Insights into negotiation from Colombia's peace talks with Farc

Many people - from corporate litigants to divorcing couples - have had to sit down to negotiate with adversaries they might once have wanted to blow out of the water. For Sergio Jaramillo, the contrast is not entirely metaphorical.

Four years ago, when this polyglot classics scholar turned security expert was Colombia's vice minister of defence, the army was trying to blast Farc guerrillas out of their jungle redoubts.

Now, as high commissioner for peace, Mr Jaramillo sits across a table every day from those same Marxist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, trying to make peace. It is a lesson in how to negotiate with bitter opponents.

"You need to be incredibly aware and lucid. So it is useful sometimes to read challenging things that keep you sharp, like difficult poetry, Rilke or Mallarme," says the 48-year-old. "It sounds funny but it helps you find new angles."

Finding new angles is one of Mr Jaramillo's specialities. Dressed in brogues and an Oxford shirt, he has the otherworldly air of an Oxbridge don, Indeed, he is a classical Greek, philosophy and philology graduate of Cambridge, Oxford and Heidelberg universities.

But neither Mr Jaramillo nor his task are otherworldly. "Peace," as Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian president, has said, "is harder to wage than war."

Several attempts to end Latin America's longest running insurgency, which has claimed over a quarter of a million lives, have failed.

Success would transform Latin America's third-biggest economy and benefit the region. Both Havana and Caracas encouraged Farc to the negotiating table. Ending its involvement in drug smuggling could slow the flow of cocaine through neighbouring Venezuela.

Mr Jaramillo is widely credited as the intellectual author of the negotiating strategy. Enrique Santos, a prominent journalist and the president's brother, has called him, "our secret weapon".

"First of all, you have to have a plan. You need from the very beginning to have the clearest vision as possible of where you want to get to," he says. But then "you need to be quite flexible tactically, but firm strategically".

This approach, keeping your eye on the main prize, emphasises the difference between negotiation and debate. The former is about "trading concessions", as Henry Kissinger once put it, to reach common ground; debate, by contrast, is about winning outright.

Preparation is essential. Backchannel talks began three years ago, following initial contact with Alvaro Uribe, the previous president. Mr Jaramillo was then vice minister of defence.

"As Sun Tzu would say, study your enemy," he says. "I had studied the Farc quite thoroughly and spoken to hundreds of demobilised members, so I have a reasonably good idea of what makes them tick . . . they are very cunning and wily negotiators."

Wide reading, and lessons from successful peace processes in South Africa and El Salvador, have helped; so too advice from other peace negotiators, such as Jonathan Powell, the British civil servant who led the Good Friday agreements in Northern Ireland.

Colombia's breakthrough came in September 2012, when the government and the Farc announced after seven months of secret talks that they had agreed a road map.

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"Talks-about-talks are in some respects more important than talks because that's when you are defining the playing field," says Mr Jaramillo. "It was incredibly tough."

The format has since followed that common to other difficult negotiations. They would take place in a "hothouse", far from prying eyes and media attention, in this case Cuba.

Whatever took place outside would also not affect the talks inside; an agreement often stretched to breaking point, as in April when Farc troops killed 11 soldiers and President Santos was booed at public events by Colombians who felt he had kowtowed to the rebels. To establish trust, there would also be full transparency with full confidentiality.

And, "nothing would be agreed until everything was agreed", a process which allows both sides to explore possible compromises without commitment until they saw the final picture.

Mornings are spent thrashing out points around a table, breaking off after lunch to prepare for the next day. But quasi-backchannel conversations remain important too, with pairs or trios breaking off for informal talks. Mr Jaramillo calls this the 2+2, or 3+3 process.

Mr Jaramillo exudes a calm authority in keeping with one of the basic rules of negotiation, which is to never lose your temper, except on purpose. But at times, in conversation, he slips into a brooding mood.

The complexities of his role are tortuous: there are the negotiations themselves; also domestic political considerations and international human rights law and diplomacy.

"It's about patience and perseverance," says Mr Jaramillo "We work all the bloody time."

In many ways Mr Jaramillo was built for the role: as a PhD student in Germany he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eastern bloc's transition from communism. An ancestor, also a philologist, wrote Colombia's 1886 constitution, which endured a century.

Today, he sometimes thinks wistfully about returning to the classics. But for the moment there is unfinished work to do.

"The difficulty now is that we are truly facing the endgame, everything is very complex . . . It is a struggle."

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