IT has been five years since Colombia’s government signed a historic peace agreement with Farc, the communist guerilla movement.

For most Colombians, however, the structural violence of the neoliberal capitalist model has only intensified and those who revolt against it continue to be legitimate military, paramilitary and police targets.

But it is not just the far-right extremists who are to blame for the failure of the peace agreement; liberal elites, with all their hope and will, were never about achieving peace but the pacification of society under a violent neocolonial and capitalist system.

The historiography of the causes of Colombia’s violent conflict often focuses on a liberal-conservative binary, neglecting broader elements but especially that of capitalist development and state formation.

Mainstream media and academia continue to operate within the various spectrums of liberalism and conservativism — which often overlap — as the only legitimate lenses to understand the conflict.

This ideological straitjacket leaves critical research into how capitalism, imperialism and globalisation sustain violence and impede peace in the country at the debate’s fringes.

Notably, a serious consideration of alternative political ideologies is muddled as the far right wrongly labels its liberal opposition as “communist” and “Marxist” — a label that often sticks.

Indeed, aspects of liberalism and Marxism appear to coincide in Colombia’s struggle to achieve peace.

In contrast to the far-right extremists who currently hold the seat of power through President Ivan Duque, the proponents of these two progressive ideologies are invested in a peaceful solution to the decades-long violent conflict — however, there are fundamental differences in their definitions of peace.

Colombia is often championed as the oldest and most enduring liberal democracy in Latin America.

By extension, the idea of liberal peace that dominates mainstream discourse in the country can be viewed as the continuation of the ideals of its independence leaders and a key sector of the country’s political class that developed after that.

Influenced by the nascent liberal democratic projects of the US and Europe in the late 18th century, Nueva Granada’s (as Colombia was known) political leaders proposed equality as the “law of all laws.”

The influence of liberalism as a political project among the new ruling class led to the ascension of a liberal government proper in 1849 that sought to introduce structural reforms that would open political participation, freedom of the press and individual liberties, among others.

However, above all these reforms, primary importance was placed on the state’s ability to put down potential revolutionary uprisings.

The rife social unrest experienced during the state-building period, coupled with an alarm over the revolutions in Europe from 1848 onwards, meant that the liberalism that developed was in practice rather conservative and in fact, often in alliance with official conservatism.

In particular, the ideas that developed around social peace, from even the more radical liberal intellectual circles, mirrored the hierarchical and autocratic postulations of their political rivals.

Crucial to this was a theory among liberals that proposed achieving a peaceful, stable society either through material progress, the development of the forces of production, or the achievement of “moral regeneration” that would lead to material gain.

Both proposals saw the liberal democratic state as the only competent and legitimate vehicle.

The development of this ideal society was not something to be invented anew either, as they had examples of countries that had already achieved similar ideals in the region; the radical liberals (and some conservatives) in Colombia looked to the apparent material progress and social stability achieved earlier in Chile as their blueprint.

The idea that Chile had overcome social unrest — or more precisely the often violent tensions between the different social classes — was a myth.

Just as in Colombia and many newly independent nations in the region, there were uprisings, protests, social unrest and violence in Chile.

From the revolutions of 1829 and 1851 to the violent and bloody wars against the indigenous Mapuche communities, which included an active policy to attract European migration to settle the regions belonging to them, to widespread, intense protests about freedom of expression and press freedom, which led to the sentencing of thinkers and activists, Chile was hardly the panacea that Colombian liberals projected.

To use the exact wordings that Colombia’s political ideologues used: “What, then, is the cause or the secret of Chile’s present happiness? A rational constitution, which has cemented peace, which is heaven’s daughter and producer of the greatest goods.”

Chile was “prosperous and happy because it is assisted by its happy geographical situation, by the policy of order of its government and by its good mercantile laws … it is the vanguard among the nations of this section of the continent.”

What the Chilean ruling class had been able to do and what the Colombian liberal ruling class sought to apply, was a violent pacification of society in general.

Whether it was the pacification of indigenous communities, radical thinkers and writers that disrupted the imposed order, rival political projects, or the working-class movement towards the end of the 19th century, underlying this project, in both Colombia and Chile, was the striving for a free-market economy, the development of economies that were being incorporated to the developing world capitalist economy.

Clearly, then, the peace project championed by these early liberal Colombian thinkers and politicians was centred on the pacification of the population so they could impose economic and political structures that also happened to serve the interests of a minority class.

The initial liberal project and its dominance of Colombian governmental power spanned just over three decades until the mid-1880s when the conservatives took control of the government.

The liberals had to wait until 1930 to retake power and, although there were many ideological developments in the decades prior, they picked up the thread of social peace unscathed.

There continued to be an emphasis on achieving social peace through the development of the free-market economy, especially in this period, by opening unused or unproductive rural lands to the growing national export economy.

Furthermore, although Liberal president Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo (1886-1959) proposed and even attempted to implement reforms, these attempts were met with violent opposition from both the liberal and conservative Establishment tied to capital and the land-owning elites.

There are parallels in the cases of some radical liberals today who are often decried as communists by mainstream media despite their moderate reformism.

Unlike Marxists, however, who define violence as the conditions that arise out of the structures of the capitalist economic model, liberals today identify political corruption — primarily due to the development of the narcotics trade — as the leading cause of violence.

Even the most radical wing of Colombian liberalism, known as “nuevo progresismo,” does not critique the capitalist system itself but, rather, the way it is run by liberal and conservative elites.

While some of these radical liberal thinkers such as Gustavo Petro may indeed also talk about the structural causes of violence, their political proposals clearly separate them from the solutions proposed by Marxists.

Marxism, particularly Colombian Marxism, provides an alternative definition and proposal for peace in the country.

Albeit with its limitations, it can help answer some of the questions that liberalism has been incapable of resolving in its proposition of a long-lasting peaceful solution to the conflict.

To these Marxist thinkers, the violence that the capitalist system produces, notably how social classes are reconfigured and stratified due to Colombia’s dependency on the world market, must be prioritised.

Marxists in Colombia stress a definition that incapsulates violence as a phenomenon in which overt physical confrontations occur, like, say, the state going to war with irregular armed groups — but also understanding that these must always be considered in conjunction with the structural violence of capitalism, specifically its globalised neoliberal model.

The war against the guerilla movements or drug cartels, in this sense, can only be understood in the context of inherent structural designs that maintain and promote the conditions of inequality and state neglect.

In turn, these conditions are what encourages widespread violent social conflict in the form of general crime or intense social protest, as we have seen recently, as well as armed insurgencies, military and paramilitary violence, drug cartels and so on.

One of these Marxist thinkers, Juan Houghton, suggests that the end of violence and war in Colombia cannot come at any costs so that business — literal business — can continue as normal.

According to him, the modes of production in the country must finally be reoriented to serve the country’s majorities to overturn the structural violence that gives rise to more overt forms of violence.

Similarly, Daniel Libreros Caicedo and Renan Vega Cantor suggest that Colombia’s dependent economic model, intertwined with global capitalist finance, gives rise to suffocating national debt.

This, in turn, imposes political decisions around public expenditure, always at the detriment of the public.

Again, this violence of poverty, inequality and state neglect from political and economic structural designs leads to overt forms of violence.

Attempts at stable and long-lasting peace are futile without dealing with the structural conditions of violence.

When combined with alternative theoretical readings that can complement class analysis, such as the coloniality of power, Colombian Marxism provides a different and perhaps more profound idea of violence — and by extension, a more realistic vision of peace.

Liberal thinkers and politicians enjoy a palpable monopoly on peace discourse and policy in the country, counterbalanced by an equally or more influential pro-war conservatism.

The effect is that political movements, whether grassroots or tied to official parties, are often confined to liberal democracy’s ideological boundaries, allowing only minimal and blunted development and diffusion of alternative political-ideological propositions.

The traditional views that pin the violent conflict to a simplistic partisan war between these two political forces have been somewhat dismantled in recent decades, setting the stage for a more nuanced approach.

A thorough examination of liberalism and its juxtaposition to alternative ideological traditions allows us to uncover critical overlapping interests between the proponents of liberalism and conservatism, partly helping to explain the stagnation in implementing the recent peace deal.

It is beyond this binary and the liberal facade of peace that Colombians will transform society.

Carlos Cruz Mosquera is a PhD candidate and teaching associate at Queen Mary University specialising in analysing the European Union’s role in Latin America.