[I don't know what's gotten into the Economist this month. This article on Colombia could have been published in Counterpunch]
Colombia is home to a large left-wing guerrilla force, the FARC (and a lesser one, the ELN). The Americans badly want the FARC defeated, supposedly because it plays a big part in the drugs trade. So they pile up invective and military hardware against it, in the guise of anti-drugs support. A recent $29m aid package includes the equipping of the Colombian helicopter fleet with 20mm cannons, supposedly for use in crop eradication. Previous military aid was listed in Washington as "category 4," for operations not involving hostilities. The 1998 package went through as category 2, for military operations short of war.
Strangely, no such hardware is being aimed at these guerrillas' bitter foes, the right-wing paramilitary groups. Yet they and the traffickers they protect are far deeper into drugs -- and the DEA knows it. But repeated paramilitary atrocities draw only a political rap on the knuckles when things get out of hand. The United States is blind neither to drugs nor to atrocities. But those who commit such crimes -- they in*clude, under both heads, some of the official armed forces -- are fighting the Marxist guerrillas, and the paramilitaries (not the army) are seen as the only people remotely capable of containing these.
So the paramilitaries operate with relative impunity in northern Colombia along with the big drug-traffickers. In the south, pre-eminently FARC country, President Andres Pastrana has won a degree of American approval for his attempt to negotiate peace with the guerrillas. But the essential American line, set mainly by the Pentagon and the CIA, is to prepare for war. And not against drugs, say DEA men.
Against this backdrop of fudged priorities, conspiracy theorists fear worse. The paramilitaries' leader, Carlos Castano, is -- and deservedly so -- much feared. But it was his brother Fidel who in the early 1990s first won for the pair's then fledgling para*military force its reputation for ferocity. Fidel was also a prominent drug-trafficker, a close ally of Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin mob, who was shot dead in 1993. Supposedly, Fidel died in 1994. But now, says one DEA source, the DEA privately believes him to be alive and well and back at his old trade, if ever he left it. DEA informants have him active over the past four years, most recently establishing links with the Russian mafia.
It sounds like fiction, and it may be. But if the DEA privately thinks one of its worst enemies alive, why is it obliged publicly to think the opposite? Low minds point to Manuel Noriega's heyday -- the days of American support for him -- in Panama. He was deep in drugs, and in league with Escobar, but he was also useful to the CIA, and indeed for a time to the DEA, since he came down hard on rival drug traffickers. Could a similar politics-over-drugs approach be driving American policy towards the Castanos, be they one or two?
That sounds far-fetched. But is it more so than the notion that the United States spends millions of dollars on its policy against drugs, yet cannot spot the most obvious target? Some Colombians think it possible -- and there is solid evidence that the United States does indeed wink at the drug-running of the only forces that look effective against the insurgency of the far left.
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com