-Caveat Lector-
Left Coast
by Alexander Cockburn
http://www.antiwar.com/cockburn/cockburn-col.html
Antiwar.com
Alexander Cockburn
August 2, 2000
Blueprints For Colombian War
As we all know, the war in Colombia isn't about drugs.
It's about the annihilation of popular uprisings by
the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and
the ELN (National Liberation Army), guerilla groups or
Indian peasants fending off the ravages of oil
companies, cattle barons and mining firms. A good
old-fashioned counterinsurgency war, designed to clear
the way for American corporations to set up shop in
Colombia, with cocaine as the scare tactic. Two recent
Defense Department-commissioned reports outline in
chilling terms the same strategy of ongoing military
intervention under the cover of the drug war. Both
urge the Bush administration to drop the pretext of
counter-narcotics and get on with the business of
wiping out the insurgents.
Last year the US Air Force commissioned the RAND
Corporation to prepare a review of the situation in
Colombia. In early June the Santa Monica-based RAND
think tank (progenitor of many a blood-sodden scenario
in the Vietnam era) submitted its 130-page report,
called "The Colombian Labyrinth: The Synergy of Drugs
and Insurgency and Its Implications for Regional
Stability." The other report is a paper written by
Gabriel Marcella, titled "Plan Colombia: the Strategic
and Operational Imperatives." Marcella is a former
chief adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the US
Southern Command who now teaches on national security
matters at the US Army War College.
Together, the two reports reach the same conclusion:
the US needs to step up its military involvement in
Colombia and quit forfeiting options by limiting its
operations to counter-narcotics raids. Along the way,
both reports make a number of astonishing admissions
about the paramilitaries and their links to the drug
trade, about human rights abuses by the US-trained
Colombian military and about the irrationality of crop
fumigation.
RAND argues that the drug war approach is on the brink
of not only failing, but of prompting a wider conflict
that might require the insertion of US troops. "If the
Pastrana administration falters, either in its
counter-narcotics or counterinsurgency approach, the
US would be confronted with an unpalatable choice. It
could escalate its commitment to include perhaps an
operational role for US forces in Colombia, or scale
it down, which would involve some significant costs,
including a serious loss of credibility and
degradation of the US's ability to muster regional
support for its counter-narcotics and political
objectives."
The RAND study draws heavily from a December 2000
report by the World Bank, titled Violence in Colombia:
Building Sustainable Peace and Social Capital, which
concluded that the quid pro quo for Colombia getting
any future large infusions of international financial
aid will depend on their successful suppression of the
FARC and other rebel groups. Another World Bank memo
describes the FARC's fundraising strategy as a
"loot-seeking" assault on "primary commodities":
cattle ranches on the eastern plains, commercial
agriculture in Urab?, oil in Magaldena, gold mines in
Antioquia and the coca fields of Putumayo. RAND cites
a former CIA analyst as saying that the FARC has
invested its "taxes" on these industries into "a
strategic financial reserve," which will enable them
to "sustain an escalation of the conflict." While the
FARC peasant army has doubled over the past decade, it
still only numbers about 7,000 fighters ? 2,000 fewer
than the paramilitary death squads.
Both RAND and the World Bank point to the horrifying
level of "social intolerance killings," which for men
aged 14-44 reached a level of 394 deaths per 100,000
last year. In all, Colombia endures 30,000 annual
murders, double the number for the entire United
States in 1998. Slightly more than 23,000 murders have
been linked to "illegal armed organizations" since
1988. The implication is that the FARC is responsible
for these killings and one has to dig deep into the
RAND analysis to discover otherwise. In fact,
according to statistics compiled by the Colombian
government, about 3,500 people were killed by the
guerrillas and 19,652 by paramilitaries and "private
justice" groups.
The leader of the AUC (United Self-Defense Groups of
Colombia), the central command for the 19 paramilitary
"fronts," is a sadistic scoundrel named Carlos
Casta?o, who supervises a killing program right off
the pages of the CIA's Phoenix Program's operations
manual. The RAND report details how Casta?o's AUC
routinely executes "suspected guerrilla sympathizers"
in order "to instill fear and compel support among the
local population." When that strategy fails to
deliver, the AUC simply launches an all-out attack on
the villages and slaughters the inhabitants. RAND
dispassionately notes that the AUC justifies these
atrocities, in language that even Bob Kerrey might
admire, as a legitimate way to "remove the guerrillas'
supply network."
The robust ties between the paramilitaries and the
Colombian military (not to mention the CIA and the
Pentagon) are cursorily dispensed with by RAND in a
brisk few sentences, concluding that, given the
circumstances, such relations are only natural. RAND
fails to note that many of the leaders of paramilitary
groups were once officers in the Colombian military,
some of them trained at the School of the Americas.
Although there are nearly as many paramilitary
fighters as there are guerrillas, there is a gross and
telling disparity between the numbers of
paramilitaries (76) versus guerrillas (2,677) killed
by the Colombian military.
The RAND study makes a great effort to legitimize the
role of the paramilitaries, remarking that "the term
paramilitaries is an unsatisfactory rubric to describe
the autodefensas, although it has gained widespread
currency [so widespread, in fact, that it is used
throughout the RAND report].... It has no particular
descriptive value in referring to the autodefensas and
(perhaps intentionally) might convey the implication
of quasi-political status." With such sinister
nonsense, and despite the murders and the drug
trafficking, RAND attempts to portray many of the
paramilitaries as performing necessary self-policing
functions in the absence of strong state authority, a
kind of benign civic group "based on the neighborhood
watch concept."
Although 20 pages are devoted to discussion of the
FARC's ties to the drug trade, the RAND report spends
only a single paragraph on the links of the
paramilitaries and the narco-traffickers. But this
paragraph is as damning as it is brief. RAND
grudgingly admits that Casta?o's group derives "a
considerable extent" of its income from the drug trade
and notes that eight of the AUC's 19 death squads also
serve as protection gangs for the cocaine industry.
Casta?o himself has boasted to CNN's International
Division of his relationship with the drug lords. He
said that 70 percent of the funds for the AUC come
from the drug trade, with the remaining 30 percent,
the RAND report notes in a stark parenthesis, "coming
largely from extortion."
The Colombian government under Pastrana (though not
the Colombian generals) takes the public position that
the paramilitaries are at least as big of a threat as
the FARC and the ELN, and is moving, rhetorically, at
least, to suppress them. RAND condemns this approach
as "unwise and shortsighted." Better, RAND concludes,
to mimic the Peruvian or Guatemalan counterinsurgency
models and fashion the death squads into "a supervised
network of self-defense organizations."
This "Peruvian model" was created by Vladimir
Montesinos, the head of Peruvian intelligence,
recently extradited from Venezuela to Peru and
imprisoned in a high security prison he himself had
helped to design. Montesinos, a longtime CIA asset,
won his spurs with his bloody tactics against the
Shining Path rebels but fell from grace when it came
to light that he had organized a shipment of arms from
Jordan to the FARC. The CIA was so enraged that it
engineered his downfall.
According to Peruvian sources, the shipment of guns
was originally intended for the paramilitaries in
Colombia (arranged with full CIA approval) which the
wily Montesinos sold for a higher price to the FARC.
This story rings true ? Jordan is essentially a US
colony, so it's likely that a weapons shipment from
there would have to be for a US-approved customer.
Even more menacingly, RAND suggests that the
Colombians could reconfigure the paramilitaries into
roving National Guard units that will hunt-and-kill
guerrillas. RAND hints that this may already be under
way with US help. There's no question that the
Colombian military, under the eye of US advisers, is
taking a more aggressive tactic, employing
hunt-and-kill squads supervised by School of
America-trained officers. The RAND analysts were
particularly excited with the results of Operation
Annihilator II, a bloody raid on FARC strongholds in
Sumapaz. RAND notes approvingly that the body count
from Colombian military strikes rose from 364 in 1999
to 506 in 2000.
Plan Colombia is inadequate to the task of eradicating
cocaine or the FARC, RAND warns. Moreover, RAND
advises that the US contribution to the effort ?
$862.3 million a year ? is too paltry to make much of
a difference.
RAND calmly ridicules the requirement for human rights
training and monitoring, which is attached to the US
aid package. "There is a question of the practical
limitations on the Colombian government's ability to
prevent human rights violations in the context of an
armed insurrection," the RAND analysts comfortably
contend. To buttress this assessment, RAND points to
the US experience in Vietnam, arguing that the
slaughter of civilians is simply a cost of doing
business during wartime and that "even with
disciplined troops, the chain of command will
ultimately break down at times under the stress of
combat."
Of course, most of the US massacres in Vietnam were
the result of troops carrying out official policy,
such as the Phoenix missions, and not the actions of
crazed grunts going on killing sprees. The same is
true in Colombia, where in the past two years alone
where 477 police and military officers have been found
guilty of human rights abuses by civilian courts.
The thrust of Plan Colombia's cocaine suppression
campaign ? and the bulk of US aid ? is aimed at
Colombian troops seizing coca fields under FARC
control in the Putumayo district. This "southern
strategy," RAND admits, is a thinly veiled effort to
re-channel anti-drug efforts into a full-blown assault
on a major FARC stronghold, with US helicopters doing
the brunt of the air assaults and US advisors
providing aid to the fledgling Colombian military in
this riverine region and "for improved radar,
airfields and intelligence collection."
But RAND warns that by targeting coca production,
particularly with the widespread use of toxic
fumigants, the Colombian military, and its US
advisors, may actually end up bolstering the FARC's
public standing in the region. "According to the
governor of Putumayo, about 135,000 of the district's
314,000 inhabitants depend directly on the coca crop
for their livelihood. Intensified coca eradication
would probably be resisted by the local
population...."
RAND rightly notes that the aerial fumigation of coca
crops is backfiring politically. "Absent viable
economic alternatives [such as crop substitution and
infrastructure development], fumigation may simply
displace growers to other regions and increase support
for the guerrillas."
RAND concludes that the only solution is the
elimination of the threat to the "stability" of the
region posed by the FARC and the ELN. It also advises
the Pentagon that "the Colombian government, left to
its own devices, does not have the institutional or
material resources to reverse unfavorable trends." One
of those trends is the resurrection of the domino
theory, called here the "spillover effect." RAND
suggests that if the US doesn't intervene, the
Colombian situation "will metastasize into a wider
regional upheaval." It is up to the US to act as the
"deus ex machina" in this conflict.
Aside from stepping up direct military aid to
Colombia, RAND urges the Pentagon to expand the US
military presence in the bordering nations, including
"helping Panama fill the security vacuum in its
southern provinces."
The Marcella paper is a more distilled version of the
RAND report. Marcella, a specialist in South American
matters at the Defense War College, suggests that the
future US role in Colombia become more like US
operations in El Salvador than Vietnam ? which, we
surmise, means the deployment of
death-squads-by-proxy. Remember that the firm of
Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld has lately reassembled the
old gang that directed such mayhem and misery in Latin
America during the 1980s: John Negroponte, Otto Reich
and Elliott Abrams. Marcella approvingly invokes the
Thatcherite English theorist John Dunn: "there cannot
be political control without the capacity to coerce."
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