Alex Fattal addresses an intriguing question: how, in the midst of a counterinsurgency war, a government can encourage defection and “flip” enemies into informants in order to better target and demoralize an armed group. In Colombia between 2004 and 2016, a “brand of warfare partnership” was established between the Defense Ministry’s special Program for Humanitarian Attention to the Demobilized (PAHD) and the British public relations conglomerate Lowe/SSP3 to develop a “humanitarian counterinsurgency … to fragment guerrilla units by fomenting desertion through appeals to an individual’s desires.” Brand value was “predicated on the cultivation of trust, loyalty, even love” (8). Guerrilla marketing, Fattal explains, is a type of “productive persuasion” to make it appear as though the military is winning the war (15), declaring a “demobilized,” “postconflict” status years before peace talks had begun anew between the government and the FARC guerrilla in 2012. According to Fattal, “There is little ethnographic work on the formative stages of the process, when the military is cross-examining former combatants and plying them for information,” and he sets out, by interviewing the demobilized, military officers, and hired publicists, to provide details on how these programs operated and the consequences for the demobilized (23, 29).
PAHD, within which the Regional Military Intelligence Unit (RIME) operated, complemented the military’s assaults in two ways. Through campaigns of “targeted persuasion” and an “attack of the heart” (83), FARC fighters were interrogated and “demobilized”; this information would then be fed back to the brigades for more effective offensives “which in turn would prompt more demobilizations” (126). Fattal’s RIME contact explains how the program deployed “three axes of a demobilization strategy”: invoke emotional bonds between guerrillas and their families (“everyone’s weak spot”), provide gifts, and award cash. On this latter point, a Financial Incentive Unit within PAHD was guided by a 2011 Defense Ministry Directive List of cash rewards by rank: “demobilization of a rank-and-file guerrilla $278; of a front leader $27,800; of a bloc leader $83,300” (140). Sometimes these incentives worked to persuade deserters, but most often, especially with the commanders and aged veterans, Fattal admits, they could not replace ideological commitment and “love of the revolution.” Nevertheless, Fattal argues, the program was ultimately successful, a point to which I will return.
To his credit, Fattal describes how the demobilized were handed over to the civilian component, the Colombian Reintegration Agency (ACR), with its predominant USAID financing. Most defectors, young, rural peasants with no education or management skills, were expected to be transformed into mini-entrepreneurs, exposed to corrupt vendors of ACR, who led them into “vicious cycles of credit and indebtedness.” With little protection from being targeted by the FARC for their betrayal and by paramilitaries in control of dangerous neighborhoods, defectors were left in extreme poverty, encouraging their entry into violent criminality. Fattal speaks forcefully about the “results” of this program: “a dispersed set of individuals …politically paralyzed by their own act of betrayal [who] carry with them an enduring stigma” (217). Despite the failure to protect, the head of the ACR pushed this cynical ruse of “demobilization and reintegration” as a peacebuilding propaganda tool, holding conferences with international participants in those processes, encouraging them to use “the successful Colombian model.”
Despite Fattal’s rich array of descriptions and forceful critiques of the PAHD/Lowe SSP3 and the ACR, significant problems of fact and analysis remain. Fattal states that the Colombian strategy was a “conflation” of flipping the enemy to attack FARC morale in the war with “technocratic peacebuilding initiatives of the United Nations” regarding disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR). This analysis is entirely mistaken: there was no conflation because they represent two distinct approaches. Used in many counterinsurgent wars since Vietnam, DDR-inwar is a counterinsurgency strategy that utilizes psychological operations (PSYOPS), including advertising campaigns, to encourage combatants’ desertion for intelligence-gathering purposes. In this case, information by PAHD/RIME from deserters was fed back to the brigades to make military assaults more effective. DDR-in-war is also used to inculcate a sense of optimism that militaries are winning the war— precisely as Fattal describes the roles of RIME and Lowe/SSP3 (87).
DDR-in-peace, in sharp contrast, does not occur until, as the UN document Fattal refers to states, there is a negotiated peace and a definitive, bilateral ceasefire that allow for the mutual crafting between the parties of a participatory and dignified exit into civilian life. Based on this confusion, Fattal posits that “this Colombian model [of militarized peacebuilding] … contributes to a U.S.-aligned geopolitical project that seeks to overtake the United Nations’ leadership in postconflict policy” (33). The “demobilization” program was most certainly a ruse for a counterinsurgency policy “to gain intelligence that former FARC rebels provide” (30) (which is why I have insisted on placing it within quotation marks), but it had nothing to do with the voluntary, dignified exit from the war obtained through the peace agreement negotiated in Havana.
Furthermore, unlike the picture Fattal paints, the parties at the negotiating table in Havana were not “locked in a standoff on the last major unresolved point on their agenda” on DDR in March 2016 (30). Instead, negotiations with the FARC on transitional justice were going on in parallel with discussions with the government’s Technical Sub-Commission on Ceasefire and DDR-in-peace. The FARC leadership had already decided to disarm and were willing to work out the details, once a clear roadmap for their troops regarding disarmament-tied-to-judicial-security had been agreed on.
In describing the marketing of “the good life” peddled by the government to the “demobilized,” Fattal presumes that this effort was the central reason FARC combatants deserted. It is somewhat ironic that while he seems to be taken in by the PAHD program’s hype, his own six interviews with the demobilized indicate a multiplicity of reasons that influenced their decision to desert—from needing cash to gaming the welfare of ACR, having a family, taking revenge, and surviving bombings. After a long discussion of “late capitalism” and Lowe/SSP3’s fancy advertising of “Christmas campaigns” as part of its “humanitarian counterinsurgency,” Fattal’s own research does not necessarily explain why fighters deserted the FARC. RIME evaluated potential incentives to analyze how best to approach targets, and their family members, to persuade them to “demobilize.” But in the end, Fattal shows how “affect” was much less persuasive than cash; in most instances these are, in fact, descriptions of bribery. Yet the author studiously avoids this conclusion.
We, moreover, are not provided any sort of profile of the thousands who did not remain in the FARC and deserted (which can be found in documents of various government agencies but are not sourced by the author) to be able to compare Fattal’s six interviewees with the larger population of deserters. Why could they be bought and others not? Are their complaints representative of the many who left (resentment, individualism, homesickness, or difficulties in adapting)? What we do know is that of those who did demobilize, the majority were still very young (in their twenties), had been in the organization for seven years or less, and often had complaints and little commitment, either ideologically or organizationally, and thus were perhaps easier to persuade with cash incentives. The majority were low-level fighters, with very few midlevel commanders deserting. None of this is raised in Fattal’s analysis.
Nevertheless, Fattal proceeds to claim that “Colombia’s model of individual demobilization may have helped to push the FARC toward the negotiating table” (220); that PAHD was not “inconsequential … help[ing] to demobilize 16,000 FARC fighters between 2003 and 2016, cripple the guerrillas, rebrand the military as a humanitarian actor, even as it left many former combatants feeling deceived, dejected, and primed to remobilize” (xiii, 208). We are also informed that in shadowing the media director of PAHD in 2007 and 2008, the claim was made that “3,300 individual guerrillas on average” were demobilized per year (25)—not “FARC guerrillas,” mind you, eliding the fact that Lowe/SSP3’s campaign, as well as the ACR (173), included fighters from another guerrilla group (ELN) and the paramilitaries.
Additionally, because of the availability of “financial rewards” and cash payments, a number of security analysts have argued that it may be the case that a good half of those who “deserted” were opportunists and criminals who lied about their connections to the FARC to reap the financial benefits of the programs. Why should we, or the author for that matter, accept without question and without attribution either the figure of 3,300, or more critically, that of 16,000? Is it not equally plausible that the PAHD and ACR were padding their figures to justify their budgets and propaganda?
We are only beginning to understand how intelligence operates in war, and how, at times, it can become reframed and conditioned by a negotiated process of peace that ensures and oversees a dignified exit from that war. This book only partially contributes to that inquiry, as, in the end, there is little relationship between the theory and the research. Fattal made the unfortunate decision to allow a theory to trump his solid field data and thus overstate the role of marketing in shaping the war. Fancy “marketing” was clearly not the decisive medium for encouraging desertion from war, as he claims; it was severe economic need and survival, as he demonstrates. That is a great pity.
