E-Notes

Colombia: Trade, Drugs, and the U.S. Congress

By Steve Salisbury

May 2007

Steve Salisbury is a freelance journalist and private consultant based in Bogota and an FPRI associate scholar. He has contributed articles to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and other publications, and worked as a TV field producer on programs for the Discovery/Travel Channel, the History Channel and FOX News.

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dominated U.S. foreign and defense policies, U.S. policymakers continue to rank Colombia as vital to American national interests. The Colombian government of President Alvaro Uribe has been touted as the United States’ strongest ally in South America, as Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez—supported by Fidel and Raul Castro—stokes anti-American sentiment in the region. Hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine, and to a lesser extent heroin, continue to flood into the United States each year. Revenues of this illegal drug trade have financed in large part Marxist guerrilla groups and rightist paramilitary vigilantes, according to U.S. and Colombian law enforcement authorities. The U.S. State Department assesses that these outlawed armed groups—left and right—could have a destabilizing influence on Colombia’s neighbors through spillovers of violence, narcotics, economic instability, and refugees.

The U.S. has helped Colombia confront this situation with hundreds of millions of dollars per year in economic, social, military, and law-enforcement aid over the past decade. But with the Democratic party taking control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress last January, the Bush administration is not going to get a “blank check” for Colombia, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) puts it. Democrats and Republicans have had differences over how much money to earmark for Colombia and on what, as well as over trade policy. Although not following party lines strictly, Democrats have apparently tended to look more than Republicans at social and development issues to try to address root causes of Colombian violence and drug trafficking, while Republicans have seemingly tended to put more emphasis than Democrats on military and police measures.

Lobbying for the pending free trade pact and to keep as much U.S. aid flowing to Colombia as possible, President Uribe visited Washington from May 2 to May 4. His visit produced mixed results, but the bottom line was that it did not accomplish what it set out to do. It did not sway the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress to support the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Nor did it clear up doubts on the Paragate scandal, which has at least 14 of Uribe’s allies in Colombia’s Congress in jail, along with other politicians, on charges of ties to rightist illegal paramilitaries. The scandal also has his former intelligence director under judicial investigation and his vice president and defense minister embroiled in controversy over their meetings with paramilitary leadership long before they assumed their government posts. They and most of the other politicians in question deny any wrongdoing. Finally, Uribe’s visit did not make a decisive breakthrough to shore up support for the counternarcotics Plan Colombia, though odds are that something can eventually be worked out to continue some form of U.S. funding for the extension of Plan Colombia.

One American human rights activist, who questions the Colombian government’s record regarding the killings of labor unionists and other apparently politically inspired crimes, characterized the Uribe visit as a “disaster” for Uribe, who mostly answered Democrats’ tough questions with evasive generalities. Disaster may be too strong a word, but Uribe seemed to face a number of rough moments, including hecklers and protesters lying nearby wearing body bags.

In this atmosphere, it looks like the Colombian FTA faces steep challenges, the mixed results of Plan Colombia will be scrutinized further, and there will be more questions about the past and present of Uribe and those associated with him over alleged links to paramilitaries and drug traffickers.

Uribe and his family strongly deny having done anything illegal and call the accusations baseless and politically motivated, made by opponents who question the controversial Justice and Peace law he signed permitting more than 30,000 rightist paramilitary vigilante troops, mostly of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), to demobilize on relatively lenient terms. (Under the law, paramilitaries who confess all of their crimes, including mass murder and drug trafficking, will spend no more than eight years in detention.) Notwithstanding reports of some demobilized paramilitaries’ having reorganized in criminal gangs or continuing to mastermind criminal activity from jail, Uribe supporters defend the law as having taken thousands of weapons out of the hands of outlaws and being tougher than what happened in demobilizations of outlawed combatants in other countries that suffered internal armed conflicts, such as El Salvador and South Africa.

In any event, the more Uribe is attacked on the Paragate issue, the more his poll numbers go up. A recent Gallup survey showed that after Senator Gustavo Petro of the opposition Alternative Democratic Pole party accused Uribe of alleged paramilitary associations, Uribe’s favorable poll numbers rose from 65 percent to 75 percent, while Petro’s negative ratings rose from 29 percent to 43 percent.

Some of Uribe’s most ardent supporters say that he might have a checkered past of associations with people of shady reputations. Uribe and his brother, Santiago, acknowledged knowing in the past members of the Ochoa drug-trafficking clan in the context of cattle or horse deals before any of the Ochoas was indicted on narcotics charges, and Uribe reportedly said that he had once met former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso before the latter became a paramilitary. However, there are no court charges against Uribe, and polls indicate that most Colombians feel that during his five years in office Uribe has pushed back Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), reduced crime, and substantially improved Colombia’s security and economic situations. Reelected in a landslide to a second four-year term in 2006, Uribe points to official statistics showing murders plummeting by as much as 50 percent and kidnappings by as much as 75 percent.

President Bush speaks of Uribe as a friend, and this friend appears to do nearly everything the White House wants. But being a friend of a U.S. president with low popularity is not necessarily a helpful recommendation for making headway with the Democrats who control Congress. The big question is whether Uribe will be able to address satisfactorily all of the concerns of U.S. Congressional members. Especially as the 2008 U.S. presidential and congressional campaigns heat up, Republican-Democrat politics may be beyond the say of Uribe,

Uribe did make gains in a visit to the Washington Post. According to a Post editorial, “Whatever the reasons, the Democratic campaign is badly misguided. If the Democrats succeed in wounding Mr. Uribe or thwarting his attempt to consolidate a democracy that builds its economy through free trade, the United States may have to live without any Latin American allies.” However, both Speaker Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid have indicated that until sufficient results are in from investigations into Paragate and the slayings of labor unionists, the pending FTA and any further funding for Plan Colombia are on hold. Democrats are also pressing to renegotiate or amend the proposed FTA text to strengthen labor rights and environmental safeguards. The Bush administration and Congressional leaders have recently agreed to revisit these issues, as well as pharmaceuticals, intellectual property, and other issues.

In televised comments, Uribe warned of the dangers of rushing to convict people without due process. Regarding the idea of amendments to the FTA, Colombian officials indicate that they are open to hearing about “adjustments.” Colombia’s Vice President Francisco Santos unleashed a furor in Bogota on May 8 with TV comments about perhaps redefining Colombia’s relationship with the U.S. if the FTA isn’t approved, but the Foreign Ministry publicly “corrected” his comments the next day, and Uribe appeared to reproach Santos indirectly, stressing the need to secure U.S. Congress support for the FTA and Plan Colombia and not to alienate Americans.

However, before Santos’s comments, a retired senior Colombian military official I spoke with said that Uribe was supposedly considering approaching Russia’s Vladimir Putin about the possibilities of Russia’s helping to fill an aid shortfall to Colombia, especially if the U.S. Congress continues to give Uribe “a hard time” about Plan Colombia and the FTA. It cannot be known whether Santos was expressing a personal view or if he had a confidential official basis for his comments.

Another storm of questions thundered in mid May when former paramilitary leader Mancuso gave judicial testimony, which could have serious repercussions in Washington as well as in Colombia. In his direct testimony, Mancuso implicated, in addition to Santos, the vice president’s cousin, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos; Sen. Mario Uribe, a cousin of the president; other current or former government, Army, and police officials; and private companies, including multinational fruit firms. Almost all of those he has named have denied his accusations. According to Colombia’s largest newspaper, El Tiempo (which is majority owned by the Santos family), Mancuso testified that in 1996 or 1997 Francisco Santos, then an El Tiempo journalist, talked with him in what Mancuso suggested was a non-journalistic way about organizing some kind of vigilante group in Bogota. Mancuso also testified that in the 1990s Defense Minister Santos, then a private citizen, had meetings with paramilitary leaders to propose a ceasefire between paramilitaries and their guerrilla archenemies and apparently to seek an exit of then-President Ernesto Samper, who was beleaguered by a drug-money scandal at the time. Mancuso mentioned meetings he supposedly had with Mario Uribe, allegedly resulting in paramilitary support for his senate candidacy.

Mancuso also explained that money obtained by paramilitaries from private-sector companies, ranchers, and other individuals was mostly the result of extortion, though he indicated that some companies—including those working with multinational banana firms like Chiquita Brands-had “arrangements” to contribute to the paramilitary cause. Earlier this year, Chiquita Brands pled guilty to charges that its Colombian representatives or those of its Colombian associates or partners had made payments to paramilitaries that totaled as much as $1.7 million over several years; Chiquita is reportedly to pay a court fine of $25 million. “On [the] subject of drug trafficking, I managed everything,” Mancuso was quoted as saying, accusing a half-dozen unnamedpolice pilots of flying paramilitary helicopters that transported cocaine.

Denying Mancuso’s allegations, Sen. Uribe and Defense Minister Santos suggest that Mancuso is trying to tie in as many people and entities as possible in order to divert attention from his own acts and spread the blame. Mancuso himself acknowledges feeling betrayed by those who are now shunning the paramilitaries, who courted them when they were eradicating guerrillas from rural areas. He writes at his website, "Those who praised me before scold me today; old allies deny knowing me; those who were my friends in war [now] abhor me." Vice President Santos posted on his website a letter to Attorney General Mario Iguaran demanding him to investigate Mancuso’s accusations.

Defense Minister Santos acknowledged that as a private citizen he had met a couple of times in 1997 with paramilitary leader Carlos Castano (who was assassinated, apparently by his comrades, years later) and separately with guerrilla leaders. But he rejects any suggestion that he was conspiring to oust President Samper and emphasizes that his efforts—made public at the time, he says-were strictly to seek peace and supported by some prominent Colombians (including Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and foreigners (including Spain’s former president Felipe Gonzalez). Samper doesn’t fully accept this explanation. El Colombiano quotes Samper as saying, “For ten years it has been known that there was a group of persons which included the current defense minister, working or conspiring to produce a coup d’etat.”

President Uribe has reiterated his support for members of his government, but knows that “it is grave, for it could be seen as affecting the government’s legitimacy and its image,” says a government official speaking anonymously. Uribe is scheduled to make another visit to Washington in June to continue making his case to Congress. Rebutting the paramilitary accusations, Uribe may point to the most recent arrests of more Colombian Congress members implicated in Paragate as new examples of the action of an independent judiciary, and to his sacking of the national police director and the top police intelligence officer on May 14 over a scandal involving eavesdropping on jailed paramilitaries’ telephone conversations.

As to that scandal, the Colombian Defense Ministry in a May 14 communique confirmed that National Police intelligence personnel had carried out unauthorized tapings and leaked the tapes to the press; that the eavesdropping had gone on for over two years; and that they also extended to members of the government, the opposition, and journalists. Some observers doubt that the government will provide full disclosure and wonder why it took so long for the government to make the problem public. During a televised Colombian Senate session, staunch Uribe critic Sen. Petro questioned police motives for leaking the surreptitious jail phone intercepts just before Mancuso’s testimony and suggested it could have been a warning to demobilized paramilitaries and others against implicating government authorities. The Defense Minister reportedly dismissed this interpretation.

Curiously, Uribe’s sweeping shake up of the national police high command came just days after a Colombian Army surveillance operation gone awry appeared to hinder the government’s lobbying efforts to reassure U.S. congresspersons that it doesn’t have a policy of hounding lawful political opponents. Two Army undercover agents were reportedly caught milling around the home of Sen. Petro’s family. Gen. Freddy Padilla and other military officials said the incident was a confused, unfortunate, awkward coincidence during a counterintelligence investigation of a purported conspiracy by Petro’s ex-wife Marilu Herran and active or retired Army officers to create in Colombia subversive “Bolivarian circles” sympathetic to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Herran, who hasn’t been judicially charged, responded in a TV interview that she wasn’t doing anything illegal and had the rights to free speech and assembly. The Colombian military has launched an internal investigation into this operation, pending which Petro—who has openly talked of his sympathies toward Chavez and been provided bodyguards against death threats—has been left wondering. But Petro’s critics also wonder about his relationship with Chavez and if this has had an influence on Petro’s political attacks on Uribe.

Opposition members and others are troubled that the eavesdropping and surveillance revelations came less than three weeks after Uribe commented during a live TV news conference that he had proof from police and military intelligence that some of his political opponents were working to defeat the FTA in the United States. Meanwhile, Uribe supporters are troubled that while the opposition is slamming the government on Paragate, it is silent about the guerrilla past of some of its own politicians.

With so many questions not yet answered satisfactorily by Colombia, and with internal U.S. politics heating up, the short-term prospects for the FTA and Plan Colombia are not looking good.

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Colombia: Trade, Drugs, and the U.S. Congress

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