ST. PETERSBURG TIMES [Florida] Sunday, 13 May 2001
Contract's end hints of Colombia trouble
By David Adams and Paul de la Garza
WASHINGTON - Their mission was to help turn the Colombian military into a first-class war machine.
But from the start, the mission was flawed. They spoke no Spanish. They didn't understand the culture. And most obviously, Colombia didn't have time for them. It was too busy fighting a war.
In February, the fate of the mission taken on by a Virginia-based private military company, Military Professional Resources Inc., or MPRI, was sealed. With pressure from Colombia, their boss gave MPRI the boot. The boss was the Pentagon.
After only one year, the Pentagon's office of Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict decided not to renew its contract. The move came as a surprise, because the idea had been for MPRI to help, in the words of the Pentagon, "fix a defective soldier" and stay on to help Colombia implement its recommendations.
For the company, it wasn't a total wash.
MPRI walked away with $ 4.3-million, paid largely from the $ 1.3-billion aid package Congress approved for Colombia last year under Plan Colombia to help fight the drug war.
The story of MPRI cracks a window into Washington's ignorance of Colombia's complexity as U.S. military involvement there grows, and the use of private contractors to do Uncle Sam's job.
Little local knowledge
After decades of bloody conflict, everyone agreed that Colombia - the world's top producer of cocaine and, increasingly, heroin - needed help. Well-financed armies of Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries were running the nation's ill-equipped and poorly trained military ragged. With law and order breaking down in large swaths of the country, drug traffickers, often in cahoots with both the rebels and paramilitaries, were having a field day.
The Pentagon compared Colombia's Ministry of Defense with a broken factory. The job of MPRI was to fix the factory in order to produce a better soldier to fight the drug war. Before MPRI won the one-year contract, it was hired by the Pentagon in fall 1999 to assess the defense ministry. MPRI charged the Pentagon $ 850,000 for six weeks of work.
MPRI consultants had the experience the Pentagon was looking for. They included retired generals, ex-CIA officers, diplomats and academics. The use of MPRI marked an unprecedented degree of cooperation between the United States and Colombia. Before Andres Pastrana was elected president in 1998, relations between Washington and Bogota had soured. Washington had revoked the visa of Pastrana's predecessor, Ernesto Samper, after accusing him of accepting drug money to help finance his presidential campaign.
After MPRI arrived in Colombia, problems arose, according to military analysts. The company chose to staff its Bogota office with people who spoke no Spanish and had little or no experience in Latin America. Instead, most had a background in U.S. operations in Europe and in the Pentagon bureaucracy.
Colombians' complaints
Officially, the United States and Colombia say that MPRI did its job and that it was no longer needed. Privately, however, officials admit that MPRI and Colombia's Ministry of Defense were not a good fit.
>From the Pentagon's perspective, it was "a business decision" not to
renew the contract, said a spokesman, Lt. Col. George Rhynedance.
"The contract expired. They did what they were asked to do," he said. "We did not feel a new contract was needed. It was a business decision, with no bad blood. I'm told we had a very collegial and thorough out-brief with MPRI at the conclusion of their contract."
Over the course of the contract, MPRI worked with the armed forces and the National Police in the areas such as psychological operations, training, logistics, intelligence and personnel management.
Colombian officials, however, criticized MPRI's work as largely irrelevant and not tailored for Colombia's needs. Indeed, they were frustrated with the very mission itself, which strictly provided advice on how to fight the drug war, not the guerrilla war.
Officers also complained that MPRI manuals were stacked with generic military advice applicable to almost any country. They were littered with references to U.S. operations like Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf but with little or no mention of specific Colombian scenarios.
Finally, Colombian officers felt patronized by retired American generals who hadn't seen combat in years.
One MPRI draft dated July 2000 described itself as "the Colombian Military Forces keystone warfighting document."
Written in English and titled "Colombian Counter-Drug Doctrine," it offered a recommendation to "know the culture and the issues."
It went on: "We must know who the decisionmakers are. We must know how the involved parties think. We cannot impose our cultural values on people with their own culture."
In an interview with the Colombian news magazine Semana, Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez confirmed what others in the Pastrana administration were saying: that Colombia didn't get much out of the company. While MPRI provided advice on military doctrine, "there was no empathy," Ramirez told the magazine.
He offered several reasons, including the fact that sometimes Colombian generals did not have time to meet with MPRI.
"In a country at war, there is not a lot of time to go to committees," Ramirez said.
But in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Ramirez was more complimentary of MPRI, describing several of its recommendations as "valid and useful." The company, he said, provided the defense ministry with operational suggestions for fighting the drug war more efficiently. He confirmed that some of the company's concepts had not been put into effect, saying, "They serve as an element of analysis and discussion."
Ramirez said that in some cases, military officials did not agree with MPRI's recommendations, "which happens a lot of times with the client (the minister) and the consultant."
For MPRI's part, spokesman Ed Soyster said that as far as he knew the Pentagon did not renew the contract because its job was done. "We did everything we were supposed to do under the contract," he said. Soyster declined to say whether MPRI had received any feedback from the Ministry of Defense.
MPRI holds scores of contracts worth tens of millions of dollars with the Pentagon around the world. Because of its experience with the Pentagon, Soyster said he was not surprised that the contract was not renewed. He said the Pentagon gave MPRI no reason for pulling the company out of Colombia.
Policy under fire
The MPRI experience provides a useful lesson for U.S. policymakers who have consistently failed to come to grips with the reality of Colombia's conflict, said Bruce Bagley, a leading expert on Colombia at the University of Miami.
"They lord it over the Colombians, they don't know the language, or the culture or the geography, and they certainly don't know the inter-service rivalries that have been impediments to reform," Bagley said.
He said it also underscored the dangers of putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of private consultants.
"The underlying truth here is this subcontracting of the war allows for no accountability for the millions of dollars the U.S. government is spending, supposedly to help Colombia," he said. "Our millions very often don't help at all."
The decision to sideline MPRI comes at an awkward time in the drug war. Increasingly, lawmakers, public interest groups and America's allies are questioning U.S. counter-drug policy in South America.
Legislation recently was introduced in Congress to try to limit the government from turning to private companies for anti-drug operations in South America.
The move follows the April 20 death in Peru of an American missionary and her baby killed when the Peruvian air force mistakenly shot down their small airplane. A surveillance plane operated by a private U.S. contractor on loan to the CIA had identified the missionary aircraft as a possible drug trafficker.
U.S. military sources say the Pentagon has no plans to replace MPRI in Colombia. Any future collaboration with the Colombian military reform effort likely will be left to the Southern Command, the Miami-based military force responsible for Latin America.
Colombian officials say they will continue to reform the defense ministry a la Colombiana, or Colombian-style.
Copyright 2001 Times Publishing Company