E-Notes

Colombia: A Trip Report

by Michael Radu

June 1, 2001

FPRI Senior Fellow Michael Radu has just returned from a trip to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. This is the first of a series of reports from his trip. He has written extensively on insurgent groups in Colombia, Peru, Turkey, and the Balkans.

After a recent three-week trip to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, I returned as pessimistic and confused about the region’s immediate future as ever. The most serious problem, at least in the short term, remains Colombia, a dysfunctional country of dubious prospects. After numerous interviews with active and retired military leaders, businessmen, journalists, and politicians, I drew the following conclusions about Colombia’s leadership, its dealings with Marxist rebels, and its relation to U.S. interests

The good news is that the military, or at least the army, remains loyal to the constitution and obedient to their commander in chief, President Andrés Pastrana. The bad news is that the words most often heard in private about Pastrana are “weak,” “deluded,” “stubborn,” and “contemptible”— with the latter most often used

Consider the case of when Pastrana requested a military report on the links between the major Marxist-Leninist insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and drug trafficking. Upon receiving the report, Pastrana implicitly castigated the armed forces chief, Gen. Fernando Tapias, for writing it and for concluding the obvious: that the FARC are, as everyone knows, Colombia’s major drug traffickers.

The April 22 capture of the top Brazilian (and, probably, South American) cocaine trafficker, Luiz Fernando da Costa, a.k.a. Fernandinho, dispelled all reasonable doubt about FARC’s narco connections. Indeed, Fernandinho admitted that he paid FARC some $10 million a month for the cocaine they supplied. This news rightly upset Pastrana, since he has long claimed that FARC are not drug traffickers and that he would never talk to them if they were — which sets his increasingly controversial pursuit of negotiations with the group on its ear.

At the beginning of his presidential mandate in early 1999, Pastrana granted FARC a zona de despeje, or ZD (roughly translated as an area of withdrawal of government presence) the size of Switzerland in exchange for peace negotiations. These negotiations never went beyond “talks about future talks,” and the FARC’s ZD became a cocaine-producing, totalitarian, fortified state-within-a-state, whose status has been renewed periodically by Pastrana ever since. Even in light of the ZD’s failure, Pastrana wants to grant a similar area in the south of the Bolivar Department to the National Liberation Army (ELN), the smaller of the two Marxist-Leninist insurgencies operating in Colombia. The area in this case is smaller and is being granted with some additional, though dubious, guarantees, such as an “international observers’ team” to include Cuba-ELN’s creator and supporter

Still, there are a number of problems here. First, the civilians in the area, who have experienced ELN’s totalitarian atrocities for years, want nothing to do with it and are quite organized and vocal on the matter. Secondly, the ELN is a spent force. Its membership declined by half during the last four years, and it is militarily defeated in the south of Bolivar — not by the government but by a nationwide paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Giving the ELN an area of control now is tantamount to reviving a communist force on the brink of terminal defeat— but something two previous Colombian presidents also did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Apparently, that is precisely what Pastrana seeks: the rescue of ELN in order to “negotiate” with it. If the idea seems absurd, that’s because it is. And, it should be pointed out, it is an absurdity paid for — at least in terms of promises, if not in cash deliveries— by ELN’s European Union supporters. Basic common sense would suggest that the army should be unleashed to finish off the ELN and then concentrate on the main enemy, FARC. It is this observation that, more than anything else, explains the military officer corps’ disdain for their civilian commander in chief.

The solution to Colombian political violence is as obvious as it is untenable— arm the civilian population, which is sick and tired of the systematic atrocities, theft, and totalitarian rule of FARC and ELN. But the Colombian political class simply hates civilian participation in the war more than they hate the communists of FARC and ELN. Ordinary Colombians, however, not to mention landowners, businessmen, and ranchers in the conflict area, feel differently. They openly support the AUC. In fact, opinion polls suggest that AUC leader Carlos Castano has at least twice the approval of FARC supreme Manuel Marulanda.

Let us be clear: Carlos Castano is no angel— but then there are no angels in civil wars. He admits to taking drug money to compete with the FARC and ELN; he admits to killing “civilians”— i.e., un-uniformed recruiters, suppliers, and supporters of the guerrillas; and he underestimates the number of innocent civilian victims of his forces, of which there are many. On the other hand, Castano is no enemy of the state. He does not seek a totalitarian Colombia, nor does he fight against state army or police — a great difference from FARC/ELN. Nor is AUC an enemy of the United States. Indeed, while the organization has this year been included in the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, it was included among “other terrorist groups”— i.e., groups which do not attack U.S. citizens or interests— again, in sharp contrast to FARC/ELN.

AUC forces clearly have better tactical intelligence than the military, as many of their members are former guerrillas themselves, and operate without the shackles imposed by Colombia’s human rights groups. Add to this the fact that many of AUC’s members are former soldiers, and the difficulty of any officer’s ordering an assault on AUC in his area becomes clear. What is also clear is that the AUC, and not the Colombian armed forces, is the main reason that ELN is on the ropes militarily. Therefore, for Pastrana to declare war on AUC in the name of human rights is tactically wrong, morally irresponsible, and strategically misguided. He does so to the dismay of his own military, and at a cost of exacerbating the splits within Colombia’s political elite.

It is time for the United States to see Andrés Pastrana as most Colombians do: a disastrous failure and, more relevant, a lame duck. To express support repeatedly for such a failure does nothing for American credibility in Colombia and less for U.S. interests in the long run. If anything, Pastrana is a perfect example of what is wrong with the Colombian political culture at both the elite and popular levels: stubbornness, a lack of realism, belief in corruption as a solution to all problems, and a lack of common sense, all combined with an extraordinary tolerance of violence. The issue should be less what the United States could do for Bogota than what Bogota is prepared to do for itself and for Colombia. Pastrana and his increasingly small circle of defeatists send all the wrong signals— and Washington should put more distance between U.S. interests and them.

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Colombia: A Trip Report

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