From: "Mike Pugsley" <wobbly8-AT-mail.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 00:47:58 +0800
Subject: Plan Colombia



This article appeared in Smash the State #2 available from Smash the State, POB 25103, Moncton NB, Canada E1C 9M9


Plan Colombia: Drug War or American Counterinsurgency? 

In 1999 Colombia became the leading recipient of US military aid. $1. 32 billion for the Andean region, $862 million of that for Colombia. Three quarters of the money is planned to be used for military and police expenses. The money will also pay for the training of Colombian soldiers by US Special Forces. Meaning that the US will be directly involved in the war in Colombia while other countries provide support indirectly, mainly through economic means. The United States defends the funding as an escalation of the Drug War, but the facts suggest that other interests are at the forefront. 
THE PLAN 
In 1998 Colombian President Andres Pastrana met with former US President Bill Clinton and called for help funding the Peace Process. Pastrana requested support for funding the peace negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and support for economic aid for the development of legal crops. Shortly after the US began planning for the military counterinsurgency. The Colombia Plan was written in English, suggesting that it was written by the American government with little Colombian input. The plan has been largely suppressed in American and Colombian media. 
President Clinton presented the plan in January 2000, calling for a “push into Southern Colombia” by military forces. The US would be training and equipping these forces with helicopters, vehicles and providing them with intelligence assistance. The requirement for this aid was an agreement by the Colombian government to eradicate coca and poppy production by 2005. A difficult task considering the plan focussed on Southern Colombia, an FARC stronghold, while the majority of coca production occurs in the northern regions. The US has similar operations in Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Aruba, El Salvador and Guatemala which provide the US with military bases. These are referred to as “Forward Operating Locations” and the US military can conduct intelligence and military operations as “necessary”. 
The likeness of this operation to Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s and Central America in the 1980s is astonishing. “In fact, the United States appears to have adopted a ‘Salvadoran’ style strategic approach. Civilian and military policy-makers alike often invoke US policy towards El Salvador in the 1980s as the model, in which direct military intervention is eschewed in favor of escalating assistance via equipment, training and intelligence cooperation. US advisors from a range of agencies, including the Defense Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency are already on the ground in Colombia. The level of US aid and number of advisors in Colombia on any given day are reaching levels as high as in Central America in the 1980s: For Fiscal Year 1999, the country had received 250 advisors and roughly $360 million in assistance.” This should be nothing short of frightening to anyone concerned about human rights, considering that hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by US trained death squads in Central America during the 1980s, millions more were displaced from there land. The Central American region was devastated by these abuses which were often times funded through US drug trafficking as noted in the Iran Contra scandal. 
THE DRUGS 
It is important to note why there is a drug trade in the first place and who is involved in it. Through media coverage and Clinton’s speeches we get the idea that there is a small group of “narcoguerrillas” controlling the drug trade. We are also told these revolutionaries are terrorists assaulting civilians and the military. While it is true the FARC kidnaps millionaires in order to finance their military, they are a Socialist organization which often invites civilians to take part in discussions. Another important point is that targeting the military with inferior weaponry is not terrorism, it is guerrilla warfare. It is also true that some factions of the FARC are involved in drug trafficking but are far from leading narcotraffickers. The paramilitary groups along with the Colombian government control the majority of the coca trade. Carlos Castano, leader of the largest paramilitary group, openly admitted on television that his army of 11,200 men was financed through “extortion and income from 30,000 hectares of coca fields in Norte de Santander”. This area is in the northern regions of Colombia, where Plan Colombia ignores. Three hundred square kilometres is a large farm to be ignoring if they really plan to completely eradicate coca production. 
The US Drug Enforcement Administration reports that “all branches of government” in Colombia are involved in “drug-related corruption”. The US is by no means free of this corruption either. In November 1998, Colonel James Hiett, who was in charge of training Colombian counternarcotic forces, and his wife were found smuggling 415 kg of cocaine and 6 kg of heroine into Florida. As for the violent narcoguerrillas, they do admit they tax coca farmers. But it is important to note that individuals and groups are, to a point, autonomous, in that some groups actively encourage farmers to cultivate other products and a few groups ban coca production. 
For the most part there is little choice for the farmers. The concentration of land ownership has been on the rise since the 1950s. Through neo-colonial institutions such as Food For Peace and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank, a few Colombian elites and foreign multinationals (mainly agribusiness) have monopolies over legal crops. There is a 20 percent urban unemployment rate and more than 1 million people have been forcefully displaced off their land. These people have no choice, they don’t want to starve to death in refugee camps, so they agree to cultivate coca for the traffickers. 
Not surprisingly, the US is targeting the poor farmers, mainly indigenous people and peasants on the Colombian side and imprisoning Latin American and African drug addicts at home. The people making the majority of the money, the traffickers and middlemen, are, for the most part, being left alone. Aside from facing military persecution, the farmers and millions of other civilians will be victimized by “extensive herbicide spraying”. The biological mycoherbicide Fusarium oxysporum which contains “several toxins associated with pulmonary illnesses, certain types of caner, skin ailments, and other health problems” will be used to destroy coca crops but will also destroy legal crops such as corn and beans, and potentially devastate the rainforest. A similar mycoherbicide has been used in Peru which destroyed legal crop lands for several years, while coca production continued. The State of Florida refused to allow spraying of marijuana for these same reasons. Pastrana also rejects the option, but will likely succumb to US pressure. The US government seems to think that a potentially lethal herbicide is safe for indigenous peoples but not Americans. 
This is by no means an experimental Drug War. The US State Department knows what is at risk and what works. In 1971 Richard Nixon declared a drug war where two thirds of funding went towards the treatment of addicts. This resulted in a substantial drop in arrests and prison populations. Obviously a return to this type of drug war, which works to a degree, would enrage the Military and Prison Industriall Complexes, two of the most powerful lobbying institutions in America. The US moved to the hawk style drug war in the 1980s. A correlation of human rights violations and unsurpassed prison populations emerged. There are obvious racist implications involved. 
THE PARAMILITARIES 
Each year some 3,000 people are murdered or “disappear” in Colombia. Over 100 labour unionists are mudered by the state every year, more than any country in the world combined. Some 300,000 people are driven from their homes and forced into refugee status. This is in a country which Bill Clinton and George Bush like to call a “leading democracy”. They obviously know the truth considering that in the US State Departments annual Human Rights Report they liberally wrote “security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups” and “government forces continued to commit, numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998.” Reports from non-partisan groups are generally more detailed and chilling. 
These paramilitary groups are created for a wide variety of reasons. “In November 1981, the April 19th Movement (M-19) guerrilla group kidnapped and demanded ransom for Martha Nieves Ochoa, a member of the prominent Ochoa drug trafficking Cartel. The next month, with Martha still a hostage, her family called a meeting, the Cartel created a professional hit squad to target kidnappers. A few months later in Puerto Boyaca, an important transhipment point on the Magdalena River, another group, including several active-duty army officers, representatives from the Texas Petroleum Company, and Puero Boyaca cattle ranchers and politicians created an armed organization to defend their interests and deter guerrilla attacks and extortions. The group would soon evolve into a full fledged paramilitary organization- called Death to Kidnappers [MAS].” This is a good example of who starts up paramilitary groups and who they represent. 
There are three main ways paramilitaries receive funding. They tax small businesses and multinational corporations in their territory, receive funding from large landowners and cattle ranchers, and through trafficking drugs. One of the largest operations in Colombia was found in 1999, a facility comprising nearly four square miles which would produce eight tons of cocaine a month. What they do with this funding is frightening, as described in an anonymous interview with a paramilitary member (Anonymous for their own safety, Amnesty International says the journalist is a reputable Colombian War Journalist and they have a video recording of the interview). The paramilitaries are first trained with blank weapons and trained how to torture and kill guerrillas. They are trained to see anyone concerned about human rights as a guerrilla, meaning union members, regular civilians and church activists. They often go on missions with the security forces and are trained to always bring back evidence of at least one casualty. Most of the paramilitary leaders are retired military personnel and train recruits how to torture civilians, from electric shock to acid and even castration. There are reports of entire families having their genitals mutilated and then acid thrown on them. People cannot cry during the torture because it is considered a crime. To think that North American governments and corporations support and fund this type of activity should be a wake up call to us all. 
THE FARC 
The first half of the twentieth century was marked by violent repression of reformist peasants and other liberals at the hands of conservatives, wealthy landowners and some Catholic Church leaders. The reformists literally had no choice but to either passively accept the murder and torture or form guerrilla groups. After the assassination of a liberal leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a violent war between factions representing landowners and peasants broke out. This period,1948 to 1958, is known as La Violencia and resulted in more than 300,000 Colombian deaths. The government gave weapons to conservative peasants in order to subdue the liberal uprisings. It is possible that these were the first paramilitaries in Colmbia. The Liberal Party and Communist Party, in response, managed to form a 10,000 man army. This filtered out into various small guerrilla groups. One man involved was Pedro Antonio Marin (or Manuel Marulanda Velez) who is now the chief commander of the FARC. In 1953, with the help of Washington, an anti-Communist leader forcefully took power, General Rojas Pinilla. With a $170 million US loan Pinilla bombed guerrilla and peasant strongholds. Many of these people were forced to flee into the Andean foothills and there they fromed communities based on economic self-management and military self defense. These later becameknown as “Independent Rpublics”. During the same period there were many peaceful anti-Pinilla demonstrations which were violently suppressed. The FARC was finally formed in 1964 after soldiers invaded the Independent Republics. Along with the National Liberation Army (ELN) the guerrillas decided it would be impossible to peacefully reform things. Some peasants were involved in expropriation of land during the 1970s and were violently removed by military and paramilitary forces. The 1970s were a great period of protest and repression including the National Civic Strike of 1977 and the Draconian Security Statute of 1978 which drastically reduce the right to protest and organize.” Thousands of people were driven from their homes and forced into the cities, drastically raisning unemployment rates. During this period many people also fled to FARC controlled areas and joined their fight, including students, intellectuals, workers and peasant leaders. “Between 1970 and 1982, the FARC grew from a movement of only about 500 people to a small army of 3,000.” The peasants were permanently displaced people, which forced them to embrace the coca farming livelihood. They literally had no choice if they wanted to survive. This led to a debate within the FARC. Many felt that the peasants would become rich and would no longer support them, but in the end they decided they could tax the farmers to finance their army. 
The early 1980s were a time of peace negotiations and the FARC gained power over some southern regions of Colombia. In 1987 the army attacked the Fifth Front of the FARC after being pressured by banana companies. They argued that the FARC was supporting union members who were fighting for wage increases. This intensified conflicts and also began the rise of paramilitaries, especially head of the Medellin Drug Cartel, Pablo Escobar. The paramilitaries and the army targeted the Patriotic Union, the political party financed by the FARC. They murdered some 3,000 activists and supporters. Four presidential candidates were murdered including Liberal leader Luis Carlos Galan, who was expected to win the election. This apparently is democratic policy according to the American government. There has been an escalation of fighting ever since and it is now at the point where the army and the paramilitaries are committing at least one massacre every day. The FARC continues to fight on though as they call for a socialist society and the rejection of American Imperialism. 
ELN 
The National Liberation Army is also worth mentioning as it is the second largest guerrilla group and differs somewhat from the FARC. While the FARC is more of a Marxist/Leninist group the ELN forces were created by university students, union workers and some Catholic priests, basing their struggle on liberation theology and a Gueveran style society. The ELN has been in the shadow of the FARC for the most part and less is known about them. During the 1990s they were heavily involved in the peace process until they were targeted by paramilitaries. They have been involved in property destruction and sabotage, mainly directed towards oil and mining corporations, including Occidental Oil whose pipeline threatens the U’wa people. Despite this they are involved in the “Group of Friends” peace process. 
THE CANADIAN CONNECTION 
Canadian support is mainly economic, although they have spent $30,000 to train Colombian soldiers to respect “basic human rights”. Companies such as Enbridge Oil, Canadian Occidental Ltd., Conquistador Mines, Bell Canada International, Nortel Networks, McCain Foods Ltd., and Bata Shoe Organization have large investments in Colombia, totalling over $5 billion. A lot is at stake for these companies if guerrilla groups gain power. Canadian companies have reported large profit making from the region. An Alberta oil company, Enbridge, holds almost 25% of OCENSA, Colombia’s largest oil pipeline. “Amnesty International has linked OCENSA to state repression” and Amnesty says “what is particularly alarming is that OCENSA/DSC (Defense Systems Colombia, a “security” group representing the pipeline) has purchased military equipment for the Colombian Army’s 14th Brigade which has an atrocious record of human rights violations.” At the time of the purchase of weapons the 14th Brigade was under investigation for complicity in a massacre of 15 unarmed civilians.” Svend Robinson, the NDP spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and Human Rights, recently visited Colombia and spoke with the President of Kappa Energy (owned by Canadian Vanguard Oil) Nelson Briceno. Briceno joked how protestors of oil exploration and development were shot by their private armies and how easy it was to bust unions. Conquistador Mines and its subsidiary Corona Goldfields, have been linked to paramilitaries in Simiti, in the Bolivar region. The paramilitaries helped “recover” the area and murdered 17 people near Simiti in March 1997. “On April 25, paramilitaries entered the town of Rio Viejo announcing their intention to ‘cleanse’ the area and ‘hand it over to multinational corporations because they will provide jobs and improve the region’/ The paramilitaries cut off the head of miner Juan Camacho and kicked it around like a soccer ball. They then placed the battered head on top of a long stick facing the mining zone to indicate the location of their next attack.” Bolivar is a strong paramilitary region where 10,000 people were driven from their land in 1998, paramilitaries killed 259 people and burnt down 689 homes between June 1998 and May 2000. The miners in the area have accused multinationals in the area of funding paramilitaries. BCI (Bell Communications International) and it’s subsidiaries control around 50 percent of the cellular market and Nortel Networks controls the majority of telephone lines in 17 regions of Colombia. 17 unionists were murdered in October 1998 protesting the telecommunications industry. These companies should be boycotted and we should let everyone know that we do not support this so-called “Drug War”. Through the Free Trade Area of the Americas we would be required to provide funding for this war. 
As the war in Colombia escalates we must recognize that it is one of the most pressing issues of our time. This discussion needs to continue so that possible positive results can be achieved. We cannot sit by and allow American imperialism to expand and we cannot allow the slaughter of innocent civilians and revolutionaries. We must also recognize that the environment is at risk and Colombia is an area with vast rainforests and a wide variety of animal species. They will all be at risk because of bombing and biochemical warfare. 

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