THE NATION  February 8, 1999



Colombia's Best Chance


By Ana Carrigan


First the good news: Peace talks between the Colombian government and the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) began on January 7 in the
remote tropical town of San Vicente del Caguan in the presence of hundreds
of international observers, including US Ambassador Curtis Kamman and
Bogota's entire diplomatic corps. The talks were jump-started by a secret
December meeting in Costa Rica between the State Department, the FARC and
the Colombian government. That meeting signaled a crucial shift in Foggy
Bottom's Colombia policy. The question now is whether Congress and all
departments of the Clinton Administration will follow the State
Department's lead and actively support a peace process that ranks as the
most significant development since the end of the Central American wars.

Obsessed by their counternarcotics crusade, powerful Republican
Congressmen are now driving a new alliance between the Pentagon's
Miami-based Southern Command and the failed Colombian Army. This alliance
is on a collision course with US human rights law, which restricts the use
of military aid in Colombia to counternarcotics, and threatens President
Andres Pastrana's peace policies.

Pastrana has said repeatedly that peace is a prerequisite for success in
the drug war, and he is making an unprecedented attempt to end a
half-century of political violence while simultaneously ending Colombia's
coca and poppy growing. He needs $3.5 billion, to be spent on roads,
credits, markets, schools and rural micro-businesses to help Colombian
peasants who grow drugs from economic necessity to switch crops. Only the
FARC has the credibility, manpower and organizational ability among the
peasant coca growers to make crop-substitution programs stick. At the
meeting in Costa Rica, the FARC's chief negotiator, Raul Reyes, reportedly
told the State Department's Phillip Chicola that, given the necessary
economic investment, the guerrilla organization would help eliminate the
drug crops within three to five years. Pastrana is asking the
drug-consuming countries to contribute to a "Marshall Plan" to finance his
program.

But Congress, the Administration and Colombian generals prefer to fight a
drug war against the peasant coca farmers. Arguing that Pastrana's peace
overtures to people they call "narcoguerrillas" undermine effective
counternarcotics action, Congress, against the wishes of the Colombian
government, recently tripled aid to the Colombian Army and police for a
militarized crop-fumigation blitz against coca and poppy plantations. A
look at how the aid is being used shows that fighting drugs has taken a
back seat to plans to fight the FARC, whose 15,000-man peasant army has
had a string of military victories and controls 40 percent of the country.
Congress and the Pentagon argue that Washington should go the El Salvador
route and strengthen the Colombian military to prevent a rebel victory by
the FARC. Commander in chief of the US Southern Command Charles Wilhelm
has already embarked on a crash program to retrain and re-equip the
Colombian Army to combat the "most serious security threat in the
hemisphere."

A recently signed US-Colombian military cooperation accord now being
implemented has opened the way for setting up a $5 million CIA-sponsored
and -equipped intelligence center and listening post inside FARC territory
to monitor rebel communications and movements; posting 300 US Special
Forces troops to train a new, 1,000-man US-equipped counternarcotics
battalion, to be deployed within FARC territory by June; and shipping Gulf
War weapons technology--smart bombs, night vision goggles, missile
launching helicopters.

Meanwhile, violence by largely narco-funded paramilitaries rages. As the
army and police sat in their barracks, the paramilitaries struck
undefended villages, murdering 139 people they called
"guerrilla-civilians" in four days. Created originally by the Colombian
Army to combat insurgency, today's paramilitaries maintain their military
links but are out of control. Their leaders demand political recognition
and intend to murder their way to the negotiating table. To date,
Pastrana's repeated presidential directives to the army and police to
arrest and disband the death squads have been ignored by his deeply
compromised senior generals and regional commanders.

The paramilitaries and their military backers represent the most dangerous
internal threat to Pastrana's policies. If he cannot get them under
control, he risks losing the FARC in the talks. If he pushes the generals
too hard, he risks a split in the army. How delicate the situation is can
be gauged by the fact that several senior generals, currently under
investigation by the attorney general for complicity in paramilitary
massacres, were recently promoted to the High Command. Among the top brass
only the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Fernando Tapias, has spoken
out against them.

Recently, Pastrana tried something new. He placed a new multiagency
intelligence unit and a special joint task force under the authority and
direction of the attorney general, whose office is the sole Colombian
institution with the guts and political will to investigate and prosecute
paramilitaries and their financial and military supporters. It remains to
be seen whether his investigators and prosecutors will receive support
from this new task force when they try to execute several hundred arrest
warrants currently gathering dust in army and police barracks.

The stakes in Colombia are high. Pastrana and the legendary 68-year-old
leader of the FARC, Manuel Marulanda, have embarked on an exciting,
dangerous, difficult journey. If they win a new country--democratic,
sovereign and drug free--they can start rebuilding from the embers of the
civil war. If the Pentagon succeeds in Salvadorizing the conflict, they
will fail. Then we will see the end of electoral politics in Colombia, a
military junta in the presidential palace and a country in flames. But
with unequivocal support from Washington and the international community
this scenario need not happen. In San Vicente, when the speechmaking
ended, negotiators for both sides rapidly went to work in circumstances of
such mutual cordiality it seemed impossible to imagine that, left to
themselves, the Colombians could fail to end a half-century of internecine
warfare, which an overwhelming majority now judge to be absurd and
useless.


Ana Carrigan



Ana Carrigan, the author of  The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy
(Four Walls Eight Windows) is writing a book on the Colombian peace
process. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation
Institute.

Copyright 1999 The Nation Company, L.P.

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