Crimes Of War Project > Magazine > The U.S. Foments Colombia‘s War

A Spiraling Devastation
By Karl Penhaul

August 2001

The kids who run barefoot down "Hope Street" have bloated bellies from malnourishment and are covered in sores. It’s the same on "Victory Street" and all the other dirt tracks that criss-cross a sprawling shantytown known as Nelson Mandela City, on the outskirts of fabled Cartagena de Indias. Downtown Cartagena, a Spanish colonial-era walled city, is the jewel in Colombia’s tourism crown. But none of the Europeans and North Americans who still come to the region’s sun-soaked beaches, or the handful that fuel the booming trade in child prostitution, ever venture into the shanties.

Almost all of Nelson Mandela City’s 50,000 inhabitants have been forced to flee from their homes in rural backwaters for fear of being caught in the crossfire of Colombia’s increasingly dirty war. Nobody here cares too much about the politics of the conflict. Some have been driven out of their homes by right-wing paramilitary gangs, others have been forced out at gunpoint by one of the country’s two main Marxist guerrilla forces.

"When the gunmen arrive you feel defenseless and can do nothing but bury your dead. Afterwards, you feel fear and cowardice," said peasant José Vicente Ortiz, who has been displaced twice. Like his new neighbors, he now lives in a shack made of cardboard, black plastic, and a tin roof.

Colombia’s urban middle and upper classes are also prey to the country’s 37-year-old civil conflict, which has been complicated by drug mobs and professional criminals. Last year 282,000 Colombians left the country and did not return--fleeing economic stagnation, booming unemployment, and the intensifying guerrilla campaign of extorsive kidnap.

"This is like a mini-Chechnya, a war of the mad, the demented, and the psychopaths," said one policeman.

ROOTS OF CONFLICT

Colombia, with a population of 40 million, has been steeped in war for almost 50 years, making the exact roots of the violence sometimes hard to fathom, even for those putting their lives on the line.

The symptoms may be more easily identified. According to the government’s own estimates, 55 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, defined as household income of less than $280 per month. Unemployment has soared to record levels, with official estimates hovering close to 20 percent, the highest in the hemisphere. Even in times of plenty, rampant corruption and state centralization have deprived remote communities of schools, health facilities, and other basics. Potholed dirt tracks are frequently the only lifeline to the outside world.

With social justice as their founding battle cry, Colombia’s leftist rebel factions took up arms against the state in the mid-1960s. The two main Marxist guerrilla forces are the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), with around 17,000 combatants, and the ELN (National Liberation Army), with around 5,000 fighters. Both groups bankroll their war effort through extorsive kidnapping; the FARC draws much of its income through taxes on the drug trade. Militarily weaker, the ELN specializes in economic sabotage, like blowing up oil wells and pipelines. The ELN’s historically hardcore Domingo Laín Front this year bombed Colombia’s second-largest crude oil export pipeline more than 100 times, causing a subsequent drop in oil exports, the country’s biggest earner. Economic analysts are already predicting that Colombia will not reach its 3.8 percent growth target in 2001, mandated as part of a loan deal by the International Monetary Fund.

The core demands of both groups center on a sweeping agrarian reform, a radical redistribution of wealth, and an end to freemarket economic policies, including a greater state role in key industries.The FARC has gained a reputation of being more radical largely due to its almost exclusively peasant membership and hierarchical politico-military structure. Concentrated largely in rural areas, the insurgents are currently estimated to control up to 50 percent of the country – most of that in the hands of the FARC.

The nationwide alliance of outlaw, right-wing paramilitary forces known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), currently musters some 8,100 gunmen, of mainly working-class stock. They are funded by a mixture of wealthy landowners, industrialists, politicians, urban upper middle-classes, and drug traffickers.

According to government figures:

In the last decade, 35,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, many of them massacred by gunmen of the left and right.
Over just the last five years, more than 1.1 million people have been displaced by the violence, the majority of those by right-wing paramilitary gangs.
In the year 2000, more than 3,700 civilians were abducted – confirming the country’s status as kidnap capital of the world. The majority of snatches are attributed to the guerrillas, who stuff their war chests with at least $150 million a year in ransoms.

There is no broad consensus on the cost of the war in financial terms. Government planners have consistently estimated it is costing the equivalent of about four percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in this Andean nation, which is the fifth largest economy in Latin America with an annual GDP of around $80 billion.

La violencia

Historians trace the violence of today back to a period spanning the late 1940s and 1950s known simply as "La Violencia" -- or "The Violence"--a civil war between supporters of the traditional Liberal and Conservative Parties that have alternately held power in Colombia for the last 150 years.

The trigger for the fighting was the assassination of populist Liberal Party leader politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitán on April 9, 1948. The killing, which has been blamed on rival Liberal factions, on the Conservatives, on a lone gunman, and even on the CIA, sparked rioting in Bogotá, but the main focus of fighting rapidly spread to the countryside.

The Conservative Party activated its powerful allies within the military, police, and the Catholic church; the Liberals rapidly organized guerrilla groups comprised mainly of peasants and workers. While leaders from both parties remained safely entrenched in the cities, their poor supporters did battle in the countryside, against a backdrop of massacres, rapes, and murders.

In 1957, a series of amnesties for the guerrillas and the advent of a power-sharing deal, known as the National Front, between Conservative and Liberal leaders put a temporary end to the bloodshed. The arrangement, which lasted 16 years, brought some political stability and moderate economic growth, but still left the running of the country to the political and economic elites who had little interest in sharing decisions—let alone wealth--with the underclasses.

The guerrillas consolidate

Since its establishment in 1964, the FARC has been under the command of its founder, Manuel "Sureshot" Marulando, a former Liberal guerrilla whose political and social model was the Soviet Union. Tirofijo [his nickname in Spanish] and his original 48 founding peasants first mobilized at the height of a U.S.-backed offensive dubbed "Operation Lasso", designed to wipe out what the government termed "independent republics," or regions loyal to the Communist Party.

In the same year, Fabio Vásquez Castaño, the well-educated son of a Liberal family who lost his father at the hands of Conservative vigilantes, formed the ELN in oil-rich northeast Colombia. Many of the peasants that joined ELN ranks had been displaced by private national and international oil companies arriving in the area. Other early members were unionized oil workers from Barrancabermeja. Unlike the FARC, the ELN drew its inspiration from the Cuban Revolution rather than adhering to the strict Soviet line of the Colombian Communist Party.

The ELN quickly attracted the support of firebrand Roman Catholic priests, who ushered in grassroots and student groups, unions, and some urban intellectuals, helping the ELN to extend its influence far beyond its military reach. A defrocked Spanish priest known as Manuel Pérez headed the rebel force until his death in early 1998.

Bloodshed at The Palace of Justice

The M-19 insurgent group, though short-lived, was very significant. Once a middle-class led leftist force that valued nationalism and the teachings of independence hero Simón Bolivar above Lenin, Marx, and Mao, the M-19 established a nationwide military presence, drawing political admiration and even support from a broad cross-section of society. Repeated attacks on delivery trucks whose cargoes were then distributed to the poor gave M-19 insurgents an air of modern-day Robin Hoods.

But in November 1985, the insurgent group invaded and occupied the Palace of Justice, which houses Colombia’s Supreme Court, with the plan to put the civil government on trial for its failure to remedy social inequity. But the armed forces immediately mobilized, and seized the building back in 48 hours of brutal urban warfare. After it was over, the nation’s top judges lay dead, and most of the M-19 leadership had been killed or disappeared. The group’s survivors de-mobilized. The Palace of Justice tragedy was an historical turning point: not only did it produce front-page headlines all over the world, it brought the "invisible" dirty war from the hinterlands to the capital.

The Massacre of the Unión Patriótica

In 1986, after two decades of fighting, the government of Belisario Betancur negotiated a truce with the FARC. The guerrillas then created a legal political party, the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union), which met with some success in local elections. At the same time, a campaign of terror and assassination was unleashed against the UP, effectively decimating the party by the early 1990s. The political arena increasingly resembled a minefield. The FARC reverted to war.

U.S. AID – ANOTHER SALVADOR OR ANOTHER VIETNAM?

Vietnam-era Huey helicopters clatter over the Tres Esquinas, or "Three Corners", military base deep in the jungles of southern Caquetá province. U.S. Special Forces advisers spin around the complex in imposing Humvee all-terrain trucks. The Colombian army’s elite, counterdrug battalions, trained by the U.S. advisers, parade and practice incessantly, ready for the next sortie into guerrilla country.

Tres Esquinas is the forward command center for Colombia’s U.S.-backed war effort in the south, known as "Plan Colombia." Bankrolled with more than $1 billion in mostly military aid from Washington in fiscal years 2000 and 2001, it ostensibly targets spiraling cocaine and heroin production.

But this is also the traditional backyard of the FARC.

Even in theory, the lines between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations are becoming virtually indistinguishable. On the ground they may now be non-existent -- sparking fears that Washington is being sucked into another Vietnam-style expeditionary war.

Publicly, U.S. officials stress they will only assist the Colombian military in anti-drug operations. But behind the scenes they seem to be looking at the model of El Salvador rather than Vietnam as a blueprint for what in its widest sense is a campaign to stifle the guerrillas and save a nation from the risk of partial break-up.

"Salvador was a tremendous success in terms of the goals of establishing peace, getting democracy and a better economic model," said Edwin Corr, U.S. ambassador in El Salvador from 1985 until 1988, the height of the civil war. "In Colombia too we’ve got some very defined goals. These are to get peace, to make the constitution more democratic, and to get them out of the economic doldrums. These are the same goals I upheld in Salvador."

General Fred Woerner, head of the U.S. Army’s Southern Command during th war in El Salvador, agrees. "The fundamental tactics and techniques that we employed in Salvador are applicable in Colombia. Small units, extensive operations day and night, sustainment of pressure on the guerrillas and denial of safe havens, coverage of border areas, protection of the population, and absolute respect for human rights."

In Central America, huge U.S. training and matériel aid packages had little effect.

Cynthia Watson, strategy expert and associate dean at the National War College in Fort McNair, Washington D.C., holds to the parallel with Viet Nam. "Colombia is a much more complex situation than Salvador." She argues that like successive South Vietnamese regimes, President Andrés Pastrana’s administration is increasingly viewed as incompetent and unrepresentative. Pastrana’s popularity rating has sunk to around 20 percent and for generations the government in power has made little effort to enact social spending programs for schools, health, and infrastructure outside the main urban centers.

A fundamental flaw in the focus of U.S. policy toward Colombia, Watson argues, is that Washington views Colombia as a state under threat of breakdown rather than a state still in formation.

"We’re asking the Colombian military to defend a motherland that doesn’t really exist," Watson said. "The government in Bogotá is not a legitimate government in many parts of the country."

PLAN COLOMBIA AND PARAMILITARIES

Since mid-December, the skies over the Guamuez Valley have resonated to the din of U.S.-donated helicopters and the hum of cropduster planes dumping defoliant on illegal coca plantations. This air assault was preceded by paramilitary ground operations that drove out guerrilla units and massacred suspected civilian sympathizers, as well as social and peasant leaders.

"Plan Colombia would be almost impossible without the help of the (paramilitary) self-defense forces. If we did not take control of zones ahead of the army then the guerrillas would shoot down their aircraft," said a paramilitary commander, who uses the alias "Commando Wilson." A former soldier, "Commando Wilson" is now head of the AUC’s military operations in Putumayo.

The paramilitary force openly admits that it receives taxes from the coca trade in Putumayo, but stresses that it is only a means to finance their prime objective--a counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC.

Evidence abounds that the AUC has been backed by the army ever since it arrived in the area in early 1998. A paramilitary commander known as "Guillermo" said he first came to the region as one of a 12-man paramilitary hit squad. When not carrying-out selective assassinations of suspected leftists, they lived inside the army’s 24th Brigade base in Santana.The incoming 24th Brigade commander Gen. Jesús Antonio Ladrón de Guevara concedes that about 30 men defected from his 31st Counterguerrilla Battalion to join the paramilitaries. "Commander Wilson" put the number of defections closer to 100.

That army unit was drafted back to Bogotá in March for "retraining." Ostensibly the move back to Bogotá, where it is now attached to the capital’s 13th Brigade, is to train it in human rights issues and refresh military training.

The 24th Brigade is currently banned from receiving any U.S. aid under the Leahy Amendment, which prevents units involved in alleged rights abuses from receiving U.S. assistance. But on paper at least, the transfer of an entire unit from the 24th Brigade should improve the unit’s rights record and clear the way for Washington to review its position.

Meanwhile, the former 24th Brigade commander Col. Gabriel Díaz is the subject of a formal inquiry by the Public Prosecutor’s office into alleged army ties with paramilitary forces in Putumayo. Pending the outcome of that inquiry, Díaz is studying in the army’s top war college and awaiting promotion to general.

DRUGS AND GUERRILLAS

Every weekend, peasants line up at secret markets along the Caguán River, in a corner of southern Caquetá province that is a longstanding rebel fiefdom. The product they are selling is coca paste, or semi-processed cocaine.

Once drug dealers purchase hundreds of kilos of the coarse powder, it is shipped deeper into the jungle to sprawling clandestine laboratories ("kitchens") for refining. According to Colombian and U.S. government and military officials, these wooden laboratories and even the plantations where coca leaf is grown are routinely protected by the guerrillas.

"As long as we pay our taxes the guerrillas leave us in peace. They don’t even come round here," said one lab foreman, who gave his name as Elver Gómez, 42. "This is still a very risky business. But as long as there’s hunger in this country this trade will not stop."

The United States has backed Colombia’s supply-side battle against illegal drug plantations since early 1993. But those efforts have had no effect at all. Cocaine and heroin output has increased dramatically. The CIA estimated Colombia’s potential cocaine output last year at 580 tons and seven tons of heroin. The area under drug crops is now calculated at more than 340,000 acres, despite intense aerial eradication.

Colombian and U.S. officials accuse the FARC of stepping in to fill the vacuum left after the break-up of the Medellín and Cali cartels in the early and mid-1990s. U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson stated publicly in April that the rebels were "up to their heads in drug trafficking." Colombian army chief Gen. Jorge Mora accused the rebels of controlling the cocaine trade from the seed to the street.

The Colombian government’s National Planning Department estimates the FARC earns upwards of $290 million yearly from the drug trade. That, however, would represent less than 2.5 percent of the value of Colombia’s estimated annual cocaine output of 580 tons--even at Miami wholesale prices, where a kilo fetches around $20,000.

Last April when the army captured Brazilian capo Luis Fernando de Costa in the rebel-held jungles of eastern Colombia, authorities insisted it proved that the FARC was dealing internationally. According to the army, Da Costa confessed to receiving protection from the rebels and paying the insurgent force $10 million a month for drugs and on occasion swapping cocaine for weapons.

Da Costa, "alias Freddy Seashore," rose from allegedly controlling 60 percent of the drug trade in Rio De Janeiro’s notoriously violent shanty towns to becoming a major international drugs and arms smuggler, according to Brazilian and Colombian police. After breaking out of a Brazilian prison where he was serving time on narco-trafficking charges, he fled to Paraguay and later Colombia.

The FARC concede that they tax all stages of the drug trade in their zones of influence, but reject accusations that they are a cartel. "We only collect a simple tax," said rebel warlord Fabián Ramiréz, No.2 commander of the FARC’s Southern Bloc fighting division which holds sway across Caquetá and Putumayo provinces.

Whether or not the FARC is in fact a cartel, the notion of a war against drug production is eminently more marketable to U.S. politicians and voters than a post-Cold War crusade against South American Communist guerrillas.

PEACE TALKS

Since assuming office in 1998, President Andrés Pastrana has staked his political life on the peace process. Showing great boldness, he created a demilitarized zone by pulling government security forces out of an expanse of jungle and savannah the size of Switzerland. But once the euphoria of Pastrana’s success in bringing the FARC to the table subsided, it was clear the talks were burdened with procedural red tape and going nowhere fast.

UN Special Envoy Jan Egeland--a veteran of peace efforts in the Middle East, Bosnia, Sudan, and Central America--described Colombia as one of his toughest-ever challenges. "There are more actors involved, more bitterness, and more dirty money fuelling the conflict," he explained in a June 2000 interview. "The peace process here will be long, hard, uphill, and have many disappointments ahead.... But I think it will succeed."

One year on, the vast majority of Colombians disagree. Opinion polls consistently show that more than three-quarters of ordinary citizens believe talks are stalled, and that the government has granted too many concessions to the rebels – like the demilitarized zone – for little in return.

Egeland believes the consequences will be dire for the entire region if talks collapse. U.S. officials have periodically warned that the war could destabilize neighboring Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.

In recent weeks, hopes of progress have been revived thanks to a limited prisoner exchange between the government and the FARC – a proposal the rebels first floated in March 1998. Under the deal, the rebels have released over 100 sick police and soldiers, of the approximately 500 they have captured in combat and been holding in jungle camps for as long as three years. In return, the government released 15 ailing guerrillas from prisons across the country. FARC warlords seem to believe the accord will boost their politico-military status in the international eye and give them de facto recognition as a legitimate warring faction seeking to topple the state.

Efforts to negotiate with the ELN have been less fruitful than the slow-moving talks with the FARC. The area slated as a safe haven for talks with the ELN’s Central Command has for the last two years been under constant assault by paramilitaries and the army. That forced the ELN to retreat and, in an effort to compensate for its weakened stance on the battlefield, it has resorted to terrorist-style attacks on civilians to show it still has muscle. The government, however, insists it has not given up on separate peace talks with the ELN before the end of Pastrana’s administration in August 2002.

Periodically, attention focusses on the merits of brokering separate peace negotiations with the fast-growing AUC. The FARC and ELN are strongly opposed, on the grounds that the AUC is a covert arm of state counterinsurgency policy. Everything is now complicated by Carlos Castaño’s sudden retirement as the AUC’s military commander-in-chief and his subsequent physical absence since that announcement in May.

In practice, Castaño is still likely to have the final say in both military and political matters behind the scenes, given that most of the leadership are fiercely loyal to him and that he is still supreme commander of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Uraba (ACCU), the largest single unit within the paramilitary umbrella organization.

For some analysts, the leadership reshuffle will allow Castaño to shrug off blame for the AUC’s flagrant human rights violations and permit him to plan a political offensive aimed at opening peace talks with the Pastrana administration or with the next president, due to take office in August 2002.

"The big obstacle in the past has been that Castaño was political and military head and had to respond for massacres. With this decision the AUC is trying to artificially separate the roles. The chiefs-of-staff will respond for military actions, while Castaño tries to open the political doors," said Carlos Lozano, senior Communist Party representative and member of the newly-created anti-paramilitary commission, set up as part of slow-moving peace talks between the government and leftist guerrillas.

One Western diplomat insisted Castaño would represent the demands of his main paymasters--industrialists, politicians, landowners, cattle-ranchers and drug traffickers--who, as part of the country’s political and economic elites, are broadly represented by the state. The diplomat suggested the government may decide to bring Castaño (or his designate) into discussions in an effort to counterbalance radical guerrilla demands.

"Castaño is a puppet on the strings of conflicting interests. Castaño may have some regional independence, but he is not strategically independent in either military or political terms. He is dependent on his financial backers," the diplomat said. "The government cannot sit down in public and talk with Castaño, but deals cut with the FARC could be passed across to the AUC for approval. That would be a two rooms, two tables scenario."

In the event of peace talks, Castaño would also likely attempt to negotiate an amnesty and perhaps even some limited land deal for his fighters, who include not only a growing number of former soldiers, but also peasants and guerrilla deserters.

Negotiating for Peace, Planning for War

Underlying the entire two-year peace process with the FARC are on-going preparations for war by both the rebels and state security forces.

The FARC realize the government will not cede to all their demands. For them, the peace process is a display window for their political platform and a diplomatic showcase. Rebel chieftains vow they will not compromise; they insist they want to run the government and will not settle for cabinet or congressional posts.

Equally important, the 16,000 square mile demilitarized zone, is a vital strategic rearguard in military terms where the rebels have been able to recruit, train, and resupply. They have also used the area as a launch pad for attacks across the rest of the country.

All that dovetails with intensive plans for what the FARC calls its "first great offensive," a two-pronged attack on Bogotá from the east and south in a bid to topple the government and batter the military. " We know how many men we would need and how many millions of dollars it would cost to carry it out," rebel commander Buendía said in a rare interview about a year ago. Buendía is head of the FARC’s Che Guevara Mobile Column and a senior commander of the FARC’s feared Eastern Bloc fighting division.

No deadline has been set for an all-out attack on Bogotá. General Woerner described the plan as "Disneyland South," and pointed to the FMLN guerrillas’ failure to take San Salvador in their "Final Offensive." But expert negotiators point out that it is the perception that either side has of its own military strength – rather than the reality – that is the key factor in dictating how much the rivals will cede in political negotiations.

Hand-in-hand with the military build-up, FARC commanders have been working in secret to build a political base among unions, grassroots social organizations, student groups, and neighborhood committees in both urban and rural areas. The organization, known as the Bolivarian Movement For A New Colombia and named after South American independence hero Simón Bolivar, operates clandestinely to avoid the murder of its members by state security forces and paramilitary groups as occurred with the Patriotic Union (UP).

"The Bolivarian Movement is not an electoral force. Its aim is to create an insurrectionary movement because the FARC cannot seize power alone by military means. Our efforts will not succeed if this just ends up being two armies, the FARC and the government security forces, fighting each other," said Carlos Antonio Lozada, former commander of the FARC’s urban militias in Bogotá and now member of the rebel negotiating team.

The FARC insists that, unlike the M-19 insurgent group, they will never disarm. But the FARC are not the only ones looking more to the battlefield than the peace table. In addition to signing up greater numbers of professional, volunteer soldiers instead of raw conscripts, and purchasing helicopters and other matériel, the military is currently completing at least five major garrisons on the strategic approaches to Bogotá.

The outposts, manned by battalion-strength units, will ultimately be used as "mooring points" to launch search-and-destroy missions into rebel strongholds. The most significant of these bases is in Sumapaz, a region that runs down the spine of the eastern cordillera of the Andes, through five provinces and into the poor southern neighborhoods of the capital. The area has long been used as a logistics route by the rebels and a major thoroughfare for spiriting kidnap victims out of Bogotá.

FARC supreme commander Manuel Marulanda has long predicted the most decisive battles of Colombia’s war will be fought in Sumapaz’s rugged mountains and high plains that rise above 12,000 feet.

"If Bogotá falls then the country falls. By building this base in Sumapaz we may set back the FARC plan by eight or 10 years," said Col. Enrique Cotes, commander of the army’s Sumapaz task force in a February interview.

Few ordinary Colombians believe there is any real prospect of peace in the short term. Most think the war will escalate before the combatants decide they must seek a genuine political solution to the conflict.

But even if, against the odds, rebel and paramilitary rifles do fall silent any time soon, one of the impoverished inhabitants of Nelson Mandela City, the Cartagena shantytown, warned the conflict would not be over.

"The peace talks mean nothing," said Lázaro Pérez, "Only when the government begins to help the poor will the war finish."