Pubdate: Sun, 20 Jan 2002
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2002 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Marc Cooper
Note: Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to The Nation and a columnist 
for L.A. Weekly. His latest book is "Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir."

THE U.S. CONTINUES ITS STRATEGY OF 'ETERNAL WAR'

When I last visited Colombia some months back, the editor of Gabriel Garcia 
Marquez's news magazine Cambio lamented that his country seemed "ripe for 
eternal war." The news last week that Colombia's sputtering "peace process" 
was salvaged from collapse at the last moment does little to alter that 
grim assessment.

The 3-year-old peace talks between the government and leftist guerrillas 
will continue. But with no truce in place, so will the mutual murder, 
mayhem and kidnapping that has turned this Andean nation into one of the 
most violent places on Earth. Regrettably, U.S. policy does nothing except 
accelerate and encourage the bloodletting.

Under its so-called Plan Colombia--a $1.3 billion, multiyear effort pushed 
through in the last phase of the Clinton administration in the name of the 
war on drugs--the Bush White House now pumps more than $2 million a day 
into the counter-narcotics conflict. Countless federal drug and 
intelligence agents act as adjuncts to the Colombian military. A couple of 
hundred or more U.S. military advisors train and counsel three new elite 
battalions of the Colombian army. Dozens of hi-tech U.S. combat 
helicopters, including a squadron of 14 battle-ready Black Hawks, are being 
shipped to Bogota. Along with them come an unknown number of 
private-contract U.S. pilots and helicopter technical crews. Another batch 
of private-contract Americans fly the crop dusters that spray toxic 
herbicides over the coca-rich countryside. Supporting this operation are 
four new so-called "forward operating locations," or FOLs--U.S .military 
intelligence outposts--in Ecuador, Aruba, Curacao and El Salvador.

Now word comes that the Bush administration is considering U.S. military 
aid that would be earmarked, not for counter-narcotics assistance, but for 
counter-insurgency, that is, for the government's war against the 
guerrillas. Already last year, one U.S. Embassy official admitted to me 
that the line between the two struggles is "ambiguous." Those who have 
worried that U.S. intervention in the Colombia drug war would eventually 
drag us directly into that country's civil war now have genuine cause to be 
alarmed.

It's no accident that Colombia is simultaneously the world's largest 
cocaine producer and home to the hemisphere's most dogged guerrilla 
insurgency. Both the drug trade and the guerrilla movement have grown out 
of social and economic injustice endemic in rural areas of the country. A 
political and economic oligarchy has monopolized much of recent Colombia 
history. Disenfranchised subsistence farmers have found in coca production 
their only salvation. Others have sought a better world through armed 
struggle or organized crime. And all sides have an interest in the 
cash-rich coca trade.

With a certain sense of irony and resignation, Colombians lump all 
rifle-toting groups--from the army and police to various guerrilla groups, 
counter-guerrilla paramilitary death squads and criminal gangs--under the 
rubric of "armed actors." They might as well add the U.S. to that roster.

For 38 years, the guerrilla insurgency has raged. Colombian President 
Andres Pastrana, whose term is up in August, has taken a two-track approach 
to the crisis. While accommodating the U.S., he has also--to his 
credit--aggressively pursued peace parlays with the FARC (Revolutionary 
Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents, an 18,000-strong guerrilla army that 
is flush with coca dollars. To the open dismay of U.S. officials, Pastrana 
granted the guerrillas a Switzerland-sized safe haven, which has been the 
venue of the talks.

The negotiations have been bumpy and inconclusive. Neither side has given 
very much. The government demands that rebels cease their tactic of 
kidnapping and that they stop using the safe zone as a staging area for 
military operations. For their part, the guerrillas demand the government 
do more to reign in right-wing death squads, which have carried out a 
string of horrific massacres.

Then last week, Pastrana stiffened. Giving the rebels a 48-hour ultimatum, 
he demanded they either meet a series of his demands or abandon the safe 
haven and face a large military offensive.

Ultimatums from any side hardly seem the remedy for what ails Colombia. In 
order to achieve a lasting peace, all "actors" in the conflict will have to 
make concessions of sizable proportions. The guerrillas will have to 
recognize that while their call for social justice widely resonates in 
Colombia, their real political support is narrow and weak because most 
Colombians are appalled by their involvement in the coca industry and are 
horrified by their use of often barbaric military tactics. As a result, the 
guerrillas have no future other than as one more political party.

On the government side, Pastrana will have to show some real grit in 
confronting and eliminating the right-wing death squads that often work as 
allies with the army. But more important, Pastrana will have to make what 
Italian leftist politicians call the "historic compromise"--convincing the 
Colombian elites that the future of their country rests on their 
willingness to accept radical economic and social reforms that close the 
gaping class divide that rends the nation weak and keeps it at war with itself.

For all this to work, the U.S. would have to scale down its current 
military posture and redirect its military assistance to economic 
development. But that possibility seems as distant as the other two. Few 
Colombians failed to see the stark symbolism in the fact that Pastrana's 
ultimatum last week came just one day after an elaborate ceremony was 
staged to receive the latest shipment of U.S. Black Hawk gunships, during 
which U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson renewed the U.S. pledge to provide 
military support. To underscore the hard-line U.S. policy, the White House 
last week made a "recess appointment" of ultra-hawk Otto J. Reich as 
assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs. As Colombia 
teetered on the abyss of all-out war, the peace talks were, nevertheless, 
rescued. Round-the-clock negotiations carried out by United Nations special 
envoy James LeMoyne and, at the final moment, supported by foreign 
diplomats brought both sides together just four hours before the deadline. 
Now Pastrana has issued another ultimatum, giving the rebels until today to 
agree to a cease-fire.

To the embarrassment of U.S. diplomacy, credit for salvaging the peace 
process should go squarely to LeMoyne. A former New York Times foreign 
correspondent, and armed with nothing more than fluent Spanish, a working 
knowledge of the region and a mandate from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi 
Annan, LeMoyne kept the dialogue alive.

One can only imagine what the government of the United States--with its 
enormous power, wealth and prestige--could accomplish if it followed 
LeMoyne's example and put all its efforts in Colombia into the work of a 
lasting peace, instead of into a seemingly endless war.
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