From the magazine TIKKUN (Hebrew: To mend, repair and transform the world) May/June 97 Columbia: Washington's Dirtiest "War on Drugs" by Peter Dale Scott With the slaughters of Guatemala and El Salvador receding, the bloodiest killing field of this hemisphere is now Colombia. Leftwing political leaders, union organizers, and many other avilians are being systematically slaughtered, while random terror is being used to drive peasants and shopkeepers from their land. Major human rights organizations agree that the United States should forthwith cease arming and training those who are conducting this organized counterinsurgency program of political terror and murder. A small group in Congress is increasingly concerned and vocal about the impact of U.S. aid on Colombian human rights. Yet many people I talk to, even those who are veterans of the Vietnam antiwar movement, know almost nothing about the Colombian atrocities. The press ako avoids this tragedy, discussing instead more remote horrors like those in Rwanda or Zaire. Uow similar this seems to the 1970s, when we were told so much about the atrocities occurring in Cambodia, and nothing at all about the mass killings occurring with U.S. support in East Timor. In part, this ignorance and avoidance is psychological. People view "revolutions" and "guerrillas" as much less glamorous today, after the revelations about Pol Pot, than they did in the 1960s. And in truth there is no reason to romanticize the guerrillas of Colombia. Most of them have become little more than bandits robbing, extorting, kidnapping and murdering in their turn, and causing vast ecological damage when they blow up oil companies' pipelines. But this ignorance can be traced back to a systematic distortion of Colombian realities in the U.S. press and in Washington. We do not hear that in Colombia most of the killings are perpetrated by the military and its allies, not by the guerrillas. Nor do we hear that these killings are part of a strategy of terror that has been encouraged by socalled U.S. Special Warfare or Low intensity Conflict theorists and trainers. United States aid to Colombia is presented as part of a legitimate "war on drugs." The aid is said to help break what journalist Robert Novak recently called the "clear link between guerrillas and drug traffickers." Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey agrees, and has said that counterinsurgency and counternarcotics are, in fact, "two sides of the same coin." But in practice the United States is supporting a militaryparamilitary alliance that works in conjunction with not against the richest drugtraffickers and their private death squads. Some U.S. aid ends up in counterinsurgency operations where no drugs are present at all. An internal Department of Defense (DOD) memo has conceded that it is "unrealistic to expect the military [to] limit use of [U.S.] equipment to operations against narcotraffickers." The American public is further confused by hearing that Colombia has been decertified as an aid recipient for not having "fully cooperated" with U.S. drug enforcement. But decertification, which embarrasses the civilian government, does not affect the flow of arms to the Colombian military and police. in fact, this is being augmented by a waiver in the name of national security, and again by supplemental "drawdowns" of arms in the DOD inventory, and finally by direct arms sales. U.S. arms grants and sales to Colombia in fiscal year 1997 are expected to be the highest ever. Pacification Through Pure Terror Consider the situation in Uraba, in northwestern Colombia. There, paramilitary units, some of them financed by drugtrafficking landowners, are mimicking the death squads of El Salvador to impose the peace that comes from maximized terror. This approach is suggested by the reaction last August to the "Peace Week" declared by Gloria Cuartas, the courageous Mayor of Apartado The Mayor was giving a lesson in conflict resolution to an elementary school class when her talk was broken up by two men outside who grabbed an eight yearold boy, chopped off his head, and threw the head into the classroom. The Mayor hid for the night under a neighbor's bed, and emerged the next morning to find her municipal car riddled with bullet holes. In Apartado alone, there were over three hundred political assassinations last year by the paramilitaries and their opponents. In Colombia as a whole there were over three thousand such killings, or more than the total during the seventeenyear military dictatorship in Chile. Groups attempting an independent analysis of these nationwide figures, like the Andean Commission of Jurists, estimate that 70 percent of the killings are committed by the army, police, and above all by the paramilitary groups. Of the remaining 30 to 35 percent, most are the work of leftist guerrillas. Less than 2 percent of the killings have anything to do with drugs. Although the gross figure of three thousand political killings has remained fairly constant over the last ten years, the percentage attributable to paramilitaries has been increasing and the military's share declining. The result is a scene of untraceable slaughter, much as in Guatemala and El Salvador. All three countries have suffered from the counterterrror strategies developed and disseminated by U.S. counterinsurgency theorists. (Decapitations and mutilations, now common in Uraba, are a technique made familiar in El Salvador.) The best proof that both the United States and the top Colombian military approve of paramilitary violence is that those responsible for coordinating it are usually promoted. Meanwhile, U.S. aid for the "war on drugs," despite official denials, continues to flow to those units identified with civilian murders. A few offending officers have been forced into retirement or dismissed, but almost none have been convicted of charges, while witnesses against them have been murdered, even when in official custody. Leftwing political leaders, union organizers, and human rights workers are especially targeted for elimination. Wherever paramilitaries are working to consolidate their domination, they are committing spectacularly brutal kilngs of ordinary citizens as a means to displace entire communities from contested areas. One of the largest paramilitary "selfdefense" groups, the Autodefensas Campesinas of Cordoba & Uraba' (ACCU), has been funded by two local drugtrafficking millionaires, the Castaijo brothers. Not surprisingly, they are wanted for murder by the civil authorities. The army has also reportedly provided support to another paramilitary leader, Victor Carranza, an emerald dealer and reputed drug trafficker. U.S. Counterterror Strategies & the Training of the Colombian Army Rural slaughter by armed civilians is rooted deeply in Colombian history, and reached a high point in the civil war that followed World War II. Out of this chaos emerged guerrilla movements and a strategy of government counterterrorism for which the United States has provided training and materiel since 1962. A toplevel U.S. Special Warfare team from Fort Bragg visited Colombia that year and recommended the same deadly strategies then being applied for counterinsurgency in Vietnam. The core of the team's report focused on training of civilian and military personnel ... to ... as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities... backed by the United States." Among the "terrorist activities" then taught by Special Warfare expert General Lansdale (and later incorporated in U.S. Army pamphlet 52571), were the murder and mutilation of captives, and the display of their bodies. in the 1980s, Reaganera counterinsurgency experts like Neil Livingstone (an Oflie North associate) explicitly endorsed the deathsquad and massmurder tactics employed in El Salvador and Argentina: "in reality, death squads are an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combating terrorism and revolutionary challenges." Livingstone even rationalized the tactic of killing not only the leftists themselves, but also their relatives, as a way "to prevent blood feud." At that time, similar strategies, more cautiously expressed, were being taught to Colombian officers at the Fort Benning School of the Americas (SOA). Just last June, Washington's Intelligence Oversight Board found that the SOA training materials had recommended "executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment." A 1992 report by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, which discussed human rights abuses by the Colombian military and police, found that almost half of those involved (105 out of 246) had been trained at the SOA. After the 1962 visit, the Colombian Army promptly incorporated the notion of "civil defense" or "selfdefense" paramilitaries into its own "Plan Lazo" counterinsurgency strategy. Under the legal umbrella of a subsequent "State of Siege," a law was passed allowing the military to provide civilians with weapons restricted to the armed forces. Political violence escalated dramatically in late 1981. At that time the death squad MAS was set up by leaders of the Medeilin and Call drug cartels, at a meeting that some say was also attended by Colombian army officers. Originally targeted against kidnappers, MAS then became a model (backed by drug lords who were becoming more and more powerful landowners) for the indiscriminate murder of leftists, civil rights activists, and civilian political leaders. In Colombia's Middle Magdalena region, the MAS model of armyparamilitary cooperation evolved from a meeting called in 1982 by a local army commander, and attended also by businessmen, ranchers, and representatives from Texaco. (For a while this coalition sponsored training centers with instructors from the United States, Israel, and Great Britain.) According to Human Rights Watch, the army, while using the name MAS, essentially "authorized and actively encouraged civilians to pursue and kill suspected guerrillas." The targets soon included any civilians who opposed MAS tactics. (By the late 1980s Medellin traffickers controlled 40 percent of the land in this region, and funded most of the paramilitary activities.) The Colombian human rights commission, Justicia y Paz, found that around just one village in the area's hundreds who refused to join the paramilitaries or leave the region were murdered. Several thousand more fled the area and settled elsewhere. Many such displaced persons have relocated to jungle areas, and now are trying to subsist by growing a plant new to them coca. After a few months of this terror campaign, the civilian government ordered an investigation. Of 163 people linked to MAS, 59 were found to be activeduty police and military officers, including the commanders of two local Army Battalions. The military tribunal, which insisted on handling the case, dismissed all charges. The government, paralyzed by rumors of a possible military coup acquiesced. Since then the justice system has effectively continued to accept the impunity enjoyed by military and paramilitary killers. This is true even today, though the State of Siege has been lifted, and a 1989 decree has made paramilitary membership illegal. (Reportedly, even after this decree, army intelligence has continued to discuss operations planning with paramilitary leaders.) The U.S. has helped to institutionalize this system of collaboration in murder. From Human Rights Watch we learn that, "Despite Colombia's disastrous human rights record, a U.S. Defense Department and ... C.I.A. team worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence reorganization that resulted in the creation of killer networks that identified and killed civilians suspected of supporting guerrillas." Significantly, there is not a single mention of drugs in this secret order (Order 20005/91), which was designed to combat what it calls "escalating terrorism by armed subversion." The Order does not mention the murders and paramilitaries by name either, referring only to "covert and compartmentalized" civilian "intelligence networks." But it does lay out a system of militaryparamilitary collaboration, modeled on that developed in the 1980s between the Army and the MAS death squads of the Cali and Medellin cartels. Under this system, laws continue to be flouted; military officers continue to equip and oversee hit men armed with prohibited weapons; civilians continue to be killed. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons have gone to one army unit, the Palace' Battalion, that has killed 120 civilians since 1990. The U.S. press ignored a Human Rights Watch press conference last November that reported on U.S. support for Colombia's militaryparamilitary killer networks. A March 1997 article in the New York Times about the Castafios' "selfdefense group,"the ACCU, also failed to mention U.S. support. The article did, however, mention past military protection for the Castanos. It observed that "it is unclear how serious the military really is about catching Carlos Castano," and it noted the latter's wry comment about an army camp being "just over the hill" from his training camp. In 1994, to placate the small but growing U.S. congressional group criticizing policy in Colombia, a State Department official testified that none of the Colombian military units identified with atrocities had received any assistance from the United States. But last October, William Schulz, U.S. Director of Amnesty International, produced official documents that, as he said, prove the opposite: "almost every unit highlighted by Amnesty for murdering Colombian civilians was in fact receiving U.S.supplied arms and other equipment." He called for an immediate halt to U.S. military aid. NarcoGuerrillas. Left and Right U.S. officials defend this aid policy with the rationale that it is needed to combat the "narcoguerrillas." As I explained in Cocaine Politics (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991), the notion of the leftwing "narcoguerrilla is the legacy of a mid1980s propaganda campaign that was promoted in part to disguise the true links between the military and the real drug traffickers. This notion relied on misleading and possibly planted evidence such as an alleged uniform of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas found in 1984 at the major Tranquilandia cocaine laboratory. The U.S. Ambassador claimed (and the New York Times duly reported) that the laboratory had been guarded by communist guerrillas. But respected drug researcher Rensselaer Lee later concluded that this was incorrect; the lab had in fact enjoyed highlevel protection from the Colombian military. Recently, some guerrilla networks have focused increasingly on the profits available from the drug bonanza by taxing and protecting the cultivation, processing, and shipment of drugs. Officials estimate that between 1990 and 1994, guerrillas extorted $701 million from the drug trade. But this figure for a fouryear period represents only 3 percent or less of an annual drug traffic averaging over $6 to $10 billion per year. Narcoterrorism from the right has been the more serious matter, especially with the rise and fall of the Medellin cartel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For a few years during this period, the U.S. press reported spectacular assassinations of judges and a presidential candidate, and also bombings of police headquarters and a civilian airliner. The problem with the leftwing "narcoguerrilla" hypothesis is that it obscures the reality: these terrorist acts against the civilian state were financed by rightwing traffickers like Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, whose death squads functioned in alliance with the military, not against them. In these circumstances, uncontextualized talk of "narcoguerrillas" makes sense only as a way to hornswoggle Congress and the American people. In a revealing article in the February, 1987 Military Review, Colonel John Waghelstein, former leader of the U.S. military mission in El Salvador, and thereafter an outspoken exponent of "PostVietnam Counterinsurgency Doctrine" described the usefulness of popularizing the "narcoguerrilla" notion: "A melding in the American public's mind and m Congress of this narcoguerrilia/narcoterrorist] connection would lead to the necessary support to counter the guerrilla/narcotics terrorists in this hemisphere ... Congress would find it difficult to stand in the way of supporting our allies with the training, advice and security assistance necessary to do the job ... Above all, we would have the unassailable moral position from which to launch a concerted offensive effort using Department of Defense (DOD) and nonDOD assets." Robert Novak and others have revived the "narcoguerrilla" as a justification for maintaining the arms pipeline. Behind this campaign are officials like General Barry McCaffrey, who, before becoming drug czar, was Commander of the Southern Commanda unit that collaborates with Latin American armed forces such as Colombia's. In 1996 and again in 1997, McCaffrey talked of the "narcoguerrillas" as a reason to increase aid to the Colombian army. The Actual Allies of the NarcoDeath Squads and of the United States According to Novak, McCaffrey told him that the chief of the Colombian military, General Harold Bedoya, is "clean and competent." (By "clean," McCaffrey may have meant that there was no cocaine powder in the man's pockets.) Bedoya is, however, one of the chief targets of human rights watchers in Colombia. The American Association of Jurists and other groups have identified him as founder and leader of the death squad Alianza Americana Anticomunista in the early 1980s. Bedoya is both a graduate and a former instructor at the U.S.run School of the Americas, and was once his country's military attache in Washington. A year ago, after the Samper civilian government was first decertified, be tried and failed to secure U.S. Embassy support for a military coup. More recently he tried to convince the U.S. Congress that all the guerrillas in Colombia "are now narcotics traffickers" an absurd notion. Another SOA graduate is the army commander, General Manuel Bonert. Bonett has repeatedly resisted investigation of his troops' involvement with paramilitaries. In 1979~80, he was personally responsible for the area around Trujillo, an area then notorious for paramilitary murders protected by the military. (One of the killers was Henry Loaiza, a member of the Cali drug cartel). Recently the Army, under Bonett, fired one of its most decorated heroes in the war against the real drug cartels, Colonel Carlos Velasquez. His crime was to have complained that the Army was losing the support of the people by its cooperation with terroristic paramilitary groups. Bedoya has since defended the firing. Bedoya's friend, General Yanine Diaz, is another graduate of the U.S. School of the Americas. Recently the Colombian Attorney General has issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with massacres. Apparently, the actions of Bedoya and generals like him are controversial in Colombia but not in Washington. The Challenge for Colombia and for the United States It would be misleading to recount only these negative features of recent Colombian history. Nondrug sectors of the economy have improved recently, with a rise in coffee prices and a minioil boom. Over the years the civilian government has struggled to restore a rule of law, partly by negotiating with drug traffickers on the one hand and guerrillas on the other. Reinforced by the new 1991 Constitution, the civilian government has made periodic, if hitherto ineffective, efforts to track down and arrest paramilitary leaders like the Castaflos. It would also be misleading to speak only of the terroristic aspects of the U.S.backed "war on drugs." Sometimes drugs themselves really are the target, as in the controversial fumigation project to eradicate coca from the air. (What happens in fact is that all local crops, not just the coca, are adversely affected along with the health of those unfortunate enough to live nearby.) The U.S. has taken some recent steps to address human rights violations by the Colombian military, such as vetting the officer candidates for U.S. training. Last September Senator Leahy managed to secure a congressional prohibition of assistance to military units known to abuse human rights. In Colombia's relatively healthy, diversified, and turnaround economy, the business classes have reason to hasten normalization by throwing their weight behind the nascent peace process in their country. The government has just announced a plebiscite on the issue of negotiating peace with the guerrillas, and the issue of peace is likely to be important in next year's presidential elections. The chief obstacle to a negotiated peace has been that the strenuous resistance from the Colombian military is not countered by but is in fact backed by U.S. policy. Historically, Washington has favored strong armies in Latin America, even at the obvious price of weakening democracy. Clinton has done nothing to change this policy direction. On the contrary, his budget for the war on drugs" is now more than three times that of Reagan's. Currently, Clinton plans to maintain thousands of U.S. troops in Panama for counternarcotics operations. The policy of aid decertification only further aggravates the Colombian crisis; as a Colombian Minister complained recently, the U.S. "helps us for war, but not to achieve peace. We need to be fighting poverty." The European Parliament, meanwhile, has voted to deflect half its antidrug aid into health and other civilian programs. As we learned in El Salvador, it is possible for seemingly hopeless slaughter to be curbed. Reluctantly, Washington came to accept the fruits of the peace process in Central America, a process that was in part the work of the Catholic church and other nongovernmental organizations who were backed by their supporters in the United States. However, a key event in this turnaround was the 1988 vote by Congress against funding the Nicaraguan contras. We need another such definitive congressional vote, a vote against aid and support for the military and police of Colombia. This vote would be not only our country's best contribution to peace and human rights in Colombia; it would also be the way to free up funds for a genuine strategy to address the drugabuse problem. ~ For more information, contact the Colombia Support Network, P.O. Box 1505, Madison, Wisc., (608)2578753. Peter Dale Scott is the author and & coauthor of various books on drug trafficking, most recently "Cocaine Politics" and "Deep Politics and the Death of J.F.K." from Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley.