The daring hijacking of a commercial plane and kidnapping of a Colombian senator by leftist guerrillas this week shattered the country’s peace process, and led to a swift military attack against rebel forces. The abduction of Sen. Jorge Gerchen Turbay Wednesday is also the latest in a series of assaults on the Turbay political dynasty, part of an apparent personal vendetta waged by rebel commander Fabian Ramirez against the prominent family.
President Andres Pastrana immediately canceled peace talks after Wednesday’s kidnapping. Fortified with new, state-of-the-art weapons courtesy of the United States, the Colombian military began bombing a rebel safe haven ceded to Ramirez’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on Thursday. Just how extensive the military operation will be remains unclear.
Colombian government officials believe the kidnapping was ordered by Ramirez, who grew up as the son of one of the Turbay family servants and harbors a deep enmity toward the wealthy, ranch-owning dynasty. But Ramirez’s personal grudge has cost the rebels dearly.
FARC leaders denied knowledge of the kidnapping and blamed the government for breaking off the peace talks. But government officials say the bold hijacking was carried out by the rapid deployment rebel unit known as the Teofilo Forero, which is partially under Ramirez’s command and is headquartered in one of the Turbay haciendas located near San Vicente del Caguan.
The Turbays were once big fish in Caqueta, a province in the rebel zone. They were rich, glamorous and powerful, boasting a former president, a Miss Colombia beauty queen and several national politicians among their ranks.
But their high profile has also made them tempting targets for Colombia’s rebels. Popular congressman Diego Turbay Cote, and his mother, Dona Ines, were murdered by FARC rebels on Dec. 29, 2000. Local investigators say those murders were ordered directly by Ramirez.
Turbay Cote and his mother were murdered along the side of the paved road that connects the city of Florencia to the guerrilla zone of San Vicente del Caguan. Forty rebels stopped and surrounded his armored SUV. Unaware he was in danger, Turbay, who was the government’s peace negotiator at the time, stepped out to talk to them. The rebels forced him, his mother, a friend, and four bodyguards face down on the ground and shot them execution style. Turbay received 42 gunshots — a sign, investigators say, that the crime was more passionate than political.
The Turbays were killed while en route to the inauguration of Jose Lizardo Rojas, a political ally who had been elected mayor of Puerto Rico, a hamlet located next to the guerrillas’ safe haven. Rojas was one of the last followers of Turbayismo in the region. Six months later he was also murdered by FARC.
Today, in downtown Florencia, the metal bust of Hernando Turbay y Turbay is in shambles. Hernando was the caudillo, or founder, of the province of Caqueta and father of Diego Turbay Cote. Weeds surround its pedestal, an unthinkable sight a few years ago when Turbay ruled this jungle territory with an iron fist. It was Turbay who in the 1950s transformed Caqueta from raw jungle into a bustling depot of cattle farms and large rubber, African palm and cocoa plantations. Now Hernando’s immediate family has been driven out, its members murdered and kidnapped and a price put on the head of the lone survivor, a daughter who lives in Europe.
The demise of the Turbays symbolizes the decline of the Colombian political class in the country’s provinces. The Turbay regime, which was mired in corruption and pork-barrel politics, is today being replaced by a harsher form of governance: a bitter war between leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups. Both armed groups are battling for control of the multibillion-dollar cocaine market. The current strife in Colombia is not just a civil war — it is a reprise of the drug war that engulfed the country throughout the 1980s.
In Florencia itself, there are two thriving industries — beauty shops for prostitutes, and bars frequented by the military and the raspachines, the coca workers who can earn up to $800 per kilo of paste. Flying into Florencia, you can see distinct clearings in the thick jungle, where coca flourishes. Crisscrossing the jungle vastness are rivers that make the territory wet and soggy and are used by the rebels to ship the drug out of the region.
Caqueta, a swath of lush jungle smack in the middle of the Colombian Amazons, is one of three southern provinces — Meta and Guaviare are the others — where the FARC has been rooted for decades. Guerrillas first came here in the 1960s because they could hide in the overgrown terrain and the region was lightly populated. It is a frontier area, where government control has always been weak.
Despite the presence of two large military bases in the province, half of Caqueta was under FARC control — at least until the government launched its military campaign this week. President Pastrana acknowledged this in 1998 when he selected Caqueta to become part of the rebel-held demilitarized zone, which was the size of Switzerland.
The FARC received foreign government emissaries and journalists in their territory, but the safe haven also contained some of the highest-yielding coca plantations in all of Colombia. Caqueta was essentially the nerve center where FARC ran a roaring drug trade, including processing and selling cocaine for international distribution, according to government intelligence sources. The FARC’s coca production is smaller than the quantities shipped by the right-wing paramilitaries, which include among their ranks the country’s more powerful drug lords. But the FARC’s product is highly prized. “Their cocaine is purer and better quality,” says one military officer.
Caqueta politics were transformed in the 1980s when the guerrillas began taxing drug traffickers in the region. This new source of income gave them formidable power. In 1996 the FARC led demonstrations of coca growers against the U.S.-funded spraying of coca plantations. The government eventually agreed to limit spraying to large areas of cultivation. Traffickers began experimenting with better seeds and higher-yield plants in Caqueta.
After reaching the compromise with the government, the guerrillas won a strong following among the coca growers. “The balance of power changed tremendously after that,” says Rafael Pardo, a former government official. The days were numbered for once-powerful families like the Turbays.
“If you are not with [the FARC], you can’t do politics outside of Florencia,” says one Florencia city council member, who has opted not to run for reelection.
The FARC controls about 400 towns in the region. But since Sen. Turbay’s kidnapping and the resumption of fighting, it is not clear what will happen to the people who live here.
International aid organizations are watching developments in Colombia closely. New York-based Human Rights Watch cautioned that paramilitary forces could inflict brutal reprisals against civilians.
“We’re worried that the people who live in the zone — who were never consulted before the area was ceded to the FARC — risk abuse by paramilitaries who might identify them as pro-guerrilla simply because they remained in their homes, farms and businesses,” says Josi Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.
But even before the collapse of the peace process, the future of Caqueta was cloudy. Seeking to challenge the FARC’s military dominance in the province — and to wrest control of its profitable cocaine market — several hundred men from paramilitary units marched into southern Caqueta in February 2000.
During the last year, paramilitary members have bought or rented homes in strategic towns to the south of the province, disrupting FARC weapon and supply lines from Ecuador. In one such town, Morelia, there have been many murders, says a former resident who fled to Florencia, who accuses the local police of collaborating with the paramilitaries.
“If they find a civilian who is not from the area, they detain him, tie him up and question him. If he fails to answer their questions properly, he fails entirely [gets killed],” he says. The Colombian military looked the other way, happy that a force not reined in by international human rights rules could take care of its opponents. Some FARC hamlets have already been deserted by guerrilla sympathizers. In response, the guerrillas have tried to keep control by enforcing a curfew after sundown and murdering suspected paramilitary or army supporters.
There have been numerous cases of collusion between paramilitaries and military personnel in the murder of civilians. A top Colombian navy officer was tied to the killing of several people in the town of Chengue last year, according to an investigation by the Colombian attorney general; the investigation also found the murders were connected to an ongoing battle over drug-trafficking routes. In another notorious massacre in the coca-growing village of Mapiripan in southeastern Colombia, 49 peasants who were singled out as guerrilla sympathizers were tortured and had their throats cut. After the massacre, paramilitary members displaced the FARC in the area and negotiated with the coca farmers and drug traffickers for a lower tax than the FARC had charged, according to army intelligence documents.
Like the cartels of the 1980s, the FARC and the paramilitaries are fighting to seize control over coca- and poppy-growing areas and arms-smuggling routes — rather than to advance the cause of the Colombian people. The blurring of lines between the groups’ criminal and political agendas is worsening. Both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries are financing several candidates for the national and local elections to be held in August.
Which brings us back to the Turbays. The senator who was kidnapped on Wednesday is powerful in Huila province, a territory the guerrillas have been trying to gain a foothold in because of its bountiful poppy plantations, according to former rebels and Colombian military sources. Last year, the FARC also conducted a mass kidnapping of Huila residents, after a female rebel posing as a maid to a prominent family opened the doors to rebel special forces. “To do politics in Huila and Caqueta is impossible,” says a local politician. Of the five senators kidnapped by the FARC, three are from Huila.
South of Florencia is Larandia Air Base, home of the Colombian army’s 12th Brigade. U.S. instructors are often here training Colombian troops. Three U.S-trained counter-narcotics battalions operate nearby out of Tres Esquinas. The government’s main anti-narcotics base is also close by, between Caqueta and Putumayo.
The United States has shifted its role in Colombia away from strictly anti-narcotics efforts to a more pro-government position. Washington has already given the government $1.3 billion. In a major new initiative made public this month, the Bush administration announced it has earmarked $98 million to train a special Colombian brigade and provide 10 “Super Huey” helicopters to protect a pipeline run by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum. The brigade will work with small roving units, and will protect not only the pipeline, but also other potential terrorist targets, including electrical pylons, bridges and roads. According to the U.S. Southern Command, there are about 250 U.S. military personnel, 50 civilian employees and 100 civilian military contractors in Colombia. Many of the non-military personnel are engaged in a massive coca spraying operation.
Initially, the United States argued that Plan Colombia was not a counterinsurgency policy, but an anti-drug push against criminal syndicates. The FARC and the major paramilitary group — the Colombian Self Defense Leagues (AUC) — are both listed as official terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department. But the U.S.-backed Colombian military has a history of collaborating with the AUC, despite its links to drug trafficking and its official listing as a terrorist organization.
The AUC has admitted that it earns 70 percent of its income from drugs. And though the paramilitary group claims it comes from extorting drug traffickers, authorities suspect that members are directly involved in cocaine trafficking. Today the AUC controls most of the northern trafficking centers in the country. The AUC has also moved to the strategic area along the border with Venezuela, a zone once controlled by the FARC.
“There are approximately four large paramilitary groups that find their own financing and have their own leadership,” says Carlos Franco, a former member of the demobilized guerrilla group Popular Liberation Front (EPL), and a consultant who has worked on the peace process. “Functioning like a federation, they pay some money to the central AUC command, but generally operate independently, procure weapons for their men, and keep separate accounts.”
Meanwhile the coca and opium poppy business is booming. Colombia produces 80 percent of the world’s cocaine paste (580 metric tons in 2000), 75 percent of the world’s refined cocaine, and 1 percent of the world’s heroin.
Coca cultivation increased by 50 percent in the last three years, as eradication programs in other Andean countries proved effective and traffickers moved their business to remote Colombian areas without government control. The FARC and AUC each earns an estimated $300 million to $600 million in the drug trade, and approximately $200 million in kidnapping and extortion rackets.
“It is business,” says Robin Kirk, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, who adds that it is always civilians who bear the brunt of the violence.
And now that FARC commander Fabian Ramirez has shattered the country’s uneasy peace by kidnapping another prominent member of the Turbays, more civilians are certain to suffer. Presidential elections are scheduled for August and the rebels have offered to talk with President Pastrana’s successor. But with the country awash in drugs and weapons, and Washington backing a military escalation, peace seems a remote possibility.
An hour after Mayor Carlos Rosas publicly described the “terror” that plagued his town of Orito in the southern coca-producing province of Putumayo, he was dead. Gunmen shot the mayor at point-blank range in front of his home in broad daylight and sped away. They were never identified or caught.
In the radio address he gave just before his assassination, Rosas described the fear that the citizens feel in an area that produces most of the world’s cocaine and has felt the full force of the nation’s civil war. “Corpses are appearing, cars are being burned, and this terrifies everyone,” he said.
As Colombia stands on the brink of a major counter-narcotics campaign, most of which will be concentrated in Putumayo, the terror shows no signs of letting up.
Last month, just as the Colombian government and the guerrillas of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) were about to begin the most serious conversations of the 2-year-old peace process — the possibility of a bilateral cease-fire — the FARC froze those talks, setting the tone for a possible intensification of the civil conflict that has torn at this Andean country for more than three decades.
The FARC was angered by a meeting between a high-level representative of the Colombian government and a leading paramilitary force, the United Colombian Self Defense Leagues (known by its Spanish acronym, AUC) which the FARC has been fighting. The meeting was held ostensibly to gain release of a group of congressmen kidnapped by paramilitary forces last month. The FARC has claimed that in meeting with paramilitary leaders, the Colombian government shows a lack of interest in curbing paramilitary terrorism.
FARC spokesmen even accused the half-dozen congressmen reportedly kidnapped last month by the AUC of having staged their own kidnappings in order to facilitate the meeting between Interior Minister Humberto de la Calle and AUC head Carlos Castano.
But the FARC also places blame on U.S. policy in the region and said its decision to cut off peace negotiations was influenced by the U.S. Plan Colombia. Though the U.S. calls that absurd, it’s clear that the future of the peace process will have a serious impact on the success or failure of the counter-narcotics campaign.
The peace freeze came as the U.S. also announced it was delaying the implementation of the Plan Colombia until January and a high level State Department delegation visited Bogota to finalize points in the plan
Originally the plan was expected to start early this month. Undersecretary of Defense Brian Sheridan in Bogota said U.S. and Colombian authorities had agreed to postpone the plan until January, when 33 of 60 helicopters included in the $1.3 billion aid package approved by Congress will arrive in Colombia and will be available for the Colombian armed forces.
Fierce fighting between guerrillas and paramilitaries has raged throughout the last two months in Putumayo, where most of Plan Colombia will be concentrated. Hundreds of residents have fled for Ecuador, since all roads to central Colombia are dangerous and controlled by one side or the other. Some who haven’t left remained trapped by the rebels or the paramilitaries.
Putumayo was selected as the primary site of Plan Colombia because an estimated 216 square miles are planted with high-yield coca plantations, and over half of the entire Colombian coca production is harvested in this province. About 300,000 people are employed in jobs related to cocaine production.
“Putumayo is the FARC’s Wall Street,” said a foreign diplomat. “This is not an area of small plantations, but of heavy cultivation.”
The area has practically been a war zone since Sept. 21, when paramilitaries took over important coca producing towns, killing those citizens they knew were guerrilla collaborators. In La Dorada, a key drug-producing town, the paramilitaries had killed up to 40 people suspected of leftist sympathies as of late October. U.S. and Colombian officials say the drug traffickers who depend on the crops produced in Putumayo had grown unhappy with the guerrillas and their control over the coca production prices. “The narcos brought the paramilitary because they didn’t like the FARC controlling the market,” said a U.S. government official.
The area’s residents have been living at the mercy of the warring parties. The government has airlifted supplies, but the needs are still greater. It took 56 days after the guerrillas took over Pasto Mocoa highway for the Colombian army to reopen it. The road, an important one that connects Putumayo with the rest of the country, was littered with abandoned vehicles left after combat had stopped their owners on their routes. Even after the army asked for the vehicle owners to return, the cars remained.
Plan Colombia is expected to unleash the biggest military offensive to date in Southern Colombia. Fumigation planes protected by helicopters will spray bountiful coca plantations in the region, which is controlled by the FARC. Colombian mobile military units, trained by the U.S., will push into the territory and try to clean the area.
But how well the Colombian military will fare is not known. They have faced several military setbacks recently. The guerrilla ambush that left 53 soldiers dead and one destroyed Black Hawk helicopter last month has left foreign diplomats and Colombian military experts wondering what they can expect in the next few months, when the war is expected to get worse. “Putumayo is going to be one of the toughest areas militarily,” according to Alfredo Rangel, a respected military analyst who advises the Colombian armed forces.
“When the army goes into that area to fight the FARC and end the coca plantations it will ignite the conflict beyond anything we have seen,” he added.
Looming in the background of the decision to freeze negotiations are reports that all the fighting forces involved in this conflict have been making preparations to increase their troop size. Military experts and foreign diplomats say the FARC has been recruiting new soldiers, and expect the force to grow from 17,000 to up to 40,000. Police intelligence reports also show that the flow of weapons to the guerillas has intensified in the last few months, including the shipment of handheld missiles that could down helicopters. The Colombian army this week announced it would recruit 10,000 more men for three additional anti-guerrilla mobile brigades, but these troops won’t be available for combat until next year. Meanwhile right-wing paramilitary groups have been pushing to be given political recognition by the government.
The FARC is playing a tough game that could backfire. Last week, Colombian police released an intercepted radio address broadcast to FARC troops by Jorge Briceno, aka Mono Jojoy, the FARC’s top military strategist, in which he said he did not believe the peace process would work. Briceno told his troops that FARC was not “going to agree to peace because it doesn’t exist” and that even if the FARC was able to seize power, there would not be peace “because there will then be war with the gringos and other powers.”
The U.S. State Department in turn has said it is “ridiculous” for the FARC to use Plan Colombia as an excuse to stop all dialogue, and urged the rebels to return to the negotiation table. But the U.S. seemed to take a cautious approach too in announcing a postponement of the launching date for Plan Colombia. Some analysts say the FARC could use similar tactics as they used in 1996 to face the army. “The guerrillas have the possibility of provoking civilian uprisings and make them confront the army. What will that do for the international opinion to see a soldier facing a starving looking peasant. I think the potential in Putumayo could be terrible for us. At this moment, militarily, Plan Colombia is teetering,” said Rangel.
But a U.S. government official rejected that scenario. “Information in the press suggests that peasants in Putumayo are leaving rather than submitting to the FARC’s pressure to arm themselves against Plan Colombia.”
Nevertheless, even high military officials understand that the role of civilians will be critical to how Plan Colombia will play out. “The only way that the FARC will be convinced that they cannot win the war will be to have a strong, solid, professional army that has the support of the civilian population,” Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez said.
Note: A correction has been made to this story.
Over the past seven years a precedent-setting legal case over multinational corporate responsibility has been winding its way through the U.S. legal system. A group of indigenous communities in Ecuador is suing Texaco for $1.5 billion in an environmental lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York.
The suit, on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorians, claims that when Texaco’s oil drilling concession in the Ecuadorean Amazon expired in 1990, after 26 years of operations, the company left more than 600 open-pit toxic waste sites in the region, causing local cancer rates to rise.
The plaintiffs want Texaco to pay healthcare costs and to clean up the remaining waste sites. But according to the company, “During its years of operations, Texaco Petroleum consistently complied with the laws of Ecuador and international petroleum industry environmental standards.” In a recent development, the plaintiffs accused the presiding judge of conflict of interest after he attended a seminar held by a foundation with financial ties to Texaco. They have requested that the judge recuse himself from the case.
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it marks the first time that an indigenous community has filed charges against a multinational oil corporation in the company’s country of origin, instead of the country where the alleged violations took place. Texaco continues to insist that the case should be heard in Ecuador.
The Texaco lawsuit is a nightmare for oil companies around the globe that, like other resource-seekers before them, launch exploration projects in undeveloped and virgin lands, often inhabited by indigenous communities. Since colonial times, conflict has arisen between foreign companies, whose intent is to profit from untapped resources, and communities whose way of life and culture are closely tied to the preservation of their environment.
Recent conflicts between oil corporations and indigenous communities across the globe include Royal Dutch/Shell in Nigeria, Talisman Energy in the Sudan and British Petroleum and Occidental Petroleum in Colombia. In each case, the communities are fighting vociferously for their rights with varying effect.
“It’s particularly difficult dealing with indigenous peoples,” says Ged Davis, vice president of Shell’s Global Business Environment Group, “because they have such a deep reverence for their natural environment that is at odds with those who want access to that environment.”
In 1997, under new leadership and after years of close ties to military dictatorships that routinely violated the human rights of indigenous people in the Niger Delta, Shell reevaluated its operating policies. It introduced corporate strategies designed to foster local community development. According to Shell’s 1999 Annual Report, these strategies include “simple cost-effective hand-operated water pumps, improved fish smoking, integrated fish and poultry farming and a micro-credit scheme for agricultural development.”
However, a major test of Shell’s new policy of social responsibility will be how it handles protests by members of the Ogoni community against Shell’s planned reentry into lands it abandoned seven years ago amid violent demonstrations.
Shell has recently withdrawn from its partnership with Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) in Colombia, following that company’s dispute with the U’wa nation, an indigenous group that claims ownership of lands where Oxy has discovered a large oil deposit.
British Petroleum (BP), which is also working in Colombia, has instituted several policy changes after being severely criticized by human rights groups. The company agreed to pay the government for protection of its facilities instead of directly paying Colombian security forces that had been accused of committing human rights violations. BP then went one step further by allowing an auditing mechanism to monitor the flow of funds and the activities of the military units providing security to its facilities.
Many companies like Shell and BP are now seeking more responsible ways to do business, in part because socially responsible behavior can also be financially sound policy. “There is an emergence of a new thinking — merging market interests with principles,” says Davis of Shell.
In contrast to the policy adjustments implemented by Shell, Occidental Petroleum continues to ignore the trend to become more transparent and socially responsible, according to its critics. Like BP, Oxy amended its agreement regarding the method of payment for protection provided by Colombian security forces. But it eschewed human rights clauses and has engaged in an ongoing battle with the U’wa, calling for the help of the Colombian armed forces.
The Colombian army has obliged by crushing U’wa protests against oil drilling. In one operation, according to press reports, three children drowned after the army violently broke up a demonstration. In testimony before the U.S. Congress, Oxy vice president Lawrence P. Meriage charged that the U’wa campaign against Oxy is being orchestrated by “the guerrillas and U.S.-based radical NGOs.”
Oxy recently received permission to begin drilling from the Colombian courts, but the U’wa claim that Oxy ignored a clause in the 1991 Colombian constitution that requires a company to negotiate in good faith with the indigenous community that will be affected by its activities. They have appealed the case to Colombia’s Constitutional Court, where it is pending. Meanwhile, Oxy is continuing with its plans to begin drilling this month.
Indeed, the stakes are high for the Colombian government and Oxy. According to government estimates, the U’wa ancestral lands contain an untapped pool of up to 1.3 billion barrels of oil. The U’wa lament that “the oil drilling will take blood from the heart of the world” may not be understood by the courts.
It was a lack of faith in the Ecuadoran legal system that led indigenous communities there to take their case to the U.S. courts. Even if the court does not rule in favor of the indigenous communities, by claiming U.S. jurisdiction the case has already changed the way disputes between corporations and indigenous communities are adjudicated — introducing a further globalization of justice.
As Davis says, “It seems to be a trend. It’s like recent developments in human rights where violations committed in one country are now judged in other countries.”
Given that the laws in developed nations are often stricter and almost always more enforceable than those in the developing world, this significant step could give indigenous communities an advantage.
The final detail in the administration’s long push of its hotly contested $1.3 billion anti-drug military aid package for Colombia is a visit by President Clinton to the South American nation Thursday — a show of support for the country’s embattled leader, President Andris Pastrana.
Clinton’s trip follows his decision last week to grant a national security waiver for the aid, thumbing his nose at congressional critics and human rights organizations that had complained that the Colombian government had not yet met the human rights conditions set forth as a requirement for Plan Colombia.
The administration’s decision to move ahead with the aid elicited harsh criticism from a handful of the congressmen and human rights activists who had participated in the six-month process of shepherding the bill through Congress. (Both houses of Congress approved Plan Colombia in early July.)
“You may say that human rights won by including strict language in the aid bill, but what good are words when we can just ignore them? We think this is the wrong policy at the wrong time,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, one of the U.S. organizations that worked with Congress during the drafting of the bill. “What the Colombian army’s bad apples are hearing from this debate is, ‘Human rights is just an official discourse, but in the end we don’t need to worry about it,’” he said.
Clinton defended his decision, describing the situation in Colombia as too serious for any delay in the aid. “I think we’ve protected our fundamental interests in human rights and enabled Plan Colombia to have a chance to succeed, which I think is very, very important for the long-term stability of democracy and human rights in Colombia and for protecting the American people and the Colombian people from the drug traffic,” Clinton told reporters in a White House Rose Garden interview.
In fact, as the aid debate continues to loom large in Washington, the civil war in Colombia is escalating. In one four-day period this month, guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and rightist paramilitaries killed 33 civilians. FARC launched a campaign of terror to manipulate elections in several municipalities. Guerrilla promoters toting AK-47s have been summoning local candidates for mayor or city councils to intimidate them.
Paramilitary forces have also engaged in election season arm-twisting. They are believed to be responsible for the murder two weeks ago of Luis Fernando Rincsn, a peace promoter who was running for reelection as mayor of Aguachica, a town in the battle-plagued state of Cisar. A former guerrilla fighter who demobilized in the 1990s, Rincsn gave up on war to champion the right of civilians to not take sides. “Rincsn’s murder was a clear political decision to eliminate the center. Every day, it becomes more dangerous to be against the war,” said Francisco Santos, a newspaper editor who was forced into exile early this year by FARC guerrillas.
The Clinton administration says Pastrana’s government is committed to improving human rights, and that nobody expected changes to be accomplished in the month that transpired between the approval of Plan Colombia and its implementation. And earlier this month, Colombia met at least one of the seven human rights conditions imposed by the U.S. Congress when Pastrana issued a directive establishing that any military personnel accused of human rights violations would be tried in a civilian court.
But Pastrana’s directive is not in full compliance, says Vivanco of Human Rights Watch. “The conditions say the civilian courts will investigate all crimes against humanity as demanded by a 1997 constitutional court decision, but Pastrana’s directive follows the military penal code,” he said, referring to legislation, recently revised under military guidance, that limits civilian oversight to the most extreme army violations, such as genocide, torture, kidnapping and murder. “It ignores extrajudicial executions, as well as rape and common crimes,” added Vivanco.
As many as 300 U.S. advisors are already stationed in Colombia. They are training the anti-narcotics battalions that will be deployed in southern Colombia, where 80,000 hectares of coca plantations are protected by FARC. The Colombian army expects to receive 18 Blackhawk and 42 Huey 2 helicopters to expedite troop movement across the country’s extensive territory. But the helicopters won’t be dispatched until the end of next year.
Though the Clinton administration agrees that Colombia has not met all of Congress’ conditions for its receipt of funds, human rights advocates are still unsatisfied. They charge that the U.S. government is willing to overlook the human rights provisions to pursue an important strategy in its ongoing war on drugs.
Vivanco believes that Clinton could still use his political muscle to exert pressure on the human rights issue. “He could use the visit to highlight his human rights agenda in very explicit terms. The most important thing is not what he is going to say in private. Publicly he has to say that the bad apples need to be isolated … Everyone must understand that they have to qualify for the next certification process at the end of the year.” As part of the conditions for aid, Colombia must be certified again in December — if it fails to be certified, continued funding would be withdrawn.
The human rights debate in Washington baffles some Colombian officials. “No government that wants to violate human rights would ask for money from other governments,” explains Jaime Rumz, an advisor to Pastrana. “We knew that the moment we got the aid from the United States we would be putting a reflector on our internal affairs.”
Yet the need to address human rights conditions becomes more obvious as the civilian toll increases. Colombians recoil in terror at the statistics: a murder every 20 minutes, an attack by a guerrilla or paramilitary group every six hours and a kidnapping every three-and-a-half hours. Recent figures released by the federal coroner’s office show that more than 14,000 Colombians were killed in war-related violence during the first six months of this year alone — and 90 percent of those casualties were civilian.
In the light of such alarming statistics, calls for humanitarian agreements with the armed groups are getting louder. “What we can affirm with certainty is that as the war continues to develop in the middle of civilian noncombatants, amidst parks, schools and churches converted in military objectives … and while the international humanitarian laws are not observed there will be more tragedies,” stated an editorial in the influential daily El Tiempo. But even journalists can’t come to an agreement. “Are we to think that our conflict is a soccer game where each armed group would meet in a defined space and fight?” asked Mauricio Vargas, editor of the newsweekly Cambio.
What makes the issue even more troubling in Colombia is the failure of human rights monitors to enforce existing laws. Doctors Without Borders, the French group that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its work in Kosovo and elsewhere, just saw one of its health promoters get kidnapped by guerrillas. “Colombia is a difficult country for us,” said the group’s director in Colombia. “The army thinks we are aiding the guerrillas, while the guerrillas kidnap us.”
Nothing brought the terror as close to home as the recent killing of six children, ages 5 to 10, by two army units perched on a hill. The victims were among a group of 40 children on a school field trip in the strife-filled state of Antmoquia. The soldiers fired for 45 minutes at the children and their chaperones, mistaking them for guerrillas while on patrol after engaging in firefights with guerrillas in nearby towns.
Shortly after the attack, the army said the children were killed in a shootout with guerrillas, who, according to the commander, had used the children as shields. But partly as a result of the international attention focused on Colombia during the certification process for Plan Colombia, the Colombian army and government had to retract their earlier statements. An investigation was launched that resulted in the suspension of 45 soldiers and some of their superiors. “A serious mistake,” read the banner headline in the magazine Cambio, which is edited by Gabriel Garcma Marquez.
The killings of the children came just days after the army had celebrated a gratifying victory over the guerrillas by rescuing four kidnap victims, including a German citizen who was being held in a country house near the capital of Bogota. The rescue mission was daring — paratroopers were dropped by helicopters into rough terrain at night, exactly the type of military action the U.S. trainers are supposed to teach the army. The army had also just launched a television campaign promoting its role as a protector of Colombia’s democracy. The killings obviously undermined both developments.
And the international outcry over the killings has given Colombians a taste of what could come next. With the American aid, such incidents will be the subject of greater scrutiny by international media.
In Colombia, even critics of the army were careful to couch their statements in careful words after the killings. Attorney General Alfonso Gomez, a liberal who has led many battles against army abuses and corruption, was quick to point out that from initial investigations, it was clear the soldiers did not know they were shooting at children. But others latched onto the news as proof that Colombians aren’t ready for U.S. military aid.
“The truth is that without the conditions attached to the aid, we would not have had the army willing to clarify the attack. Their first reaction was to blame the guerrillas for the incident,” pointed out Vivanco of Human Rights Watch.
But presidential advisor Rumz said the problem with the debate in Washington is that American politicians don’t understand how the conflict in Colombia has evolved. “Yeah, sure, we have a historical conflict that includes guerrillas and paramilitaries, but that historical conflict has been modified by drug trafficking. This is not Vietnam nor El Salvador. And if you want to write about the war on drugs, that’s not exactly what is happening in Colombia.
“Sure we are in favor of decriminalizing drugs. And if the United States and Europe stopped consuming drugs, it would be better for Colombia. But the consumption in those countries is what generates the violence in our country. For us right now, to reduce violence and strengthen our democracy, we must reduce drug production,” Ruiz said.
The next stage for disagreements between Colombia and the United States is already set. Some analysts think the policy is headed for serious trouble just because of the disconnect between the two realities. “We have to remember that Plan Colombia is a result of transactions in the U.S. Congress, and as such it is subject to the goings-on of American politics and public opinion. If there is another heart-wrenching accident like that of the children, or another humanitarian disaster — from which we are not exempt — there could be a breakup or discontinuation of the aid, severely affecting the military advances we would have gained,” says Gabriel Silva, who was an aide to former President Cesar Gaviria.
“We should not get addicted to this aid,” warns Silva. “It would be dangerous for this country to believe the tale that someone else will fight for us, and that they are also willing to pay the bill.”
As President Clinton prepares to sign the bill to send $1.3 billion in anti-narcotics military aid to Colombia, criticism from Colombians and Europeans has gotten more and more severe. Angry that the plan was not subject to a national debate, Colombians fear the military solution to fight decades of drug trafficking will unravel peace negotiations and worsen its civil war. Europeans are threatening to pull out their aid for social programs that would have gone along with the U.S. aid. And in the middle of it all, Colombian President Andres Pastrana is under fire for not letting Colombians have a bigger say in developing the plan.
On Friday, Congress passed the aid package to help Colombia fight drug traffickers and their guerrilla allies. The U.S. aid is a contribution to Colombia’s $7.5 billion total development plan. The House approved a $1.7 billion version last March, and the Senate approved a package with less money last month, attaching tougher human rights conditions. The lion’s share of the aid will be for Blackhawk and Huey helicopters and training of two Colombian anti-narcotics battalions that will operate in southern Colombia, a drug-producing area largely protected by guerrillas from the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). The aid also includes $200 million for nonmilitary social and human rights programs.
The Clinton administration first asked for emergency aid to Colombia last February, and Pastrana banked heavily on getting the aid sometime this year. But the aid is not expected to arrive in Colombia until the last year of Pastrana’s term in office. The delay has cost Pastrana heavily. He had managed to keep unity in the country by waving the millions of dollars the U.S. package would bring, but as the months have passed, his leadership has weakened considerably. The fact that the aid package, which is known in Colombia as Plan Colombia, was not debated nationally, has added to the perception that the initiative was written by the U.S. and not by the Pastrana government.
Just as Washington congratulates itself for supporting Latin America’s oldest democracy and making an investment in the fight against drugs, Colombians are questioning the strategy the anti-narcotics package will finance. Groups that are traditionally against military aid, such as human rights organizations and trade unions, view the package as a direct threat to the incipient peace process with leftist guerrillas. And even those who support U.S. military aid are criticizing the package. They fear that some of the plan’s anti-drug techniques, such as fumigation of coca plantations, will only turn the affected coca growers into full supporters of the leftist guerrillas.
Colombians with sophisticated knowledge of the drug war and the insurgency accept that the U.S. is more comfortable fighting a drug war than helping a government besieged by well-armed leftist guerrillas. But they worry that the new U.S. initiative will end up as muddled as the U.S. anti-drug mission of the early 1990s, when Colombians fought against the Medellin and Cali drug cartels.
The plan to use fumigation as a main weapon is a major controversy in Colombia. Under the aid package, planes will spray hundreds of hectares of coca plantations in southern Colombia with glysophate, a herbicide known in the U.S. as Roundup. In order to avoid the FARC guerrillas who patrol the coca plantations, the planes will spray from higher than normal, increasing the danger that the herbicide could fall on local inhabitants. U.S. officials maintain that the herbicide is safe to humans.
“I support the concept of U.S. aid in global terms,” said Enrique Santos Calderon, a respected analyst and editor in chief of the daily El Tiempo. “We need a more professional army, we need the helicopters; we need the aid with human rights conditions, so the army can fight off the guerrillas and the paramilitary groups. But I am worried to see we are too focused on fumigation. After so many years of fighting drugs, it becomes a charade that Washington wants to keep using methods that have failed,” he said.
Despite five years of fumigation programs in Colombia, drug production has increased by 20 percent. “It is a balloon effect,” Calderon said. “I press here and the coca growers are displaced there,” he said.
Calderon is among many Colombians who feel that Washington’s emphasis on seeing the war in Colombia through the narcotics prism — and believing that only police work and fumigation will weaken leftist guerrillas and make the Colombian army more professional — has the potential of creating more chaos in Colombia.
“I understand that Washington has to say they are not going to chase guerrillas. That they will only attack guerrillas if they attack the fumigating planes. But for Colombians fumigation is a problem, it affects our ecosystem and it could unravel other elements in the civil war. The fumigation part is the Achilles’ heel of the Plan Colombia,” he said.
Knowing all along that the United States would back a military, drug-war solution, Colombian leaders were banking on money from Europeans to fund peace-based social programs to resolve civil conflicts and help the besieged government. The Colombian government has asked Europe for up to $1 billion in aid for crop substitution, judicial reform and other projects. But Europeans are balking at the U.S. package and threatening to cut their aid.
At a meeting of European donors in London late last month, a constituency of Colombian nongovernmental organizations brought a message that worried the European community. After years of working in the countryside, they said the government had ignored their concerns that the U.S. military option would only threaten the peace process launched with the FARC last year.
In response, some European representatives said their countries will only provide aid if the Colombian government allows the dissenting organizations more say in the future of the social aid. In general, Europeans believe the Colombian government has mishandled Plan Colombia by combining the peace initiative they want the Europeans to finance with the U.S. military aid.
“It was to be expected that many European nations would not go for Plan Colombia,” said a representative from an international organization who was present at the London meeting. “The plan has become controversial. The Colombians should have realized that although the U.S. and Colombia have a bilateral interest in the drug issue, in Europe the concerns are different. There should have been two different plans.” Europeans envision a kind of Marshall Plan for Colombia, to help it rebuild after four decades of conflict.
Colombia’s credibility with Europeans took an especially big hit when a key mediator dropped out. The Program for Development and Peace for the Magdalena Medio, a conflict resolution and development NGO, declined the government’s request to pilot the social investment aspects of Plan Colombia. In addition, the Rev. Francisco Le Roux, a centrist who has been attacked both by paramilitary and guerrillas, publicly said he could not collaborate with the government’s plan as it was drafted.
But some European community representatives have tried to save the issue. Jan Egeland, the United Nations special advisor to the secretary general for Colombia, a Norwegian national, has urged the international representatives to continue to support the peace process in Colombia. Obviously there is a lack of agreement on some issues, he told participants at the meeting, but this should not be an obstacle to providing aid to those social groups in Colombia who will clearly be desperately in need of European support. A final answer from the Europeans will come after a meeting in Madrid on July 7.
The U.S. package is not strictly military. It does contain $200 million for social programs and stipulations on human rights conduct. Some here think Colombians might see the package in a more positive light if only U.S. politicians pushing for the aid weren’t so focused on the drug war.
“Washington needs to understand the concerns of our citizens,” Pardo said. Colombians know all about the drug war, “because we have fought it for a long time. Colombians fear that Washington will not help us with the peace process, and that their help will be limited only to the fumigation issue,” he said.
According to Raphael Pardo, a peace negotiator in the 1990s and Colombia’s first civilian defense minister, things aren’t as bad as many Colombians believe. The social impact of fumigation has been exaggerated and few Colombians understand that the U.S. military package already has $200 million for social changes. “That’s a lot of money, which will have an impact in the country,” he said. Pardo has studied other fumigation programs that were successful in Bolivia and Peru. “None of those projects had the social investment we have now,” he explained.
But for Pastrana, things do look bad. The showdown over the aid has come down while Pastrana’s political arsenal has been devastated. His conservative party, including top members of his cabinet, has been rocked with accusations of corruption and misuse of public funds. He has also fallen out of favor with the Liberal Party-dominated Congress, which has put the brakes on a number of legislative pieces needed to get the peace program going.
Meanwhile, the FARC has not made any pronouncements since the congressional approval of U.S. aid. But its representatives have been traveling throughout Europe discussing their willingness to sign peace agreements. The guerrillas and the government will exchange cease-fire proposals in the next few weeks. While nobody expects a cease-fire to be reached soon, analysts worry about the military reaction the guerrillas could make when President Clinton signs the final bill. “They won’t get up from the negotiating table, but they will do something to express their discomfort,” said Pardo.
Critics of the Pastrana government, both at home and in the United States, say the Colombian government has created many of its problems itself by not debating the aid package robustly in Colombia. “President Pastrana has always played his cards close to the chest,” says Miles Frechette, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia. “I don’t agree with the Colombians’ analysis of what glysophate does, but there should have been a more open discussion of the entire aid package, including fumigation and its impact.”
Thus a lack of debate has cost Pastrana the political boost he was counting on, and it might also have cost Colombians knowledge about the plan that could calm their concerns.
