Plan Colombia

As the United States becomes ever more deeply enmeshed in Colombia,
individual Americans here, conscious of the threat of kidnapping or
guerrilla attack, are rarely seen in public.

Equally difficult to find is any concrete effect of the $2.2 million-a-day
US aid program.

With the country now into the third year of a crushing recession, factories
remain shuttered while the unemployed sell tangerines, shoelaces, cookies
and bootleg CDs on the clogged streets.

Farmland is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few rural barons,
causing a million recently dispossessed campesinos to crowd into Bogota's
satellite slums.

The country's infrastructure--its roads, schools and clinics--slowly waste
without repair.

Indeed, to glimpse any effect of US aid you have to travel to the grimy
southern side of this capital to a cluster of incongruously gleaming and
heavily fortified buildings that are, in effect, Colombia's Pentagon. Walk
into the marble-floored and track-lit headquarters of Colombia's national
antinarcotics police and the generosity of that aid, as well as the
incestuous relationship between Washington and Colombia's military machine,
are suddenly evident.

Outside the door of Commanding Gen. Gustavo Socha's office, mounted on a
tripod, is an oversize photo of a grinning George W. Bush celebrating his
election.

Next to it is a full-color promotional illustration of a US-made Black Hawk
attack helicopter. In the general's waiting room, visitors are attended to
by a young, uniformed press officer, a polished graduate of the recently
renamed School of the Americas, run by the US Army. Also present is an
equally young security officer just returned from an intelligence training
course at Lakeland Air Force Base in Texas.

In case there's any doubt about the level of American involvement here, the
office adjoining General Socha's is occupied by a craggy, Clint Eastwood
clone in civilian clothes, a former US Army colonel.

A veteran trainer at the School of the Americas, the ex-colonel now works
with the State Department's Narcotics Affairs Section and is deployed as
full-time adviser to General Socha.

Countless other federal drug and intelligence agents also work in Colombia.
In addition there are a couple of hundred or more US military advisers
training three new elite battalions of the Colombian Army. Dozens of US
choppers are also arriving here: one fleet of "Super Hueys," mostly for the
Colombian Army, and a squadron of top-of-the-line Black Hawks, allocated
mostly to Socha's antidrug troops.

Along with them come an unknown number of private contract US pilots and
helicopter technical crews.

Another batch of private contract Americans are here to fly the
crop-dusters that spray toxic herbicides over the coca-rich countryside.
Supporting this operation are four new so-called Forward Operating
Locations--US military intelligence outposts--in Ecuador, Aruba, Curacao
and El Salvador.

General Socha, in an interview, calls the US aid "crucial" to his efforts.
"The value of the American technical assistance, the exchange of know-how,
the electronic intelligence, the exchange of intelligence, cannot be
overestimated," he says. And of course, neither can the helicopters. "They
give us irreplaceable mobility and security for our operations."

All this largesse is paid for by a two-year, $1.6 billion US aid package
shaped by the Clinton Administration, approved with little Congressional or
public debate and wide bipartisan support, now inherited by the Bush White
House. Commonly called Plan Colombia, its stated goal is to aid the
Colombian government in wiping out half of the 300,000 acres of coca fields
in Colombia within five years.

About 80 percent of the program is strictly military, most of it focused on
a "push" kicked off in early December into southern Colombia's Putumayo
region, where about half the country's coca crop grows.

Colombia is now the third-largest recipient of US aid in the world, after
Israel and Egypt. And it seems likely that more US aid will soon be on the
way. Colombian President Andres Pastrana met with President Bush in
Washington in late February and asked for an ongoing US commitment.

American supporters of the plan point to Colombia as the source of 90
percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States and about 60 percent
of the heroin that flows to the East Coast. The billion-dollar interest in
Colombia, say US officials, can be summed up in one word: drugs.

But critics claim Plan Colombia is a blueprint for war. They argue that
Colombia has a surplus of violence and warfare and that the last thing it
needs is another military-based program, especially one that embroils the
United States in armed conflict with Colombian guerrillas who have their
strongholds in the coca-growing countryside.

Indeed, rifle-toting groups--from the army and police to various guerrilla
groups, counterguerrilla death squads and criminal gangs--are so prevalent
in Colombian political life that most analysts simply lump them together
under the deceptively delicate term "the armed actors." And what a ghastly
tragic-opera this ensemble has produced.

The greatly escalated US involvement comes as a forty-year dirty war
between the Colombian government and the continent's most entrenched
guerrilla army spins into a blood frenzy; as an armed right-wing
"paramilitary" force burgeons in size and asserts its presence by
butchering unprecedented numbers of civilian victims; as hundreds of
thousands of rural families are "displaced" by the rampaging violence; as
Colombia becomes the kidnapping capital of the world; as a national peace
process hangs by a thread; and as the worst economic recession in a
half-century ravages the lower and middle classes and drives unemployment
to a stratospheric 20 percent. "No less than a generalized humanitarian
crisis" is how Colombia's semiautonomous national human rights ombudsman,
Eduardo Cifuentes, describes the situation.

Against this backdrop, the US plan to put four-fifths of its mammoth aid
program into a Colombian military buildup seems to many the precise
opposite of what is needed.

Says political analyst Carlos De Roux of the Jesuit-run Fundacion Social,
"If you have a patient who is very ill and whose internal organs are
inflamed, you don't just intervene with a scalpel and start tearing away at
more flesh and tissue.

Instead, you make a diagnosis of the root causes of the problem and you
begin treatment by stabilizing the patient, not further aggravating him."

A Typical Day: 26 Massacred, 10 Missing

The tectonic class divide in Colombian society emerges in this mountainous
Andean capital of 6 million as a near-perfect geographic split.

The southern half of the city melts into the legendary Ciudad Bolivar, a
sprawling and violent Casbah-like ghetto whose inhabitants boast that it's
too dangerous even for the army to enter.

Northern Bogota, meanwhile, flaunts designer boutiques from Hugo Boss to
Mont Blanc, along with Colombia's equivalent of Wall Street. At its edge,
it neatly melds into foothill neighborhoods festooned with elegant
high-rise condos whose rooftops are often shrouded in a gossamer mountain
fog. On any Sunday, take a stroll down Avenida Chile toward the discos,
casinos and outdoor cafes of the northern Zona Rosa and there is a cop, or
even a soldier, on every corner--not to menace, but to protect the social
elite bunkered into this rarefied enclave.

For while the war that rips through the countryside is barely heard here in
the capital, its byproducts, especially pandemic kidnappings, haunt the
daily routines of the better-off. It might be a short-term abduction
triggered by stepping into a "taxi" whose driver, at gunpoint, forces his
fare to sign a sheaf of blank checks or surrender his ATM card and code. Or
it could be the real deal--one that demands the family patrimony as ransom.

So, to enter just about any public building, or even a private apartment
house, in Bogota is to go through the same security routines as at the
jumpiest of international airports: sign in with armed private security
guards, trade a photo ID for a visitor's badge and, often, pass through a
metal detector.

Which is precisely the ritual that precedes a visit with David Buitrago,
legal director of Pais Libre, a nonprofit that fights kidnapping. "Hardly
anyone feels safe here anymore," he says as he pulls out a sheet with the
latest tallies. "In ten years we have gone from 100 kidnappings a year to
3,706 during the year 2000." That's not only a 16 percent increase over the
previous year but also about 50 percent of all the kidnappings in the
world. All the "armed actors" do it. Usually for money.

Last year 75 percent of abductions were carried out by guerrillas, mostly
by the largest of the insurgent groups, the FARC and the ELN; 10 percent
were committed by the right-wing paramilitaries. "While the paramilitaries
kidnap fewer, their victims most frequently just disappear," Buitrago says
dryly.

And he worries that Plan Colombia will make matters worse. "If the plan
really cuts into the drug trade from which all the armed actors profit," he
says, "it might force them to increase kidnappings to make up the
difference." And it's not just the rich who feel threatened. A recent poll
showed that a mind-boggling 43 percent of Colombians fear they could be
kidnapped. "Let's face it," says Buitrago, "Everyone wants to leave Colombia."

Consider three news articles on the front page of the Bogota papers on
January 19, the day I meet with Buitrago. One piece reports that a
right-wing paramilitary group entered the northern town of Chengue two days
before, rounded up the villagers and beat twenty-six of them to death with
stones and machetes.

As sixty homes were set on fire, the attackers fled with ten other live
victims.

The article goes on to say that this is the latest in more than 150
"massacres" by the paras in the past eighteen months, which have cost more
than 1,500 lives.

The leader of these death squads, Carlos Castano, says the news report, is
wanted on twenty-two different warrants but has not been arrested.

Another article reports that Bill Clinton's State Department, with only
hours left before the Bush transition, employed a loophole in the US aid
package and "voluntarily" decided to "skip" having to certify that the
Colombian government has complied with US human rights demands attached to
Plan Colombia legislation--specifically, suppression of the paramilitary
death squads. The third news article reports that Gen. Peter Pace of the
Pentagon's Southern Command has arrived in Bogota to say that eighteen
Super Hueys have been put into the hands of the Colombian military.

The deadlier Black Hawks, says General Pace, will arrive by July.

Clinton's wink at the human rights certification on the same day as the
Chengue massacre should provoke no special outrage.

The bloodshed here is continuous. More than 35,000 Colombians have died in
political violence over the past decade. "What we have in Colombia isn't a
civil war," says Ombudsman Cifuentes. "What we have is a war of the armed
actors against civil society."

La Violencia

President Pastrana was elected in 1998 on a peace platform, vowing to end a
half-century of violence and war. He spoke boldly of a sort of Colombian
Marshall Plan that would seek foreign assistance to fight corruption, give
some depth to Latin America's oldest formal democracy, reform the justice
system, negotiate a settlement with the leftist guerrillas and, yes, fight
the drug trade.

He asked for $3.5 billion in foreign support which he would match with $4
billion in Colombian government funding.

Pastrana's election so stirred the hopes of a war-weary nation that soon
after his election, millions of Colombians came into the streets rallying
for peace.

At first blush, the aristocratic, fine-featured President seems an unlikely
choice to play such a historic role. His father, Misael Pastrana, was a
lackluster president in the early 1970s. And Pastrana's Conservative Party
is hardly the voice of the common people.

But, then again, Colombia defies nearly all Latin American stereotypes. It
has produced no significant stretch of military rule nor any sustained
populist or nationalist movement of the sort common elsewhere on the continent.

The political left, meanwhile, has been historically weak.

For most of this century, the Colombian political stage has been so
monopolized by two major parties, the equally ill-named Conservatives and
Liberals, that from the mid-1950s into the 1970s they even governed
together with no real opposition. "Strangely, we have a deep democratic
institutionality that coexists with the most barbaric violence, and the
state has a foot in both," says analyst Carlos de Roux.

Bloodletting in Colombia became more or less a permanent fixture back in
1948 when a popular presidential candidate was murdered.

Mass rioting turned into an era known as La Violencia, which stretched into
the 1960s. At that time, some of the peasant groups that had armed
themselves as self-defense militias became politicized and, under the
leadership of the now-septuagenarian Manuel "Sure Shot" Marulanda, morphed
into the leftist guerrilla group known as the FARC--today a well-armed
force of 18,000 fighters. Other smaller Marxist insurgencies flowered.

The FARC and to a lesser degree the 3,000 member ELN have through the
decades extended their reach over sizable chunks of sparsely populated
Colombian countryside but failed to gain much support elsewhere. "Be clear
on the FARC," says Mauricio Vargas, an editor and columnist at Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's weekly, Cambio. "They are not your Che Guevara, Comandante
Marcos sort of romantic guerrilla force."

That's an understatement. While originally rooted in Marxism, the FARC has
moved into criminal activity.

Its base of operations in southern Colombia overlaps some of the richest
coca-growing regions in the world.

For some time now, the FARC has harvested rich revenues by levying a "tax"
on the coca-growers, in return for which the FARC protects the growers from
attack. Recently, there is growing evidence that the guerrillas have gone
deeper into the coca trade, expanding into processing and edging into
trafficking and sales.

Colombia's--and President Pastrana's--dilemma is this: Poverty and social
inequality produce not only coca plantations and violence but also dogged
guerrilla armies.

And eventually they all become intertwined. How to undo this Gordian knot?

Talking Peace--Planning War

President Pastrana met with US officials in 1999, showing them his
comprehensive national reconstruction plan and asking them to fund a
significant part of it. He came out of those meetings with a $1.5 billion
opening commitment. But in those same meetings, the Plan Colombia playbook
got radically redrafted.

The Marshall Plan aspect of the blueprint was pushed aside.

Shoved to the top were a militarized drug war and an El Salvador-like
counterinsurgency plan. "Maybe the rewritten Plan Colombia is the price
Pastrana had to pay the US to be able to proceed with the peace process,"
speculates Carlos de Roux.

Pastrana pushed ahead with his peace initiative, meeting with the FARC's
Marulanda and even granting the guerrillas a temporary demilitarized zone
to be used as a staging area for negotiations. But because the talks
produced no cease-fire, the fighting has intensified as all sides escalate
in order to win bargaining advantages. Government forces, badly hurt by the
guerrillas from 1997 to 1999, have gone on the offensive.

The FARC has also ratcheted up its forced recruitment, its drug involvement
and its kidnapping for ransom.

Not only has the United States been lukewarm to the peace talks--many
Colombians have also soured on their prospects.

To the revulsion of millions, the FARC used the demilitarized zone to hold
kidnapped hostages. Meanwhile, it allowed coca cultivation, while its
attacks on civilian areas rose. The FARC formally froze the peace talks in
November, demanding that President Pastrana take effective action against
the right-wing paramilitaries if he wanted to renew the negotiations.

Which brings us to the latest set of "armed actors," the paramilitaries, at
least 11,000 well-armed troops financed by the wealthiest coca barons and
committed to exterminating the leftist guerrillas and their supporters.
From their stronghold in the north, the paras have started branching out
nationwide and are locked into a particularly bloody struggle with the
guerrillas to secure access to the Pacific Coast--a key to maintaining the
coca trade. "In the past few years the Colombian military has gotten out of
directly waging the dirty war, and at the same time there has been a
commensurate rise of the size and ferocity of the paramilitaries," says
Andrew Miller of Amnesty International. "And it is amply documented that
even if independently financed, the paramilitaries work hand in hand with
the government forces." Even the US government, at some level or another,
will concede that last point.

In February Pastrana managed to get the stalled peace talks restarted by
making a commitment to crack down on the paramilitaries. But the FARC also
bears responsibility for the situation: Its behavior has been so outrageous
that it has allowed the paramilitaries to pose as heroes to an ever more
frightened and disillusioned urban population.

Fumigating the Poor

Sensitive to charges that Plan Colombia will only stoke the fires of this
internal conflict, the Colombian government's point man on the issue,
National Security Adviser Gonzalo de Francisco, strains to emphasize the
least bellicose aspects of the operation.

During an extended interview in the elegant Narino Presidential Palace, the
soft-spoken 40-year-old political scientist makes his best case. "Coca has
feet, it moves around," he says. So, yes, he says, there is a military
component to eradication. But aerial fumigation is not to be
"indiscriminate," he says. "Forced eradication is like chemotherapy," he
says. "If we continue forced eradication for five more years we will kill
the patient." So while forcible fumigation will be escalated against the
big-time growers, for the first time in a serious way, de Francisco says,
the Colombian government will strive to negotiate contracts with
impoverished coca farmers under which they will agree to manually destroy
their crops.

In return, the government will give each family up to $2,000 in subsidies
and technical assistance to grow substitute crops like rice, corn and
fruit. (De Francisco says that Washington is providing $16 million
specifically for these purposes--about 1 percent of its Colombian aid
package.) The average coca farmer makes about $1,000 a month, but de
Francisco argues that while a campesino might make less growing corn or
rice, he has a moral and legal obligation to stop growing coca. "Coca will
be leaving Putumayo," he affirms, while agreeing that as many as 10,000
rural residents might be "displaced."

But de Francisco's critics contend that as much as 75 percent of the
illicit crops are on tiny plots owned by poor farmers who have little other
chance of economic survival.

Only a minority are large "industrial" sites. "Plan Colombia is absurd and
dangerous because it believes it can fumigate poverty," says political
science professor Jose Cuesta. Cuesta, a former M-19 guerrilla, is now a
leader of the Citizens' Network for Peace in Colombia. "The coca crops are
nothing but a concrete response to the ravages caused by unrestrained
free-market economic policies." Even the coca pickers, he says, are
increasingly the urban poor looking to survive. "If the government were
serious about drugs, it would forget about the campesinos and attack the
industrial and financial centers that most profit from trafficking," says
Cuesta. "This wouldn't be called Plan Colombia. It would be called Plan
United States."

De Roux fears the current actions could drive the farmers deeper into the
arms of the FARC. "Until now the farmers have not supported the guerrillas
but merely accommodated them," he says. "This military push might cement
the bond. Worse, it could push the FARC and the coca growers deeper into
the jungle, and it could encourage the FARC to become a full-blown cartel."
Already Ecuadorean farmers living near the southern Colombian border are
reporting that they have been offered money by Colombian drug traffickers
to begin coca production.

Meanwhile, the indigenous population of the targeted southern region is
already paying an elevated price.

Right-wing paramilitaries have recently expanded in that area and are
challenging the FARC not only for territorial control but also for
collection of the coca "tax." The Indian communities have been caught in
the crossfire and have lost much of their traditional leadership in the
bloodshed.

The FARC has also escalated its forced recruitment of teenagers from
indigenous families.

Add to that the stepped-up government spraying, and "for the indigenous
this is a catastrophe," says a government anthropologist who requested
anonymity. "Much of the land there is unfit for anything but coca. And the
government is wiping out the traditional and even the nontraditional
crops." The national human rights ombudsman's office has highlighted
several cases involving Cofan Indians who had their food crops, medicinal
plants, fish harvesting tanks and grazing fields sprayed with herbicides.
An Associated Press correspondent who traveled to Putumayo reported that
most of the fumigation he saw had hit the smallest of crops, many an acre
or less. This directly contradicts the government claim to be targeting the
"industrial" crops.

None of this has deterred the Colombian Army from claiming at least partial
victory in mid-February. An official army press release said that
eradication efforts were running ahead of schedule and had been "carried
out without any incident to date with any farmers or settlers." This
bluster might be just that--face-saving public relations.

A few weeks after the push began, six regional governors protested the
forced eradication and military approach of Plan Colombia, doubtlessly
contributing to the otherwise unexplained decision to halt the spraying
temporarily.

Echoes Of Vietnam

Perhaps after the meeting between Pastrana and Bush, we'll have a better
idea of what the new Administration's Colombia policy will be. Someone in
Washington is going to have to decide how much more it wants to invest in
Colombia, how much of that aid should continue to be military and just how
much, if at all, Pastrana's parallel peace efforts will be supported.

Or, on the contrary, what kind of appetite Washington has for being more
explicitly entwined not so much in a drug war as in counterinsurgency. The
line between the two is already considerably blurred by Plan Colombia.
"It's ambiguous," says a US Embassy official. "Anyone involved in any phase
of drug production no matter what hat he is wearing is now a legitimate
target."

There's no question that a significant part of the American political class
would just as soon see Pastrana shut down the peace talks. "If the FARC
does not start showing some real good faith real soon, it is indeed time to
pull the plug [on the peace process]," says Republican Congressman Benjamin
Gilman. "Pastrana should then go ahead and shut down the guerrilla zone and
send in the troops." This sort of talk rattles some Colombian analysts.
"It's not very reassuring that we are the only regional headache for the
US," says Roberto Pombo, editor of Garcia Marquez's Cambio. "If we have a
couple of hundred advisers here and one day the FARC kills three of them
and that happens on a day when the US President is in trouble on some
domestic issue, what happens to us? Ask the Libyans under Reagan, or the
Sudanese under Clinton." Adds Mauricio Vargas, "The US is already up to its
ears in Colombia. Everything's already here except the troops." There are
already American "contract" teams in Colombia, one of which was fired upon
in late February when it went into a guerrilla zone to rescue a downed
helicopter crew.

But is Plan Colombia really a prelude to a new Vietnam? It's unlikely that
the Bush Administration is about to send thousands of US troops into the
crossfire between the FARC and the paramilitaries. But there are,
nevertheless, historical parallels beyond the obvious imagery of blanketing
foreign jungles with defoliants. Once again, US power is being projected
abroad to achieve its own objectives at a punishing social cost to a
country we're "assisting." And as in Vietnam, even the US objectives are
muddled and elusive.

All available evidence shows that drug use is never reduced by attacking
the source but only by reducing the demand.

Plan Colombia, at best, will only disperse drug production from Colombia to
some neighboring location, and it will do nothing to reduce drug use in the
United States--except perhaps to spike the price of cocaine and make the
trade that much more profitable.

One US Embassy official essentially confirms the gap between what seemed to
be Pastrana's original vision of Plan Colombia and its reality today. "The
US and Colombia have different priorities," the official says. "Colombia
has peace as a priority.

We have narcotics."

Eternal War?

The US strategy has little regional support. "Panama does not want to get
involved in the internal problems of Colombia. We've been shying away from
that in every way," Panama's Ambassador to the United States, Guillermo
Ford, told the press.

Nor are Europeans enamored of Plan Colombia. In early February the European
Parliament, concerned about human rights and the rise of the
paramilitaries, voted 474 to 1 to oppose it.

Unfortunately, there's little echo of that peace constituency in the US
Congress. Senator Paul Wellstone has waged an unsuccessful battle to
redirect US policy toward domestic drug treatment programs.

But, he says, "I have hope, because across the country I see people more
engaged in this issue."

Only a comprehensive and negotiated settlement can stop the cycle of
violence in Colombia. Such a settlement would include a program of manual
eradication bolstered by deep reform that would incorporate and
demilitarize the armed actors.

The peace process undertaken by Pastrana and the FARC--and recently joined
by the ELN--is the first step in that process.

But for now, the staccato crackling of automatic weapons and the beating of
chopper blades are still louder than the voices of dialogue and
reconciliation. "If you pick your head up against the military, you can get
it blown off by the paramilitaries," says a discouraged Mauricio Vargas.
"And if you are on the left, where can you go? You are squeezed between a
government and a guerrilla army, neither of which you can support.

All the conditions here are ripe for eternal war."

And yet at times an astounding number of Colombians--as many as 10 million
on one occasion in 1999--have rallied for peace.

On the evening of January 25, as talks between the government and the FARC
seemed hopelessly stalled and the pundits were preparing the peace
movement's obituary, some 10,000 to 15,000 Colombians once again came out
to defy the odds. Brought together by the umbrella group Paz Colombia, they
gathered in front of the Bogota bullring to stage a lantern-lit march.

The procession snaked its way through downtown, led by a contingent of
jugglers, leaping acrobats and costumed stilt walkers passing out candies
and candles to onlookers.

From human rights activists to striking trade unionists, from students to
well-dressed middle-class professionals, the crowd was a mix not only of
class but of ideology.

Internal refugees displaced by the death squads marched alongside those
pushed from their homes by the guerrillas. The wives of slain and kidnapped
policemen locked arms with the mothers of young men "disappeared" by the
security forces.

The crowd sang out its chants, "Plan Colombia--Plan for War" and "Not one
more body, not one more peso for war!"

No one in that demonstration better embodied the complex forces that
underlie war--and peace--in Colombia than 45-year-old Nubia Sanchez.
Originally from San Vicente de Caguan, Sanchez said she fled the area after
it was ceded to guerrillas in the peace talks and the FARC began forced
recruitment of 13- and 14-year-olds. And yet she marched that night to
demand not only that the peace talks continue but that the government renew
the agreement to let the guerrillas continue to control the area from where
she fled. "My personal situation is not important," she said as she held
the candle lantern to her chest. "Dialogue is the only way to get to peace."

At Simon Bolivar Plaza, as mounted police and a helmeted riot squad gazed
on from the shadows cast by colonial-era lamps, the marchers swarmed around
a statue honoring the "Liberator of the Americas." When the organizers set
free a barrage of white helium-filled balloons, the marchers lifted their
lanterns and cheered.

One could imagine that someone standing on one of the mountain peaks behind
the city and peering down into the dark Andean night would discern a
distant flicker of light--and of hope.