organisations involved in the
often suppressed socialist movements in Latin America. With
regard to alleged connections between FARC and the IRA,
Gonzalez believes that the image of Colombia in Ireland was
negatively affected by the affair. She considers the 'Bring
Them Back' [sic] campaign to have emphasised Colombia's
most serious problems in the eyes of the general public in
order to build a strong case for their campaign and to enhance
their arguments. Nonetheless, she does not think the
reputation of Latin America in general has been damaged by the
event.
Caitríona
Ruane is Sinn Féin's spokesperson on Equality, Human Rights
and Women. She is an elected member of the Northern Ireland
Assembly for the South Down constituency. She has experience
of working in Latin America since 1983 and has chaired the
Bring Them Home campaign since 2001. Ruane confirms that Sinn
Féin has extensive links with political parties and social
movements in Latin America, and points to the relationship
between Britain and Ireland, historically that of coloniser
and colonised, suggesting that it is therefore qualitatively
different to that between Ireland and Latin America. In
reference to immigration, Ruane recognises some
institutionalised resistance to immigrants expressed in new
Irish legislation. However she claims that Ireland has
traditionally been a place which welcomes and assists new
arrivals. Regarding the trial of the three Irishmen accused in
Colombia, she asserts that only the reputation of the
Colombian government, army, police and prison service, along
with elements of the judiciary, has been damaged by this
episode. From her own experience she has a positive view of
the people and the cultures of Colombia, but criticises the
abuse of authority by the rich and powerful.
It seems to
me that the FARC-IRA affair represents one of the lowest
points in the Irish relations with
Colombia
- and perhaps with Latin America - since the massive
enrollment of Irish mercenaries almost two centuries ago to
fight against Spanish colonial forces in Simón Bolívar's
independence armies. In the present-day situation, the
immigration controls in place for any visitor to Ireland are
far more rigorous in the case of Colombian citizens than those
of most other countries. The FARC-IRA affair did not help to
ease those measures and did not contribute to facilitating
free travel for Colombians. At the Colombian embassy in London
I was informed by a spokesperson that owing to this affair the
reputation of their country in Ireland has been negatively
affected. [8] Conversely, since October 2001, the Irish are
the only Europeans who are required to obtain a visa to enter
Colombia.
News, Facts and Perceptions
Media
reporting of the alleged FARC-IRA connection frequently comes
across as a dichotomous discourse in which every player or
episode is invariably consigned to one or the other side of a
right-wrong divide. As a result of this, an astonishing number
of print media and their online pages seem to have opted for
one or the other position without further consideration of the
numerous complexities of the situation.
One example
is in the headlines, which are important in providing a brief
summary of the news that follows, and indeed in attracting the
audience's attention. The latter aim is often attained by
paraphrasing literary texts or works of art - the subtitle of
the first section of this article, 'Gangs of Colombia', is
symptomatic of this trend, playing on the title of the film
Gangs of New York - or by making an association with a
popular historic event. News items relating to the FARC-IRA
affair frequently include the title 'Colombia Three', thereby
establishing an immediate association for Irish, and to a
lesser extent UK audiences and readers, with the 'Birmingham
Six' and the above mentioned 'Guildford Four'. All of
these prisoners were proven to be innocent people framed by
various members of the police force in the UK and imprisoned
for offences and crimes which they did not commit. I could not
access information on how the headline 'Colombia Three'
originated and became popular among journalists and others
writing about this matter, but it is clear that it is not a
neutral heading. [9] Another rather clumsy headline used by
some print media is 'The Colombia Connection'
which recalls William Friedkin's film The French Connection
(1971), inherently linking violence and drug trafficking with
the South American country. Likewise the campaign name 'Bring
Them Home' mirrors a number of anti-war crusades in
the US.
Elaborating
on the information available relating to alleged links between
FARC and the IRA would be misleading given the difficulties in
locating reliable sources. In my analysis of newspaper
sources, I covered the period from August 2001 to January 2006
inclusive, and a variety of national newspapers in Colombia,
Ireland and the United Kingdom which offer online websites.
Very few of the features published on this matter that I was
able to study can be characterised as providing neutral
information, the balance being unambiguously against the
accused men in the case of the majority of Colombian and
British media, and vaguely in favour among their Irish
colleagues. Ostensibly, journalists writing these articles did
not have recourse to the trial documents and rulings, most
notably absent were references to the text of the charges.
Simplify and
exaggerate is often the mantra when information is scarce and
contradictory, when the subject is difficult to explain to a
broad audience, and when prejudices are widely rooted in
public opinions. Used by management counsellors,
pseudo-scientific strategists, and self-improvement book
authors, this recipe is also a favourite among the press and
politicians to reduce complex information to simplistic
statements that are difficult to dispute. News items on the
FARC-IRA affair tend to pigeonhole the three accused men,
their lawyers, Sinn Féin and even their country of origin
together with the Marxist FARC rebels, Cuban and Venezuelan
governments, international terrorist networks,
drug-traffickers, warlords and arms dealers in Colombian
jungles. Prevalent on the other side of the divide are the US,
British, Irish and European governments, in co-operation with
the regular Colombian forces, law enforcement organisations
combating drug and arms trafficking, the international war on
terror, and even paramilitary groups such as AUC.
[10]
Another
over-simplified taxonomy divides the players in this affair
between those belonging to the supposedly civilised world of
North America and Europe and representatives of the perceived
untamed societies of
Latin America. This opposition, redolent of Oliver Goldsmith's
The Traveller's prejudiced depictions of continental
European peoples, is given further contours by the reality of
Latin America's Europeanised elites who regard native cultures
as backward and barbarous. An appalling example is Mario
Vargas Llosa's recent article about successful political
movements in
Bolivia, Peru
and Venezuela, in which the aspirations of the indigenous
people are seen by the Peruvian-Spanish author as racist,
nationalist and militarist. [11] Even more outdated and
entirely useless are 'left' and 'right' categorisations,
which, even acknowledging the use of 'centre' and the more
nuanced 'centre-left' and 'centre-right', should
be limited to their French Revolution context. Nevertheless
they are employed with staggering frequency to classify
people, political movements, media and even entire countries
and continents.
How should
one approach the analysis of the FARC-IRA affair? In view of
these prejudiced categories and descriptions, the likelihood
of the publication in our lifetimes of a complete, accurate
and candid account is doubtful to say the least. If the
objective is to achieve a simple elucidation of the affair
without falling into the trap of creating a new conspiracy
theory, perhaps it is only our children, or even
grandchildren, who will benefit from the neutrality more
easily afforded by a historical perspective. Writing the
history of current events is never an easy ride, and it is a
task most reviled by historians. Reliable documents are in
short supply or difficult to obtain. Factual or in-depth
research is often resisted by the actors in the affair, most
of whom have a vested interest in the story. When 'good' and
'evil' are identified, people tend to justify themselves, and
their susceptibility is intense.
With these
potential pitfalls in mind, instead of trying to ascertain the
real facts of the story of the three Irish men in Colombia, I
endeavoured to expose some prevalent perceptions that are
deeply rooted in the mentalities of the people of Colombia and
Ireland. As a rule, according to Tzvetan Todorov, we tend to
think in a binary mode, liberal/conservative,
idealist/realist, left/right, active/passive, and so on.
[12]
It is not necessary to reject one or the other term in these
oppositions, but rather this very way of conceptualising the
problem.
There may be
other ways to classify the behaviour of all the players in
this puzzling affair. Human beings are morally undefined, good
and bad at the same time. Instead of the many manifestations
of the opposition between 'us' and 'them', I propose to use
Todorov's qualifying categories - democratic and totalitarian
- to regard the events in a different manner. We are all
democratic and totalitarian, Latin American and European (and
African and Asian), left- and right-wing, moral and wicked.
But when we preach as high-priests of morality we do little to
ameliorate sectarian divisions.
As Renaud says in his other song 'La ballade Nord-Irlandaise':
Ce sont les hommes pas le curés / qui font pousser les
orangers. [13]
Edmundo Murray
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Johanna Cortés Nieto, Maria Alejandra
Gonzalez-Perez,
Claire Healy, Catherine Jennings, Fergal McAuliffe, Jorge
Restrepo, Caitríona Ruane and Edward Walsh, for sharing with
me their valuable information and views. I am also thankful to
Jonathan McCormick and the CAIN Web Service (Conflict Archive
on the Internet) for their authorisation to reproduce the
mural photographs. |
