As we went to press, the Colombian peace process discussed here broke down again, this time seemingly irreparably. On February 20, after FARC guerrillas highjacked an airplane and kidnapped a Colombian senator, President Andrés Pastrana declared talks with the FARC over. He ordered the military to retake the demilitarized zone earlier ceded to the insurgents.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, it was not clear what would become of the United States’ large and growing military aid program in Colombia. With higher-profile missions in Afghanistan and the “homeland,” might Washington reverse its steady descent into Colombia’s messy, complicated conflict? Or would Colombia, with three groups on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, become a new front in the “war on terrorism,” breathing new life into the failed “Plan Colombia” drug-war strategy?
In early 2002, it seems as though the second scenario is being fulfilled. The “Bush Doctrine” is not yet calling for a headlong rush into Colombia’s war. But its new aid proposals and statements have explicitly targeted the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group, erasing the long-standing, though always artificial, distinction between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency.
After falling from the headlines after September 11, Colombia reappeared in Washington’s consciousness in early January, when its long-suffering peace process entered its latest, and worst, crisis.[1] Since October, the FARC had refused to negotiate anything but a demand that the Colombian military lift controls, such as roadblocks and overflights, around the demilitarized zone where talks have taken place since January 1999. A frustrated Colombian government suddenly got up from the table on January 9, and President Andrés Pastrana threatened to start a 48-hour countdown for the military’s re-entry into the zone.
With tens of thousands of government troops massing on the zone’s perimeter, the FARC held two days of intensive talks with James Lemoyne, the UN Secretary General’s representative to Colombia. Pastrana rejected the first FARC proposal to restart the talks, setting the 48-hour countdown in motion on January 12. On the 14th, hours before the troops were to move in, the FARC gave up its demands about military activities outside the zone, and the dialogues re-started. By January 20, both sides had agreed to a timetable for cease-fire talks. Had the timetable been followed, a cease-fire could have been in place by April 7.
The United States played a quiet but important role during the crisis. Ambassador Anne Patterson—who on January 8 presided over the delivery of 14 Blackhawk helicopters to Colombia’s army—met several times with President Pastrana and Colombia’s high command. Probably reflecting a lack of administration consensus on whether to continue supporting the talks, officials took pains to be noncommittal, their statements falling short of specifically endorsing the current peace process. “We support President Pastrana, his decisions regarding how to proceed,” was the most that State Department spokesman Richard Boucher could say on January 14. A delegation of mostly Republican members of Congress, coincidentally in Bogotá for a four-day visit, was effusive in its praise for Pastrana’s new hard line. Official U.S. opposition to the talks may soon become more explicit; a “confirmed intelligence report” leaked to the conservative Washington Times in mid-February contends that the FARC “is just buying time through unproductive peace talks while it mounts attacks and expands its highly lucrative cocaine operations.”[2]
Despite these difficulties, there was reason for optimism about the future of the talks. UN representative LeMoyne, as well as the Colombian Episcopal Conference, a Catholic Church group, and ambassadors from the ten European and Latin American nations of the “group of friends” of the peace process, were given permanent seats at the table. It was hoped the third parties’ “accompaniment” would speed the talks by holding both sides to an agenda and finding solutions to inevitable impasses. Another source of optimism was the mere fact that the FARC made a concession, perhaps its largest in three years of talks. Some observers hoped that this rare show of flexibility indicated that the guerrillas—who have too often resembled an armed band with no coherent political direction—were showing more concern for public opinion and the political impact of their actions.
Any goodwill the guerrillas’ concession earned was squandered, however, with a large-scale FARC offensive in late January and early February. This round of attacks was more urban than most previous actions, marked by bombings of infrastructure (34 power pylons, as well as aqueducts and oil pipelines) and three car bombings.
While the offensive earned universal condemnation, analysts offered divergent interpretations of its meaning. Many saw it as evidence that the guerrillas are in fact uninterested in peace. Others, however, viewed the brutal rampage as the FARC’s attempt to extract the best possible terms in a cease-fire agreement. As a truce would cut off the guerrillas’ main sources of income (kidnapping and extortion) while having little effect on military capabilities, FARC leaders undoubtedly view a cease-fire as a period of relative weakening, and may be using the violence to press for maximum government concessions in exchange.
Whatever the reason, the offensive shattered most remaining public support within Colombia for the peace process and swelled the chorus of calls for a hard-line response. It has severely shaken the campaign for Colombia’s May presidential elections. A poll taken in late January by several of the country’s main media outlets found a third-party law-and-order candidate, Alvaro Uribe Vélez, ahead of his nearest challenger by a margin of 40% to 30%.[3] Uribe—who promised to send the military into the FARC zone as soon as he took office, if the guerrillas did not immediately cease attacks and kidnappings—had only 22% support in a November 2001 poll by the same organizations.
It was against this increasingly bellicose backdrop that the Bush administration, on February 4, made public its future plans for Colombia. As details about the 2003 foreign-aid budget request emerged, it became clear that the administration is ready to go where no U.S. administration has gone before, offering Colombia its first significant non-drug military aid since the Cold War.
In its foreign operations budget request, which includes all economic and most military aid, the State Department would give Colombia $538 million in 2003, $374 million of it (70%) for Colombia’s military and police. Counting additional antidrug aid through the defense budget (mostly construction, intelligence and training), the military/police aid figure approaches half a billion dollars, more than Colombia has ever received in a single year.[4] By comparison, at the January 2002 international donors’ conference in Tokyo, the United States pledged just $290 million in economic aid to help rebuild Afghanistan.
Most of the foreign operations request for Colombia ($275 million in military aid and $164 million in economic aid) comes under the category of the “Andean Regional Initiative,” a proposed $731 million outlay of funds by the State Department’s drug control program for Colombia and six other countries. Begun in 2002 in an effort to regionalize the Clinton administration’s “Plan Colombia” approach, this “initiative” has already nearly doubled military assistance to several of Colombia’s neighbors (particularly Ecuador, Panama and Peru).
Much of the Colombia portion of the 2003 Andean request would maintain, with spare parts, fuel, follow-on training and other support, a 2,300-man Colombian Army Counternarcotics Brigade. This brigade, created with U.S. funds in 2000 and 2001, is based in Putumayo department in southern Colombia, near the Ecuadorian border. It is almost ready to begin full-scale operations, pending the mid-year delivery of thirty upgraded “Huey II” helicopters and the graduation of trained pilots for its expensive new Blackhawk helicopters.
Once operational, the brigade will embark upon the so-called “push into southern Colombia,” an offensive against the armed groups that dominate Putumayo. The operation’s stated goal is to “create the security conditions” for vastly expanded aerial herbicide fumigation of the zone’s coca-growing peasants. The fumigation is carried out jointly by Colombia’s police and employees of DynCorp, a Virginia-based contractor that supplies the State Department with dozens of spray-plane and helicopter pilots, mechanics, search-and-rescue personnel and other specialists. The contractors operate at some risk under conditions that would be off-limits for uniformed U.S. personnel; on January 18, three U.S. contractors on a spray mission were pinned down for hours by FARC fire after the guerrillas shot down their Huey helicopter in Caquetá department, just north of Putumayo. Five Colombian police died in the effort to rescue them.
The fumigation has brought a tidal wave of health and environmental complaints, whose scientific verification has been made difficult by security conditions.[5] The spraying was to go hand-in-hand with a multimillion-dollar campaign of development assistance, designed to provide legal alternatives to the peasants whose only viable economic option, coca, is to be eradicated. Delivery of this aid has been excruciatingly slow, however, with aid being delivered to only a small fraction of Putumayo residents who signed “social pacts” of aid in exchange for manual eradication. With trust in the U.S.-funded development program eroding quickly, the effort risks the outcome of past U.S. fumigations minus economic aid: discouraged peasants simply moving along to grow new coca, out of the spray planes’ range.
It appears that the response to new coca-growing, foreseen in the 2003 Andean Initiative request, will be to create a second Colombian Army counternarcotics brigade to mount a second “push” into another part of the country. Though details are sketchy as of early February, this new unit may operate in the eastern departments of Guainía and Vichada, near the Brazilian border.
The most controversial proposal, however, is elsewhere in the aid request. The 2003 plan would give Colombia’s army $98 million in Foreign Military Financing (FMF). FMF is the heir to the programs used for Central America’s 1980s military buildup, and in recent years has mostly aided Israel and Egypt. The money would create (or re-train) yet another army brigade with a very different mission: to protect an oil pipeline.
The FMF-aided unit would be given a dozen UH-1 “Huey” helicopters and charged with protecting the Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, which runs from guerrilla-dominated Arauca department to paramilitary-dominated Sucre department in northern Colombia. Much oil in this pipeline, which was attacked 166 times by the FARC and ELN guerrillas in 2001, belongs to Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum.
Occidental, which many activists know as the company that has pushed for oil exploration on land claimed by the U’Wa indigenous nation in Arauca, has spent years lobbying for additional military assistance to Colombia. The $98 million “Critical Infrastructure Brigade,” as the Bush administration aid proposals call it, would be protecting a pipeline that, when operational, pumps about 35 million barrels per year. This adds up to nearly $3 per barrel in costs to U.S. taxpayers to protect a pipeline for which Occidental currently pays security costs of about 50 cents per barrel, according to the Wall Street Journal.[6]
The pipeline brigade represents a qualitative change in U.S. policy toward Colombia, one that would have been difficult to contemplate had the September 11 attacks not taken place. Before, U.S. military assistance was portrayed as limited to the counternarcotics mission. “We are not saying this is counterdrug—this is different,” an unnamed U.S. official told reporters on February 5. “The proposition we are making to the government of Colombia and to our Congress is that we ought to take an additional step.”
In fact, officials are now portraying Colombia’s armed groups, particularly the FARC, as terrorist threats to U.S. security, and are indicating that the pipeline-defense unit is only a first step. “The terrorist threat also goes beyond Islamic extremists and the Muslim world,” CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 6. “The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia poses a serious threat to U.S. interests in Latin America because it associates us with the government it is fighting against.”According to a February 11 Washington Times report, “some Bush administration officials are advocating taking the fight—and U.S. involvement—even further. They want the [existing counternarcotics] brigades authorized to attack FARC units if intelligence shows they are about to attack a village or other target.”
Administration officials have far less to say about Colombia’s right-wing United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group, which is also on the State Department’s terrorist list. Though the paramilitaries have tripled in size in the last four years (to 12,000 members), carry out the majority of non-combatant killings, and are also involved in the drug trade, the guerrillas are getting the lion’s share of U.S. attention.
As of mid-February, the next step for Washington’s military-aid plan in Colombia is the implementation of human rights conditions in the 2002 foreign aid law. The State Department must decide whether Colombia’s Armed Forces are suspending officials suspected of violating human rights, cooperating with investigations and prosecutions, and actively cutting links with the paramilitaries. If the State Department cannot certify that this is happening, no aid can go to the Colombian military. On February 6, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin America released a joint report with ample evidence that “Colombia’s government has not, to date, satisfied these conditions.”[7] But the State Department appears likely to certify anyway.
In Colombia, the next several months promise to be especially violent. Once the Putumayo counternarcotics brigade receives its dozens of helicopters, the launch of the “push into southern Colombia” and expanded aerial fumigation may cause a further spread of violence, drug cultivation and forced migration. This may particularly affect beleaguered Ecuador, which has already suffered some cross-border violence and the economic impacts of instability and fumigation in Putumayo.
In Washington, where the Bush administration has shed the counternarcotics fig leaf, we are likely to see an energetic debate about the long-term direction of U.S. policy in Colombia. If the administration does indeed seek to allow past counternarcotics aid (especially the dozens of helicopters given in the past few years) to be used for counterguerrilla missions, Colombia will move to the very top of the U.S. foreign policy debate, right next to the so-called “axis of evil” countries.
It is still not clear how far U.S. foreign policy planners want to go with their new counterterror/counterinsurgency emphasis in Colombia. Hopefully, they will recall that the FARC, ELN and AUC are not small groups of shadowy cells, like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Abu Sayaaf in the Philippines, but large armies with long histories and control of territory. Confronting them militarily would require a large-scale counterinsurgency effort—something that is clearly under consideration, as indicated by recent conversations with government officials, some of whom cite the experience of El Salvador. A June 2001 study by the Rand Corporation, funded by the U.S. Air Force, in fact suggested that “the U.S. program of military assistance to El Salvador during the Reagan administration could be a relevant model.”[8]
As the debate heats up, those who would repeat this model in Colombia might want to step back from the charged rhetoric of the war on terrorism, and recall that the United States spent $2 billion on El Salvador’s military over a 12-year period, during which 70,000 people died and over a million were forced into exile. Colombia is fifty-three times larger than El Salvador.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Isacson is a senior associate at the Center for International Policy where he coordinates a program that monitors and seeks limits on U.S. military assistance to the Western Hemisphere.
NOTES
1. For background on the participants in the peace process, Nazih Richani, “Colombia at the Crossroads: The Future of the Peace Accords,” NACLA Report, XXXV No. 4, Jan-Feb2002. Available online at http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=526
2. Rowan Scarborough, “FARCtriggers concern in U.S.,”Washington Times, February 11, 2002.
3. “El terremoto de enero,” Cambio (Bogotá) February 3, 2002.
4. The “Plan Colombia” aid request covered two years (2000-2001). See Center for International Policy, “The 2003 aid request.” http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/aid03.htm.
5. See Maria Alvarez, “Forests Under Fire”NACLA Report, XXXV No. 1 July/Aug 2001. Available online at http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=452
6. Alexei Barrionuevo and Thaddeus Herrick, “Threat of Terror Abroad Isn’t New For Oil Companies Like Occidental,” the Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2002.
7. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin America, “Colombia Human Rights Certification III,” Washington, February 5, 2002.
http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/02/colombia0205.htm
8. Angel Rabasa and Peter Chalk, “Colombian Labyrinth: The Synergy of Drugs and Insurgency and Its Implications for Regional Stability,” Rand Corporation, June 2001.
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1339/
