More billions down a rathole. But I really doubt the FARC are more than a leftist mirror of official repression.
Michael Pugliese
http://www.drugwar.com/active%20army.htm ...And if the campesino-guerrillas were the real "narcoterrorists," they would hardly be demanding the controlled legalization of all drugs, since that will collapse their value, making them useless as a source of military funding. As with the Zapatistas of Mexico and the Senderistas of Peru ("the Shining Path," Sendero Luminoso), the original FARC intention had been to empower the campesinos by eliminating the McCaffrey, that is, by eliminating the excuse for Colombian participation in the U.S. military-industrial complex.
But warfare often perverts good intentions. A veteran member of the foreign press corps, who has lived in Colombia for years, warns me not to lionize the left. "The FARC are not freedom fighters or defenders of the peasants. They might have been originally but they have degenerated into just another power block within this complex, brutal and absurd civil war we have now. So far as most intelligent observers can see, they really only have the Stalinist aim of keeping themselves in power, grabbing more territory and imposing their will by force."
"All of this power-grabbing is with the aim of eventually having the clout to get the government to make fundamental reforms in the system here, which is completely corrupt and unjust, but by now, after fifty years in the bush as guerrilla fighters, they have lost sight of political realities, are out of touch with the world as it is nowadays, don't really have the ability to administer a country well, have lost the support of intellectuals and technicians and in short, no longer really know what they want."
"For example, they talk about nationalizing oil, which is run by foreign companies. But at the same time they are living off pay-offs from these companies and would never in a million years be able to run the oil wells by themselves." ".... It was the guerrillas who killed the three US Indian rights people, two of them Native Americans, who came to Colombia to support a tribe in its fight against a multinational oil company who wants to exploit their natural resources. So what does that say to you!!!!"
"The peasants support them, in part, because the army is a traditional enemy and behaves even worse. But more and more it is because the FARC have the guns and anyone who goes against them is bumped off. A lot of young guys and girls go into the FARC because there is no other economic alternative and because, for some half-literate, resentful 15 year-old kid, who never will have a chance to be anyone important, it's great to have a gun and be part of a group that pushes people about. Besides, this is no longer a country with a peasant majority, as it was before. It is more and more urban, which means that it is a much more complex economy and raises much more complex questions about who is guilty of exploitation. Is a middling guy who owns a shop or a truck a capitalist or not?"
And if he is, will the structural economy benefit by subsidizing his sweat? Is an Indian farmer, hoping to scratch a living from his produce, a sweat-equity capitalist deserving of state support? Jacobo Arbenz, the great Guatemalan reformist of the 1950's, so famously overthrown by the Dulles brothers, would have said so, but the IMF has a different idea. Juan Manuel Ospina, president of the Colombian Farmers' Society, points out that under IMF-US sponsored trade models, Indian grain, corn, rice, potato and onion farmers are undersold by cheap global imports - Archer Daniels Midland's great humanitarian contribution to Colombia. Given the artificial Prohibition-value of the drug crops, starving Indians are forced into the drug-crop economy and into the civil war. Lowland Indians are growing ipadú coca, highlanders grow opium.
The solution, as native Colombian politicians are well aware, is to collapse the value of drug crops with controlled legalization, thereby economically collapsing the militarization of the countryside. The money not spent on warfare could then be used to support sweat-equity production models...
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http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWsrch.cgi?text=Alma+Guillermoprieto+
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20000427031F
April 27, 2000
Colombia: Violence Without End? ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO 1. The war in Colombia between the army and an irregular paramilitary force, on one side, and various armed left-wing organizations on the other has claimed thousands of lives, and sown terror in the countryside for decades. During the last couple of years, however, the guerrillas have sought to have a greater impact by interrupting daily life in the cities. In Bogotá, for example, a few days before the end of December, a group of Colombian friends considered their holiday options-a trip to the countryside or a long drive to the coast for a few days of sunshine-and decided that the choice would depend on the road conditions. The country's largest guerrilla organization, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, had declared a holiday truce as a gesture of commitment to the peace talks that have been fitfully underway since President Andrés Pastrana took office a year and a half ago. This meant, one friend said, that there would be no combat activity, and so the beach might not be a bad idea. But other members of the group were doubtful: the guerrillas had said that there would be no combat, but had they said anything about kidnappings?
Kidnappings are the worst danger for civilians who are traveling overland. At roadblocks set up by the guerrillas, which can last for hours, or even days, civilians will be allowed through only if a quick search through a computer database shows that their bank accounts are too small to qualify them as "kidnappable." Combined with the large number of targeted abductions, these "fishing expeditions," as they are known, have made Colombia the kidnap capital of the world: last year 2,945 abductions were reported to the police-eight a day. The guerrillas were responsible for most of them, all of which gave the friends' discussion a certain urgency. If the guerrillas had not included kidnappings in the cease-fire, a long trip was out of the question.
There had been no recent reports of guerrilla roadblocks, and the idea of a trip seemed plausible, until one member of the vacationing party remembered something. The rival guerrilla group to the FARC, the ELN, whose initials stand for Ejército de Liberación Nacional, derives its income almost exclusively from kidnappings and extortion. It is still holding fourteen passengers who were on a commercial plane that was carrying forty-six people when the guerrillas hijacked it a year ago. Founded in 1965, and led by the Spanish priest Manuel Pérez until his death two years ago, the ELN is considered the most intransigent of the various armed left-wing associations that have prospered in Colombia during the last forty years. And indeed, the group of friends quickly realized, the ELN had not declared a truce for the holidays. All plans to spend the New Year somewhere other than Bogotá were immediately canceled...