This is FARCing War!

by Stephen C. Preston
(originally published in the Stony Brook Press, 10/27/99)

Before venturing further, a quick tutorial on Colombia's civil war.  There's Pastrana, the neoliberal and quite unpopular President.  Colombians generally view him as an American puppet, because his government operates according to IMF instructions, and because of his drug eradication program.  The eradication program goes like this: the military flies jet planes into the fields where Colombian farmers grow coca and spray chemicals to kill the plants.  Colombia is quite poor (in the midst of a depression worse than that of the 1930s), and according to the Colombia Support Network, "The peasants...have two options: to go to the big cities and become beggars and prostitutes, or go to the rainforest to colonize the land. ... Colombian peasants growing coca are the result of social, political, and economic problems that cannot and will not be solved by military means."

So the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the major leftist guerrilla insurgency, receives wide support for opposing government policies, especially the drug eradication program.  It collects money by taxing the coca producers in the territory that it controls (currently, quite a large chunk of the country), and in exchange it assists in the transport of the drug.  With this money, it has been able to buy many weapons and to pay its soldiers three times what those in the military are paid.

To prevent the FARC from taking control of the whole country, the local elites have set up privately funded paramilitary groups.  These paramilitaries terrorize the peasants, especially those they suspect of sympathizing with the guerrillas.  They have been receiving training from the military, and the two groups have cooperated in fighting, though the military has tried to separate itself publicly from the paramilitaries.  Now since the paramilitaries (unlike the military) can't officially get money from the government or from the United States (human rights violations and all that), they have also begun helping local coca growers transport their cocaine.  In fact, the DEA believes that the paramilitaries are even more involved in drug trafficking than the FARC.

Colombia's military, like most militaries, tends to sympathize with the right-wing, and is thus adamant about continuing to fight the FARC.  They resent Pastrana, whom they view as too conciliatory toward the FARC.

Pastrana has been attempting to negotiate some kind of peace settlement with the guerrillas, but neither side has ventured very far from its own position to negotiate; thus, the talks remain stalled.

The United States has been involved in this conflict for several years, and is gradually planning to get even more involved.  It already provides $289 million every year in military aid to Colombia, which makes that country the third largest recipient of American military aid.

American aid to the Colombian military is illegal, due to a law passed by Congress which bars aid to those with a record of human rights abuses.  However, the money has been provided under the pretext of the War on Drugs, and is technically supposed to be used only for the counter-narcotics operations.  The military has been surreptitiously diverting funds to direct counter-insurgency operations, with the apparent approval of the Clinton Administration.

The rationalization for American policy has been the claim that the narcotics traffickers and the guerrillas are one and the same, though the DEA's reports demonstrate that this is false.  Despite such evidence, "drug czar" Barry McCaffrey claims publicly that the Drug War in Colombia is a war against "narco-guerrillas," and this myth is increasingly unquestioned in the media.  Under this pretext, American involvement in the war is rapidly increasing.

The Clinton Administration is now seeking Congressional approval for $1 billion in additional military aid to Colombia.  According to the Washington Post, the US Southern Command, a military unit formerly headed by McCaffrey, is currently training a 950-man Colombian battalion to retake the southern part of the country, now controlled by the FARC.  Blackhawk helicopters, satellite surveillance, and cluster bombs are to be used in a new low-level air war, according to John Pilger of the London Guardian.  Already there are roughly 200 American military personnel who are openly acknowledged to be serving in Colombia; more may be there covertly.

In late July of this year, an American spy plane crashed into a mountain in southern Colombia, killing five Americans and two Colombians.  The plane "was packed with sophisticated intelligence equipment ... just the sort of equipment that would be useful in tracking guerrilla movements," according to Newsweek.  Though the plane was supposed to be on an "anti-narcotics patrol," it was actually being used to spy on the guerrillas.  Only the crash made this public.  Other Americans have also died in Colombia, while flying crop-killing missions.
 
As Alan Bock and the other fine people at www.antiwar.com have pointed out, this is the same policy that gradually got the country into the Vietnam war.  First, military advisors are sent to support the government; then, when they are threatened, "low-level" bombing campaigns begin; eventually, of course, the troops are sent in directly.  The morale of the guerrillas would be boosted by such an invasion, and much of the population would unite behind them to repel the American forces.  Unlike the wars in Kosovo or Kuwait, for example, where the government could declare victory by forcing a mostly foreign power from a small territory, a guerrilla war is a completely different operation, particularly since the guerrillas already control 40% of Colombia's territory.  This war, if Clinton presses on toward the inevitable consequences, will be a disaster, even if it's won.

Other critics compare the present Colombian war to El Salvador's.  Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International has said, "If you liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia.  It's the same death squads, the same military aid, and the same whitewash from Washington."  El Salvador during the 1980s was torn by one of the most brutal "dirty wars" in Latin American history, with even priests and nuns being openly murdered by paramilitaries, with the direct support of the military, who in turn had the direct support of the US.  Clinton seems bent on repeating the story in Colombia, by providing direct aid to a military which is increasingly at odds with the democratic government, and which has notoriously abused human rights.

But the essential point, even to those of you who think that the Drug War is a good idea, is that this has nothing to do with drugs.  It never did.  America has long had relationships with drug traffickers when convenient: in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, and most notoriously in Nicaragua, with Contras who raised much of their money from the sale of cocaine.  America, if it were concerned about preventing drug trafficking, would be focused equally on the FARC and the paramilitaries; yet the paramilitaries are being supported by the military in their activities.  The War on Drugs is a convenient ruse, for those situations where drastic measures are needed.  The government hopes that the public is so inundated with anti-drug propaganda that they will not question any actions taken with this ostensible purpose.

And so, if you've been wondering what happened to the "peace dividend" we were supposed to have at the end of the Cold War...  There was never meant to be one.  The war never ended, because the war was not about communism.  Anti-communism was a pretext.  American foreign policy has always been about American corporations being guaranteed access to open markets, cheap labor, and plentiful resources.  Those communist nations who were nationalist, who thought that their resources were their own to control, were our enemies; those like China, who allowed American corporations to exploit as desired, were our allies.

Now the fear is that Colombia's rebels may become strong enough to take over, and nationalize Colombia's oil and other resources.  Even more pressing, as the Investor's Business Daily and John Pilger both point out, is the prospect that oil-rich Venezuela, a Colombian neighbor, is led by Hugo Chavez, a populist and "leftist demagogue."  Seeing the independence of their nationalist neighbors, the Colombian peasants may get the idea of controlling their own affairs as well (the Domino theory never died).  It is this fear which is driving the Clinton Administration's actions.

In the coming months, perhaps even sooner, the calls for "intervention" in Colombia will grow.  Already the newspapers and television shows are telling stories of sinister narco-guerrillas terrorizing the peasants, a convenient side of a far more complicated story.  The war propaganda is building, and disaster is increasingly close.  This anti-drug pretext is already far more dangerous than the drugs themselves could ever have been.