Pubdate: Mon, 10 Apr 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Section: Front Page
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer

FOR REBELS, IT'S NOT A DRUG WAR

VILLA NUEVA COLOMBIA - For nearly 40 years, Colombians rarely saw the faces 
of the men who run the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the 
country's most powerful guerrilla group. Today, they are hard to avoid.

Manuel Marulanda, the rumpled, 69-year-old founder of the FARC, as it is 
known by its initials in Spanish, appears regularly in the Colombian media, 
meeting with government officials and business leaders here in the 
Switzerland-size demilitarized zone the government has turned over to the 
rebels as a venue for peace talks.

Bearded, bespectacled Raul Reyes, another member of the seven-man FARC 
leadership, began a recent interview by inviting e-mail messages to his 
Hotmail account. Commander Joaquin Gomez promised to introduce foreign 
visitors to local peasants growing coca, the raw material of cocaine. 
Reyes, Gomez and other rebel leaders calmly discussed the finer points of 
peace and their objections to a proposed $1.6 billion emergency U.S. aid 
package that could bring Washington deeper into Colombia's civil war.

But there is a through-the-looking-glass quality to life inside the 
demilitarized zone. Outside, in the rest of Colombia, the guerrillas have 
stepped up a campaign of killing, kidnapping and extortion. According to 
the government, they "assassinated" 42 police officers and 39 soldiers in 
the first three months of this year. The FARC continues to reject a 
cease-fire. And it is making more money than ever from cocaine smuggled to 
the United States.

It is concern over the drug connection that the Clinton administration says 
motivates its aid proposal, approved largely intact last month by the House 
of Representatives but now having a rough ride in the Senate. Most of the 
aid, which represents a major escalation of U.S. involvement in Colombia, 
is intended to train and equip special military and police forces to move 
into remote, coca-growing areas in the southern part of the country, 
fumigate the drug crops and establish a permanent government presence.

Although the United States has no declared quarrel with the guerrillas, as 
long as they don't interfere with the anti-drug campaign, most of the areas 
targeted for U.S. aid are under FARC control. And officials such as White 
House drug policy director Barry R. McCaffrey, the administration's chief 
salesman for the Colombia aid package, routinely describe the rebels as 
indistinguishable from drug traffickers. McCaffrey calls the FARC "the 
narco-insurgents, narco-guerrillas, narco-terrorists."

"There's no question about what's happening down there," McCaffrey said at 
a congressional hearing last month. The war in Colombia is simply 
"struggling over money out of drug production."

The administration's allies in Colombia wince at such language. While 
lobbying desperately for the U.S. aid, they say the violence tearing apart 
the country has deeper roots than the drug trade that fuels it. The drug 
war and the civil war in Colombia may have common fronts, Colombians say, 
but they have different long-term solutions, especially as related to the 
guerrillas.

In peace talks started last year, President Andres Pastrana has attempted 
to make the FARC part of the solution, offering it a voice in formulating 
wide-ranging reforms and an opportunity to participate in the political 
process--a strategy for which there is historical precedent. At least once 
a week, senior Colombian officials fly from Bogota to the town of San 
Vicente del Caguan, and drive into the hills to this government-built 
village they have christened New Colombia. If all goes as scheduled, the 
reform plan will be completed and put to a vote nationwide 18 months from now.

The negotiations imply that the government has decided to take the FARC at 
its word when it promises to help eliminate coca production as long as the 
peasants it claims to represent are protected, given money and trained to 
develop an alternative crop. But the Colombian government says it 
recognizes that its approach reflects a broader agenda than that of its 
American backers, and envisions a role for the FARC that few in Washington 
seem prepared to acknowledge.

"In American terms," said Jaime Ruiz, in charge of overall implementation 
of Plan Colombia, the government reform program that includes U.S. military 
aid, "they want to see the problems of Colombia through the prism of El 
Salvador, or human rights, or guerrillas, or left versus right. Or through 
the prism of drugs--that the guerrillas are narco-traffickers and the 
problem is drugs."

European Tour

Earlier this year, several FARC commanders embarked on an unprecedented 
tour of European capitals accompanied by their negotiating counterparts in 
the government. After years of isolation, members of the FARC delegation 
resembled Rip Van Winkle when they described their encounter with modern 
social democracy.

"The most important thing that we saw . . . is that there is a really good 
relationship among the state, the private sector and the workers," Raul 
Reyes recalled. "Because there is tolerance. There is income distribution. 
There is money to spend on the unemployed, on the illiterate, the homeless. 
There is medical attention, and enough hospitals. There are subsidies for 
those who work the land. In Colombia, it's just the opposite."

Like most of its contemporaries among 20th century Latin American guerrilla 
groups, the FARC was born in the convergence of domestic politics and the 
Cold War. According to revolutionary lore, Marulanda took to the hills of 
southern Colombia with 48 fellow peasants in 1964, after their demands for 
local autonomy and development aid were met with repression. The repression 
was funded in part under a U.S. program.

Unlike its contemporaries, the FARC neither sought nor received much 
ideological or financial input from the Soviet Union or Cuba. Instead, it 
owed its survival to the fact that Colombian governments, and their 
military forces, were largely bound to the cities and the more wealthy 
agricultural areas and rarely came after them. For sustenance, the rebels 
extorted money from the wealthy and threatened isolated large landowners.

In exchange for fealty and recruits, they offered peasants the promise of 
eventual political power and, more immediately, protection from the 
government and from the growing "self-defense" paramilitary organizations 
that today are the guerrillas' most brutal and, in some cases, effective 
adversaries.

The FARC's political agenda, a 10-point plan that talks about land 
distribution, social benefits and political access for the rural poor, has 
changed little in nearly four decades. "It's very clear in its fundamental 
principles--the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor--and very 
ambiguous in its details," said Daniel Garcia-Pena, who served as peace 
commissioner under the government that preceded Pastrana's.

Despite an early alliance with the Colombian Communist Party, the FARC has 
always been an essentially rural movement that attracted few of the 
university intellectuals and liberal theologians who flocked to more 
doctrinaire guerrilla groups.

"They still say they're Marxist-Leninist," said Garcia-Pena. "But it's like 
religion. It's like saying you're a Catholic, but you get an abortion and 
don't go to church."

According to Reyes, "Marxism is a guide, not a dogma," along with the 
liberation philosophy of Colombia's first president, Simon Bolivar.

As the FARC grew in strength over the decades, there were periodic 
cease-fires and peace negotiations, most of which fell apart due to 
guerrilla intransigence or, more often, government betrayal. During the 
1980s, the FARC attempted to enter the political process as part of a 
leftist coalition, but thousands of its candidates and adherents were 
killed. While others point out that the FARC continued armed combat 
throughout this period, few dispute its basic analysis of what happened.

The years of isolation have created a sort of time warp for rebel leaders. 
During one meeting not too long ago, a Western diplomat said, "they started 
the discussion talking about United Fruit," the Boston-based company that 
during the 1950s and 1960s was the symbol of controlling U.S. economic 
interests in Central America. The company has gone out of business, its 
influence replaced by cooperative local ownership and international trade 
agreements.

"They have a lack of understanding of the 21st century world, and where 
Colombia fits in," the diplomat said.

"We're looking for a model," Reyes said of the European tour. "Something we 
can apply here in Colombia. . . . We also want to find out more about Latin 
America, and we'd like to go to the United States, and to Canada."

Although the FARC is on the U.S. government's list of terrorist 
organizations, a Clinton administration official met with the guerrillas in 
late 1998, at the Pastrana government's request. Reyes and fellow guerrilla 
Olga Marin, traveled to Costa Rica for sessions with Phillip T. Chicola, 
the State Department's director of Andean affairs.

"They wanted to tell us they are not narco-guerrillas, and that they want 
peace," said an administration official familiar with the talks. The 
Americans, the official said, responded that they supported Pastrana's 
peace process, and that Colombian democracy and an end to terrorism were 
not negotiable.

Reyes told Chicola the FARC wanted to set up back-channel communications 
with the Americans. Telephone numbers and e-mail addresses were exchanged.

The first chance to use them came in March last year, when three American 
humanitarian workers disappeared in northeastern Colombia. Chicola sent an 
e-mail message to Marin, who called him at home to say she knew nothing of 
the disappearances. Several days later, according to the administration 
official, the FARC acknowledged they had the Americans; a week later, Marin 
told Chicola the Americans would be released.

The next day, the three bodies were found just inside Venezuela.

When the FARC official called back, Chicola said that unless those 
responsible for the deaths were brought to justice, there was nothing more 
to discuss. Later, the FARC announced it had detained several low-level 
guerrillas. The FARC has sent further e-mail messages, but administration 
officials say they have gone unanswered.

Army Outmaneuvered

What it may lack in political sophistication, the FARC makes up for in its 
ability to surprise and outmaneuver the conscript-heavy and poorly trained 
and motivated Colombian Army.

Last month's FARC attack on the small town of Vigia del Fuerte, 230 miles 
north of Bogota, was a classic rebel operation - a surprise assault on a 
lightly defended, isolated garrison with few, if any, guerrilla casualties. 
The army said 21 police officers and nine civilians died. The civilians, 
including the mayor and two young children, apparently were victims of the 
"gas bombs" favored by the guerrillas - homemade mortars that fire a 
propane tank through a length of pipe stolen from an oil pipeline. Many of 
the police officers were reportedly killed with a single bullet to the head.

Holding the FARC leadership directly responsible for the deaths, army 
commander Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora lashed out in a press statement that 
reflected the military's ambivalence about the government's negotiating 
strategy. "These are the same people that the most important leaders of the 
country are seen embracing on television," Mora said.

The FARC has grown to an estimated 15,000 armed combatants. Although 
government officials acknowledge their own tactics have driven peasants 
willingly into the arms of the guerrillas, and the rebels' pay is 
reportedly attractive, the FARC's ranks also include some who are 
teenagers, and there are increasingly widespread reports of forced recruitment.

Unquestioned political leadership comes directly from the organization's 
secretariat, and the FARC has long been known for its hierarchical 
discipline. But with evermore far-flung units - there are now at least 60 
combat "fronts," each with at least 150 guerrillas, organized under eight 
regional blocs - outsiders see local commanders as increasingly and 
alarmingly autonomous.

Each front is assessed a regular monetary contribution by the central 
office, but it is largely up to local commanders to determine where the 
money comes from. Although some outsiders who deal regularly with the 
guerrillas say the leadership frowns on indiscriminate kidnapping for 
ransom, there has been no public criticism from on high.

The leadership denies any loss of control over its troops. "We are a 
revolutionary organization that has control over all its units," said 
Reyes. Those who imply otherwise, "are trying to justify more U.S. aid."

But the FARC acknowledges that the killing of the American civilians last 
year was "a mistake . . . one of the things that happens in war, like the 
U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy" last year in Belgrade, said Gomez. 
"One of our commandos killed them. We've acknowledged this to the world, 
and we've apologized to the American people."

Although much of the FARC's weaponry is seized from government forces, the 
central leadership handles bulk weapons purchases, usually from Central 
American black markets. To the ongoing puzzlement of U.S. intelligence, 
which prepares twice-yearly assessments of FARC strength, the guerrillas 
have remained low-tech.

"They tend to be dressed better, trained better, paid better and armed 
better than the Colombian army," a senior U.S. official closely involved 
with the proposed aid package said. Guerrilla troops on guard duty around 
this village on a recent visit were in crisp camouflage uniforms, armed 
with knives and machetes and a variety of automatic rifles--U.S.-made 
AR-15s, Israeli Galils, Soviet-designed AK-47s.

"If they're making as much money . . . as everyone says they are . . . 
they're certainly making enough to buy some decent mortars" or 
surface-to-air missiles, said the U.S. official. But with the limited 
effectiveness of the Colombian military, he said, the FARC's current 
arsenal seems to be "good enough for their purposes."

Fueled by Drug Money

The FARC predated the cocaine industry in Colombia, and most Colombians 
believe the rebels are capable of surviving its demise. But the money that 
flowed from the expansion of the drug business was like jet fuel to 
virtually all parties fighting on the war's multiple fronts.

Since the mid-1970s, frequently shifting alliances, and the rise and fall 
of the major drug cartels, brought the traffickers together with the FARC 
and other, smaller, guerrilla organizations as well as with the military 
and the paramilitary groups fighting the insurgents.

A bonanza fell into the FARC's lap in the 1990s, when successful anti-drug 
programs closed down much of the coca cultivation in nearby Peru and 
Bolivia. Traffickers moved their crops into the remote, government-free 
areas of southern Colombia that have long been the FARC's home base.

For the guerrillas, whose political identity is tied to representing the 
peasantry, coca was lucrative for all concerned. But the FARC insists it is 
a limited business relationship.

The FARC's overall interests "are basically incompatible with the 
narco-traffickers," Reyes said. "They work with the army to kill 
progressive people. We charge them a tax. We don't do them any favors, and 
they don't do us any.

"In Caqueta, Guaviare and Putumayo," three southern Colombia provinces, 
Reyes said, "the economic base is coca, so that's what we tax - not the 
traffickers directly, but their intermediaries. In other regions . . . we 
tax the cattle ranchers, the sugar growers, the businesses."

Gomez described what he called the "dialectic" of drug trafficking:

"As long as there is someone consuming it, there is going to be someone 
selling it. And as long as somebody is prepared to sell it, there is going 
to be someone to grow it," he said. The problem with Americans, he said, is 
that "they make no distinction between the narco-traffickers, the Colombian 
peasants who grow coca leaves as their only way of surviving, and the 
insurgency."

"We invite any American to come to the coca-growing sector," Gomez said. 
"We'll take full responsibility for their security - they can talk to the 
peasants, ask them why they grow coca, what they make from it, who they 
sell it to, how it's processed."

"When the [fumigation] helicopters come," he said, "we shoot at them. We 
disagree with the whole idea of fumigation. . . . It's killing not only the 
coca but everything else." The result, he said, is that a peasant farmer 
whose five acres of coca are sprayed simply moves on to five more acres, 
many times destroying virgin jungle.

Besides, said Reyes, "they're the same helicopters that come to bomb us."

Despite the view of some leading officials in Washington, outsiders who 
frequent the coca-growing areas say the FARC's role in the cocaine 
industry, with some exceptions, is largely as its leaders describe it.

"The guerrillas are something different than the traffickers," said Klaus 
Nyholm, who runs the U.N. Drug Control Program in Colombia. Representatives 
of the U.N. agency, along with Colombia's rural development agency, travel 
into coca-growing regions and the much smaller highland areas where 
heroin-producing opium poppies are cultivated to persuade small farmers to 
switch to other crops and give them the money and tools to do so.

In some areas, Nyholm said, FARC units are more intimately involved with 
cocaine processing and export than the leadership admits. "It's far from 
general, but we've seen it. . . . The local fronts are quite autonomous. 
But in some areas, they're not involved at all. And in others, they 
actively tell the farmers not to grow" coca.

"I wouldn't use the term 'narco-guerrillas,' " he said. "I still consider 
the . . . guerrillas political. They need the money to finance their war."

Ready for Talks

Asked why the FARC, having done so well on the battlefield, would now want 
to talk peace, Reyes says only that "we have come to the conclusion that we 
have to solve [Colombia's] problems through negotiations."

Other Colombians have a more cynical view - that after nearly 40 years in 
the jungle, the guerrillas will only give up when they decide they can't 
win. The guerrillas' primary goal, said political analyst Alfredo Rangel, 
remains "taking complete power. Second best is peace negotiations" that 
would provide political and economic reform, and a share of power. The 
final decision, Rangel said, "will be made the day before they sign a peace 
agreement."

But even Rangel believes a deal eventually will be struck. "Colombians kill 
each other at the drop of a hat," he said.

"But they also make agreements," he said, referring to the negotiated end 
of a 1945-65 period of political violence that resulted in 300,000 deaths.

"One day, they said, 'Enough. Okay, let's make a deal,' " Rangel said. "The 
FARC are Colombians, too."
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