Bailey83221 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bailey83221) wrote,@ 2006-02-14 01:52:00 |
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PART 2: The Colombian crisis in historical perspective (Record in progress)
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The Drug Traffickers and the Paramilitaries
Twentieth-century Colombia has been mostly known for coffee and, among literary aficionados, for bananas (because of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel-prize winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude). But in the last 40 years, Colombia experienced the sudden emergence of entirely new export products--drugs (Tovar 1993; Betancourt and Garcia 1994). First came marijuana in the 1970s: potheads in North America created a big demand, the US sprayed the Mexican crop with chemicals, and Colombian suppliers moved into the void. Marijuana growing and trafficking concentrated on the Caribbean coast in the traditional contraband area of La Guajira, the Sierra Nevada Mountain, and the Senta Marta banana zone from which the United Fruit Company had just withdrawn. Marijuana in Colombia was a boom-bust industry: it was immensely profitable in the 1970s, but Colombia's advantage soon evaporated as North American producers began to supply their own markets.
Then came cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cocaine, then crack, emerged as the new drug-consumption fad in the United States (Bourgois 1995). Cocaine processors and overseas marketers from the big cities of Medellin and Cali eagerly stepped up to supply the demand. They began by processing coca produced in Peru and Bolivia by native Indian peasants. (Initially, only native people knew how to raise the coca plant, a pre-Columbian Andean crop used to treat colic, altitude sickness, hangovers, and hunger.) Before the 1980s, Colombians did not grow coca on a large scale, nor did they consume cocaine; domestic consumption is still negligible in terms of demand. The Colombian ''drug lords'' who emerged in the 1980s were mainly people of lower middle class origin, entrepreneurs who responded to international demand, seeking social and economic mobility within Colombian society (Leal Buitrago 1989; Roldan 1999).
In the late 1980s, as Peruvians and Bolivians began processing their own coca and the United States implemented eradication campaigns, Colombians began producing the coca plant commercially. Thousands of families in the late 1980s and early 1990s migrated out of the settled mountainous centre of Colombia into the southern regions (the northern Amazonian jungle), where they cleared the forest and began producing coca on small farms. Traffickers went with them to buy the coca, process it, and arrange transport to foreign markets. And the FARC guerrilla movement was already there in the new producing zones, or it soon expanded into the regions of new settlement. FARC was the local government; FARC taxed the growers, the traffickers, the truckdrivers, and the shopkeepers. Raising coca was a prosperous way of life for all concerned. The FARC guerrillas became the middlemen; it is estimated that FARC today makes about half of its income or between $200 and $500 million (US) annually by taxing coca production and cocaine processing.
In Colombia, drug trafficking relates to land in yet another way. The big drug lords in Medellin and Cali, smart entrepreneurs from humble backgrounds, were getting rich. They wanted to bring the drug money they made outside the country back to Colombia, and one of the major investments they made was in cattle ranching. From the early 1980s on, there is a clear pattern of cartel members investing drug profits in huge tracts of land for cattle ranching in the Middle Magdalena River valley region, the Eastern Plains, lowland Antioquia, and the department of Cordoba. Economists who study the internal impact of the drug trade on Colombia emphasize that the drug lords did not invest in productive agriculture; indeed, the economic resources of the drug producers have generally been used in non-productive and inefficient ways (Reina 2001).(f.#19) Because of the narco-investments, a significant trend toward the concentration of landholding is distinguishable in cattle ranching regions since the early 1980s (Zamosc 1992).
Meanwhile, the guerrillas sought to get money by kidnapping the wealthy for ransom. And since the drug lords were becoming spectacularly rich, the guerrillas began kidnapping their relatives in Medellin and Cali. The drug lords and their families were, of course, terribly upset: in 1981, in retaliation for the kidnapping of Marta Nieves Ochoa, 227 narcos formed a paramilitary death squad called Death to Kidnappers (Muerte a Secuestradores, or MAS) to kill guerrillas. Also, the new drug-trafficking landlords, together with ranchers already there, formed private armies to protect their cattle ranches against guerrillas who tried to tax them and against peasants who contested their land claims. (These were former public land areas where social relations were conflictual [Romero 1994].) So, beginning around 1982, many paramilitary groups formed and took the law into their own hands. They adopted some of the methods and organizational techniques of the guerrillas to retaliate against them. The active involvement of civilians in the war as armed allies of the military was partially sanctioned by Colombian law from the mid 1960s until 1989 (Human Rights Watch 1996, 12-15).(f.#20)
Where guerrillas were strong, the government stationed military brigades, and intimate collaboration developed among large landowners (cattle ranchers and, in some areas, palm oil and banana producers), paramilitaries, and specific military commanders who facilitated their activities. This ongoing collaboration is so close that some international observers call the paramilitaries ''irregular forces of the state.'' There is evidence of intelligence sharing, and many men who participate in paramilitary abuses are former or off-duty military or police (Human Rights Watch 2000, 2001, 2003). The paramilitaries, however, are not directly controlled by the army or drug traffickers: they are an increasingly powerful force with independent financing from the expanding drug trade and large donations from local businessmen and politicians hostile to the central government's peace negotiations and the reforms emanating from Bogota that allowed the popular election of mayors (Romero 2000b).
During the 1990s, the paramilitaries have expanded greatly in size and have created a national organization called the United Self-Defence Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC) that claims more than 10,000 men in arms, a significant number of whom may be guerrilla defectors. AUC is led by Carlos Castano, whose father was kidnapped and killed by FARC. Castano openly admits that AUC is mainly financed by money from the drug economy. The Castano family are drug traffickers themselves, operating through the jungles of Darien to Panama; Colombian judicial authorities have located paramilitary drug-processing laboratories in the department of Antioquia (Gomez Mendez 24 November 2000).
The paramilitary groups emerged out of the cattle-ranching areas of the middle Magdalena River valley and northern Colombia (the departments of Cordoba and Bolivar), but in the last few years they, like the guerrillas, have significantly expanded their radius of action. The paramilitaries are highly organized, have urban as well as rural operatives, and now carry out operations all over the country. In 2000 they boarded planes and flew into zones of guerrilla influence in eastern Colombia and south into Putumayo to massacre peasant villages there. They have wrested control of the oil city of Barrancabermeja on the Magdalena River from the ELN and are penetrating the poor barrios of Medellin (Semana 26 March 2002).
The paramilitaries (or ''paras'') call themselves anti-Communist nationalists and demand political recognition. Carlos Castano has given interviews to the national media and demanded representation at the peace negotiations (Castro Caycedo 1996; Kirk 1998; Aranguren 2001). Vehemently opposed to this, FARC says that peace negotiations cannot come to fruition until the government controls or disbands the paramilitaries. In 2002 AUC claimed success in another route to legitimate political influence: Salvatore Mancuso, military chief of the AUC, alleged that 35% of senators and congresspeople who won seats in the March parliamentary elections were close to the paras and represented their viewpoints (El Tiempo 13-14 March 2002).(f.#21)
On the ground, the paramilitaries engage in extortion and struggle with the guerrillas for territorial control. The form this takes is constant attacks on civilians whom the paras allege to be guerrilla sympathizers. In the 1980s the paramilitaries were responsible in part for the extermination of the Union Patriotica party; in the 1990s they threatened and assassinated human rights workers, unionists, journalists, and teachers, and they carried out the great majority of massacres in the countryside (in recent years, one every two days). The paramilitaries are responsible for the displacement of thousands upon thousands of peasants as they carry out a dirty war against the civilian population in rural areas.(f.#22) Without directly confronting the guerrillas, the paras seek to wrest control of territory from them by expelling the civilian population and then providing security for large estates, the vast cattle ranches that are consolidating there. The paramilitaries charge tribute for the protection they provide. So they are carrying out a kind of reverse agrarian reform, expelling peasants to take over land.
One final point is that although both city and countryside and all the social classes are affected by the escalating violence, they experience the situation in different ways. The paramilitaries are responsible for most brutal murders of civilians in rural areas and for 70% of the displacements that result as people flee in fear for their lives. In contrast, the urban population, including the large middle class and elites in both city and countryside, suffer from the threat of guerrilla kidnappings, roadblocks, and the cutting off of electricity, telephone service, and water. Provincial shopkeepers, small businessmen, and middle-size farmers are caught between the extortionist demands of both groups. The variety of ways in which the violence is lived--which also varies from region to region--must influence people's politics, but the long-term consequences are not yet clear. ''Violentologos'' (Colombian social scientists who study the violence) do agree, however, that Colombia is a society ''held hostage,'' that the conflict cannot as yet be described as a civil war because most people do not side with either the guerrillas or the paramilitaries (see Leal Buitrago 2001; Pecaut 2001). There is, however, some concern that the decision of current President Alvaro Uribe Velez to form militias of peasant soldiers and to pay civilian informants may make these people guerrilla targets, thus drawing an increasing percentage of the population of the countryside and small towns into the vortex of the war.
The Military
What of the Colombian military? Historically the Colombian military has not played an autonomous political role.(f.#23) The Colombian armed forces did not take national political power in the 1960s and 1970s as did so many other Latin American militaries. Because it was functioning within a stable, elitist, formally democratic political order, the Colombian military remained subordinate to the civilian government. But the organization, mentality, values, and behaviour of the Colombian military would be profoundly shaped by its very early involvement in guerrilla warfare. This is an army predicated on counter-insurgency.
For 50 years the Colombian army has been continuously embroiled in fighting a war within the country against guerrilla forces. In this situation of prolonged internal conflict, the military naturally became more and more influential in elaborating state decisions related to public order. Thus, over time, the Colombian military became a political actor, although it did not take direct control of the national government. It is also important to realize that since the Second World War, the United States has been the major foreign influence on the Colombian military; the Colombian army was the only army in Latin America to send troops to fight in the Korean War.
In the 1960s when the National Security doctrine, which focused on the threat of internal Communist subversion, was being elaborated (a doctrine that would profoundly affect all Latin American militaries), it made absolute sense to Colombian officers. They were fighting Communist guerrillas inspired by the USSR and Cuba, they were receiving instruction in US army schools, and in the 1970s they were reading training manuals produced by the militaries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. From the 1960s on, as the Colombian government gave the military a carte blanche to fight the anti-guerrilla war, the state and army became increasingly intertwined. During the presidency of Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala (1978-82), some Colombian political scientists say that a partial military occupation of the civilian state occurred: progressive unionists, intellectuals, and students were labelled Communist sympathizers and roughed up, and both military and civilian officials expressed a polarized view of the world with great fear of ''the internal enemy.''
The government and the army agreed that, faced with a grave internal war, Colombia was experiencing exceptional times. So for decades Colombia lived under continuous and repeated declarations of state of siege. This does not mean that there were curfews. Rather, a legal state of siege legitimizes judgement of civilians by military tribunals when national security is threatened. In these years as well, the police were militarized, and the army became involved in state development projects: road-building, literacy programs, and public health initiatives.
Furthermore, the civilian government declared certain conflictual areas militarized zones with military mayors. This occurred, for example, in the middle Magdalena River valley around the oil town of Barrancabermeja. Often particular commanders and troops in these militarized zones forged very close relationships with landlords, drug traffickers, and paramilitaries.(f.#24)
In the early 1980s, a significant change began. The National Security doctrine came under serious criticism throughout Latin America, and military governments in much of South America gave way to civilian, democratic regimes. Colombia is part of this trend in its own specific way. In 1982 President Belisario Betancur initiated peace negotiations; he expressed his desire to deal with the various guerrilla groups politically rather than militarily, that is, to incorporate them into democratic life as political parties. Thus President Betancur raised the state of siege, proclaimed amnesty for the guerrillas, and opened dialogue with them, and he denied the military a major role in the peace negotiations. Betancur also established a presidential commission for human rights; indeed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s some people in Colombia began to talk seriously about human rights.(f.#25)
As the peace process got underway, discussion also began about the need to trace the line between legitimate military actions and military excesses, or what now began to be called military violations of human rights. The violation of human rights by the military, and the paramilitaries with whom it collaborated, stemmed from the military's embrace of the Doctrine of National Security and the fanatic anti-Communism it implied. For this reason, military officials opposed the peace process and this new talk of human rights because it limited their normal capacity for operations. They saw it as an underhanded way for ''the subversives'' to expand their influence and attack the nation.
With the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, President Cesar Gaviria made a concerted effort to bring the armed forces under civilian control by appointing a civilian to be minister of defence, among other measures. But given the increasingly chaotic conditions of the 1990s-- the narco-traffickers' bloody war against extradition in the early 1990s, the expansion of the guerrillas and paramilitaries, and the escalation of the death rate to levels that rivalled La Violencia of the 1950s--the armed forces recouped a great deal of their freedom of manoeuvre. At the same time, they remained isolated from society; distrust and suspicion characterized relations between the army and civil authorities. In 1994-98, when FARC took the offensive, ambushing military patrols, over-running army bases and taking 500 soldiers hostage, the army was roundly criticized for being weak and ineffectual. But later, after 1998, strengthened by tactical reform and US equipment and training introduced to combat narco-trafficking, the army began to hold its own, resulting in a stalemate. Knowledgeable analysts say, though, that it is nearly impossible for a conventional army to win against a guerrilla war of sabotage; a ratio of 10 soldiers to each guerrilla would be necessary, and in 2002 the army had only 130,000 soldiers, 30,000 of whom were well trained in counter-insurgency warfare. One of the main aims of President Uribe Velez, who came to office in August 2002, is to strengthen the military.
A review of the military history of Colombia since La Violencia raises two important questions: how unified are the armed forces, and to what extent are they under civilian control? The major problem for state coherence and human rights, according to Colombian sociologist Francisco Leal Buitrago (1992), is that successive Colombian administrations have not had a real national security policy and they know little about military matters. As a result, national security has been seen purely from a military point of view, when it is a much broader issue and should be part of an integrated civilian strategy. Because of these problems, the Colombian government never clearly defined and enforced a role for the military that respects civilian legality, institutions, and human rights in a situation of ongoing internal warfare.
Furthermore, the fragmentation obvious in the multiplication of guerrilla fronts and paramilitary groups is also manifested to an extent in the behaviour of army brigades stationed in rural areas. What the guerrillas, paramilitaries, officers, and soldiers actually do and how they relate to each otehr and to local populations varies, depending on local socioeconomic and political circumstances. Especially in regions of violent competition over territory between paramilitaries and guerrillas, some army commanders tacitly ally with regional elites and the paramilitaries, giving rise to specific instances of, in Marc Chernick's words, ''state forces... unconstrained by rule of law or conventions of war'' (Woodrow Wilson International Center 2001).
A number of prominent Colombian social scientists argue that to force FARC to negotiate seriously, to end the war, and to fortify democracy in Colombia today it is essential to strengthen the state, of which the military is an integral part. This may be realistic, but it is not easy to do and the sometimes contradictory authority and ill-defined relations between the civilian government and the armed forces are cause for concern. In the wake of September 11 and the breakdown of Colombian peace talks, new anti-terrorist statutes and a strong military presence in the most conflictive parts of the country (the so-called Rehabiliation and Consolidation Zones) reinforce the military's hand both in the judicial sphere and on the ground.
Final Comments
In closing, I want to emphasize a few crucial elements that must be kept in mind in order to make sense of the Colombian situation.
First, peace negotiations in Colombia have been going on--in fits and starts--for 20 years. In the late 1980s, President Virgilio Barco came to an agreement with the M-19 guerrilla movement, which turned itself into a legal political party.(f.#26) Beyond peace talks, Colombian policy makers also have tried political reform as a way out of the violence. In 1990 President Cesar Gaviria called a constituent assembly to write a new constitution for the first time since 1886. The hope was that the Constitution of 1991 would bring peace by creating more decentralized, more participatory institutions, thus strengthening and legitimating the state by making it more inclusionary. Despite the best intentions, it did not work (see Betancur 1998; Posada-Carbo 1998; Cepeda 1998; A. Bejarano 2000, 2001). Ironically, efforts at peace negotiations and at constitutional reform to provide the legal base for a more pluralistic, democratic Colombia were taking place in the same years that the leftist insurgency and the paramilitaries gathered strength and the Colombian state became more and more unable to cope.
Second, I want to emphasize that the regions where new commercial crops and export products have developed over the past 40 years are the most violent places in Colombia today. These include areas of coca production in the southern jungles (Guaviare, Caqueta, Putumayo) that are the bases of the FARC guerrilla movement and targets of paramilitary incursions and aerial fumigation, the cattle ranching zones of the Magdalena River valley and the Atlantic coast, the oil areas of Arauca and Casanare in the Eastern Plains, the new banana zone of Uraba near the Panamanian border, and gold and emerald mining zones. Most are recently colonized public land areas without a history of effective state presence. They are also areas of Indian, black, and mixed-race people who seem to have experienced more death and displacement than other Colombians (CODHES 2003).(f.#27)
Finally, over the past few decades we have seen the emergence of many interesting new social movements: a national peasant movement that later fell apart, a national Indian organization, various regional initiatives of Afro-Colombians, civic strikes (paros civicos), coca unions, movements of urban squatters, refugees' movements, human rights organizations, and peace movements.(f.#28) Thus, we may ask: what is Colombian civil society? What role has it been playing, and what role can it play in bringing the conflicts to an end? Much of the Colombian writing indicates that civil society is very weak, fragmented and lacks influence in Colombia.(f.#29) One major question is whether the violence of the last 20 years has undermined social movements and made them impossible to sustain or, alternatively, whether it has generated new movements, new kinds of concern and unity essential to bringing the violence to an end. Can local initiatives make a difference? What are the effects of the drug economy on popular mobilization? What are the effects of the economic recession? And what effects do Plan Colombia and evolving US policy have?
To conclude, in this article I have tried to explain the current Colombian situation by focusing not solely on drugs and hardly at all on the United States, but rather by conveying some insight into the internal complexity of the situation and its historical roots.
What we have in Colombia is a weak state trying to deal with increasingly strong private forces who are using violent means to accumulate economic resources (money, land); to establish control over whole regions or territories; and to seek political advantage. The guerrillas are playing on anti-imperialism and nationalism; the paramilitaries play on anti-communism and nationalism; the Pastrana government asked for foreign aid, said it wanted to negotiate, yet at the same time militarized. The government has no workable judicial system, nor does it control force in the country or even its own military, and it is losing control over many regions. The worsening Colombian crisis is generating great nervousness in the neighbouring countries of Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama, all of which express concern that the war and its human devastation may be expanding into the Amazon basin and into the Darien rainforests of Panama.
The nature of the violence has changed a great deal since the 1950s. Although some observers maintain that war in Colombia has been going on for 50 years, it is important to recognize that there was no drug trade in the 1950s, no left-wing guerrilla movements, and no paramilitaries as there are today.(f.#30) The drug economy did not cause the conflicts, but certainly fuelled them, stimulating an ethic of materialism and individual advancement through illegal means, providing unheard-of resources to illegal armed groups, and contributing in a myriad of ways to the weakening of the government. The onset of cocaine trafficking and in the same decade the development of the oil export economy largely coincide with the transformation of the rural, peripheral insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s into the amorphous, multifarious, and much more lethal violence of the 1980s and 1990s.(f.#31) Today's violence is combined with a serious economic recession and high unemployment, which contribute to the recruitment of young people by the paramilitaries and the guerrillas.
The responsibility of the Colombian state for the situation is not entirely clear. What is clear is that the state is in crisis--an institutional crisis and a crisis of representation and legitimation. The political class in Bogota is perceived to be self-interested and corrupt, lacking the vision of socioeconomic reforms necessary to appeal to popular groups and the financial means to carry them through. Meanwhile the Liberal and especially the Conservative parties are losing influence and, with it, their capacity to structure Colombian political life. Although still major players, they are discredited, candidates for elective office prefer to show an independent face, and tiny upstart political organizations compete for votes. At the same time, disaffected regional elites resist the implementation of state reforms that threaten their interests by allying with violent armed right-wing groups. State institutions cannot reach many areas in a positive way, and the state funds that do arrive, given the strong presence of guerrillas or paramilitaries in those regions, are often funnelled into private armed groups' coffers or programs they sponsor in the zones they control. Obviously it is difficult for this state to deal with what is an intractable situation. Indeed, the Colombian state seems to be experiencing in some ways the disaggregation that at present characterizes the whole country.
Ironically, whereas public opinion in 1998 strongly supported seeking an end to the violence through negotiations with the guerrillas, four years later the majority of the population, exhausted by war and angered by FARC, favoured an all-out offensive to defeat the guerrillas or at least wear them down to make them surrender through future negotiations. The election of hard-line president Alvaro Uribe Velez in May 2002 signalled a rightward shift in Colombia as public security and winning the war against FARC and the ELN took precedence over his predecessor's failed peace initiative. President Uribe states that he aims to revive the economy, modernize and strengthen the state, and build up the military to pressure the guerrillas, by levying a domestic war tax and getting more US support. He has indicated his willingness to demobilize the paramilitaries (who favoured his election) by negotiating with them; meanwhile, Colombian and international human rights organizations express concern that some of Uribe's civilian militias will collaborate with and perhaps reinforce the paramilitaries. President Uribe's declaration of a ''state of internal commotion'' early in his administration and his creation of counterinsurgency ''rehabilitation zones'' and citizen militias seem to have led to growing confidence on the right and an increasing number of threats against human rights organizations and others. Uribe argues that coca production is shrinking because of US-sponsored aerial fumigation and that FARC is reeling under the brunt of his offensive, but many knowledgeable observers say that what is really occurring is an escalation of the war (Revista Foro 2002-2003, ICG 2002). The April 2003 bulletin of the Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Dezplazamiento (CODHES) indicates that in 2002, in the wake of the breakdown of peace negotiations, 412,550 people (or an average of 1,144 per day) were displaced in Colombia, 20% more than in 2001.
There is no obvious solution to the Colombian crisis. This is a grave situation of tragic proportions, the end of which is not yet in sight. Some Colombians have asked for international help, but a simplistic reading of the Colombian situation that focuses on ''the drug problem'' or ''the terrorist problem''(f.#32) at the expense of everything else does not create understanding or generate solutions. It is important to attend to the valiant efforts of Colombians of all walks of life to reconceptualize citizenship, community, region, state, nation, and development in ways that will overcome exclusion and bring peace and prosperity in a period when neo-liberalism and globalization limit the parameters of what is possible. At this point, it is essential that international observers who would act ethically and consciously in Colombia attend to the internal causes, domestic interpretations and debates,(f.#33) and the evolving complexity of the conflicts. The Colombian crisis requires sensitivity to the fragmented, privatized, multidimensional realities of the struggle for resources, territory, and political power that informs contemporary violence in Colombia and makes it so immensely difficult to resolve.
PART 1: http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/5881
PART 2: The Drug Traffickers and the Paramilitaries http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/5855
NOTES: http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/5820
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The Drug Traffickers and the Paramilitaries
Twentieth-century Colombia has been mostly known for coffee and, among literary aficionados, for bananas (because of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel-prize winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude). But in the last 40 years, Colombia experienced the sudden emergence of entirely new export products--drugs (Tovar 1993; Betancourt and Garcia 1994). First came marijuana in the 1970s: potheads in North America created a big demand, the US sprayed the Mexican crop with chemicals, and Colombian suppliers moved into the void. Marijuana growing and trafficking concentrated on the Caribbean coast in the traditional contraband area of La Guajira, the Sierra Nevada Mountain, and the Senta Marta banana zone from which the United Fruit Company had just withdrawn. Marijuana in Colombia was a boom-bust industry: it was immensely profitable in the 1970s, but Colombia's advantage soon evaporated as North American producers began to supply their own markets.
Then came cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cocaine, then crack, emerged as the new drug-consumption fad in the United States (Bourgois 1995). Cocaine processors and overseas marketers from the big cities of Medellin and Cali eagerly stepped up to supply the demand. They began by processing coca produced in Peru and Bolivia by native Indian peasants. (Initially, only native people knew how to raise the coca plant, a pre-Columbian Andean crop used to treat colic, altitude sickness, hangovers, and hunger.) Before the 1980s, Colombians did not grow coca on a large scale, nor did they consume cocaine; domestic consumption is still negligible in terms of demand. The Colombian ''drug lords'' who emerged in the 1980s were mainly people of lower middle class origin, entrepreneurs who responded to international demand, seeking social and economic mobility within Colombian society (Leal Buitrago 1989; Roldan 1999).
In the late 1980s, as Peruvians and Bolivians began processing their own coca and the United States implemented eradication campaigns, Colombians began producing the coca plant commercially. Thousands of families in the late 1980s and early 1990s migrated out of the settled mountainous centre of Colombia into the southern regions (the northern Amazonian jungle), where they cleared the forest and began producing coca on small farms. Traffickers went with them to buy the coca, process it, and arrange transport to foreign markets. And the FARC guerrilla movement was already there in the new producing zones, or it soon expanded into the regions of new settlement. FARC was the local government; FARC taxed the growers, the traffickers, the truckdrivers, and the shopkeepers. Raising coca was a prosperous way of life for all concerned. The FARC guerrillas became the middlemen; it is estimated that FARC today makes about half of its income or between $200 and $500 million (US) annually by taxing coca production and cocaine processing.
In Colombia, drug trafficking relates to land in yet another way. The big drug lords in Medellin and Cali, smart entrepreneurs from humble backgrounds, were getting rich. They wanted to bring the drug money they made outside the country back to Colombia, and one of the major investments they made was in cattle ranching. From the early 1980s on, there is a clear pattern of cartel members investing drug profits in huge tracts of land for cattle ranching in the Middle Magdalena River valley region, the Eastern Plains, lowland Antioquia, and the department of Cordoba. Economists who study the internal impact of the drug trade on Colombia emphasize that the drug lords did not invest in productive agriculture; indeed, the economic resources of the drug producers have generally been used in non-productive and inefficient ways (Reina 2001).(f.#19) Because of the narco-investments, a significant trend toward the concentration of landholding is distinguishable in cattle ranching regions since the early 1980s (Zamosc 1992).
Meanwhile, the guerrillas sought to get money by kidnapping the wealthy for ransom. And since the drug lords were becoming spectacularly rich, the guerrillas began kidnapping their relatives in Medellin and Cali. The drug lords and their families were, of course, terribly upset: in 1981, in retaliation for the kidnapping of Marta Nieves Ochoa, 227 narcos formed a paramilitary death squad called Death to Kidnappers (Muerte a Secuestradores, or MAS) to kill guerrillas. Also, the new drug-trafficking landlords, together with ranchers already there, formed private armies to protect their cattle ranches against guerrillas who tried to tax them and against peasants who contested their land claims. (These were former public land areas where social relations were conflictual [Romero 1994].) So, beginning around 1982, many paramilitary groups formed and took the law into their own hands. They adopted some of the methods and organizational techniques of the guerrillas to retaliate against them. The active involvement of civilians in the war as armed allies of the military was partially sanctioned by Colombian law from the mid 1960s until 1989 (Human Rights Watch 1996, 12-15).(f.#20)
Where guerrillas were strong, the government stationed military brigades, and intimate collaboration developed among large landowners (cattle ranchers and, in some areas, palm oil and banana producers), paramilitaries, and specific military commanders who facilitated their activities. This ongoing collaboration is so close that some international observers call the paramilitaries ''irregular forces of the state.'' There is evidence of intelligence sharing, and many men who participate in paramilitary abuses are former or off-duty military or police (Human Rights Watch 2000, 2001, 2003). The paramilitaries, however, are not directly controlled by the army or drug traffickers: they are an increasingly powerful force with independent financing from the expanding drug trade and large donations from local businessmen and politicians hostile to the central government's peace negotiations and the reforms emanating from Bogota that allowed the popular election of mayors (Romero 2000b).
During the 1990s, the paramilitaries have expanded greatly in size and have created a national organization called the United Self-Defence Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC) that claims more than 10,000 men in arms, a significant number of whom may be guerrilla defectors. AUC is led by Carlos Castano, whose father was kidnapped and killed by FARC. Castano openly admits that AUC is mainly financed by money from the drug economy. The Castano family are drug traffickers themselves, operating through the jungles of Darien to Panama; Colombian judicial authorities have located paramilitary drug-processing laboratories in the department of Antioquia (Gomez Mendez 24 November 2000).
The paramilitary groups emerged out of the cattle-ranching areas of the middle Magdalena River valley and northern Colombia (the departments of Cordoba and Bolivar), but in the last few years they, like the guerrillas, have significantly expanded their radius of action. The paramilitaries are highly organized, have urban as well as rural operatives, and now carry out operations all over the country. In 2000 they boarded planes and flew into zones of guerrilla influence in eastern Colombia and south into Putumayo to massacre peasant villages there. They have wrested control of the oil city of Barrancabermeja on the Magdalena River from the ELN and are penetrating the poor barrios of Medellin (Semana 26 March 2002).
The paramilitaries (or ''paras'') call themselves anti-Communist nationalists and demand political recognition. Carlos Castano has given interviews to the national media and demanded representation at the peace negotiations (Castro Caycedo 1996; Kirk 1998; Aranguren 2001). Vehemently opposed to this, FARC says that peace negotiations cannot come to fruition until the government controls or disbands the paramilitaries. In 2002 AUC claimed success in another route to legitimate political influence: Salvatore Mancuso, military chief of the AUC, alleged that 35% of senators and congresspeople who won seats in the March parliamentary elections were close to the paras and represented their viewpoints (El Tiempo 13-14 March 2002).(f.#21)
On the ground, the paramilitaries engage in extortion and struggle with the guerrillas for territorial control. The form this takes is constant attacks on civilians whom the paras allege to be guerrilla sympathizers. In the 1980s the paramilitaries were responsible in part for the extermination of the Union Patriotica party; in the 1990s they threatened and assassinated human rights workers, unionists, journalists, and teachers, and they carried out the great majority of massacres in the countryside (in recent years, one every two days). The paramilitaries are responsible for the displacement of thousands upon thousands of peasants as they carry out a dirty war against the civilian population in rural areas.(f.#22) Without directly confronting the guerrillas, the paras seek to wrest control of territory from them by expelling the civilian population and then providing security for large estates, the vast cattle ranches that are consolidating there. The paramilitaries charge tribute for the protection they provide. So they are carrying out a kind of reverse agrarian reform, expelling peasants to take over land.
One final point is that although both city and countryside and all the social classes are affected by the escalating violence, they experience the situation in different ways. The paramilitaries are responsible for most brutal murders of civilians in rural areas and for 70% of the displacements that result as people flee in fear for their lives. In contrast, the urban population, including the large middle class and elites in both city and countryside, suffer from the threat of guerrilla kidnappings, roadblocks, and the cutting off of electricity, telephone service, and water. Provincial shopkeepers, small businessmen, and middle-size farmers are caught between the extortionist demands of both groups. The variety of ways in which the violence is lived--which also varies from region to region--must influence people's politics, but the long-term consequences are not yet clear. ''Violentologos'' (Colombian social scientists who study the violence) do agree, however, that Colombia is a society ''held hostage,'' that the conflict cannot as yet be described as a civil war because most people do not side with either the guerrillas or the paramilitaries (see Leal Buitrago 2001; Pecaut 2001). There is, however, some concern that the decision of current President Alvaro Uribe Velez to form militias of peasant soldiers and to pay civilian informants may make these people guerrilla targets, thus drawing an increasing percentage of the population of the countryside and small towns into the vortex of the war.
The Military
What of the Colombian military? Historically the Colombian military has not played an autonomous political role.(f.#23) The Colombian armed forces did not take national political power in the 1960s and 1970s as did so many other Latin American militaries. Because it was functioning within a stable, elitist, formally democratic political order, the Colombian military remained subordinate to the civilian government. But the organization, mentality, values, and behaviour of the Colombian military would be profoundly shaped by its very early involvement in guerrilla warfare. This is an army predicated on counter-insurgency.
For 50 years the Colombian army has been continuously embroiled in fighting a war within the country against guerrilla forces. In this situation of prolonged internal conflict, the military naturally became more and more influential in elaborating state decisions related to public order. Thus, over time, the Colombian military became a political actor, although it did not take direct control of the national government. It is also important to realize that since the Second World War, the United States has been the major foreign influence on the Colombian military; the Colombian army was the only army in Latin America to send troops to fight in the Korean War.
In the 1960s when the National Security doctrine, which focused on the threat of internal Communist subversion, was being elaborated (a doctrine that would profoundly affect all Latin American militaries), it made absolute sense to Colombian officers. They were fighting Communist guerrillas inspired by the USSR and Cuba, they were receiving instruction in US army schools, and in the 1970s they were reading training manuals produced by the militaries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. From the 1960s on, as the Colombian government gave the military a carte blanche to fight the anti-guerrilla war, the state and army became increasingly intertwined. During the presidency of Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala (1978-82), some Colombian political scientists say that a partial military occupation of the civilian state occurred: progressive unionists, intellectuals, and students were labelled Communist sympathizers and roughed up, and both military and civilian officials expressed a polarized view of the world with great fear of ''the internal enemy.''
The government and the army agreed that, faced with a grave internal war, Colombia was experiencing exceptional times. So for decades Colombia lived under continuous and repeated declarations of state of siege. This does not mean that there were curfews. Rather, a legal state of siege legitimizes judgement of civilians by military tribunals when national security is threatened. In these years as well, the police were militarized, and the army became involved in state development projects: road-building, literacy programs, and public health initiatives.
Furthermore, the civilian government declared certain conflictual areas militarized zones with military mayors. This occurred, for example, in the middle Magdalena River valley around the oil town of Barrancabermeja. Often particular commanders and troops in these militarized zones forged very close relationships with landlords, drug traffickers, and paramilitaries.(f.#24)
In the early 1980s, a significant change began. The National Security doctrine came under serious criticism throughout Latin America, and military governments in much of South America gave way to civilian, democratic regimes. Colombia is part of this trend in its own specific way. In 1982 President Belisario Betancur initiated peace negotiations; he expressed his desire to deal with the various guerrilla groups politically rather than militarily, that is, to incorporate them into democratic life as political parties. Thus President Betancur raised the state of siege, proclaimed amnesty for the guerrillas, and opened dialogue with them, and he denied the military a major role in the peace negotiations. Betancur also established a presidential commission for human rights; indeed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s some people in Colombia began to talk seriously about human rights.(f.#25)
As the peace process got underway, discussion also began about the need to trace the line between legitimate military actions and military excesses, or what now began to be called military violations of human rights. The violation of human rights by the military, and the paramilitaries with whom it collaborated, stemmed from the military's embrace of the Doctrine of National Security and the fanatic anti-Communism it implied. For this reason, military officials opposed the peace process and this new talk of human rights because it limited their normal capacity for operations. They saw it as an underhanded way for ''the subversives'' to expand their influence and attack the nation.
With the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, President Cesar Gaviria made a concerted effort to bring the armed forces under civilian control by appointing a civilian to be minister of defence, among other measures. But given the increasingly chaotic conditions of the 1990s-- the narco-traffickers' bloody war against extradition in the early 1990s, the expansion of the guerrillas and paramilitaries, and the escalation of the death rate to levels that rivalled La Violencia of the 1950s--the armed forces recouped a great deal of their freedom of manoeuvre. At the same time, they remained isolated from society; distrust and suspicion characterized relations between the army and civil authorities. In 1994-98, when FARC took the offensive, ambushing military patrols, over-running army bases and taking 500 soldiers hostage, the army was roundly criticized for being weak and ineffectual. But later, after 1998, strengthened by tactical reform and US equipment and training introduced to combat narco-trafficking, the army began to hold its own, resulting in a stalemate. Knowledgeable analysts say, though, that it is nearly impossible for a conventional army to win against a guerrilla war of sabotage; a ratio of 10 soldiers to each guerrilla would be necessary, and in 2002 the army had only 130,000 soldiers, 30,000 of whom were well trained in counter-insurgency warfare. One of the main aims of President Uribe Velez, who came to office in August 2002, is to strengthen the military.
A review of the military history of Colombia since La Violencia raises two important questions: how unified are the armed forces, and to what extent are they under civilian control? The major problem for state coherence and human rights, according to Colombian sociologist Francisco Leal Buitrago (1992), is that successive Colombian administrations have not had a real national security policy and they know little about military matters. As a result, national security has been seen purely from a military point of view, when it is a much broader issue and should be part of an integrated civilian strategy. Because of these problems, the Colombian government never clearly defined and enforced a role for the military that respects civilian legality, institutions, and human rights in a situation of ongoing internal warfare.
Furthermore, the fragmentation obvious in the multiplication of guerrilla fronts and paramilitary groups is also manifested to an extent in the behaviour of army brigades stationed in rural areas. What the guerrillas, paramilitaries, officers, and soldiers actually do and how they relate to each otehr and to local populations varies, depending on local socioeconomic and political circumstances. Especially in regions of violent competition over territory between paramilitaries and guerrillas, some army commanders tacitly ally with regional elites and the paramilitaries, giving rise to specific instances of, in Marc Chernick's words, ''state forces... unconstrained by rule of law or conventions of war'' (Woodrow Wilson International Center 2001).
A number of prominent Colombian social scientists argue that to force FARC to negotiate seriously, to end the war, and to fortify democracy in Colombia today it is essential to strengthen the state, of which the military is an integral part. This may be realistic, but it is not easy to do and the sometimes contradictory authority and ill-defined relations between the civilian government and the armed forces are cause for concern. In the wake of September 11 and the breakdown of Colombian peace talks, new anti-terrorist statutes and a strong military presence in the most conflictive parts of the country (the so-called Rehabiliation and Consolidation Zones) reinforce the military's hand both in the judicial sphere and on the ground.
Final Comments
In closing, I want to emphasize a few crucial elements that must be kept in mind in order to make sense of the Colombian situation.
First, peace negotiations in Colombia have been going on--in fits and starts--for 20 years. In the late 1980s, President Virgilio Barco came to an agreement with the M-19 guerrilla movement, which turned itself into a legal political party.(f.#26) Beyond peace talks, Colombian policy makers also have tried political reform as a way out of the violence. In 1990 President Cesar Gaviria called a constituent assembly to write a new constitution for the first time since 1886. The hope was that the Constitution of 1991 would bring peace by creating more decentralized, more participatory institutions, thus strengthening and legitimating the state by making it more inclusionary. Despite the best intentions, it did not work (see Betancur 1998; Posada-Carbo 1998; Cepeda 1998; A. Bejarano 2000, 2001). Ironically, efforts at peace negotiations and at constitutional reform to provide the legal base for a more pluralistic, democratic Colombia were taking place in the same years that the leftist insurgency and the paramilitaries gathered strength and the Colombian state became more and more unable to cope.
Second, I want to emphasize that the regions where new commercial crops and export products have developed over the past 40 years are the most violent places in Colombia today. These include areas of coca production in the southern jungles (Guaviare, Caqueta, Putumayo) that are the bases of the FARC guerrilla movement and targets of paramilitary incursions and aerial fumigation, the cattle ranching zones of the Magdalena River valley and the Atlantic coast, the oil areas of Arauca and Casanare in the Eastern Plains, the new banana zone of Uraba near the Panamanian border, and gold and emerald mining zones. Most are recently colonized public land areas without a history of effective state presence. They are also areas of Indian, black, and mixed-race people who seem to have experienced more death and displacement than other Colombians (CODHES 2003).(f.#27)
Finally, over the past few decades we have seen the emergence of many interesting new social movements: a national peasant movement that later fell apart, a national Indian organization, various regional initiatives of Afro-Colombians, civic strikes (paros civicos), coca unions, movements of urban squatters, refugees' movements, human rights organizations, and peace movements.(f.#28) Thus, we may ask: what is Colombian civil society? What role has it been playing, and what role can it play in bringing the conflicts to an end? Much of the Colombian writing indicates that civil society is very weak, fragmented and lacks influence in Colombia.(f.#29) One major question is whether the violence of the last 20 years has undermined social movements and made them impossible to sustain or, alternatively, whether it has generated new movements, new kinds of concern and unity essential to bringing the violence to an end. Can local initiatives make a difference? What are the effects of the drug economy on popular mobilization? What are the effects of the economic recession? And what effects do Plan Colombia and evolving US policy have?
To conclude, in this article I have tried to explain the current Colombian situation by focusing not solely on drugs and hardly at all on the United States, but rather by conveying some insight into the internal complexity of the situation and its historical roots.
What we have in Colombia is a weak state trying to deal with increasingly strong private forces who are using violent means to accumulate economic resources (money, land); to establish control over whole regions or territories; and to seek political advantage. The guerrillas are playing on anti-imperialism and nationalism; the paramilitaries play on anti-communism and nationalism; the Pastrana government asked for foreign aid, said it wanted to negotiate, yet at the same time militarized. The government has no workable judicial system, nor does it control force in the country or even its own military, and it is losing control over many regions. The worsening Colombian crisis is generating great nervousness in the neighbouring countries of Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama, all of which express concern that the war and its human devastation may be expanding into the Amazon basin and into the Darien rainforests of Panama.
The nature of the violence has changed a great deal since the 1950s. Although some observers maintain that war in Colombia has been going on for 50 years, it is important to recognize that there was no drug trade in the 1950s, no left-wing guerrilla movements, and no paramilitaries as there are today.(f.#30) The drug economy did not cause the conflicts, but certainly fuelled them, stimulating an ethic of materialism and individual advancement through illegal means, providing unheard-of resources to illegal armed groups, and contributing in a myriad of ways to the weakening of the government. The onset of cocaine trafficking and in the same decade the development of the oil export economy largely coincide with the transformation of the rural, peripheral insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s into the amorphous, multifarious, and much more lethal violence of the 1980s and 1990s.(f.#31) Today's violence is combined with a serious economic recession and high unemployment, which contribute to the recruitment of young people by the paramilitaries and the guerrillas.
The responsibility of the Colombian state for the situation is not entirely clear. What is clear is that the state is in crisis--an institutional crisis and a crisis of representation and legitimation. The political class in Bogota is perceived to be self-interested and corrupt, lacking the vision of socioeconomic reforms necessary to appeal to popular groups and the financial means to carry them through. Meanwhile the Liberal and especially the Conservative parties are losing influence and, with it, their capacity to structure Colombian political life. Although still major players, they are discredited, candidates for elective office prefer to show an independent face, and tiny upstart political organizations compete for votes. At the same time, disaffected regional elites resist the implementation of state reforms that threaten their interests by allying with violent armed right-wing groups. State institutions cannot reach many areas in a positive way, and the state funds that do arrive, given the strong presence of guerrillas or paramilitaries in those regions, are often funnelled into private armed groups' coffers or programs they sponsor in the zones they control. Obviously it is difficult for this state to deal with what is an intractable situation. Indeed, the Colombian state seems to be experiencing in some ways the disaggregation that at present characterizes the whole country.
Ironically, whereas public opinion in 1998 strongly supported seeking an end to the violence through negotiations with the guerrillas, four years later the majority of the population, exhausted by war and angered by FARC, favoured an all-out offensive to defeat the guerrillas or at least wear them down to make them surrender through future negotiations. The election of hard-line president Alvaro Uribe Velez in May 2002 signalled a rightward shift in Colombia as public security and winning the war against FARC and the ELN took precedence over his predecessor's failed peace initiative. President Uribe states that he aims to revive the economy, modernize and strengthen the state, and build up the military to pressure the guerrillas, by levying a domestic war tax and getting more US support. He has indicated his willingness to demobilize the paramilitaries (who favoured his election) by negotiating with them; meanwhile, Colombian and international human rights organizations express concern that some of Uribe's civilian militias will collaborate with and perhaps reinforce the paramilitaries. President Uribe's declaration of a ''state of internal commotion'' early in his administration and his creation of counterinsurgency ''rehabilitation zones'' and citizen militias seem to have led to growing confidence on the right and an increasing number of threats against human rights organizations and others. Uribe argues that coca production is shrinking because of US-sponsored aerial fumigation and that FARC is reeling under the brunt of his offensive, but many knowledgeable observers say that what is really occurring is an escalation of the war (Revista Foro 2002-2003, ICG 2002). The April 2003 bulletin of the Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Dezplazamiento (CODHES) indicates that in 2002, in the wake of the breakdown of peace negotiations, 412,550 people (or an average of 1,144 per day) were displaced in Colombia, 20% more than in 2001.
There is no obvious solution to the Colombian crisis. This is a grave situation of tragic proportions, the end of which is not yet in sight. Some Colombians have asked for international help, but a simplistic reading of the Colombian situation that focuses on ''the drug problem'' or ''the terrorist problem''(f.#32) at the expense of everything else does not create understanding or generate solutions. It is important to attend to the valiant efforts of Colombians of all walks of life to reconceptualize citizenship, community, region, state, nation, and development in ways that will overcome exclusion and bring peace and prosperity in a period when neo-liberalism and globalization limit the parameters of what is possible. At this point, it is essential that international observers who would act ethically and consciously in Colombia attend to the internal causes, domestic interpretations and debates,(f.#33) and the evolving complexity of the conflicts. The Colombian crisis requires sensitivity to the fragmented, privatized, multidimensional realities of the struggle for resources, territory, and political power that informs contemporary violence in Colombia and makes it so immensely difficult to resolve.
PART 1: http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/5881
PART 2: The Drug Traffickers and the Paramilitaries http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/5855
NOTES: http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/5820
