Pubdate: Mon, 19 Aug 2002
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: 1
Copyright: 2002 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/areas/colombia (Colombia)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

COLOMBIA'S DRUG WAR ATTRACTS DUBIOUS ALLY

Policy: Paramilitary Force Is Backing U.S. Program To Help Farmers Give Up 
Illegal Coca Crop.

SIMITI, Colombia -- A fledgling U.S. program to eradicate cocaine in 
central Colombia has gained a notorious ally: a right-wing paramilitary 
army that the State Department has labeled a terrorist organization.

The so-called self-defense forces, responsible for the majority of 
massacres in Colombia's bloody internal conflict, have thrown their support 
behind a U.S. alternative development program that seeks to persuade 
farmers to give up their profitable coca crops for legal products such as 
beans, chocolate and cattle.

The paramilitaries, who fill a power vacuum left by the ineffectual 
Colombian army, have sponsored community workshops to educate farmers on 
the environmental and social destruction wrought by cocaine. They have 
begun distributing fliers asking farmers to give up their coca crops.

Chillingly, however, they also have warned that those who continue planting 
and harvesting coca will no longer be welcome in this region, which is 
almost completely under their control. Their stated enemy, the nation's 
leftist guerrillas, control most of southern Colombia, the nation's 
dominant drug-producing region.

U.S. officials said they have had no direct contact with paramilitary 
members, although local community leaders say they passed on news of the 
right-wingers' support. And top paramilitary commanders insisted in 
interviews that theirs is an independent effort to rid the region of cocaine.

Still, their enthusiastic embrace of the program puts the Colombian and 
U.S. governments in an awkward position. At best, it offers the promise of 
coca-free communities. At worst, it makes the United States an 
unintentional partner of terrorists--and complicit in their attempts to 
become "respectable."

U.S. and alternative development officials acknowledged that they are 
concerned about the possibility that paramilitary soldiers might force out 
or even kill those who don't cooperate with the eradication plan but say 
that they see no way to stop such help.

They said, however, that the militia's cooperation might help the success 
of their alternative development program, which has failed to live up to 
expectations in southern Colombia.

"We're certainly happy that anybody is saying they support this and will 
work toward manual eradication," said one U.S. State Department official. 
"It remains to be seen if it will help."

The development especially concerns human rights groups, because the plan's 
success might turn on paramilitary muscle.

However noble the goal, human rights officials said, the U.S. plan has the 
potential to increase the region's instability and provide legitimacy to a 
violent private army seeking to improve its international reputation.

"What this means for Colombia is poison," said Adam Isacson, the Colombia 
expert at the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning Washington 
think tank. "The Colombian government is supposed to be making sure 
[alternative development] happens, not a bunch of men with guns who follow 
their own law."

It also remains to be seen how committed the paramilitary forces will be to 
the strategy.

The paramilitaries maintain that their main goal is to combat the leftist 
guerrillas who have waged war against the Colombian government for 40 years.

Leaders Split on Drugs

Paramilitary leaders have long admitted that they rely on profits from 
drugs to support the estimated 11,000 paramilitary soldiers fighting 
throughout Colombia.

But recently, the paramilitaries have split over the issue. Their former 
leader, Carlos Castano, dissolved the umbrella group coordinating military 
operations, saying too many fronts were too deeply involved in drug 
trafficking. Now the paramilitaries have broken up into a series of private 
armies.

The second largest of those armies, known as the Central Bolivar Bloc, has 
said it will continue to rely heavily on drugs to finance operations in 
some areas of southern Colombia under its control. But in several 
interviews, leaders of the bloc argued that it makes sense to give up coca, 
at least in the central Colombian region known as Sur de Bolivar.

First, it's a military strategy. Ridding the region of cocaine makes it a 
less attractive target for leftist rebel groups, who also exploit the 
profits from drugs to finance their operations.

Second, most of the paramilitary fighters are from the region. Getting rid 
of coca for legal crops improves their own community.

Finally, the plan also seems part of a series of recent moves made by the 
paramilitaries to improve their image. It makes them allies not only in 
Colombia's war against the guerrillas, but in the United States' war 
against drugs.

The paramilitaries have taken other steps, including giving up 
headline-grabbing massacres and focusing instead on less noticeable 
selective killings. In the end, such measures could help them win a seat at 
peace negotiations and possibly amnesty for their acts.

Here in the Sur de Bolivar region, bloc commanders said they hope to rid 
the area of drugs and guerrillas in two years.

But, they warned, the plan will only work with the help of the U.S. government.

"The support of the national government, the private sector and decisive 
international cooperation headed by the United States is fundamental," 
Ernesto Baez, the political commander of the Central Bolivar Bloc, said in 
an e-mail interview conducted with the help of armed paramilitary fighters 
at a base just outside this colonial Spanish town.

Sur de Bolivar is a crossroads of violence, drugs and danger.

The region runs along the Magdalena River, Colombia's version of the 
Mississippi. The river is a crucial transport corridor for nearly 
everything made in Colombia, from petroleum to African palm oil to cocaine.

The wide, dark river threads through jewel green lowlands. Dirt-poor towns 
made of wood shacks cling to its banks. Banana plantations and dense jungle 
line the long unpopulated gaps in between. To the west, the San Lucas 
Mountains poke up like the edge of a rusty saw blade.

The region was long under the control of the country's smaller leftist 
guerrilla army, the National Liberation Army. But two years ago, the 
government proposed handing over part of Sur de Bolivar to the guerrillas 
as a demilitarized zone for peace talks. Locals rebelled, blocking roads 
and marching in the streets.

They found ready help from the paramilitaries, who moved in and within a 
matter of months had cleared the guerrillas from much of Sur de Bolivar.

"They control everything here," said Jorge Enrique Gomez, the regional 
representative for the government's human rights office. "We're not talking 
about paramilitaries. We're talking about a para-state."

The Rise of Coca

As the paramilitaries consolidated control over the region by the early 
part of last year, they also took control of its drug trafficking. Sur de 
Bolivar accounts for almost 10% of the coca crops in Colombia, which in 
turn produce 90% of the cocaine consumed in the United States. The bright 
green bushes dot the hillsides throughout the fertile region, although 
fumigation efforts last year severely cut into the crops.

Coca, which arrived in force in the mid-1980s, made some people in Sur de 
Bolivar rich. But it also brought thousands of transient workers, guerrilla 
conflict and aerial fumigation that killed legitimate crops.

In a matter of a decade, the once productive cattle and agriculture zone 
had become a killing field.

"More than 10 years of the production and exploitation of coca in Sur de 
Bolivar has only left us with poverty, violence, prostitution, alcoholism, 
ignorance and isolation," Baez said. "The narco-economy completely distorts 
the ideals of progress and development."

Beginning in January, the paramilitaries began holding meetings with local 
mayors, community leaders and dirt farmers to discuss their plans to rid 
the region of cocaine.

They helped local nonprofit groups organize a signature drive in which they 
successfully won a promise from the Colombian national government to 
temporarily suspend U.S.-backed aerial drug spraying in Sur de Bolivar to 
give their plans time to work.

They also made clear that those who continued to plant coca would face the 
wrath of the community--and the paramilitaries.

The local paramilitary commander in Sur de Bolivar, known as Comandante 
Gustavo, said in an interview that there would be no forced displacements 
of people.

Instead, he predicted that transient laborers who work as coca pickers--an 
estimated 4,000 people--would simply pick up and leave. The rest, he said, 
would bend to community pressure.

He didn't spell out what would happen in case of resistance, but those who 
have defied paramilitary demands in the past have often been killed.

"We realize that not all coca growers are going to want to give up what 
they're doing," said Gustavo, noting that a farmer with 50 acres can make 
about $40,000 a year on coca, an astronomical sum in the area.

"If they don't, we'll have a little meeting with them," he said. "We, and 
the local farmers, will apply pressure."

It is unclear how many farmers actually would hesitate to give up their 
coca. In numerous interviews throughout the region, no one expressed 
reluctance to give up the crop.

"We don't like seeing our children and our brothers and sisters working 
with coca," said Hernando Ospina, a 52-year-old coca farmer who heads a 
group of about 100 families seeking to replace their coca plants with 
cattle. "We want to do things legally."

Alternative development programs have largely failed in southern Colombia, 
where leftist rebels have refused to cooperate and local farmers have been 
unwilling to exchange their coca crops for less profitable legal ones. The 
rebels could also prove a danger in Sur de Bolivar if they manage to get a 
foothold and insist that coca continue to be planted.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Agency for International Development told the Pan 
American Development Foundation, a nonprofit group tied to the Organization 
of American States, in early June that it would be interested in trying 
alternative crops in the northern part of Antioquia state and in Sur de 
Bolivar--both paramilitary strongholds.

It would be the first major push into the region by the United States. The 
European Union has been active there for some time and has pledged to 
provide $20 million to make the zone a "laboratory of peace."

In July, the foundation met with leaders from Asocipaz, a nonprofit group 
in the region that has long been accused of being a paramilitary front, who 
told the foundation that the paramilitaries would support alternative 
development.

Also in July, U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson visited Sur de Bolivar to 
review an ongoing program funded by the Colombian government.

Community leaders there told a member of her delegation that the 
paramilitaries would support alternative development projects, according to 
a local mayor present at the discussions.

Both the foundation and U.S. State Department officials denied that the 
paramilitary offer of support affected their decision to launch the new 
program in the zone.

Beto Brunn, the foundation's country director for Colombia, said other 
factors influenced the decision. "We chose this area because the FARC did 
not have a big presence," Brunn said, referring to the country's largest 
leftist rebel army. "We picked an area where there was a lot of coca."

The $4-million project will begin later this month with the paving of roads 
in the hills around this town perched above a broad estuary just off the 
Magdalena River. The aim is to take out nearly 5,000 acres of coca in 18 
months.

Weighing the Risks

Brunn said he was uncertain about how to deal with the paramilitaries' 
offer of cooperation. But he said he was worried about the dangers it might 
bring.

"Hopefully, nobody will get killed for not eradicating coca," he said. 
"That would be a disaster."

But those who live and work in the area said it may be difficult to avoid 
providing legitimacy to the paramilitaries.

Father Francisco de Roux, a Franciscan priest who has long worked in the 
area to promote human rights and alternative development, acknowledged the 
complexity of the problem.

Ignoring the region would mean turning it over forever to control of 
paramilitaries. But working in it means tolerating the active support of 
lawless killers, he said.

De Roux said the U.S. must choose its partners carefully. It must work 
closely with local community members. And most of all, it must in every 
instance try to refuse the help of the paramilitary forces.

"If the U.S. is not very clear about avoiding deals with the 
paramilitaries, it will be complicit with criminals," De Roux said. "It 
will help destroy the rule of law in Colombia."
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