The Peace Processes of Colombia and El Salvador: A Comparative Study

Colombia and El Salvador, two Latin American countries, have developed similar counterinsurgency processes and started similar processes of peace negotiations between the insurgent armies and the forces of order. One peace process was concluded in 1992, when El Salvador ended the war through a political solution (Peace Accords). Salvadoran insurgent forces agreed to demobilize its army and to become a legal political party, while the government agreed to make changes in the social and political structure. Colombia, after forty years of guerilla warfare and after failed peace talks during the last decade, is still trying to set conditions to gain peace through negotiations. The thesis, while contrasting both general contexts, emphasizes their differences to explain the success of the peace process in El Salvador and the failure in Colombia. After comparing the political actors involved - the military and the guerrillas, studying the intensity of the conflict, and analyzing the outcomes of the different peace processes, we arrived to the conclusion that the Salvadoran model of negotiation cannot be applied entirely to the Colombian case. Similarly, no government should try to copy the Salvadoran recipe as the remedy for their own social and political problems. Any simplistic interpretation should be avoided because it could lead to fallacies that could generate dangerous interpretations by the key actors in the process.Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'The Peace Processes of Colombia and El Salvador: A Comparative Study' with ISBN 9781423570189 and ISBN 1423570189.