Plan For Colombia: Day 1

COLOMBIA CRISIS: CIVIL WAR, DRUG GANGS ARE RIPPING COUNTRY TO SHREDS

BOGOTA, Colombia - At a military base near Bogota in late October, an army
commander put his troops through an unusual exercise.

Three or four soldiers held a squirming dog, stomach up, while others filed
by, one by one, sticking a knife into the canine's belly. Afterward, the
soldiers gnawed on bits of the animal's raw flesh. The dog stabbing was a
training exercise, the commander explained, in case his troops "should ever
have to do the same thing with a human being."

Though footage of the exercise was shown on a national Colombian network,
it brought no outcry. Colombians rarely comment much on such instances -
let alone protest them - in part because, in Colombia, commentary can get
one killed.

Colombian drug lords are notoriously punitive toward those who speak
against them, and over the past two years, according to official counts,
3,289 Colombian civilians have been killed by politically motivated death
squads. The country is engulfed on all sides by violence and war, and if
the first casualty of ordinary war is truth, in civil war, the first
casualty is frankness.

Colombia's war against rural guerrillas, at least 40 and arguably 50 years
old, is the hemisphere's longest-running counterinsurgency action, and many
observers believe that violence will escalate before any peace comes,
largely because of American plans to intervene in the country's drug war.

Within the next few months, some 3,000 American-trained Colombian troops
will board American-made helicopters and fly into southern Colombian fields
of coca, the plant from which cocaine is made. As part of the $1.3 billion
U.S. aid package for Plan Colombia - a program of agricultural improvements
and reforms proposed by Colombian President Andres Pastrana - soldiers will
secure the fields and Colombian national police will spray them with
herbicides from crop-dusters.

The United States has committed up to 800 military and civilian advisers to
the operation. The counter-narcotics squads will use some 60 U.S.-made
Blackhawk and Huey helicopters to locate and protect the fields for fumigation.

A San Antonio Express-News reporter and photographer recently spent three
weeks in Colombia, traveling from the capital of Bogota to the southern
jungles to assess the conditions that the plan aims to transform. They
interviewed politicians and drug war specialists in Bogota, conversed with
guerrillas in towns they control and kept company with soldiers and
refugees in Puerto Asis - a rural market center that was under siege. They
also visited a naval base in the village of Puerto Leguizamo, where
residents were making do during the siege with smuggled goods from Peru.

Plan Colombia, its backers say, will repeat efforts that during the past 10
years have reduced coca acreage in Peru and Bolivia.

But unlike the Peruvian and Bolivian campaigns against coca, in Colombia
soldiers must go in before eradicators can do their work. Colombia's coca
fields are protected by gangsters and right-and left-wing guerrilla groups,
especially by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its
Spanish acronym as the FARC, a force of 20,000 armed insurgents. Some of
the small coca farmers reportedly have been armed by criminal and insurgent
groups, and might resist the army's advances.

In announcing the U.S. role in Plan Colombia last summer, President Clinton
pledged that U.S. soldiers will be limited to advisory roles in the looming
conflict.

"A condition of this aid is that we are not going to get in a shooting
war," he said.

"This is not Vietnam," he emphasized.

But neither Colombian nor American critics of the U.S. aid package are
convinced.

"This is always how it starts," Patrick Symmes, a U.S. writer on South
American affairs, said recently in Harper's magazine. "Colombia isn't
Vietnam in 1965. It is closer to Vietnam in 1955. ... The course of action
we set now will close off future options and lead, inexorably, to next
year's events."

"Its promoters present this plan as a means of reducing the flow of drugs
to the United States," editorialized the Colombian newsweekly Semana. "But
the motivation nevertheless appears to be the fear that the insurgency of
the FARC is out of control and constitutes a threat to other countries in
the region."

Three of the five countries bordering Colombia aren't happy about the plan,
which, the United Nations predicts, will send 25,000 to 30,000 refugees
across their borders. Panama and Ecuador have offered limited support for
Plan Colombia, but Peru, Brazil and Venezuela have refused to endorse it.

Venezuela and Brazil regard the FARC as a legitimate political movement,
allowing it to keep offices inside their borders. In December, FARC
representatives even spoke before the Venezuelan Congress.

Sense of lawlessness

The most common aspect of Colombia's many-sided violence is a high rate of
crime - a rate that most Colombians regard much as Americans do the
weather: Something one must accept. The important thing is to accept it
with aplomb, like wearing a stylish all-weather coat during a rain.

Though soldiers and policemen with semiautomatic weapons stand on nearly
every busy street corner, a contemporary survey of businesses in the
capital of Bogota indicates that about one in five is held up each year,
about 4 percent are subject to extortion, and personnel from nearly 3
percent become victims of kidnapping.

In Colombian banks, clerks work behind panels of bulletproof glass. Not
content with metal detectors alone, most banks, nightspots and jewelry
stores put customers through pat-down searches as well.

In some office centers, customers and employees are issued passes
authorizing entry, not to a building, but to one of its floors. Guards
check passes on elevators and every floor.

Ordinary citizens are searched, day and night, by soldiers and members of
Colombia's National Police, who say that they are trying to halt traffic in
drugs, explosive materials and arms. The military and police throw up
roadblocks, march into nightclubs, haunt parks and halt passers-by; street
vendors are shaken down with special thoroughness because lawmen claim that
many are contact men for drug rings. Municipal buses are stopped and their
passengers ordered to disembark for interrogations and searches that can
delay traffic for an hour.

Because of the frequent searches, almost nobody leaves home without
carrying a cedula, the national identity card.

Countermeasures to crime have been creeping into Bogota's daily life for
more than a decade, so inexorably that today, most of the city's
middle-class residents identify security measures as status symbols. In
prosperous districts, children are driven to school by their bodyguards;
playground status is as much a matter of one's security entourage as of
Nikes and Reeboks. If a millionaire should attend a public event without a
bodyguard at his side, his friends would gossip, not so much about his
safety as about his cash position.

"It's just part of the price of doing business," a jeweler said. "It would
be nice to think about not needing security measures, but what's the sense?
Nothing will ever change unless the government applies a heavy hand, and
starts shooting thugs and guerrillas in the streets."

Drug traffickers are responsible for most of the country's atmosphere of
lawlessness and public insecurity. Pablo Escobar, Colombia's Al Capone, set
a new standard for mayhem in 1989 when, because he wanted to murder a
single passenger, he brought down an Avianca jetliner, killing 107
passengers and crew members.

Escobar was killed in a government ambush in 1993. His death brought an end
to the era of big gangs, but not to the drug traffic. Some 300 minicartels
now supply the world with Colombian cocaine and heroin. "The drug traffic
has been democratized," one expert said - but so has narcoviolence, of
several different kinds.

Drug traffickers have brought poor and not-so-poor farmers into their nets,
as producers of opium poppies and coca leaf. Paramilitary and guerrilla
groups protect the growers, and their activities challenge the army and police.

On the day of the televised dog stabbing, left-wing guerrillas downed an
army helicopter, killing 18 soldiers. Before the week was out, they mowed
down 32 other recruits as they disembarked from a copter that had just landed.

"The government is losing its sovereignty to armed groups that are outside
the law and have very strong financial backing," a navy commander warns.

"Of the multiple factors that weigh on today's situation in Colombia,"
retired Gen. Juan Salcedo Lora said at an academic forum, "two can be
considered definitive: the growing presence of armed groups that dispute
with the state for a monopoly on the use of arms - guerrillas and
paramilitary groups - and the drug traffic."

"The worst thing," he added, "is that there is no guarantee that we can
advance."

Rebels and paramilitaries

Violence has come to mark Colombian daily life, for civilians as well as
combatants.

On the night of Nov. 23, in the southwestern town of Santander, a dozen men
in ski masks rode up to a bar called "Los Recuerdos" (Memories) went inside
and ordered its occupants to lie on the floor. Then they killed 12 of them,
including a barmaid, with semiautomatic rifle fire.

Los Recuerdos was a reputed hangout for paramilitary types, and at least
two of the dead were members of a right-wing militia, authorities later
reported. Their killers were presumed to be FARC guerrillas.

About the same time, in the same town of less than 25,000, five men in
civilian dress went into a simple home, pulled out Ananias Iipia, 47, her
son, Duglas, 26, and son-in-law, Walter Tenorio, 29, and shot them dead.

Iipia and her kin - poor people for whom friends took up a collection to
buy caskets - apparently had been guerrilla sympathizers. Town gossip
chalked up their murders to a paramilitary umbrella group, the United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC.

Both sets of Santander killings were just a night's work for the guerrillas
and paramilitaries, whose actions caused some 300,000 Colombians to flee
from their homes last year.

Colombians who live in cities rarely take their autos into the countryside
anymore, because they are afraid that armed groups will halt them, rob them
and even kidnap them.

"I had to sell my car and buy a motorbike," said a pharmacist in the
guerrilla-controlled city of San Vicente del Cauguan, in southeastern
Colombia. "A car attracts attention. If you leave town to go somewhere and
you get stopped at a roadblock, the next thing you know, the guerrillas or
the criminals are investigating to see if you're worth kidnapping."

In southern Colombia, guerrillas in September declared an "armed strike,"
forbidding all highway traffic. They burned vehicles that defied their ban.
Buses still sometimes run in the central zone between Medellin and Bogota,
outside the blockade, but anyone who can afford to takes a plane, because
guerrillas and hoodlums have made all highway travel chancy. On the Pan
American highway between Cali and Quito through southern Colombia, traffic
has declined by 30 percent during daylight hours and 80 percent at night,
because of the danger.

So extreme is the threat from organized Colombian violence that the
International Red Cross is no longer able to do its work in the country. On
Sept. 22, a Red Cross ambulance picked up a wounded FARC guerrilla near
Apartado, in northern Colombia. While carrying her to a hospital, the
ambulance was stopped and members of a right-wing militia pulled her out of
the vehicle and shot her to death.

In apparent retribution, some 10 days later, near the southern town of
Puerto Asis, members of the FARC yanked a wounded paramilitary out of an
ambulance and killed him on the roadside.

These twin incidents led the International Red Cross to announce it would
no longer attempt to rescue wounded members of either paramilitary or
guerrilla groups.

Cedric Diserens, director of the International Red Cross office in Puerto
Asis, came to Colombia from posts in Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania. Despite
his African experience, the scenario in Colombia soon worried him.

"Within a few days after I got here," he recalls, "I said to myself, 'this
situation is going to get worse and worse.' Unfortunately, I wasn't wrong
about that."

Not only are militants and ordinary civilians dying violently in Colombia,
but public officials are coming under fire, too.

Over the past two years, 34 mayors have been assassinated, 50 others have
been threatened by armed groups, and as a means of averting the threats, 26
are now administering their cities from remote locations, by telephone.
Colombians are 10 times as likely as Americans to be murdered - and the
murder rate for Colombian mayors is now 25 times as high as that for
ordinary Colombians, according to a CNN.com report by Marina Cristal
Caballero, editor of investigations for the Semana newsweekly.

Nor are higher-ranking officials immune: In October, right-wing
paramilitaries kidnapped seven members of the Colombian Congress.

One result is that officials, like most Colombians, have begun to hold
their tongues in fear. "I might have an idea about how our situation will
end," said Manuel Alzate, the mayor of Puerto Asis, a market town for coca
growers, "but I don't dare say what it is."

Dick J. Reavis, a senior reporter with the San Antonio Express-News since
January 2000, has reported extensively from Latin America during his 26
years in journalism. A former fellow of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard
University, he is the author of four books, including 'The Ashes of Waco,'
and the translator of two others. His memoir of the civil rights movement,
'If White Kids Die,' will be published this spring by North Texas
University Press.

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n145/a05.html