LAST AUGUST, FOLLOWING THE ASSASSI- nation of Colombia’s front-running presidential can-
didate Luis Carlos Galen, George Bush went on television
to announce an emergency $65 million loan to help that
nation fight the drug traffickers who took responsibility
for the killing. Bush also sent stockpiled military equip-
ment and a crew of military advisers. It was already
becoming clear that the cocaine-producing nations of the
Andes had surpassed Central America as a foreign policy
priority. Since then, hundreds of millions more have been
approved.
In the rush to battle its new enemy, the administration
and the Congress have conveniently swept under the rug
any questions about the recipients of this aid, or about the
real nature of the conflict into which the United States is
wading. No one is asking about Colombia’s 30-year-old
counterinsurgency war, nor about the army-linked death
squads which have murdered over 8,000 citizens since
1986, nor about the documented ties between military
officers and the barons of the drug trade.
For this Report, we set out to probe these issues, and
the answers we found are disturbing. The United States is
not supporting an embattled democracy, under siege from
ruthless drug dealers. It is supplying the means for the
armed forces, in league with the drug barons themselves,
to continue the slaughter of the country’s trade unionists,
community organizers, peasant leaders and other grass-
roots activists.
COLOMBIA, AS OUR TITLE IMPLIES, HAS EN-
tered a period of profound instability. In part, be-
cause of the drug barons’ quest for power and influence.
Much more so because Colombia’s people are no longer
willing to put up with abuse at the hands of the economic
and political elites. Colombian democracy, writes British
political scientist and author Jenny Pearce, quoting Gab-
riel Garcia Mdrquez, is made of paper. Behind marvelous
words lies a system which, by means of 40 years of nearly
uninterrupted state of siege, defends the autocratic rule of
family-based oligarchies, and excludes the vast majority
from any effective participation. The violence for which
the country is rightly infamous, is not caused primarily by
cocaine-pushing thugs. It is, Pearce argues, better under-
stood as the result of the elite’s desire to preserve its
privileges.
Thousands of Colombians joined trade unions, peas-
ant leagues and community organizations in the 1970s,
forming by the 1980s massive and combative movements
to demand basic rights and an opening in the hermetic
political order. Violence at the hands of local elites, and
the refusal of the national political class to make demo-
cratic reforms, led many of them to turn to an
option-guerrilla warfare-which offered some defense
against rapacious bosses and landowners (including the
drug barons) and their allies in the armed forces. These
paramilitary forces, decrying the hesitation of the national
political elite, launched a dirty war to battle rising guer-
rilla strength by murdering alleged sympathizers.
Colombia’s six guerrilla armies have some 12,000
combatants and wield influence over large areas of the
countryside. Most of them have overcome early sectari-
anism and sought to bring their struggle to the political
plane via a negotiated solution to the war. The nation’s
third political force, the Uni6n Patri6tica, was founded by
the largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC). Over a thousand members
of the UP have been murdered since 1985, including most
recently its presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo
Ossa, gunned down at the BogotA airport on March 22.
MEASURE OF COLOMBIA’S VIOLENCE DOES
indeed result from the drug barons’ battle against ex-
tradition to the United States. The assassination of Liberal
presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galin, which prompted
Bush’s speech last August, the murder of the editor of a
major daily, of several attorney generals, of dozens of
judges, magistrates and politicians, and random bomb-
ings in the major cities, can all be attributed to this.
Though dwarfed by the thousands of deaths caused by the
dirty war, it is this violence which most worries the
political elite, because it is directed at them.
Marc W. Chernick, assistant director of the Institute
for Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia
University, points out that Colombia’s drug war is not the
same as that waged by the United States. While the Bush
administration is ostensibly concerned with stemming the
flow of cocaine to the United States, for the traditional
Colombian elite it is a battle over political turf with the
cocaine nouveau riche, which in many realms has already
been integrated into the upper class.
The lion’s share of the multi-million dollar U.S. aid
package is going to Colombia’s armed forces, an institu-
tion which has maintained close ties to the Pentagon ever
since it sent a battalion to fight in Korea in 1950. The
military is far more concerned with fighting guerrillas
than with fighting drugs. Moreover, after nearly a decade
of working together to wage the dirty war, officers and
drug lords have become close allies. By throwing money,
equipment and advisers at the Colombian armed forces,
the Bush administration, rather than put an end to the drug
problem, seems bound to involve the United States in the
dirty war against the Left.
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