-Caveat Lector-
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, 8 July 2001
Colombia War Highlights Arms Trade
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By Nick Rosen
BOGOTA -- The smuggling operation showed how fueling a war in Colombia can
be nearly as easy as stepping into a Miami gun shop.
Colombian arms dealers in the United States on tourist visas purchased
assault rifles in Miami shops, packed them in bubble wrap and sent them
home on cargo flights, listed as machinery parts.
Their destination: guerrillas trying to overthrow the South American
country's elected government.
The smuggling operation, which Colombian and U.S. officials say was
operating during 1997 and 1998, illustrates just one of the myriad ways
that black market weapons elude national and international controls to
fuel the violence of Colombia's 37-year civil war, rampant drug
trafficking and sky-high common crime.
The smuggling network from Miami to the Caribbean city of Barranquilla was
also one tiny link in a global small arms trafficking problem that will be
the focus of unprecedented attention with the start of a U.N. conference
in New York on Monday.
The 11-day conference, presided over by a Colombian diplomat, aims to
combat an illicit trade believed to be worth billions of dollars a year
and contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths in conflict zones from
Africa to Latin America.
The impact is severe in Colombia, with more than 3,000 people killed in
the civil conflict annually and one of the world's highest per capita
homicide rates.
Many of the guns flowing into Colombia are left over from civil wars
fought during the 1980s in Central America or come from stockpiles in the
former Soviet bloc. In recent years, authorities have seized handguns and
assault rifles from the United States, Brazil, China, North Korea,
Bulgaria and Romania.
Some recent high-profile cases:
On Sunday, Colombian police said they seized 31 assault rifles including
27 AK-47s three rockets and a rocket launcher sent from Nicaragua and
destined for the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The shipment and three men were captured on San Andres Island, 372 miles
off Colombia's northern coast, said National Police chief Gen. Ernesto
Gilibert.
A fugitive Brazilian trafficker was caught in the Colombian jungles in
April, accused of trading guns for cocaine with the FARC.
Peruvian authorities are investigating allegations that disgraced former
spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos arranged for at least 10,000 AK-47 assault
rifles Peru purchased from Jordan to be diverted to the FARC in an airdrop
last year.
Colombia's top rightist paramilitary leader claimed last year that he had
arranged to purchase a large cache of Chinese-made arms from traffickers
in Suriname, but that the FARC outbid him for the shipment once it arrived
via Brazil.
The U.S. government has provided Colombia army counterdrug battalions with
grenade launchers, mortars and M-60 machine guns as part of a $1.3 billion
aid plan. There have been no reported cases of selloffs of U.S.-provided
weapons by corrupt soldiers.
With coasts along two oceans, long chains of Andean mountains and rivers,
and 3,700 miles of sparsely populated borders with five different
countries, Colombia is particularly vulnerable to smuggling.
The number of illegal firearms confiscated here grew from about 23,000 in
1994 to 42,000 last year, according to police. Ten times that amount are
believed to be entering the country undetected.
Colonel Alberto Ruiz, director of the DIJIN, Colombia's judicial police
force, says intelligence-sharing by Colombia's neighbors has helped stem
arms trafficking, but that more far-reaching measures are needed.
''We really need wider accords with countries that manufacture the guns,
to try to get more control over the legal sale of weapons,'' says Ruiz,
''Because most illegal arms begin as legal arms.''
The assault rifles being shipped from Miami to Barranquilla were headed
for the National Liberation Army, Colombia's second largest rebel band,
according to Detective Edgar Gonzalez of the DAS state security agency.
Colombian intelligence officials intercepted a phone conversation in
February 1997 revealing a sale about to occur. Agents pounced on a house
outside the city and captured dozens of Kalashnikov assault rifles.
The smugglers got away, but Colombian officials with the help of the U.S.
Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms traced the weapons' serial
numbers back to sales made a several Miami gun shops, Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said authorities have traced more than a hundred assault rifles
seized here from rebels and criminal gangs back to the Miami purchases.
ATF officials said they believe the group purchased at least 600 assault
rifles in the United States.
The five Colombians involved in the smuggling operation are now behind
bars three here and two in the United States. But authorities acknowledge
they may barely have dented the flow of illegal U.S. arms into Colombia.
''There are an estimated 200 million firearms in the United States and
they are readily available for purchase,'' said Scott Pickett, the ATF's
chief of international programs in a phone interview from Washington.
''This makes working these trafficking cases very difficult,'' he added.
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