[NOTE: Get ready for some "humanitarian bombing" of
Colombia by the U.S. Air Force, as soon as some of
the other interventions in Yugoslavia and Iraq quiet
down. Stay tuned to see how the "vietnamization" of
Colombia unfolds. -DG]
==================================================
"The problem is that that is inexorably drawing
us into counterinsurgency operations in a civil
war that has never been really debated in Congress
and which is beyond the purpose of what the aid is
for," said Tim Rieser, aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy,
D-Vt., who, as the ranking member of the Foreign
Operations subcommittee, has cautioned against
hasty American involvement. _________________ ================================================== HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Friday, 7 May 1999
Colombia turmoil plays out like upheaval in Kosovo
Drawing more notice in Congress,
level of violence comparable to Kosovo
--------------------------------------------------
By Juan Forero
Newhouse Service
TAMARA, Colombia -- Far from any large city, this hamlet was defined for years by its slow pace and the familiar faces of its people --the mud-spattered farmers who dry coffee beans in the town plaza, school children in pleated uniforms, the merchants with their long-established stores.
Then strangers armed with assault rifles and rocket launchers began patrolling Tamara's cobblestone streets.
First came leftist guerrillas; they were followed by the Colombian army. Then came right-wing paramilitary gunmen hired by wealthy landowners to ferret out rebel sympathizers. All toted weapons --and used them-- around town.
Tamara was now caught in the middle of Latin America's longest and bloodiest guerrilla war, a complicated conflict that may be the next regional conflagration that draws in the United States.
While it hasn't captured the intense worldwide interest now focused a world away on Kosovo, the level of senseless violence and suffering here is numbingly comparable --tens of thousands of lives lost and more than 1 million people driven from their homes.
The conflict, however, is increasingly alarming to U.S policymakers and members of Congress. They are worried that Colombia's efforts to check the flow of north-bound cocaine have been hamstrung by the rebels' growing control of the countryside. Washington has already responded by increasing its aid to the national police and military from $88.6 million last year to $287 million this year, making Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. assistance behind Israel and Egypt.
Many experts believe more aid will be forthcoming, especially now that the Clinton administration has found a partner it can work with in newly elected President Andres Pastrana.
"Colombia's promising new president is determined to overcome threats posed by drug cartels, guerrillas, paramilitary forces and poverty. And we are determined to help him," U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said recently.
To some conservatives in Congress who associate the rebels with the drug cartels, military aid for Colombia is seen as crucial if a narco-state only two hours from Miami is to be averted.
"Whatever pressure needs to be exerted on the narco-guerrillas down there needs to be exerted," said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., a conservative member of the House International Relations Committee. "The entire northern tier of South America could be lost to narco-guerrillas and traffickers, and that would be horrible for the United States."
In Tamara, townspeople are just trying to stay clear of all the warring factions.
"We feel like we're between the sword and the wall," said Juan de la Espriella, 40, a farmer who works in the fields outside this hamlet of 2,000 in the eastern state of Casanare. "You never know who's coming into town and who's going to fall. You have to be aware of it, that things can change at any minute."
Warfare in Colombia goes back to at least the mid-1960s, with the founding of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an outgrowth of a peasant movement intent on obtaining land reform and a redistribution of wealth.
Led by Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda, the FARC developed into a potent force in the 1970s and '80s with the help of Soviet arms and Cuban training. The fall of Eastern Bloc communism could have meant the end for the FARC, as it did for other rebel movements. Instead, the FARC has flourished by turning to a more reliable source of support --Colombia's ample cocaine and heroin industry.
In the 1990s, the FARC has been invigorated into the best-funded rebel organization ever in Latin America, earning anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion annually by providing protection for jungle airfields, charging "war taxes" to drug traffickers, as well as kidnapping the wealthy and extorting from big businesses.
The result is that the 15,000-member FARC --along with a smaller, separate rebel movement, the 5,000-member National Liberation Army (ELN)-- now enjoys a presence in as many as half of the country's 1,074 municipalities.
"The security forces (army and police) confront a triangle of violence with themselves on one point, two well-entrenched insurgent groups who exercise de facto control over at least 40 percent of the countryside on another, and brutal paramilitary organizations on the third," Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, told Congress last month. Wilhelm noted that the FARC has "handed the Colombian army and national police one tactical defeat after another."
In Washington, where Colombia's troubles have recently been the subject of several congressional hearings, concern is high that Bogota's inability to defeat the rebels will translate into a greater flow of drugs.
"This is an increasingly well-funded and well-armed guerrilla movement, making it more difficult for underfunded Colombian forces to maintain order and effectively fight the war on drugs," said Sen. Paul Coverdell, R-Ga., chairman of the Senate Western Hemisphere subcommittee. Coverdell noted that coca production in Colombia had grown by as much as 26 percent last year, a byproduct of the government's lack of control over the countryside.
The dire situation has resulted in a drumbeat of support for more military assistance and training for Colombia, though U.S. officials insist aid is being devoted to counternarcotics operations.
But with the line ever more blurred between drug traffickers and rebels, experts say, Washington's assistance is being naturally employed in counterinsurgency efforts. And the FARC's senseless kidnap-murders of three Americans in February is expected to further build support on Capitol Hill for increased military aid.
"The problem is that that is inexorably drawing us into counterinsurgency operations in a civil war that has never been really debated in Congress and which is beyond the purpose of what the aid is for," said Tim Rieser, aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who, as the ranking member of the Foreign Operations subcommittee, has cautioned against hasty American involvement.
To human rights groups and some U.S. lawmakers, Washington's growing aid is cause for concern because of well-documented links between the Colombian military and the right-wing paramilitary groups that stand accused of thousands of indiscriminate slayings.
U.S. law pushed through by Leahy does restrict aid to military units linked to abuses, so at the moment most American aid goes to the Colombian national police.
Like a growing number of towns, Tamara has seen the escalating violence of war since the late 1980s, when guerrillas first attacked the police barracks with a hail of machine-gun fire. The military counterattacked, driving the guerrillas into the hills. But in 1995, the police and military abandoned Tamara altogether after rebels launched a furious assault that killed several policemen and destroyed the police station.
But if the townspeople of Tamara thought peace had come to their town, they were mistaken. Guerrillas made frequent forays into the area, purchasing provisions from store owners and letting people know they were the regional authorities.
Their presence ensured that paramilitary gunmen would arrive, and last Oct. 27, that's exactly what happened.
About 30 heavily armed men, their faces covered to mask their identities, arrived in Tamara. Searching for guerrilla sympathizers, the gunmen herded the townspeople --including dozens of children-- into the central plaza at gunpoint.
"We are the Self Defense Forces of Casanare," the lead gunman told the townspeople. "We're going to call out names of collaborators, people who allow the guerrillas to exist."
The gunmen then produced a list containing the names of 20 people they accused of having sold provisions or provided intelligence to rebels.
Jaime Corredor was one of those whose name was on the list, recalled his wife, Doris Roncancio de Corredor. In one telling incident, she said, an army lieutenant had even threatened her husband, telling him: "You should abandon this town if you want to live."
Corredor and his family, though, had never taken sides in the war and assumed violence would not touch them. "Our conscience was clean," Roncancio de Corredor explained.
But on the day the paramilitary gunmen arrived, Jaime Corredor's name was called out and gunmen went to his store. Cursing loudly and waving automatic weapons, they dragged him and another storekeeper, Alberto Guacho, down the dirt road leading out of town.
Then Roncancio de Corredor and her children heard the gunfire. The gunmen had riddled the two merchants with bullets, leaving their bodies on the muddy road.
"They took him that way. When I got there, they had already killed him," said Corredor's widow, tears welling in her bright black eyes.
The slayings stunned a town that until that point had seen only the deaths of combatants in the war, not innocent civilians.
"Before, the war was between the guerrillas, the military, the paramilitaries. The people were spectators," explained Arcadio Benitez, Tamara's 38-year-old mayor. "But then they took children out of school at gunpoint, threatened us and killed two people. It was a hard experience to live through."
On a recent night at the 16th Brigade headquarters in Yopal, capital of the province of Casanare, a fleet of armored personnel carriers loaded with heavily armed soldiers rumbled out of the base. They were bound for a rural sector controlled by FARC guerrillas, a zone not far from Tamara.
For the combat soldiers of the brigade, skirmishes with rebels are nothing new, said Brig. Gen. Leonel Gomez, the brigade commander. But in an interview in an office plastered with maps and charts, the 32-year military veteran, noting the patriotism and heroism of his troops, said the encounters usually go the army's way.
"The FARC has not been able to do what they want to do. We haven't permitted them," said Gomez, who attended a recent course at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington. "When the military goes in, there's no problem. All over Colombia, where there is military, there is control."
The general's rosy assessment, though, sharply contrasts with assessments made by the State Department and U.S. military officials such as the Southern Command's Gen. Wilhelm, who last year said "the performance of the Colombian military to date provides little cause for optimism."
Military experts agree that the Colombian military --with fewer than 30,000 combat-ready troops out of a force of 120,000-- lacks the manpower, resources or technical ability to cover a varied terrain composed of treeless plains, jungles and high mountain peaks in a country twice the size of France.
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