FIRST OF A SERIES
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Colombia's rich narcoguerrillas score PR coup

Government bested in a jungle hellhole where cocaine rules

By Linda Diebel
Toronto Star Latin American Bureau

CARTAGENA DE CHAIRA, Colombia IT'S A WET and gloomy Monday in June,
the day after this town witnessed the spectacle of Colombian rebels
handing prisoners back to the army, and everybody is getting drunk.

Not quietly drunk but mean, stinking, fallingdown drunk.

It's the rainy season here. Bad enough.

Moreover, the mood is ugly.

It shows what cocaine can do to a place.

This is not a pretty town. It's a godforsaken jungle outpost of
whorehouses, gin joints and lost people on the Caguan River that lives
on the cocaine trade.

Cartagena de Chaira is the base from which big bags of coca paste
what remains after coca leaves have been soaked in gasoline for 24
hours and treated with an assortment of chemicals are transported
upriver to Rio Negro, and beyond.

Cocaine is king here, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) are lords of the court.

Whatever motivates these Marxist rebels who control the cocaine trade
and there are wildly divergent views on the morality of
narcoguerrillas there are no doubts who runs things.

The FARC rebels are the richest guerrillas in Colombia, maybe the
world.

They've been fighting the longestrunning and deadliest civil war in
Latin America, and they finance it right here in the Colombian Amazon
basin.

``Forget about your romantic images of Che Guevara,'' says Gabriel
Rios, an agronomist and expert on Colombia's coke trade.

``These are not the idealistic, madeforTV revolutionaries that you
might know and love from Nicaragua or even El Salvador.''

Nationwide, the FARC numbers roughly about 12,000 troops, not counting
a reserve force that may double that number.

They control the vast jungles and swamps of southern Colombia. The
region stretches more than 220,000 square kilometres through Putumayo,
Caqueta, Guaviare, Vaupes and Amazonas, states which border Ecuador,
Peru and Brazil.

``This is our Vietnam,'' says sociologist Alberto Valencia, rector of
Amazonias University in Florencia, the Caqueta state capital.

``In the same way the United States could never win the war in
Vietnam, the government will never defeat the FARC here in the south.
The jungle is just too hard, too unforgiving.''

And, here in the Colombian Amazon, as in other areas, poor campesinos
are at the bottom of the power grid.

Although they're not being slaughtered by death squads as in central
and northern parts of Colombia, they're caught in a savage cycle of
violence.

They are the scapegoats.

It's not poor coca farmers who get rich from cocaine. A campesino has
to own more than 10 hectares to break even, and more than 70 per cent
of the farmers are scratching a living from a hectare or two.

Yet the campesinos are caught between the government and the FARC
guerrillas and are blamed for the cocaine trade that has made the
rebels rich. As a result, they're being driven off lands being
fumigated by a Colombian government that is acting under U.S.
pressure.

Washington wants an end to $200 billion (U.S.) worth of cocaine
imports into the U.S. every year. The Colombians have responded to
this pressure by cracking down on coca farmers at the bottom.

It's the same old story, say groups defending the farmers.

Hit the powerless.

``People are living in misery. They don't even have enough money to
buy bread to feed their children,'' says Maria Inez Gutierrez, an
advocate for the region's coca farmers. A former coca merchant
herself, she's fighting fumigation programs that have dumped heavy
chemicals over vast stretches of the Amazon jungle.

Here, in Cartagena de Chaira, landless peasants, driven in from the
jungle by fumigation, or by government bans on gasoline and cement
(key ingredients in the production of coca paste), fill the streets.

They add to the general misery of this awful place.

The ban on alcohol was lifted at midnight, Sunday, June 15.

The leadership of the FARC southern command had ordered the town dry
for two days in advance of the prisoner release that day. They didn't
want the locals drunk to spoil the day when they handed over 70
hostages to the army in the full glare of the media spotlight.

The event had been a public relations coup for the FARC.

The rebels captured the prisoners months before in combat. The largest
group of hostages was 60 soldiers taken in a nighttime raid last
August on Las Delicias army base on the Caqueta River. The attack left
more than 100 soldiers dead.

For months, the rebels negotiated with a governmentappointed peace
commission to arrange the hostage release.

Sunday was their big moment.

The world was watching.

Scores of reporters made their way here, flying to the Caqueta capital
of Florencia, driving four hours on bad road by jeep to Rio Negro,
then travelling two more hours down the Caguan River, deep into
guerrillaheld territory.

FARC checkpoints dotted the Caguan River.

The next day, newspapers were full of photos of heavily armed rebels
leading unarmed, and clearly embarrassed, prisoners, out of the jungle
and over to the Red Cross helicopters that would fly them to safety.

Dignitaries applauded.

``Here, we're returning your little soldiers. So you can take stock of
the deal and the war continues,'' was the way the Bogota daily, El
Tiempo, described FARC's defiant attitude.

FARC Comandante Joaquin Gomez even made the captured prisoners form
ranks and salute him, before letting them go.

``Don't be misled by the show,'' drug expert Rios had said the day
before. ``Joaquin can't control his own people any more. The FARC has
decomposed into drugdealers and thugs. They are contaminated by the
money. They rule their little republics like religious sects.

``Joaquin is an illusion.''

In a way, he may be right.

Comandante Joaquin a.k.a. Milton Toncil is a sinewy, mustachioed,
intense MarxistLeninist revolutionary of about 45.

In another life, he was a zoologist at Amazonia University, a good
teacher, very professional and ``not particularly interested in
politics,'' according to those who knew him. A former roommate
describes him as ``very tidy.''

In 1980, Toncil won a scholarship to Patrice Lumumba University in
Moscow and came back a firebrand revolutionary. He disappeared into
the jungle and reemerged a few years later as Comandante Joaquin.

``The armed struggle will always be relevant in a country like
Colombia,'' he told the thousands of journalists, dignitaries, gawkers
and sightseers who jammed the town plaza here Sunday.

``A circus of clowns,'' was how Colombian Armed Forces Gen. Harold
Bedoya described the event.

``When one sees drug dealers saying they're politicians, that's part
of the circus,'' the angry general told the weekly newsmagazine
Semana.

Bedoya warned the army will retake remote jungles areas that have been
turned into ``little narcoterrorist republics.''

Still, the general consensus among Colombians is that Joaquin as
well as the absent FARC Supreme Comandante Manuel Marulanda won the
public relations battle.

They gained credibility. The rebels showed they could keep prisoners
for 10 months in the jungle, abiding by the terms of the Geneva
Convention; negotiate a deal with government and church officials as
equals; then slip back into the jungle without a trace.

The rebels vanished, and the drinking began.

Today, people here are surly. The town elders of Cartagena de Chaira
are in no mood to be interviewed. They can barely talk.

They sit at rickety chairs and stools at outdoor cantinas, flies thick
as soup over sticky tables, manure still steaming in dark piles at
their feet, and chug back whole bottles of Chivas Regal like water.

Mules wander aimlessly down the main street to the docks. Malarial
mosquitoes wait for sundown.

Raspachins pickers who make up to $300 (U.S.) a day harvesting
coca leaves, argue drunkenly. They're mostly young men, far from home.

They blow their money on women and booze, either here or at the jungle
town of Remolinos de Caguan, a perilous place where the population has
grown to 60,000 from 6,000 in three years. People boast that Remolinos
has the biggest whorehouse in the region, with 90 beds.

People are even testy with the town priest. That's very uncommon in
Latin America.

They glance sideways at Father Viciano Vizcardi out of shifty eyes
when he asks who's around on behalf of a reporter searching for sober
townsfolk.

``Sorry, Father,'' they mumble, and fade away.

``Nothing happens in this region that the FARC doesn't know about,''
says the Italianborn priest. ``They run it like a state, with their
own rules, their own code of conduct, their own social dynamic. They
don't want the people getting drunk all the time, and they try to
educate them in Marxist philosophy.''

But such discipline holds only while the rebels are around, says
Vizcardi.

Otherwise, Cartegena de Chaira reverts to form: savage and volatile.

This fleabitten town and seldom has a cliche applied more aptly
shows how cocaine has destroyed the social fabric of an entire region,
says Monsignor Luis Augusto Castro, Catholic bishop in the jungle town
of San Vicente de Caguan.

``The people have paid a terrible price for cocaine. It has created a
culture of death that has destroyed people's sensitivity towards
dying. There is so much violence that human life seems cheap as if
it's worth nothing,'' says Castro, a member of the peace commission,
called the Commission of National Reconciliation.

Castro is a softspoken, humble man, with a gentle smiling face and
easy manner. It's easy to see why he is respected by both rebels and
government officials.

After leaving the jungle, he met in Bogota with President Ernesto
Samper at the presidential palace to hammer out a plan for immediate
relief for the region's coca farmers. Only a few million dollars are
available, but Castro says the gesture is important.

He is hopeful that Sunday's hostage release represents a small glimmer
of hope for eventual peace in Colombia.

He's spent much of the past year negotiating with FARC rebels, and is
more sympathetic to their motives than others.

``I don't accept the line that these are narcoguerrillas, or
narcoFARC, as they've been called,'' he says. ``The rebels tax the
production and sale of cocaine in order to pay the costs of their war.
They would argue classic Marxist ideology that the end justifies the
means. Of course, the Catholic Church considers that immoral.''

Others agree.

``The FARC is not a cartel; it's simply not true,'' Daniel
GarciaPena, another peace commission member, said recently.

``They don't take this money to buy luxurious houses; the money goes
to buy arms.''

Roberto Ramirez, a Florencia sociologist and longtime Communist Party
stalwart, argues that the rebels didn't conjure up the cocaine trade.
He says they simply take advantage of an existing fact of economic
life in order to fund a war for social justice in a country run,
essentially, by four or five big conglomerates and the drug cartels.

``They would tell you, `We're working to achieve our goals, and when
they are achieved, we will stop,' '' says Ramirez. ``They have a
financial plan and quotas to fill.''

Even the FARC raid on Las Delicias last summer was in retaliation for
the government's fumigation programs that drove peasants off their
jungle lands and turned them into refugees, he says.

Ramirez points out that the FARC is not alone in taxing the drug
trade. The guerrillas levy a tax of roughly 10 per cent on every
aspect of the business, including coca growers, pickers, the middlemen
who float through the region on behalf of the big cartels and the
pilots who take off from illegal runways throughout the jungle.

Apparently, they waive the rules for poor farmers who can't pay.

Soldiers take their cut too.

``Everybody knows the soldiers are getting rich on cocaine,'' says
Ramirez, ``and they're not doing it for a cause.''

For the past year, campesinos have walked hundreds of kilometres in
protest marches Las Marchas over the government fumigation
programs.

``You might say that I am the most evil man in the world,'' says
Florencia teacher Raul Franisco Doncel, an advocate for the rights of
coca growers.

``That's because I defend cocaine. But, personally, I'm not defending
the drug trade, but rather the lives of people who have no other way
to survive,'' he says.

``There are 20,000 families in this region who get their sole
subsistence from the coca leaf. They switched over from yucca, bananas
and other crops during the boom years of the 1980s and early `90s
because they saw it was an easier way to survive. Now they have no
alternative.''

Cocaine prices are down again. Although the farmer never sees this
kind of money, a kilo of coke in Colombia goes for just under $1,000.
That same coke sells for $25,000 and up in the U.S. and Canada.

``I'm convinced that repression fumigation and military occupation
is absolutely the wrong way to try and solve the cocaine problem
here,'' says Doncel.

``You just can't blame the peasants because the rebels run the coke
business.

``They're just on the bottom rung of the ladder. This whole country is
a narcodemocracy. Look for blame there. Everybody is getting rich,
including the politicians who finance their campaigns with drug money.

``And, what about Gringolandia?'' he asks, waving a vague arm in a
general northern direction towards the United States and Canada.

``You consume cocaine at a huge rate. You like our white powder. As
long as there is such a big demand, there will be coke production. So,
I ask again, `Why should the poor coca farmers of Colombia pay for the
sins of the world?' ''

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Tomorrow: Colombia's refugees, caught between guerrillas and the
government.