Carlos Castaño is not a name that comes up much in the debate over whether to escalate U.S. drug-war aid to Colombia. But U.S. policy-makers and politicians should be mindful of the alliances that he and other rightist paramilitaries have made with Colombia’s drug syndicates, including the ones that are now ascendant after the mid-1990s decapitation of the once-powerful Cali cartel.
Instead, people from the Clinton Administration’s drug czar to its opponents in Congress have focused only on the role played by Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in the drug trade. This bias directly shapes U.S. policy, leading it to aid the Colombian government’s fight against leftist rebels.
The U.S. drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, wants to double current U.S. military aid to provide $600 million to help Colombian defense forces fight off the powerful leftist “narco-guerrillas,” while Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) recently succeeded in pushing the Administration to arm Colombia with Blackhawk helicopter gunships to help in the fight. That raises the question: When looking at Colombia, do U.S. politicians see only red?
Castaño is not only the top commander of Colombia’s rightist paramilitary groups, he is also “a major cocaine trafficker,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Castaño has given many interviews to journalists from a ranch compound in northwestern Colombia that has been attacked by guerrillas, yet Colombian military commanders say they cannot find him. One reason may be that the Colombian military has long collaborated with the country’s paramilitaries against the guerrillas.
The military has not apprehended Castaño even though the DEA’s then-chief of operations, Donnie Marshall (now the agency’s acting administrator) said in 1997 that Castaño is “closely linked” to the Henao Montoya organization, which he told Congress is “the most powerful of the various independent trafficking groups” to emerge since the demise of the Cali cartel.
In fact, alliances between rightist paramilitaries and drug cartels is an old story in Colombia. Unlike its leftist guerrillas who have always been outlawed, paramilitaries operated legally there until 1989, when the government outlawed them because their movement had been taken over by Pablo Escobar, the late drug lord of the once-feared Medellín cartel.
In effect, the paramilitaries became an armed wing of the Medellín drug lords, who had declared war on the Colombian state. They were fighting over whether Colombia should extradite people like Escobar to the United States to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges. “The Extraditables,” as they called themselves in unsigned communiqués, terrorized Colombia with attacks like the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers.
Colombian civilian investigators later linked the perpetrators of the attack to a group of paramilitaries based at Puerto Boyacá on the Magdelana river. They further revealed that Escobar had financed Israeli, British and other mercenaries who taught his paramilitary forces techniques like altitude-sensitive detonation. Last year, four Israeli officers were indicted in Bogotá for their alleged involvement in terrorist crimes.
There is no doubt that Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, too, are deeply involved in the drug trade. Following U.S.-backed eradication efforts that have reduced coca production elsewhere in the Andes, Colombian peasants protected by leftist guerrillas today grow coca in areas comprising at least one-third of the country’s terrain. They now produce the raw coca leaf used to make about half of the world’s cocaine. But the guerrillas still earn just as much money, maybe more, through kidnappings and other forms of extortion against wealthier Colombians.
It is the rightist paramilitaries who are linked to the highest levels of the drug trade. In 1995, the Colombian judicial police reported that paramilitaries working clandestinely with local army commanders were protecting peasants growing poppy plants to make heroin in the Magdalena valley. The paramilitaries control many if not most processing laboratories throughout the country. U.S. Naval intelligence, DEA and CIA observers all report that among Colombia’s irregular armed groups only the paramilitaries dominate the storage and internal transport of heroin as well as cocaine.
After the paramilitaries were outlawed in 1989, the Colombian military went on secretly collaborating with them for political reasons at the same time that the paramilitaries went on secretly collaborating with the country’s drug cartels to profit. The judicial police report accused Major Jorge Alberto Lazaro, a former local army commander who graduated from the U.S. School of the Americas in 1981, of collaborating with illegal paramilitaries financed by the suspected paramilitary leader and drug trafficker, Víctor Carranza, who was later incarcerated and still awaits trial on charges of murder as well as commanding illegal paramilitary groups.
Other paramilitary leaders and military officers have been linked to even higher levels of the drug trade. The former army commander in Cali, Gen. Hernando Camilo Zuñiga, resigned as the military’s chief-of-staff in 1996 after U.S. officials accused him of having protected the Cali cartel. Henry Loaiza, known to his confederates as “The Scorpion,” was the cartel’s underboss in charge of security. He was linked to many paramilitary atrocities including the notorious Trujillo chainsaw massacres near Cali, according to a government-sanctioned truth report. By 1996, Loaiza was one of seven top cartel leaders apprehended by Colombian forces backed jointly by the DEA and the CIA.
U.S. officials like McCaffrey and Gilman have come to mimic Colombian military officers who have long exaggerated the importance of the country’s guerrillas to the drug trade while ignoring the action of the paramilitaries. Their misleading claims only lead the United States into another counterinsurgency quagmire. Colombia is currently the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world after Israel, Egypt and now Jordan. The U.S. military and intelligence presence in Colombia is larger now than it was in El Salvador a decade ago, making it the largest U.S.-backed counterinsurgency effort since Vietnam.
In 1994, when U.S. drug-war aid to Colombia was just beginning to escalate, Amnesty International accused U.S. officials of turning a blind eye to counterinsurgency efforts that also involved human rights abuses. McCaffrey, then-chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, ordered an internal audit that found that 12 of 13 Colombian military units cited by Amnesty International as abusers had previously received either U.S. training or arms. But McCaffrey only buried the audit. (I later obtained the audit and broke the story in coordination with Amnesty International.) Meanwhile, McCaffrey began publicly saying that because of the guerrillas’ increased involvement in the drug trade, counterinsurgency and counterdrug measures had become “two sides of the same coin.”
Colombia’s complex situation may look simple to McCaffrey, a soldier who has been fighting Marxist guerrillas since Vietnam. But the view held by the Administration and its chief drug-war official only reflects a Cold War bias that is wrong. Increasing military aid to Colombia will not curb the drug flow, although it will boost Colombia’s bloodletting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in The Progressive, The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. He has also served as a research consultant for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. This article is drawn from a longer piece that appeared on the Website of IntellectualCapital.com.
