U.S. STILL NOT SEEING COLOMBIA'S WAR FOR WHAT IT IS

PRESIDENT Clinton's visit to Colombia signals that the U.S. military
machine is grinding into gear as part of the $1.3 billion aid package to
that South American country. It has become a truism that Colombia's
conflict is primarily provoked by Marxist guerrillas financed by the drug
trade. But this analysis, which underpins U.S. policy, dangerously misses
the mark.

Indeed, it is every bit as pernicious as the parallel presumption: that the
war between the so-called guerrillas and the so-called paramilitaries --
the guerrillas' main enemy -- is a war between the left and the right, a
dispute between opposing ideologies or, even, classes.

The conflict that is sucking scores of U.S. helicopters and military
trainers into southern Colombia is indeed generated by the very
commodities, cocaine and heroin, whose trade it is nominally their
principal objective to destroy.

But the U.S. effort is targeted single-mindedly on the guerrillas, as was
underlined by the fleeting nature of Clinton's references to the
paramilitaries/self-defense groups. This ignores the fact that the central
axis of Colombia's conflict is the guerrilla/paramilitary war. This war is
not about political ideology -- it is about gaining control over the drug
trade.

As a senior U.S. Army officer noted recently, taking issue with official
policy: "Our fear is that in homing in on the guerrillas we will enable the
paramilitaries to triumph and by that time they will have complete control
over the drug flow."

The truth is that the paramilitaries were created by the drug traffickers
in the first place. Nearly two decades ago, in an age when the original
Cali and Medellin cartels were one and the same and before Pablo Escobar
launched their terrorist campaign against extradition, members of the
now-defunct M-19 guerrilla movement kidnapped the sister of Jorge Luis
Ochoa, a leader of the Medellin cartel.

Marta Nieves Ochoa was kidnapped in 1981 at the same time as guerrillas of
the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia, or FARC) were beginning to react against the territorial
expansion of the drug traffickers in areas such as the Magdalena Medio,
between Medellin and Bogota. FARC, then still true to its political origins
as Latin America's oldest Marxist insurgency and as yet scarcely involved
in the drug trade, stood up for the peasantry against the abuses of the new
landowners -- whom they also squeezed for money.

In response, the drug traffickers formed Muerte a los Sequestradores (Death
to Kidnappers, or MAS) and paid Israeli and British mercenaries to train
the first death squads in the Magdalena Medio. As a result of their
collaboration with the army, these squads became known as paramilitaries.

Two leaders emerged. One was Fidel Castano, a senior member of the Medellin
cartel whose father was reportedly killed by guerrillas in spite of a
ransom being paid. The other was Victor Carranza, a former peasant who had
seized control of Colombia's emerald trade and become a close business
associate of the drug traffickers. Their breaking with Pablo Escobar
ultimately led to Escobar's death.

Today, Fidel Castano's family conveniently claims he, too, is dead. His
brother, Carlos, has assumed his mantle and is the head of an armed force
named the United Self Defence Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de
Colombia, or AUC), comprising up to 6,000 armed members. Castano controls
much of the northwest.

Victor Carranza, meanwhile, owns or controls a huge swath of Colombia
stretching from outside Cartagena in the northwest to the plains south of
Villavicencio -- Los Llanos -- where he borders the principal guerrilla
zone. Carranza's forces, which are part of the AUC, continue to expand
their influence in spite of his incarceration on charges related to his
paramilitary activities.

It is common knowledge in police, judiciary, intelligence and military
circles that Colombia's biggest cocaine laboratories, as well as the
airstrips from which the drug is exported, are in the areas under Castano's
and Carranza's control. Intelligence sources maintain that they own
laboratories themselves as well as levy taxes on other laboratories and the
trade in general.

The guerrillas, on the other hand, generally dominate the cocaine trade at
the lower and far less profitable end of the value-added scale: licensing
the coca plantations and the production of cocaine paste, the primitive
first stage of the drug-making process. They also tax the buyers of the
paste as well as the suppliers of the basic input ingredients, cement and
gasoline.

In March, Castano himself admitted that 70 percent of AUC's financing came
from drug traffickers (a claim from which he is backtracking fast).
Meanwhile, Colombia's minister of defense, Luis Fernando Ramirez,
reportedly said last week that the proportion of FARC's income from the
drug trade is 60 percent. That each side obtains most of its money from
drugs tells us what indeed the war is really all about.

The escalation in the guerrilla/paramilitary conflict since the mid-1990s
mirrors two important events. The first was the success of coca eradication
efforts in Bolivia and particularly Peru, which quickened the displacement
of coca cultivation into southern Colombia at a time when the Colombians
were already looking to produce more and higher-quality coca at home in
order to cut costs and grab a greater market share.

The second was a dispute between Carranza and a significant drug trafficker
from southern Colombia, Leonidas Vargas, currently also in jail. It is
believed that Carranza took exception to Vargas' business agreements with
the guerrillas -- who were the dominant grouping in Vargas' area and the
barrier to Carranza's southward expansion.

Civilians are the primary victims of a war in which each side fights to
terrorize them into submission. Inside a zone the size of Switzerland
allocated to the FARC during the peace process launched by the government
of President Andres Pastrana, the guerrillas have made no attempt to
establish any political model. Instead, they have created a militarist
regime every bit as repressive as that of the paramilitaries in their own
zone of control.

As each side battles to dominate strategic roads, rivers and mountain
passes, extorting traders, businessmen and farmers at will amid spiralling
violence, the security forces have increasingly found themselves sidelined,
reduced to onlookers or, at best, bit-part players on the stage of a bigger
conflict. At worst, rogue elements of the security forces have worked
alongside the paramilitaries and committed grave human rights abuses.

With U.S. aid, the military's peripheral role will change. But in failing
to depict Colombia's war for what it actually is -- a struggle to gain
control of the drug trade from top to bottom -- from coca cultivation to
the export of cocaine -- the threat from the paramilitaries risks being
overlooked. And unlike the guerrillas, the paramilitaries enjoy some
growing public sympathy. They are even understood to be supporting a
potential presidential candidacy for the election in 2002.

Strong is the author of Whitewash, Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars,
Macmillan, UK, and a senior director at the Miami office of the global risk
mitigation company, Kroll Associates.
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