Pubdate: Thu, 27 Dec 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Section: Page A01
Contact: letters@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

A TRANSFER OF POWER IN COLOMBIA

Paramilitary's Rise Unintended Outcome Of U.S. Assistance

PARAISO, Colombia -- It is hard to imagine a place more misnamed than this
village in northern Colombia's San Lucas Range. Paradise has had a difficult
year.

Months ago, President Andres Pastrana sent the army into Paraiso and the
surrounding region to create a safe haven for peace talks with Colombia's
second-largest guerrilla force.It was a politically risky move. Pastrana's
orders to the army were unusual: Leave the guerrillas mostly alone, but
focus on driving the right-wing paramilitary forces out of southern Bolivar
province, where they had massed to block the peace plan.

The army did not carry out Pastrana's orders. Instead, it appeared to work
in tandem with the paramilitary forces to drive the guerrillas deep into the
jungle-covered mountains. Three times since then, paramilitary forces have
burned Paraiso to the ground. On Dec. 9, after crossing the clear stream
west of town and ransacking stores and destroying the health clinic, they
killed four men with machetes and left the warning that anyone caught trying
to rebuild the ruined village would die the same way.

The destruction of Paraiso is another sign of the rising power this year of
rightist paramilitary forces in Colombia, a development that is altering the
strategic balance in the country after four decades of civil war. Although
the paramilitary force is listed by the State Department as a terrorist
organization, Western diplomats following the conflict describe its growing
reach as an unintended byproduct of a U.S. program to strengthen Colombia's
armed forces, which frequently work alongside the paramilitary groups. The
paramilitary forces, once a collection of armed groups sponsored by wealthy
landowners, have become a national movement and the most potent new
dimension in Colombia's civil war.

During Operation Bolivar, diplomats said they petitioned U.S. officials in
Bogota to threaten to withhold U.S. aid from the Colombian armed forces
unless Pastrana's orders were carried out. But that message was clouded by
differences of opinion in Congress and the Bush administration over the
value of creating a safe haven for a Marxist-led guerrilla group and was
never delivered, according to Western diplomats here working to end the war.

"We all should do more to use both moral and material pressure to curb
paramilitary violence, which is the most rapidly growing cause of civilian
suffering," said Jan Egeland, the U.N. secretary general's special envoy for
peace in Colombia who is leaving at the end of the year. "What happened in
Bolivar shows that the killers can go on and on and on killing innocent
civilians and not face any consequences."

The nature of U.S. involvement in Colombia's war has been an unresolved
question since Congress approved a $1.3 billion, mostly military aid package
last year. The helicopters, military training and herbicide spraying
included in the package were to be narrowly focused on Colombia's drug
trade, keeping the U.S. outside the fight against the rebels. But because
the drug trade is so intertwined with the civil war, the United States has
assumed a central role not only in counter-narcotics strategy but also in
the far more complicated issues of war and peace.

So far this year, aerial herbicide spraying has killed more than 180,000
acres of coca, the key ingredient in the production of cocaine. A U.S.
official here said "that is tons and tons of cocaine that has been kept off
our streets." But a development program designed to coax small farmers to
grow legal crops as an alternative to coca has been slow in arriving, so
much of the coca has been replanted in the same locations.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials have hailed the success of three U.S.-trained
anti-drug battalions in the Colombian army that have destroyed hundreds of
processing labs. By summer, the number of spray planes in use will rise from
10 to 25, and more than a dozen U.S.-donated Black Hawk helicopters will be
deployed, prompting the U.S. official to predict that "we will then be
killing coca faster than they are able to replant."

The money and diplomatic support have been felt most squarely by the
130,000-member military, which has seen its prestige and hardware upgraded
by the stepped-up U.S. involvement. However, the military's rising fortunes
and the increased pressure on the country's oldest guerrilla movements --
major targets of the anti-narcotics campaign -- have proven to be a boon for
the paramilitary groups.

The shifting balance has even allowed the paramilitary forces to take over
some coca areas once dominated by the guerrillas. Drug profits are helping
them pay troop salaries, buy arms and recruit members from the growing pool
of unemployed Colombians.

Rising Popular Support

During the past year, the main paramilitary organization, the United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, has deepened its territorial gains
with a right-of-center political agenda. According to its leaders, AUC ranks
have grown from 8,000 to 14,000 combatants. Once backed mostly by wealthy
business and ranching interests and former military leaders, it now enjoys
increasing support among rich and poor Colombians, public opinion polls
show.

The AUC is also the country's leading author of civilian massacres,
according to Colombia's Defense Ministry. More than 1,000 civilians have
been killed this year by the AUC, compared with 18 in 1995, according to the
Defense Ministry, and its strategy of depriving guerrillas of supplies and
intelligence has helped cause the displacement of 2 million people.

The AUC's principal guerrilla adversary is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, which coalesced in 1964 from a group of rural protection
squads, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which is more
ideologically Marxist than the FARC but is weaker militarily. The FARC,
which has an estimated 18,000 members, derives significant financial support
from taxing the drug trade in areas it controls. Both groups, like the AUC,
are on the State Department list of terrorist organizations.

While U.S. officials describe their aid package as "a plan to get dope off
of our streets," Pastrana continues to view Plan Colombia -- a $7.5 billion
initiative that primarily invests in social development projects --
principally as a peace plan designed to deprive the FARC of its drug-fueled
war financing. Since taking office promising to end the war, Pastrana has
chosen a controversial approach to peace negotiations, one that places
tracts of land under guerrilla control to create venues for those talks.

His decision in late 1998 to give the FARC a Switzerland-size patch of
southern jungle as a step toward peace negotiations has, so far, yielded
little more than a prisoner exchange agreement and mounting friction between
his government and Washington as public support for the process fades.

Drug Trade and War

The overlapping relationship between the civil war and the campaign against
drugs is starkly evident in the southern province of Putumayo. In villages
such as El Tigre, paramilitary forces have taken control of territory
vacated by retreating guerrillas pressured by the anti-drug offensive.

One recent evening in El Tigre, 50 paramilitary recruits were working, in
plain sight, through a month-long military training course. At the beginning
of the year here in western Putumayo, where the U.S.-trained anti-drug
brigade has been most active, the FARC controlled these coca-filled valleys.
Today Commander Enrique, the AUC leader in western Putumayo, sleeps in the
same complex of wood-plank houses in which the FARC village militia lived.

Enrique said that whereas the FARC charged a $200 tax per kilo of coca base,
his men take $50. The FARC has hit herbicide spray planes with 180 rounds of
ammunition this year and has shot down one helicopter; the AUC does not fire
on aircraft.

Throughout the year, the AUC has increasingly relied on drug proceeds to
fund its expansion, according to Colombia's national police and U.S.
officials. But the leader of the AUC, Carlos Castano, has ordered his troops
to get out of the drug business in hopes of gaining U.S. support for
political recognition from the Pastrana government.

In tailoring the AUC's political objectives with those of the United States
and the Colombian army, Castano has made it more difficult for U.S.
officials to convince senior Colombian military leaders that paramilitary
forces are their enemies. In southern Bolivar province, the army and
paramilitary forces have openly colluded this year in ways that have
confounded Pastrana's peace efforts, according to diplomatic sources.

During much of February and March, a military campaign swept along a stretch
of coca fields and farmland in southern Bolivar to create a promised
demilitarized zone for negotiations with the ELN, the second-largest leftist
insurgency. More than 3,000 soldiers arrived between the San Lucas mountain
range and the Magdalena River, and U.S.-backed herbicide spraying began on
30,000 acres of coca in the hills 200 miles north of Bogota.

In the view of many diplomats working on the peace process, this was
probably Pastrana's last chance to show that his strategy could succeed. He
told the army's Fifth Brigade, the unit responsible for the region, to drive
out paramilitary forces who were gathering to block creation of a zone they
believed would provide the ELN with a strategic, government-sanctioned
foothold and arriving FARC troops a new area of protected influence.

The army began by attacking San Blas, an AUC base. Weapons and
drug-processing equipment were seized, but no senior paramilitary commanders
were arrested and the group suffered no casualties. "It was clear . . . that
the bad guys knew the army was coming," a Western diplomat in Bogota said.

Then the operation turned into a rout of the guerrillas as the army and
paramilitary forces united and chased the surprised rebels deep into the
hills. By the time Pastrana ordered the army out less than two months later,
paramilitary forces had taken vast stretches of land and occupied towns once
used by the guerrillas as supply stops. The demilitarized zone was dead, and
a series of villages were under siege, abandoned or in ruins.

As Operation Bolivar unfolded, the new Republican administration in
Washington backed by Republican leaders in Congress began to weigh in on
Pastrana's peace efforts, officials said. The State Department position on
the peace talks had long been that it was a domestic matter best left to
Pastrana. Privately, however, that position was changing.

During a visit to Washington, Pastrana was told by Rep. Henry J. Hyde
(R-Ill.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, that he
opposed giving the guerrillas a safe haven for peace talks, according to
people at the meeting.

A short time later, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson, who had
reiterated U.S. support for Pastrana's approach in an interview with the
newspaper El Espectador, was told by Roger Noriega, then senior professional
staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that neither he nor
his boss, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), then committee chairman, favored a
second guerrilla safe haven. Noriega told her not to declare such support
again, according to people at the meeting. Noriega is now the U.S.
ambassador to the Organization of American States.

"U.S. policy has always been that there should be no negotiations with
terrorists, and when you see it happening you wonder why something is going
against U.S. policy," said a Republican congressional staff member. "When
Patterson jumped in to endorse the idea, that's when the rubber hit the road
up here."

Controlling the Zone

Today, as the army remains on the northern and southern edges of Bolivar,
the paramilitary forces run the villages between the mountains and the river
while a mixed guerrilla force patrols the hill towns. Travel along the
area's mostly deserted roads turns up armed members of both the paramilitary
and two major guerrilla groups, but no presence of the armed forces.

"When the army came in, we left," said Commander Carlos, a 12-year AUC
veteran who joined after serving in the military. "So they didn't hit us
much -- more the guerrillas. And now we're doing the army's job here."

Gen. Martin Orlando Carreno, who for two years has commanded the army's
Fifth Brigade with high-profile dash, denied turning a blind eye to
paramilitary forces in the region and said "no brigade has done more to
attack them." U.S. officials share his assessment that the zone "fizzled"
not because of collusion with paramilitary forces but because "the
government couldn't control the area."

But Carreno acknowledged that he was angry when Pastrana ordered his men out
of the zone, and he said another few weeks of combat would have driven all
groups from the area. Since then, Carreno said, he has been working with
U.S. officials to move up the delivery of helicopters and intelligence
support, currently scheduled for 2003, to his troubled region.

"It ended without our controlling the zone, without either group controlling
it, and without peace," said Carreno, who has been promoted to commander of
the Second Division.

In recent months, several U.S. delegations have visited Colombia to meet
with senior military officials about ties to the paramilitary groups.
Charges of human rights abuses leveled against the Colombian army have
declined sharply in recent years, but U.S. officials and foreign diplomats
are concerned that the paramilitary forces are becoming an auxiliary force
of the regular army.

"I got a variety of opinions about cooperation between the military and the
AUC, but it is clear to me that certainly at the higher ranks there is an
understanding that human rights abuses and a successful counter-guerrilla
strategy do not go together," said Lorne W. Craner, assistant secretary of
state for democracy, human rights and labor, who met here last week with
senior military officials about new human rights restrictions on aid to
Colombia pending before Congress. "I think the U.S. is doing the right
things to try to make things better here."

In Paradise, though, all seems lost. One recent morning, three visiting ELN
guerrillas, the butcher, the canteen owner and a few shopkeepers chatted
amid the ruins. The rest of the 500 former residents now live on farms in
the hills to the east.

Several witnesses said Commander Carlos led the most recent paramilitary
attack on the town, coordinating the killing of four men that included a
19-year-old farmer named Eberto Pardo. But all agree there is no one nearby
to call for help.

"There is no way to stay," said Cesar Pardo, Eberto's cousin. "They will be
back to kill the rest of us."