[In favor of the FARC]
Colombia: Adopting a Tougher Stance Against The FARC
25 January 2001
Summary
Colombian President Andres Pastrana is adopting a tougher stance with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the first time since taking office in 1998. Over 2,500 Colombian army soldiers are on the border of the FARC-held demilitarized zone in southern Colombia, and Pastrana is warning that if the rebels don't renew peace talks by Jan. 31 - the deadline for ending the DMZ - the negotiations would be over. Pastrana, however, is posturing. The Colombian government lacks the military capability to launch a successful all-out offensive against the FARC.
Analysis
Colombian President Andres Pastrana is rattling sabers in a last-ditch bid to compel the FARC to resume peace negotiations with the government. A week before the Jan. 31 deadline for ending the two-year-old demilitarized zone in southern Colombia controlled by the FARC, the Colombian army has positioned over 2,500 heavily armed soldiers at several points on the DMZ's border.
Another 7,000 soldiers are being concentrated at several bases and held in reserve, according to General Fernando Tapias, commander of the Colombian armed forces. Meanwhile, Pastrana told the Parisian daily Le Monde that if FARC leaders do not return unilaterally to the peace talks they abandoned last November, then "logically there is no negotiation."
Pastrana's uncharacteristic show of force sounds more like political posturing than steely determination to launch an all-out military offensive against the FARC.
In fact, the Colombian army does not have the capability yet to conduct a successful all-out offensive. The truth is that Pastrana - like the majority of Colombia's political leaders who have shown little willingness to confront the FARC on the battlefield - is unlikely to launch an aggressive military campaign against the FARC without first receiving guarantees of strong political and military support from the United States.
Until now, Pastrana has pursued a policy of peace at any price with the FARC. FARC leaders, however, have not made a single concession in return. Two years of faltering talks have failed to produce a cease-fire agreement. Instead, kidnappings and killings by FARC units have increased rapidly since 1988.
FARC leaders have used their sole control of an area in southern Colombia - roughly the size of Switzerland - to recruit and train new fighters, acquire a large arsenal that includes over 30,000 automatic assault rifles, expand the FARC's civilian support militia throughout Colombia, position its forces strategically near major urban centers, and consolidate the rebel group's dominant role in the cocaine trade.
Today the FARC numbers about 17,000 well-armed fighters scattered across Colombia in at least 66 identified separate units or fronts. In addition, the FARC has expanded its civilian support militia from about 36,000 persons in 1998 to nearly 100,000 today, according to Colombian intelligence sources cited by El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald.
The bulk of this civilian militia engages in providing financial, logistical, political, legal and other non-violent support to the FARC. Some militia members, however, could be armed and used to reinforce small urban guerrilla networks the FARC has positioned in Bogota and other major urban centers in the last two or three years.
President Pastrana is in a political bind. Alfonso Lopez, one of the Colombian government's peace negotiators, warned this week that the peace process has lost credibility while Pastrana's maneuvering room "has been reduced vertically."
Moreover, a poll by Colombia's Caracol Network showed that 89 percent of those surveyed oppose extending the FARC-held DMZ beyond the Jan. 31 deadline. Until now Pastrana and the overwhelming majority of Colombia's political leaders have shown no stomach for confronting the FARC in any venue other than peace negotiations.
FARC leaders are gambling that Pastrana is only posturing, and that he will extend the Jan. 31 deadline for the DMZ rather than risk escalating the country's civil war.
On Jan. 17, the FARC issued a new proposal that linked renewing the peace talks to an indefinite extension of the FARC-held DMZ and to the official involvement of the European Union in the peace talks. The FARC proposal also held out the possibility of a partial prisoner exchange involving some of the more than 550 soldiers and police officials held captive for as long as three years.
Until now, the FARC has controlled the pace and direction of the two-year-old peace talks. While the Colombian government has made concession after concession, the FARC has conceded nothing in return. Moreover, even if Pastrana agrees to extend the DMZ's life indefinitely, the FARC will not alter its strategy of making no concessions while slowly increasing the tempo of hostilities throughout the country.
Recorded and printed FARC documents captured in the past year by the Colombian military and intelligence authorities show that FARC leaders use the peace process as an umbrella to expand their military and political capabilities.
This week's issue of Cambio, a Colombian weekly magazine edited by the Nobel Prize winning author and journalist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, reproduced a cassette recording made in mid-1999 by the FARC's top warlord, Jorge Briceno (a.k.a. Mono Jojoy) and reportedly distributed to the commanders of the group's combat fronts.
According to Briceno, the talks with the Pastrana government are not peace negotiations, but simply "a dialogue with a transitory government." The FARC leader says the peace talks will not succeed, and that the DMZ is a military gain for the FARC.
When the talks break down, he added, the FARC's Southern and Eastern Blocks will be responsible for opposing the Colombian army's efforts to retake control of the DMZ. FARC units inside the DMZ will "fade into the jungle" and fight a classic guerrilla war against the Colombian army, while other FARC units from the Eastern and Western Blocks will spread the conflict to Colombia's urban centers, "according to our strategic plan," Briceno said.
In the recording, Briceno also orders his forces to counter aerial bombing and chemical spraying inside the DMZ by extensively mining and booby-trapping rebel camps, villages, roads and trails used by Colombian soldiers and civilians
The FARC will not flee from the DMZ if Pastrana does not extend the deadline. Instead, FARC units will engage the Colombian army in guerrilla warfare inside the DMZ, while FARC forces throughout the country will increase the frequency of attacks against Colombia's national energy and transportation infrastructure, blowing up oil pipelines and electricity transmission towers, blockading roads and highways, and mounting a wave of terrorist bomb attacks, kidnappings and killings of civilians in urban centers.
Although the Colombian armed forces are growing in size and armament, they are still spread too thin and ill-equipped to confront the FARC's escalating terror tactics, especially in urban areas.
General Tapias says the Colombian army is ready to immediately retake control of the DMZ. However, the reality is that the army's mobility remains limited by a shortage of helicopter transports and good intelligence. The military units massed near the DMZ are not part of the $1.3 billion U.S.-trained and equipped anti-narcotic offensive currently underway in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo, where more than half of the country's illegal coca crops are cultivated.
Moreover, recent aerial surveillance photographs show that the FARC has built concrete bunkers within the DMZ to protect its fighters from air attack and has been digging trench networks.
Pastrana is inclined by temperament and conviction to extend the DMZ's lifespan, if not indefinitely then for three or six months. If Colombia's president concludes that there is no political future in extending the deadline, the FARC is well positioned to inflict heavy casualties on army units invading the DMZ while it escalates the conflict throughout the country, inviting immediate retaliation from more than 8,000 paramilitary fighters.
Pastrana is painting himself into a corner. If Pastrana orders the Colombian army to retake the DMZ and engage the FARC without first securing guarantees of political and military support from the U.S. government, he risks souring Washington's tenuous support for the military offensive against the drug trade.
Additionally, if the FARC inflicts heavy casualties on Colombian army units invading the DMZ and simultaneously launches a wave of terrorist attacks against economic and human targets in urban areas, Pastrana risks embarrassing the Colombian armed forces and making his government look weak and incompetent.
However, if Pastrana talks tough and then extends the DMZ's existence yet again, he will appear a weak president, easily manipulated by the FARC's ruthless leaders. As Pastrana grows politically weaker, the FARC will appear politically stronger. Meanwhile, the peace talks will languish while the political violence continues to escalate.