> Colombia: Is U.S. Re-Creating El Salvador?
> by William M. Leogrande and Kenneth Sharpe
> (Los Angeles Times, 3/19/00)
>
> WASHINGTON--One year ago this month, President Bill Clinton publicly
> apologized to Guatemalans for decades of U.S. policy in support of a
> murderous military that "engaged in violent and widespread repression,"
> costing the lives of some 100,000 civilians. That policy "was wrong," the
> president declared, "and the United States must not repeat that mistake."
> One year later, Clinton is about to repeat it in Colombia.
>
> In the name of fighting drugs, the United States is preparing to join
> the Colombian armed forces in a civil war that has been raging for more
> than 40 years, despite the fact they have they worst human-rights record
> in the hemisphere. On Jan. 11, the president sent to Congress a request
> for $1 billion in security aid for Colombia, up from $65 million in 1996
> and $300 million last year. Most of the money will finance a new
> counterinsurgency campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
> Colombia (FARC), the largest of three armed leftist guerrilla movements.
>
> The insurgents are a serious force. Numbering about 20,000, they
> exercise significant influence in more than half of Colombia's
> municipalities. Until now, the United States has had the wisdom to stay
> out of the military's protracted war with the guerrillas. The rationale
> for abandoning that restraint is what drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey has
> called a "drug emergency": a dramatic increase in coca-leaf cultivation
> in the southern provinces of Putumayo and Caqueta, strongholds of the
> FARC. To "secure" these areas for drug eradication, Washington plans to
> outfit the Colombian army to wage counterinsurgency war.
>
> But even if coca eradication in southern Colombia succeeds, production
> will simply move elsewhere. As long as demand for drugs in the United
> States remains high, and enormous profits can be made from the illicit
> trade, traffickers will adapt to eradication and interdiction programs
> the way they always have: by shifting from region to region and country
> to country. Decades of eradication campaigns the world over tell us the
> war in southern Colombia will have no significant effect on the supply of
> drugs entering the United States. The idea that we can win the war on
> drugs by waging war on the Colombian guerrillas is a dangerous fantasy.
>
> The elements of Washington's counterinsurgency strategy for Colombia
> are taken straight from the Pentagon's experience in El Salvador:
> U.S.-trained and -outfitted rapid-deployment battalions, advanced
> gunships, intensive intelligence gathering and hundreds of U.S. military
> advisors who won't go into combat (just as they weren't supposed to in El
> Salvador, although they did, as the Pentagon acknowledged years later).
>
> A billion dollars of aid turned the Salvadoran military into a large,
> well-equipped, politically powerful force that murdered more than 70,000
> civilians with impunity for more than a decade. It did not win the war.
> The war ended when the United States finally recognized that it was
> unwinnable and forced the army to accept a negotiated peace or face a
> cutoff of U.S. aid.
>
> The 40-year-old civil war in Colombia is unwinnable, too, as Colombian
> President Andres Pastrana acknowledges. Elected in 1998 on a peace
> platform, he has opened negotiations with the guerrillas, and rightly so.
> Despite their serious human-rights abuses and involvement with coca
> growers, they are a powerful force representing a constituency with real
> social and political grievances. But the guerrillas are wary of
> negotiations. The last time they signed a cease-fire and agreed to
> participate in elections, death squads of the paramilitary right, often
> paid by large landowners and assisted by the military, assassinated
> 3,000 activists of the left's Patriotic Union party, including elected
> officials, two senators and two presidential candidates. Since then,
> the right has grow even stronger, now numbering greater than 5,000
> combatants who terrorize whole regions of the country.
>
> Pastrana cannot guarantee the personal security of the guerrillas if
> they lay down their arms, just as the Christian Democrats in El Salvador
> could not guarantee the security of the Farabundo Marti National
> Liberation Front guerrillas in the early 1980s, at the height of the
> death-squad violence there. As long as the Colombian government is
> unwilling or unable to control the violent right, the guerrillas dare not
> agree to peace.
>
> No one doubts Pastrana's desire to halt paramilitary violence and to
> sever the ties that have long existed between the paramilitary right and
> the armed forces. But Pastrana, like Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon
> Duarte in the 1980s, has limited control over the military. He has
> managed to reduce the army's human-rights abuses, but despite his best
> efforts, he has not been able to dissolve the silent partnership between
> mid-level, even senior, officers and the paramilitaries. A Human Rights
> Watch report last month links half of Colombia's 18 brigade-level army
> units to paramilitary violence, which is now responsible for 78% of
> reported abuses, including several thousand political killings and
> disappearances annually. Investigations by Amnesty International, the
> United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Colombian
> government confirm the army's collusion in paramilitary violence.
>
> In El Salvador, the army had no interest in reining in the death
> squads because they were an essential weapon in its war against the left.
> The Colombian situation is similar; by leaving the dirtiest work in this
> dirty war to the paramilitaries, the regular army can claim a clean
> human-rights record as it seeks more military aid from Washington.
>
> In lobbying Congress for the Colombian aid package, McCaffrey echoes
> the arguments made by Reagan administration officials who lobbied for
> military assistance to El Salvador and Guatemala, insisting that the
> death squads were independent of the armed forces. The declassified
> history of those wars has revealed that such arguments were
> disingenuous. In Colombia, the record of complicity is equally clear.
>
> As in Central America, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into
> the Colombian armed forces will make them more powerful politically
> and less answerable to civilian authority. Senior officers are already
> hostile to Pastrana's peace overtures and his efforts to discipline
> officers linked to the paramilitary right. A massive infusion of U.S. aid
> will be seen by officers as Washington's endorsement of their preferred
> strategy: escalating the war rather than ending it through negotiation.
> That will make it harder to stop the paramilitaries and harder to
> convince the guerrillas that the government's desire for peace is
> genuine.
>
> This month marks the 20th anniversary (on March 24) of the
> assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. Two months
> before he was killed by a rightist death squad, he wrote a personal
> appeal to Jimmy Carter, asking the president to abstain from increasing
> U.S. military aid that "will surely aggravate the repression and
> injustice" inflicted on the populace by the armed forces. "If you truly
> want to defend human rights," Romero wrote, "I ask that you . . .
> prohibit all military assistance." Instead, we allowed our obsession with
> communism to justify arming and financing a murderous military, and a war
> that could have ended with a peace accord in 1980 dragged on for another
> decade, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. In Colombia, we
> are about to let our fear of drugs lead us into an equally futile and
> bloody war. We failed to heed Romero's plea 20 years ago; we ought not
> make the same mistake again.
>
> William M. Leogrande Is a Professor of Government at American University
> and the Author of "Our Own Backyard: the United States in Central America,
> 1977-1992." Kenneth Sharpe Is a Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore
> College and Coauthor of "Drug War Politics: the Price of Denial."
>
> Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times