US Steps Up Intervention in Colombia

By Brad Sigal

The US government is in a panic about Colombia. On July 26, US General Barry McCaffrey (the US's "drug czar") rushed to Colombia to assess the situation and made a call for $1.5 billion in mainly military aid to the Colombian government-on top of the $300 million it received this year. This was two days after a US military plane carrying five US soldiers was found shot down in the dense jungles of Colombia, supposedly on a "routine counter-drug mission." It was also after a massive July military offensive by the Colombian leftist guerrillas, the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army), that brought them within 25 miles of Bogotá, Colombia's capital.

US Special Forces are already on the ground training counterinsurgency battalions. White House diplomats are preparing the grounds for a "regional intervention force" by calling on neighboring countries of Peru and Ecuador to move large numbers of troops to their borders with Colombia. There has also been real talk of a direct US invasion. What exactly is going on in Colombia and why is the US ruling class suddenly so concerned?

Some Background

With 39 million people, Colombia is the third most populous country in Latin America behind Brazil and Mexico. It occupies a key geopolitical location, with two coastlines and a proximity to the Panama Canal. Colombia is a large and very mountainous country, making rural transportation difficult. It is a nation rich in natural resources, with petroleum, natural gas, coal, iron ore, nickel, gold, copper, and emeralds. The state-controlled petroleum industry is huge.

Despite all of Colombia's rich natural resources, about half of Colombia's population of 33 million people live below the poverty line. In the countryside, 48 percent of the land is owned by rich absentee landowners, while campesinos comprising 63 percent of the rural population own less than 5 percent of the land. As a result of military assaults and war, since 1985 over 1.5 million Colombians, including over 400,000 children, have been displaced. Last year a record 308,000 people were forced from their homes.

While large numbers of Colombians live in poverty, the Colombian government is itself in debt $18 billion to foreign lending institutions and governments. Almost half the gross domestic product goes on paying off an unrepayable debt, while the Pastrana government is selling off most of the infrastructure, from telecommunications to the water supply, at well below its true value. The beneficiaries are, as ever, US and other western multinationals. Colombia continues to climb further in debt-in 1995 they received $40.7 million in "aid." The creditors-the IMF and World Bank-require the government to implement policies of austerity and privatization that in turn increase poverty, land displacement, and other major social problems.

In order to maintain this highly exploitative social order, the government has to use serious repression. Not surprisingly, Colombia has one of the worst human rights records on the planet. In 1998 Amnesty International Secretary-General Pierre Sané wrote a scathing statement to Colombia's then-President Ernesto Samper Pizano castigating the Colombian government for its human rights record. It noted that "Human rights defenders have been subjected to what increasingly appears to be a systematic campaign designed to silence them and destroy their work. Over a period of years they have been victims of a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation ranging from repeated death threats to arbitrary detention, 'disappearance,' and cold-blooded murder."

The government blames these attacks on "dark forces," meaning the right-wing paramilitary groups, such as the Colombian United Self-Defense Groups (AUC) led by the notorious Carlos Castaño. They claim to be independent but basically carry out the dirty work of the military of killing anyone who attempts to organize. The paramilitaries have clear connections with top ranking military generals; for example, in April President Pastrana was forced by international pressure from human rights groups to retire two senior Army generals for their role in forming and supporting paramilitaries.

There are also numerous examples of the right wing paramilitaries working with and protecting drug production and distribution. AUC Paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño's older brother was a right-hand man to Pablo Escobar, the Medellin Cartel chief killed in 1993. This year a massive cocaine-processing lab capable of producing eight tons of cocaine a month was discovered in an area protected by the AUC. Colombian National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano said the lab was run by paramilitaries working with remnants of the dismantled Cali and Medellin cartels.

Cocaine is far and away the dominant factor in the Colombian economy. According to the FARC, "Intimately linked to the phenomenon of narcotrafficing is the concentration of thousands of hectacres of land that is passing to the new rich; in Colombia 70% of the known cultivatable land is now in the hands of the narcotrafficers and their front men, as a product of their business. . . Colombia is now the premier producer of coca, because the peasants displaced by this agrarian counter-reform, are directed to the zones of colonization to farm the only thing that allows them to subsist: coca, amapola and marijuana."

Current US Intervention

Listening to Colombia's president Andres Pastrana, one would get the idea that Colombia is a country where the US has no economic control or direct military presence. In July, Pastrana said that he would "never accept nor permit the intervention of other countries in the internal problems of our nation." But while trying to strike a popular nationalist chord with such statements, Pastrana simultaneously begs the US for increased military aid and already hosts a large US military presence inside his nation.

The US already has at least 200 US soldiers-Army Green Berets, soldiers from the Naval Special Warfare Unit, and other elite troops-stationed in Colombia. There are also Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) operatives there. In addition, this year the US has given the Colombian military six newly refurbished Vietnam-era UH-1H helicopter gunships, while four "Super-Huey" helicopters will be sent at a cost of $1.4 million each and three more sophisticated Blackhawk helicopters are slated to be delivered later this year. This is on top of the tripling of US military aid to almost $300 million in 1998.
The official reason given by the US government for the dramatic aid increase is still that they are there to fight the "war on drugs." But after 15 years and $30 billion invested by the US government in international drug control efforts, cocaine and heroin are purer, cheaper, and more readily available than before.

The real reason for the state of alarm in Washington and the big bucks going to Colombia is the very real possibility that the socialist forces in Colombia will win their struggle for national liberation in the near future. Drug Czar McCaffrey's call for $1.5 billion in aid to Colombia's government came immediately after the FARC launched their nationwide military offensive.

Since the "war on drugs" was officially declared in the late 1980s, the US has repeatedly insisted that its only reason for being in Colombia (and neighboring countries) is to fight drugs, not to take sides in political conflicts. But over the past few years as the FARC has gained strength, US politicians and military officers have increasingly been saying that the problem of drugs and leftist guerrillas are intertwined so much as to be the same problem. They have popularized the term "narcoguerrillas" in order to create the intellectual pretext for legitimizing US efforts to fight the national liberation organizations under the guise of fighting drugs.

To anyone who cares to investigate in any real way, the FARC are clearly not "narcoguerrillas" or the source of the drug problem. The cocaine economy in Colombia is a result of the fact that its economy has been controlled and stunted by imperialism. The drug lords themselves are part of the ruling class of Colombia, many developing out of rural landowners and domestic businessmen. The narcotics trade is in fact central to the Colombian economy, as drug money keeps the Colombian ruling classes afloat. Government corruption and complicity in the drug trade is pervasive. Huge profits from the drug trade have gone into investments in cattle ranching, real estate and the tourist economy. And the drug money also flows to the U.S. where it is laundered through major banks and "legitimate" investments.

The FARC in fact has the most progressive, sensible and effective position in the country on how to deal with the drug problem. They put out a detailed document in July 1997 explaining their position. In this document, the FARC makes it clear that they do not collaborate with narcotrafficers: "We must repeat that the FARC-EP does not share anything with, does not negotiate with, and has no relations with narcotrafficers. We refuse to do this based on principle and ethics, because it is incompatible with democracy and social harmony; because it generates corruption, impunity, criminality, social decomposition, among other things that especially affect the world's young people."

The problem for the Colombian government is that the FARC refuses to attack the peasants who are forced to grow cocoa (from which cocaine is made) to survive, and they refuse to support a military solution to the drug problem, which is a social and political problem. "What is inconvenient for [the government] is that we don't serve as rural police for their false and hypocritical anti-drug policy and that we don't run over the farmers who cultivate illegal products to destroy the little that they have. We don't play their double game: under the pretext of an anti-drug struggle they punish the popular sectors, criminalizing their protest while simultaneously enriching themselves with the immense profits of this business, financing their electoral campaigns and promoting their industries and financial centers."

The National Liberation Movement Grows

In Colombia, the movement fighting for national liberation and socialism is very strong. While the FARC has certainly made mistakes, they are not terrorists or "narcoguerrillas." They are a formidable and well-organized group with a long history and deep support among many Colombians. They are the de facto government in much of the countryside. The FARC is strongly supportive of the popular movements for justice in Colombia such as labor unions, women's movements, environmental movements, and indigenous movements, often coordinating their armed actions to coincide with the demands of urban-based mass protests.

For example, in late August and early September there was a general strike of unions, along with peasant, community, and student organizations, to demand an end to President Pastrana's economic policies of austerity and privatization. On August 31, the FARC took control of the Empresa de Energia del Pacifico (EPSA) hydroelectric plant in the southwestern town of Anchicaya demanding that the plant reduce electricity tariffs 30% and carry out social development projects in the area.

This is what scares the US: the prospect of a popular and legitimate socialist-led national liberation movement taking power and cutting Colombia out of the World Bank and IMF-imposed neo-liberal economy. An independent, socialist Colombia-a country with vast material resources including oil that could not only develop successfully but could also aid and inspire other revolutionaries around the world-would be a huge disaster for the ruling class in the US and their cronies who run Latin American countries on the IMF/World Bank-imposed model that guarantees increased poverty and misery.

The Possibility of Peace

President Pastrana was elected on a platform of negotiating an end to the war with the FARC and a smaller group, the National Liberation Army (ELN). He has tried to do that in a superficial way, but does not want to talk about the economic and political causes of the war. Both the FARC and the ELN have started negotiations, but neither group is willing to give up their arms unless it's part of an overall dramatic transformation of the entire society, including the military and paramilitaries.

The left has very legitimate reasons to refuse to give up their guns. In May 1984 the FARC signed a "peace" agreement, gave up their arms and became a legal political party, the Patriotic Union (UP). Soon after, hundreds of their members were assassinated, including their presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal. The FARC was forced to return to the armed struggle to avoid being defenseless in the face of an extermination campaign.

There may be different opinions within the FARC about the current peace process. Some forces are clearly more supportive of the peace process than others. The same is true for the government. But the process is moving forward. Where it will end up is unclear.

Here in the United States, our greatest responsibility is to build a movement against the current US intervention in Colombia, In particular, we must build opposition to the US government's plan to dramatically increase aid to the bloody Colombian military. We should support the popular movements fighting for justice in Colombia-the unions, students, women, indigenous people, teachers, etc. Additionally, we should support the national liberation movement fighting for the only real solution to Colombia's problems-an end to capitalism and a socialist Colombia.