Columbia: Washington's Dirtiest "War on Drugs"

by Peter Dale Scott

With the slaughters of Guatemala and El Salvador receding, the bloodiest
killing field of this hemisphere is now Colombia. Leftwing political

leaders, union organizers, and many other avilians are being
systematically slaughtered, while random terror is being used to drive
peasants and shopkeepers from their land. Major human rights
organizations agree that the United States should forthwith cease arming
and training those who are conducting this organized counterinsurgency
program of political terror and murder. A small group in Congress is
increasingly concerned and vocal about the impact of U.S. aid on
Colombian human rights.

Yet many people I talk to, even those who are veterans of the Vietnam
antiwar movement, know almost nothing about the Colombian atrocities.
The press ako avoids this tragedy, discussing instead more remote horrors
like those in Rwanda or Zaire. Uow similar this seems to the 1970s, when
we were told so much about the atrocities occurring in Cambodia, and
nothing at all about the mass killings occurring with U.S. support in
East Timor.

In part, this ignorance and avoidance is psychological. People view
"revolutions" and "guerrillas" as much less glamorous today, after the
revelations about Pol Pot, than they did in the 1960s. And in truth there
is no reason to romanticize the guerrillas of Colombia. Most of them have
become little more than bandits robbing, extorting, kidnapping and
murdering in their turn, and causing vast ecological damage when they
blow up oil companies' pipelines.

But this ignorance can be traced back to a systematic distortion of
Colombian realities in the U.S. press and in Washington. We do not hear
that in Colombia most of the killings are perpetrated by the military and
its allies, not by the guerrillas. Nor do we hear that these killings are
part of a strategy of terror that has been encouraged by socalled U.S.
Special Warfare or Low intensity Conflict theorists and trainers.

United States aid to Colombia is presented as part of a legitimate "war
on drugs." The aid is said to help break what journalist Robert Novak
recently called the "clear link between guerrillas and drug traffickers."
Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey agrees, and has said that
counterinsurgency and counternarcotics are, in fact, "two sides of the
same coin." But in practice the United States is supporting a
militaryparamilitary alliance that works in conjunction with not
against the richest drugtraffickers and their private death squads.
Some U.S. aid ends up in counterinsurgency operations where no drugs are
present at all. An internal Department of Defense (DOD) memo has conceded
that it is "unrealistic to expect the military [to] limit use of [U.S.]
equipment to operations against narcotraffickers."

The American public is further confused by hearing that Colombia has
been decertified as an aid recipient for not having "fully cooperated"
with U.S. drug enforcement. But decertification, which embarrasses the
civilian government, does not affect the flow of arms to the Colombian
military and police. in fact, this is being augmented by a waiver in the
name of national security, and again by supplemental "drawdowns" of arms
in the DOD inventory, and finally by direct arms sales. U.S. arms grants
and sales to Colombia in fiscal year 1997 are expected to be the highest
ever.

Pacification Through Pure Terror

Consider the situation in Uraba, in northwestern Colombia. There,
paramilitary units, some of them financed by drugtrafficking landowners,
are mimicking the death squads of El Salvador to impose the peace that
comes from maximized terror. This approach is suggested by the reaction
last August to the "Peace Week" declared by Gloria Cuartas, the
courageous Mayor of Apartado The Mayor was giving a lesson in conflict
resolution to an elementary school class when her talk was broken up by
two men outside who grabbed an eight yearold boy, chopped off his head,
and threw the head into the classroom. The Mayor hid for the night under
a neighbor's bed, and emerged the next morning to find her municipal car
riddled with bullet holes.

In Apartado alone, there were over three hundred political
assassinations last year by the paramilitaries and their opponents. In
Colombia as a whole there were over three thousand such killings, or more
than the total during the seventeenyear military dictatorship in Chile.
Groups attempting an independent analysis of these nationwide figures,
like the Andean Commission of Jurists, estimate that 70 percent of the
killings are committed by the army, police, and above all by the
paramilitary groups. Of the remaining 30 to 35 percent, most are the work
of leftist guerrillas. Less than 2 percent of the killings have anything
to do with drugs.

Although the gross figure of three thousand political killings has
remained fairly constant over the last ten years, the percentage
attributable to paramilitaries has been increasing and the military's
share declining. The result is a scene of untraceable slaughter, much as
in Guatemala and El Salvador. All three countries have suffered from the
counterterrror strategies developed and disseminated by U.S.
counterinsurgency theorists. (Decapitations and mutilations, now common
in Uraba, are a technique made familiar in El Salvador.)

The best proof that both the United States and the top Colombian
military approve of paramilitary violence is that those responsible for
coordinating it are usually promoted. Meanwhile, U.S. aid for the "war on
drugs," despite official denials, continues to flow to those units
identified with civilian murders. A few offending officers have been
forced into retirement or dismissed, but almost none have been convicted
of charges, while witnesses against them have been murdered, even when in
official custody.

Leftwing political leaders, union organizers, and human rights workers
are especially targeted for elimination. Wherever paramilitaries are
working to consolidate their domination, they are committing
spectacularly brutal kilngs of ordinary citizens as a means to
displace

entire communities from contested areas.

One of the largest paramilitary "selfdefense" groups, the Autodefensas
Campesinas of Cordoba & Uraba' (ACCU), has been funded by two local
drugtrafficking millionaires, the Castaijo brothers. Not surprisingly,
they are wanted for murder by the civil authorities. The army has also
reportedly provided support to another paramilitary leader, Victor
Carranza, an emerald dealer and reputed drug trafficker.

U.S. Counterterror Strategies & the Training of the Colombian Army

Rural slaughter by armed civilians is rooted deeply in Colombian history,
and reached a high point in the civil war that followed World War II. Out
of this chaos emerged guerrilla movements and a strategy of government
counterterrorism for which the United States has provided training and
materiel since 1962. A toplevel U.S. Special Warfare team from Fort
Bragg visited Colombia that year and recommended the same deadly
strategies then being applied for counterinsurgency in Vietnam. The core
of the team's report focused on training of civilian and military
personnel ... to ... as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or
terrorist activities... backed by the United States."

Among the "terrorist activities" then taught by Special Warfare expert
General Lansdale (and later incorporated in U.S. Army pamphlet 52571),
were the murder and mutilation of captives, and the display of their
bodies. in the 1980s, Reaganera counterinsurgency experts like Neil
Livingstone (an Oflie North associate) explicitly endorsed the
deathsquad and massmurder tactics employed in El Salvador and
Argentina: "in reality, death squads are an extremely effective tool,
however odious, in combating terrorism and revolutionary challenges."
Livingstone even rationalized the tactic of killing not only the leftists
themselves, but also their relatives, as a way "to prevent blood feud."

At that time, similar strategies, more cautiously expressed, were being
taught to Colombian officers at the Fort Benning School of the Americas
(SOA). Just last June, Washington's Intelligence Oversight Board found
that the SOA training materials had recommended "executions of
guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."
A 1992 report by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, which
discussed human rights abuses by the Colombian military and police, found
that almost half of those involved (105 out of 246) had been trained at
the SOA.

After the 1962 visit, the Colombian Army promptly incorporated the
notion of "civil defense" or "selfdefense" paramilitaries into its own
"Plan Lazo" counterinsurgency strategy. Under the legal umbrella of a
subsequent "State of Siege," a law was passed allowing the military to
provide civilians with weapons restricted to the armed forces.

Political violence escalated dramatically in late 1981. At that time the
death squad MAS was set up by leaders of the Medeilin and Call drug
cartels, at a meeting that some say was also attended by Colombian army
officers. Originally targeted against kidnappers, MAS then became a model
(backed by drug lords who were becoming more and more powerful
landowners) for the indiscriminate murder of leftists, civil rights
activists, and civilian political leaders.

In Colombia's Middle Magdalena region, the MAS model of
armyparamilitary cooperation evolved from a meeting called in 1982 by a
local army commander, and attended also by businessmen, ranchers, and
representatives from Texaco. (For a while this coalition sponsored
training centers with instructors from the United States, Israel, and
Great Britain.) According to Human Rights Watch, the army, while using
the name MAS, essentially "authorized and actively encouraged civilians
to pursue and kill suspected guerrillas." The targets soon included any
civilians who opposed MAS tactics. (By the late 1980s Medellin
traffickers controlled 40 percent of the land in this region, and funded
most of the paramilitary activities.)

The Colombian human rights commission, Justicia y Paz, found that around
just one village in the area's hundreds who refused to join the
paramilitaries or leave the region were murdered. Several thousand more
fled the area and settled elsewhere. Many such displaced persons have
relocated to jungle areas, and now are trying to subsist by growing a
plant new to them coca.

After a few months of this terror campaign, the civilian government
ordered an investigation. Of 163 people linked to MAS, 59 were found to
be activeduty police and military officers, including the commanders of
two local Army Battalions. The military tribunal, which insisted on
handling the case, dismissed all charges. The government, paralyzed by
rumors of a possible military coup acquiesced. Since then the justice
system has effectively continued to accept the impunity enjoyed by
military and paramilitary killers. This is true even today, though the
State of Siege has been lifted, and a 1989 decree has made paramilitary
membership illegal. (Reportedly, even after this decree, army
intelligence has continued to discuss operations planning with
paramilitary leaders.)

The U.S. has helped to institutionalize this system of collaboration in
murder. From Human Rights Watch we learn that, "Despite Colombia's
disastrous human rights record, a U.S. Defense Department and ... C.I.A.
team worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence
reorganization that resulted in the creation of killer networks that
identified and killed civilians suspected of supporting guerrillas."
Significantly, there is not a single mention of drugs in this secret
order (Order 20005/91), which was designed to combat what it calls
"escalating terrorism by armed subversion."

The Order does not mention the murders and paramilitaries by name
either, referring only to "covert and compartmentalized" civilian
"intelligence networks." But it does lay out a system of
militaryparamilitary collaboration, modeled on that developed in the
1980s between the Army and the MAS death squads of the Cali and Medellin
cartels. Under this system, laws continue to be flouted; military
officers continue to equip and oversee hit men armed with prohibited
weapons; civilians continue to be killed. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons have
gone to one army unit, the Palace' Battalion, that has killed 120
civilians since 1990.

The U.S. press ignored a Human Rights Watch press conference last
November that reported on U.S. support for Colombia's
militaryparamilitary killer networks. A March 1997 article in the New
York Times about the Castafios' "selfdefense group,"the ACCU, also
failed to mention U.S. support. The article did, however, mention past
military protection for the Castanos. It observed that "it is unclear how
serious the military really is about catching Carlos Castano," and it
noted the latter's wry comment about an army camp being "just over the
hill" from his training camp.

In 1994, to placate the small but growing U.S. congressional group
criticizing policy in Colombia, a State Department official testified
that none of the Colombian military units identified with atrocities had
received any assistance from the United States. But last October, William
Schulz, U.S. Director of Amnesty International, produced official
documents that, as he said, prove the opposite: "almost every unit
highlighted by Amnesty for murdering Colombian civilians was in fact
receiving U.S.supplied arms and other equipment." He called for an
immediate halt to U.S. military aid.

NarcoGuerrillas. Left and Right

U.S. officials defend this aid policy with the rationale that it is
needed to combat the "narcoguerrillas." As I explained in Cocaine
Politics (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991), the notion of
the leftwing "narcoguerrilla is the legacy of a mid1980s propaganda
campaign that was promoted in part to disguise the true links between the
military and the real drug traffickers. This notion relied on misleading
and possibly planted evidence such as an alleged uniform of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas found in 1984 at
the major Tranquilandia cocaine laboratory. The U.S. Ambassador claimed
(and the New York Times duly reported) that the laboratory had been
guarded by communist guerrillas. But respected drug researcher Rensselaer
Lee later concluded that this was incorrect; the lab had in fact enjoyed
highlevel protection from the Colombian military.

Recently, some guerrilla networks have focused increasingly on the
profits available from the drug bonanza by taxing and protecting the
cultivation, processing, and shipment of drugs. Officials estimate that
between 1990 and 1994, guerrillas extorted $701 million from the drug
trade. But this figure for a fouryear period represents only 3 percent
or less of an annual drug traffic averaging over $6 to $10 billion per
year.

Narcoterrorism from the right has been the more serious matter,
especially with the rise and fall of the Medellin cartel in the late
1980s and early 1990s. For a few years during this period, the U.S. press
reported spectacular assassinations of judges and a presidential
candidate, and also bombings of police headquarters and a civilian
airliner.

The problem with the leftwing "narcoguerrilla" hypothesis is that it
obscures the reality: these terrorist acts against the civilian state
were financed by rightwing traffickers like Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha, whose death squads functioned in alliance with the military, not
against them. In these circumstances, uncontextualized talk of
"narcoguerrillas" makes sense only as a way to hornswoggle Congress and
the American people.

In a revealing article in the February, 1987 Military Review, Colonel
John Waghelstein, former leader of the U.S. military mission in El
Salvador, and thereafter an outspoken exponent of "PostVietnam
Counterinsurgency Doctrine" described the usefulness of popularizing the
"narcoguerrilla" notion: "A melding in the American public's mind and m
Congress of this narcoguerrilia/narcoterrorist] connection would lead
to the necessary support to counter the guerrilla/narcotics terrorists
in this hemisphere ... Congress would find it difficult to stand in the
way of supporting our allies with the training, advice and security
assistance necessary to do the job ... Above all, we would have the
unassailable moral position from which to launch a concerted offensive
effort using Department of Defense (DOD) and nonDOD assets."

Robert Novak and others have revived the "narcoguerrilla" as a
justification for maintaining the arms pipeline. Behind this campaign are
officials like General Barry McCaffrey, who, before becoming drug czar,
was Commander of the Southern Commanda unit that collaborates with Latin
American armed forces such as Colombia's. In 1996 and again in 1997,
McCaffrey talked of the "narcoguerrillas" as a reason to increase aid to
the Colombian army.

The Actual Allies of the NarcoDeath Squads and of the United States

According to Novak, McCaffrey told him that the chief of the Colombian
military, General Harold Bedoya, is "clean and competent." (By "clean,"
McCaffrey may have meant that there was no cocaine powder in the man's
pockets.) Bedoya is, however, one of the chief targets of human rights
watchers in Colombia. The American Association of Jurists and other
groups have identified him as founder and leader of the death squad
Alianza Americana Anticomunista in the early 1980s.

Bedoya is both a graduate and a former instructor at the U.S.run School
of the Americas, and was once his country's military attache in
Washington. A year ago, after the Samper civilian government was first
decertified, be tried and failed to secure U.S. Embassy support for a
military coup. More recently he tried to convince the U.S. Congress that
all the guerrillas in Colombia "are now narcotics traffickers" an
absurd notion.

Another SOA graduate is the army commander, General Manuel Bonert.
Bonett has repeatedly resisted investigation of his troops' involvement
with paramilitaries. In 1979~80, he was personally responsible for the
area around Trujillo, an area then notorious for paramilitary murders
protected by the military. (One of the killers was Henry Loaiza, a member
of the Cali drug cartel). Recently the Army, under Bonett, fired one of
its most decorated heroes in the war against the real drug cartels,
Colonel Carlos Velasquez. His crime was to have complained that the Army
was losing the support of the people by its cooperation with terroristic
paramilitary groups. Bedoya has since defended the firing. Bedoya's
friend, General Yanine Diaz, is another graduate of the U.S. School of
the Americas. Recently the Colombian Attorney General has issued a
warrant for his arrest in connection with massacres. Apparently, the
actions of Bedoya and generals like him are controversial in Colombia but
not in Washington.

The Challenge for Colombia

and for the United States

It would be misleading to recount only these negative features of recent
Colombian history. Nondrug sectors of the economy have improved
recently, with a rise in coffee prices and a minioil boom. Over the
years the civilian government has struggled to restore a rule of law,
partly by negotiating with drug traffickers on the one hand and
guerrillas on the other. Reinforced by the new 1991 Constitution, the
civilian government has made periodic, if hitherto ineffective, efforts
to track down and arrest paramilitary leaders like the Castaflos.

It would also be misleading to speak only of the terroristic aspects of
the U.S.backed "war on drugs." Sometimes drugs themselves really are the
target, as in the controversial fumigation project to eradicate coca from
the air. (What happens in fact is that all local crops, not just the
coca, are adversely affected along with the health of those unfortunate
enough to live nearby.)

The U.S. has taken some recent steps to address human rights violations
by the Colombian military, such as vetting the officer candidates for
U.S. training. Last September Senator Leahy managed to secure a
congressional prohibition of assistance to military units known to abuse
human rights.

In Colombia's relatively healthy, diversified, and turnaround economy,
the business classes have reason to hasten normalization by throwing
their weight behind the nascent peace process in their country. The
government has just announced a plebiscite on the issue of negotiating
peace with the guerrillas, and the issue of peace is likely to be
important in next year's presidential elections.

The chief obstacle to a negotiated peace has been that the strenuous
resistance from the Colombian military is not countered by but is in fact
backed by U.S. policy. Historically, Washington has favored strong armies
in Latin America, even at the obvious price of weakening democracy.
Clinton has done nothing to change this policy direction. On the
contrary, his budget for the war on drugs" is now more than three times
that of Reagan's. Currently, Clinton plans to maintain thousands of U.S.
troops in Panama for counternarcotics operations. The policy of aid
decertification only further

aggravates the Colombian crisis; as a Colombian Minister complained
recently, the U.S. "helps us for war, but not to achieve peace. We need
to be fighting poverty." The European Parliament, meanwhile, has voted to
deflect half its antidrug aid into health and other civilian programs.

As we learned in El Salvador, it is possible for seemingly hopeless
slaughter to be curbed. Reluctantly, Washington came to accept the fruits
of the peace process in Central America, a process that was in part the
work of the Catholic church and other nongovernmental organizations who
were backed by their supporters in the United States. However, a key
event in this turnaround was the 1988 vote by Congress against funding
the Nicaraguan contras.

We need another such definitive congressional vote, a vote against aid
and support for the military and police of Colombia. This vote would be
not only our country's best contribution to peace and human rights in
Colombia; it would also be the way to free up funds for a genuine
strategy to address the drugabuse problem. ~

For more information, contact the Colombia Support Network, P.O. Box
1505, Madison, Wisc., (608)2578753. Peter Dale Scott is the author and &
coauthor of various books on drug trafficking, most recently "Cocaine
Politics" and "Deep Politics and the Death of J.F.K." from Univ. of
Calif. Press, Berkeley.