Interview: Alejandro Eder on Colombia's Peacebuilding and Reintegration Experience
Interview: Alejandro Eder on Colombia's Peacebuilding and Reintegration Experience
A sustainable peace in the Andean country depends on demobilizing former guerrillas but also on reconciliation, said the director of the Colombian Agency for Reintegration.
“If we want a sustainable peace…we will have to pay a price, which means reconciliation.”
Over the past decade, more than 56,000 former guerrillas and paramilitaries have gone through a process of demobilization in Colombia. As the country continues peace talks with the hopes of ending five decades of armed conflict, the pace of demobilizations grows. Alejandro Eder, director of the Colombian Agency for Reintegration, spoke to AS/COA’s Media Relations Director Adriana La Rotta about Colombia’s experience with disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) and how the government shares best practices with other countries in similar circumstances. “What we have done is to identify different actors who work in peacebuilding, and have an ongoing, aggressive policy of exchanging experiences,” said Eder. What sets the Colombian case apart is that the country’s reintegration process began before the peace talks, he explains. But he also warned that peacebuilding depends on society as a whole. “If we want a sustainable peace…we will have to pay a price, which means reconciliation,” he explained.
AS/COA: We are not used to hearing about Colombia as a country that can give lessons on security or peacebuilding, but that’s exactly what is happening. When did that transformation start?
Alejandro Eder: For the past decade, Colombia has been developing skill sets that have allowed it to turn the tide on the violent situation, and those skills are mainly in the security and peacebuilding sectors. In the past few years, we’ve seen Colombian police officers and Colombian military personnel go to other Latin American countries and even some African countries to share their experience as far as security goes. More recently, in the past five years we’ve started an aggressive South-South technical cooperation strategy through which we share our DDR know-how with other countries that are going through similar processes. And that has been quite effective.
Watch clips from Eder's February 14 presentation at AS/COA, when he shared his experience on demobilization. Here, he gives a rundown on Colombia's DDR by the numbers.
