In These Times 

Colombia on the Brink

By Ana Carrigan October 1999


On Sept. 26, two news stories from Colombia precisely reflected the
edgy, roller-coaster quality that has characterized the Colombian peace
process from the start. In the first, the Colombian government and the
leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas
announced the long-delayed opening of peace negotiations, stalled since
mid-July. In the second, U.S. Ambassador Curtis Kamman formally
announced in Bogotá that U.S. military aid would be forthcoming for
the Colombian army to bolster its fight against drugs and the guerrilla
insurgency. 

On the one hand, for the first time since the counterinsurgency in
Colombia began more than 40 years ago, the two sides have agreed to open
formal negotiations covering the full spectrum of the political,
economic and social causes of the war. 

This agreement was achieved at zero hour. Since the breakdown of talks
last July, paramilitary violence and the secret, dirty war of selective
assassinations targeting prominent Colombian intellectuals and human
rights defenders has intensified. The momentum toward a full-scale civil
war has been gathering critical speed. 

On the other hand, Kamman's announcement confirms that, for all the fine
words about support for the peace process, the only help Colombia will
get from this administration is an intensification of Washington's
failed drug eradication program. Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey's
determination to "wipe out drug production at the source" has finally
succeeded in erasing the line between the U.S. drug war and the internal
Colombian insurgency. The new aid will include vastly expanded military
aid for the Colombian army to fight the FARC "narco-guerrillas."

McCaffrey's crop-spraying program also will be bolstered by a new
950-man, U.S.-trained counter-narcotics battalion, scheduled to go into
operation against peasants growing coca under guerrilla protection.
These poor farmers cultivate drug crops to feed their families. Perhaps
it was always naïve to believe that the Clinton administration would
provide the same support and leadership for peace in Colombia that it
has in far-away countries like Ireland and Israel with powerful U.S.
lobbies. The brutal fact is that no one in Washington cares enough to
commit the kind of resources Colombian President Andres Pastrana
requires to support his imaginative and courageous commitment to a
political solution of the country's tangled web of interrelated crises.

Unwilling to confront McCaffrey and the Republican congressional
leadership­who have always opposed the peace process as an obstacle to
the drug war­Clinton gave President Pastrana's peace efforts
half-hearted support for about six months. Now, behind closed doors
without any public debate, the decision has been made to go the military
route. 

U.S. aid is anticipated to be in the neighborhood of $500 million a year
for the next three years. While there still may be time to resist being
sucked into yet another tragic, unnecessary Latin American quagmire, it
is urgent that those who will sign off on this policy take a hard, cold,
honest look at what is involved. 

The roots of the war and of Colombia's narco-trafficking are the same:
poverty, neglect, exclusion and impunity. Guns and helicopters will
never stop drugs. And spraying chemicals will not stop hungry peasants
from growing coca. Since 1985, nearly 500,000 acres have been fumigated.
The environmental damage, of course, has been incalculable. But the
Colombian drug crop has expanded to almost 300,000 acres of coca and
7,000 acres of poppies. 

In fairness, no one familiar with the situation in Colombia would deny
that the Colombian government needs an honorable, modern, professional
army to defend and protect its institutions, and to guarantee the
security of all of its citizens from the violent forces conspiring
against it­be they guerrillas, narco-traffickers or paramilitaries.
But denials to the contrary, Washington policymakers know well that the
Colombian army is light years away from attaining those standards. By
now, a reliable army would have devised and implemented a concrete plan
for dismantling the drug-trafficking paramilitaries and arresting their
leaders. The high command also would have purged the right-wing
extremists within their own ranks, who those closest to the scene say
still run the dirty war from within military intelligence. This is not
to say the army does not have the capacity to reform­but reforms take
time. Claims circulating in Washington that the army has cleaned up its
act and become a law-abiding, human-rights-respecting force are just
untrue. 

The Colombian army's atrocious history of human rights abuse and
corruption over the past two decades cannot be solved, as American
officials would have us believe, by firing two or three generals. In
spite of the best and most courageous efforts of the Pastrana
government­in collaboration with intense pressure from the State
Department­and new and honest leadership at the very top of the
military, far too many powerful senior figures retain intimate links to
corruption and extreme right-wing death squads. Before Washington
lawmakers extinguish the Colombia peace process and launch the United
States into the middle of a bloody and messy civil war, there are
questions that need asking. For starters, what precisely is the U.S.
objective? 

If, as per McCaffrey, the goal is to cut off the flow of Colombian
cocaine and heroin, then why is all the effort and investment directed
exclusively to fighting poor peasant farmers in the south who grow drug
crops under the protection of the guerrillas? Why is there no similar
plan to attack the paramilitaries, which, according to the DEA, are far
more heavily involved in processing, trafficking and shipping drugs out
of their fiefdoms in the north? 

Or is the objective, as the Clinton administration claims, to strengthen
democracy and the rule of law in Colombia? Because if that is the goal,
then the administration needs to use its leverage with the army to
insist on a program of serious, systematic reforms before granting
hundreds of millions of dollars for lethal new weapons. Claims that the
army has severed links to the paramilitaries open the way for the
creation of an elite counter-paramilitary battalion. Trained and
equipped by Washington, with sole responsibility for dismantling the
paramilitaries, such a force would transform relations with the
population by returning authority and legitimacy to the army. The core
of Pastrana's peace strategy, which originated with leaders of the FARC,
consists of ending the insurgency while simultaneously ending coca
production in the guerrilla-controlled territories. The guerrillas even
sent delegates to Washington to bring their proposal to the attention of
the administration almost two years ago­long before Pastrana's
election. It's a very straightforward plan: manual eradication of drug
plants in return for massive infrastructure, alternative crop
development and access to markets. The price tag? Around $1 billion a
year for five years. In fact, the FARC and the Colombian government are
already collaborating in a $10 million pilot plan with the U.N. Drug
Control Program. Pastrana is not alone in his conviction that the
precondition to solving the drug problem in Colombia is to deal with the
insurgency first. Only the United States believes the opposite. 

Current U.S. plans risk providing a tragic and bitter ending to years of
dangerous, dedicated efforts to persuade Colombia's entrenched opponents
to start talking to each other. For there must not be any mistaken ideas
about the consequences for Colombia if U.S. military assistance ­ without 
a counter-paramilitary policy­tips Colombia over the edge into full-scale 
civil war. Once unleashed, that war will lead to a humanitarian disaster 
on a scale not yet seen on this continent.

Forget the Central American wars, dreadful and destructive though 
they were. Colombia is sui generis. The El Salvador war was fought 
in a country of 8,000 square miles with a population of 5 million. 
It lasted for 12 years and cost 80,000 lives and $5 billion to support 
a 62,000-man army. Imagine the cost, in lives and money, of a war 
fought in Colombia­a country of 440,000 square miles with a population 
of 40 million, several large urban centers teeming with militias, three
mountain ranges slicing from north to south, a large Amazon jungle in
which only the guerrillas know how to survive, and an army forecast to
become three times the size of El Salvador's. When Colombia's cities and
landscape have been scorched and the 1.5 million internally displaced
people (already more than those driven from Kosovo) have multiplied 
many times over; when Colombian refugees and their pursuers spill 
across the borders into neighboring countries, bringing violence and 
destabilization to the impoverished and fragile democracies of Ecuador,
Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Panama; And when finally the war moves
away, following the international drug trade as the traffickers shift
their production centers south into Brazil or north into Panama, in
eternal pursuit of the U.S. cocaine market: Who will calculate the 
cost of Colombia's destruction then?