VIOLENCE IN COLOMBIA A GOOD OLD-FASHIONED COUNTERINSURGENCY WAR

The war in Colombia isn't about drugs. It's about the annihilation of
popular uprisings by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerilla groups, or
Indian peasants fending off the ravages of oil companies, cattle
barons and mining firms. A good old-fashioned counterinsurgency war,
designed to clear the way for American corporations to set up shop in
Colombia, with cocaine as the scare tactic.

Last year, the U.S. Air Force commissioned the Santa Monica-based
RAND think tank to prepare a review of the situation in Colombia. In
early June, RAND (progenitor of many a blood sodden scenario in the
Vietnam era) submitted its 130 page report, called "The Colombian
Labyrinth: The Synergy of Drugs and Insurgency and its Implications
for Regional Stability."

RAND'S conclusion? The United States needs to step up its military
involvement in Colombia and quit forfeiting options by limiting its
operations to counter-narcotics raids. Along the way, the report
makes a number of astonishing admissions about the paramilitaries and
their links to the drug trade, about human rights abuses by the
U.S.-trained Colombian military and about the irrationality of crop
fumigation.

The RAND report addresses the horrifying level of "social intolerance
killings," which, for men ages 14 to 44, reached a level of 394
deaths per 100,000 last year. In all, Colombia endures 30,000 annual
murders -- double the number for the entire U.S. in 1998. Slightly
more than 23,000 murders have been linked to "illegal armed
organizations" since 1988.

The implication is the FARC guerilla group is responsible for these
killings, and one has to dig deep into the RAND analysis to discover
otherwise. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the
government, about 3,500 people were killed by the guerillas, and
19,652 by paramilitaries and "private justice" groups working in
concert with the Colombian military.

The overall commander of the 19 paramilitary "fronts" is a sadistic
scoundrel named Carlos Castano, who supervises a killing program
right off the pages of the CIA's Phoenix Program's operations manual.
The RAND report details how Castano's forces routinely execute
"suspected guerilla sympathizers" in order "to instill fear and
compel support among the local population."

When that strategy fails to deliver, the AUC simply launches an
all-out attack on the villages and slaughters the inhabitants. RAND
dispassionately notes the AUC justifies these atrocities, even Bob
Kerrey might admire, as a legitimate way to "remove the guerillas'
supply network."

Although 20 pages are devoted to discussion of the FARC's ties to the
drug trade, the RAND report spends only a single paragraph on the
links of the paramilitaries and the narco-traffickers. But this
paragraph is as damaging as it is brief. RAND grudgingly admits that
Castano's group derives "a considerable extent" of its income from
the drug trade and notes that eight of the AUC's 19 death squads also
serve as protection gangs for the cocaine industry.

Castano himself has boasted to CNN's International Division of his
relationship with the drug lords. He said that 70 percent of the
funds for the AUC come from the drug trade, with the remaining 30
percent, the RAND report notes in a stark parenthesis, "coming
largely from extortion."

The Colombian government under Andres Pastrana (though not the
Colombian generals) takes the public position that the paramilitaries
are at least as big of a threat as the FARC and the ELN, and is
moving, rhetorically, at least, to supress them. RAND condemns this
approach as "unwise and shortsighted." Better, RAND concludes, to
mimic the Peruvian or Guatemalan counterinsurgency models and fashion
the death squads into "a supervised network of self-defense
organizations."

RAND calmly ridicules the requirement for human rights training and
monitoring, which is attached to the U.S. aid package. "There is a
question of the practical limitations on the Colombian government's
ability to prevent human rights violations in the context of an armed
insurrection, the RAND analysts contend. To buttress this assessment,
RAND points to the United States' experience in Vietnam, arguing that
the slaughter of civilians is simply a cost of doing business during
wartime and that "even with disciplined troops, the chain of command
will ultimately break down at times under the stress of combat."

Of course, most of the U.S. massacres in Vietnam were the result of
soldiers carrying out official policy, and not the actions of crazed
grunts going on killing sprees. The same is true in Colombia.

RAND concludes that the only solution is the elimination of the
threat to the "stability" of the region posed by the FARC and the
ELN. The report also suggests that if the United States doesn't
intervene, the Colombian situation "will metasticize into a wider
regional upheaval." It is up to the United States to act as the "deus
ex machina" in this conflict.

Aside from stepping up direct military aid to Colombia, RAND urges
the Pentagon to expand the U.S. military presence in the bordering
nations as well, including "helping Panama fill the security vacuum
in its southern provinces."

Remember that the firm of Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld has lately
reassembled the old gang that directed such misery in Latin America
during the 1980s: John Negroponte, Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams.
Marcella approvingly invokes the Thatcherite English theorist John
Dunn: "There cannot be political control without the capacity to
coerce."