Every 15 days, residents of Solano, a small city in the jungles of southern Colombia, watch an army plane take off from a nearby air base and bomb the outskirts of town. The air attacks are part of a anti-drug operation that has been in place since rind1997. Given the frequent appearance of U.S. pilots and planes on the base, the operation, which also involves the fumigation of the region’s coca crops, may well be guided by U.S. military personnel.
Solano is not, in fact, a major cocaine producer. The isolated city is home to a small artisanal process of cocaine production in which the coca leaves are cut with hoes and the processing of the coca paste is worked in rustic stables. Over the past century, the region’s peasant population has tried its luck with a variety of cash crops, changing with the changing demands of national and intemational markets. Coca cultivation was established in the early 1990s, and despite constant harassment, has continued on a small scale ever since.
In Solano’s Catholic parish of Las Mercedes, alternative proposals to cocaine began to be formulated in 1992, soon after coca cultivation began. A prime mover of the alternative proposals was the parish’s Italian-born priest, José Svanera known as Father Pepe. “Our situation is desperate,” wrote Father Pepe in 1992. “We are blamed for miniscule cultivations of coca, but no economic alternative is offered us to help us abandon the cultivation. It seems as if they want to sentence us to death by hunger.”
Despite the difficult economic conditions, the parish helped organize 40 peasant groups dedicated to changing their principal source of income, while defending their right to survive, even if that meant growing coca. Similar groups emerged throughout southern Colombia. In mid- 1996, over 200,000 farmers and peasants from the coca-growing regions of the country, located principally in the south, marched on their state capitals, protesting the fumigations and demanding viable economic alternatives to illicit crop cultivation. The magnitude of these peasant protests, combined with the simultaneous guerrilla attacks on military bases in the neighboring departments of Putumayo on August 31 and Guaviare on September 4, 1996 convinced the authorities that the protests were an expression of the political and military strength of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
These circumstances, together with the “narcoguerrilla” theory developed by the Colombian military, prompted the armed forces to step up their anti-drug efforts in southern Colombia. The military justified its campaign as part of its commitment to combat illicit drugs, but its attacks were in fact motivated by the desire to contain the financial, social and military strength of the guerrillas in the south.
As the army was beginning the fumigation and bombing of Solano in 1997, paramilitary attacks against the civilian population of the region intensified as well. Carlos Castaflo, head of the United Self Defense Units of Colombia (AUC), which has links to the large narco-landowners in northern Colombia, decided that the army’s efforts at dislodging the guerrillas from the eastern plains and the Amazonian jungles in the south were insufficient.”It is the time to reconquer these regions,” he argued, “because it is here that subversion has been able to create a parallel government, which is extremely dangerous for the nation.”[1] The new paramilitary drive has raised the level of Colombian violence to its deadliest heights in years.
The military strategy at play in towns like Solano—including the fumigations—may have more to do with the nearby presense of the FARE than with the region’s small-scale cultivation of illicit crops. It is, in fact, no longer possible to separate the production and distribution of illegal drugs from the country’s general armed conflict. U.S. pressure on Colombia to step up its anti-drug program, along with the support given to the anti-narcotics police to strengthen fumigation and interdiction programs, have blurred the distinction between the U.S.-financed drug war and Colombia’s guerrilla war. The guerrillas, of course, become stronger thanks to the money coming from the taxes they levy on commercial coca crops, drugtrade transportation networks, and laboratories which operate in the territories under their control. To undercut this strength, the military engage in armed fumigation attacks, making an environmentally questionable process a principal strategy of the counterinsurgency war.
Fumigation attacks against coca cultivations complement the military’s campaign of terror and displacement of the poor. The attacks bring economic chaos to the small-level growers and peasants of the region and in so doing, become an integral part of the military strategy to destroy the social and economic bases of the areas controlled by the FARC. This explains why despite the failure of fumigation to reduce coca cultivation in the countryside, it continues to be used in areas controlled by the guerrillas. The use of chemicals such as tebuthioron have devastating effects on Amazon soil, causing improductivity and impeding the natural regeneration of the vegetation over a prolonged period. Fumigation creates deserts within the jungle.[2]
The fumigation of the coca crops has other consequences. As the principal source of employment evaporates, offers to join the guerrillas or paramiltaries become more attractive. The paramilitaries offer young men some $400 a month-a substantial sum for youths who have little alternative. The fumigations also deprive the guerrilla groups in the region of tax revenues. This has led them to impose taxes on the food shipments coming from the interior of the country by river, which has raised the cost of living in the region. The armed forces, meanwhile, have launched “social” campaigns, constructing schools and basic infrastructure to improve their image among the remaining population, while they simultaneously launch terror campaigns. The idea is to make the villagers dependent on them alone.
The strategy as a whole exemplifies the coming together of a wide variety of international and local interests in ways that seem to be spiraling out of control. The military sees the “problem” of illegal drugs not so much as an evil to be combated, but as way to pry firiancing Out of the U.S. government in order to neutralize the guerrillas. The “bilateral commitment” to fight drugs is a story carefully scripted by both the U.S. government and the Colombian military to conflate the images of the drug dealer and the guerrilla.[3] The deadly paramilitaries, in turn, find their justification in the inability of the state to offer protection to the landowners, cattle rancher, and rural entrepreneurs-including drug- trade entrepreneurs-from the economic and military pressure of the guerrillas.
The besieged city of Solano is located in the department of Caquetá, in which the FARC guerrillas have an influential presence in many small villages and frequently take on the role of local authorities. The guerrillas have a routine, says a restderit of Solano: “Two or three people a day enter the village and then leave, return and then leave again, making sure everything is in order. They are the ones who maintain public order. They charge the local mafiosos taxes. They charge a tax for each kilo of coca. Thai is how they survive.”[4] The guerrillas, however, have not always been strong enough to protect these villages from state and paramilitary retaliation, and many villages have been forced to maintain their own security in the face of paramilitary attack.
The paramilitaries have also tried to win over coca growers in the south by appealing to their economic self interest. In early 1997, Castaño met with commercial coca growers in the south-central departments of Guaviare and Caquetá who had been paying taxes to the guerrillas. If he could woo some of his financing to his side, Castaho believed he could defeat the FARC-and at the same time establish control over the lucrative drug trade in the south. Castaño says that he met with “40 or 45 chiefs of coca cultivation. I told them that if they gave me half of what they were paying to the guerrilla, I would respond to their needs. ‘Let’s finish the guerrilla,’ I told them. ‘The hour has arrived.’ I explained to them that I didn’t consider them military targets for having helped the guerrilla, but neither would I defend their crops. If the authorities were to enter, it would be their responsibility.”[5]
By the middle of July, the paramilitaries had launched their attack. They signalled the beginning of their presence in the south with the massacre of 26 people in the village of Mapiripán, and nine months later, the murder of 19 in nearby Puerto Alvira. Until these incursions, paramilitary groups in Colombia had been active primarily in the northern parts of the country—Urubá, Córdoba, Santander—where they had established alliances with narco-landowners and cattle ranchers to eradicate guerrilla influence as well as legal leftist political groups like the Patriotic Union (UP) in the region.[6] The attack in Mapiripán marked the beginning of a new paramilitary campaign to move beyond their traditional strongholds and directly challenge guerrilla control in southern Colombia.
The major city in the area in which Castaño met with the growers is San José, Guaviare, a village linked to the outside world only by river and air. The paramiltary group that carried out the massacre at Mapirprin, a small village on the Guaviare River, used the San José airport-controlled by the army and the anti-narcotics police-as a staging ground. They began their earnpaign of terror against the peasants on the evening of July 15. “After 7:30 in the evening,” reported the judge who later heard the victims’ complaint at both Mapiripán and Puerto Alvira, “villagers were brought out two at a time, gagged and with their hands tied. They were tortured and then killed.”[7] Each night of the massacre, the judge, based in Mapiripdn, was able to communicate by telephone with Major Hernán Orozco of the army battalion in control of the airport. Orozco informed his superiors what was happening, but nothing was done to stop the campaign of terror.
In San José, paramilitaries carried out systematic and selective violence against small intermediary buyers of coca paste, those who pay the weight tax to the guerrillas. At least 18 people were killed during July and August of last year. During the same period, the paramilitaries carried out a quiet campaign to purchase businesses in San José. They paid off local politicians and business people and presumably established connections with the local police. Finally they established a site of operations in the northern region in Puerto Arturo around the Guayabero river, the boundary of guerrilla influence in the area. On October 18, 4997, the San José-based paramilitarics entered the Guaviare village of Miraflores and executed four people they believed to be friendly with the guerrillas.
On May 4, 1998, long after the authorities of San José had been rinade aware of the paramilitary presence, 200 members of the same group entered the village of Puerto Alvira, due east of Mapiripdn along the river, and murdered another 19 people. “Various witnesses,” reported the weekly magazine Cambio, “agreed in their testimony that at the moment of the paramilitary invasion and during its action in the municipality, the zone was flown over by a plane of the Colombian Air Force. “[8]
In early 1998, a round of massacres began in the southern department of Putumayo. According to the Attorney General’s office of Puerto Asís, Putumayo, 25 people were murdered by private armed groups between January 4 and February 10. Investigators from the Attorney General’s office were forced to leave the region a few days later. The reports of priests, civic leaders and peasants pointed to the existence of a list of 250 people who had been sentenced to death by paramilitary organizations. On February 22, three people were killed in the EI Aguila district of Puerto As’s. On February 27, four people were murdered, including a catechist from the Puerto As’s parish. In the municipality of La Hormiga, a grave was unearthed with six bodies. On March 18, in the Las Brisas district of La Hormiga, ten people were murdered. Five days later, on March 23, seven people were murdered in the streets of Puerto Asís.
In July, a new wave of selective murders began against those suspected of having links to the guerrilla, intermediaries of coca-paste production and the merchants of Puerto Asfs, who had been the objects of extortion by the paramilitaries of the UAC. According to the merchants’ complaints, “these groups have come to our businesses demanding large quantities of money, between five and ten million pesos [$4,000$8,0001 and levying a monthly quota of 500,000 pesos [$4001 on each establisment, collecting a total of 50 million pesos [$40,000]. In response to this extortion and blackmail, we have opposed paying the money. As a result, they have forced us to shut down our businesses.”[9]
As paramilitary terror grows, the dispersion of the residents is total. Abandoning all of their belongings, people have migrated westward toward the city of Florencia, Caquetá, settling in difficult conditions without basic services and with little hope of finding work. The community organizations created by the parishes have been destroyed. Community leaders and activists have fled or are in hiding. The neighborhoods have been abaridoned by residents, and the school rooms are now empty. The army has begun to camp in areas belonging to schools and parish organizations. When a Solano school teacher complained that a children’s agricultural project had been dislodged, his complaint was interpreted by the nnlitary as a gesture of solidarity with the guerrillas. After receiving several threats to his life, he left the region.
As this irregular war spreads, the possibilites of an alternative development process recede and violent confrontation becomes the norm, The latest major escalation ocurred this past March when FARC guerrillas attacked the town of EI Billar on the Caguan River. This led not only to the entrance of 5,000 military personnel into the area, but to the increased presense of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) advisors as well. U.S. interference in the name of combating drugs has now grown so intense that one of the commanders of the FARC guerrillas in the south, Fabian Ramirez, declared U.S. anti-drug advisors to be legitimate military targets. Ramirez’s declaration came in the wake both of the events at EI Billar and of a U.S. Congressional debate in which several Republicans asserted that the drug war could not proceed in Colombia witbout a willingness to directly confront the guerrillas.[10] This new stance of both the FARC guerrillas and U.S. Representatives, together with Washington’s decision to increase military personnel in Colombia, has accelerated the internationalization of the conflict.
The boundaries separating the guerrillas, the drug traffickers and the villagers who are involved in the drug economy one way or another have been erased by the counterinsurgency. For the military, “the suspicious attitude of neutrality that certain official and private institutions hold is reprehensible.”[11] This polarizing attitude justifies attacks against coca growers, who are treated as the financiers of the guerrillas. Peasants have become legitimate military targets.
All this, together with the displacement brought about by paramilitary violence, has destroyed the social fabric woven by community, church and political organizations in rural southern Colombia. By emptying the region of virtually all forms of popular participation and representation, the social organization required to promote and maintain alternatives to coca cultivation—one of the indispensible conditions for any alternative form of economic development—has come to an end.
The combined massacres and fumigations have prorooted an environmental disaster both through the chemicals that are altering the fragile Amazonian ecosystem, and through the constant fear that has pressured growers to abandon their fields and move into humid tropical forests to plant new crops. As the borders between drugs and the armed conflict grow increasingly hazy, the optimal path has been charted for the escalation—and intemationalization—of a conflict that has long ceased to make any political sense.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ricardo Vargas Meza is a researcher at the Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEF) in Bogota. He is co-author of Drogas, Poder y Región en Colombia (CINEP, 1995),
NOTES
1.”Los paras quieren medio país,” Cambio 16 (Bogotá), July 28, 1997.
2.Colombian Environment Ministry, Concepto técnico sabre los riesgos ambientales del uso del herbicidio tebutioron en la erradicación de cultivos ilícitos. (Bogotá, no date).
3.Ricardo Vargas Meza, Colombia: Usos y abusos de la guerra a las drogas. (Montivideo: Brecha, 1998).
4.Teófilo Vásquez, Las masacres en Colombia, (Bogota, August,1998), mimeo.
5.”Soy el ala moderada de las auodefensas” entrevista a Carlos Castaño, ” Cambio, 16 (Bogotá), December 22, 1997.
6.Ceder es más terrible que muerte: 1985-1996, una d´cada de violencia en el Meta, (Bogotá, 1997), minneo.
7.”Nadie quiso evitar la masacre,” Cambio 76 (Bogotá), November1997.
8.”Nadie quiso evitar la masacre.”
9.”Denuncian más crímenes selectivos en Puerto Asís,” El Tiempo (Bogotá), September 6, 1998.
10.Reported in Dallas Morning News, March 18, 1998.
11.Interview with General Victor Alvarez, Commander of the First Division, in “Nos convertimos en fusibles del Estado,” El Tiempo (Bogotá), August 14, 1998.
