The Narco-Terrorist Who Came in From the Cold

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Left-wing rebels killed at least 17 peasants in northeast Colombia on New Year's Eve in reprisal for cooperating with far-right paramilitaries, police and local authorities said Saturday.

...or did the paramilitaries and unspecified local authorities, noting the "prompting fears of reprisal attacks" placed prominently in the AP article about FARC representative Palmera's extradition, decide it was a good time to teach locals not to co-operate with FARC, and blame FARC for the massacre in the national and international press?  I have not yet seen an article quoting a relative of a murdered peasant, another local, or even a non-governmental organization.  Only "police and local authorities."

FARC does carry out massacres— although less than a third of the horrific total, by most counts (such as that by the CDPH, Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights), which hold right-wing paramilitaries
responsible for 70 percent of Colombia's several hundred massacres a year.

Back to Reuters:

The massacre, in which police said four children and six women died, took place Friday night in the town of Tame, in the province of Arauca near the Venezuelan border.  The oil-rich region is contested by Marxist rebels and their paramilitary foes.

In any case, if the AUC or another paramilitary group had been blamed, you wouldn't be reading about the massacre in your friendly neighborhood media conglomerate, Garry Leech of Colombia Journal On-line wrote 2004 June 22.

Salvatore Mancuso and Ricardo Palmera aka Simon Trinidad were both indicted in the U.S. on cocaine trafficking charges based on claims by the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA,) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) that their respective organizations, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance terrorism through drug trafficking.  Speaking to the Heritage Foundation in April of 2002, DEA Administrator Asa Hutchison said that:

"In Colombia, we deal with three groups designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department: the revolutionary group called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia); the ELN (National Liberation Army); and a paramilitary group, the AUC (United Self-Defenses of Colombia). At least two of those, without any doubt, are heavily engaged in drug trafficking, receiving enormous funds from drug trafficking: the AUC and the FARC."

His comments implied that both organizations are equally involved in drug trafficking and that U.S. authorities take their fight against both organizations seriously.  Neither statement could be further from the truth.  The FARC plays a marginal role in "taxing" coca cultivation and cocaine production in the zones under their control and trafficking in coca paste while the AUC is heavilly involved at all levels in the production and export of cocaine.  However, US drug policy in Colombia has focussed almost exclusively on pushing the FARC out of coca growing areas in the southern part of Colombia while paying only marginal and symbolic attention to the cocaine trafficking activities of the AUC, and at times actually indirectly aiding the AUC in gaining control of all phases of cocaine production.

THE FARC AND COCA

In his authorative work on the role of the FARC in the cocaine trade, "The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Illicit Drug Trade," sociologist Ricardo Vargas who coordinates Accion Andina's work in Colombia, wrote that:

"Since the 1990s, Colombian coca plantations have covered an expanse that, according to residents of the affected areas, could be as large as 150,000 hectares. An estimated 300,000 people are directly dependent on the coca economy. These zones are, at the same time, controlled by guerrillas who derive significant revenues by levying taxes on medium- and large-scale farmers, intermediate coca products (base, further refined into cocaine), merchants, and, most importantly, processing laboratories and clandestine air strips for cocaine shipments. These funds are employed to strengthen the guerrillas' logistical and communications capacity for the war effort."

The FARC thus benefits indirectly from the cocaine trade by extorting money from relatively small time players.   In recent years there have also been reliable reports that the FARC has begun buying up coca leaves and coca past and selling it to cocaine traffickers.  However, there is no evidence that the FARC is actively involved in producing or exporting cocaine hydrochloride.  

The Colombian military has used this limited relationship to justify labelling the FARC "narco-terrorists."  Vargas again:

"This military analysis focuses on illegal crop cultivation. Rather than claim that the FARC is connected to the international illicit drug trade, military officers now suggest that that the FARC has developed financial strength through the control of coca-growing regions. For military officials, 'the revenues the FARC bring in from this activity are far superior to those obtained through kidnapping, extortion, or the 'cattle tax.'"

Based on this argument, the U.S. and Colombian governments developed first Plan Colombia and then Plan Patriota to drive the FARC out of southern Colombia, and to erradicate coca crops in FARC controlled areas.  

THE PARAMILITARIES AND COCAINE

Colombia's modern right wing paramilitaries, on the other hand, have deep and lasting ties to the cocaine trade.  The AUC's precursor, "Death to Kidnappers" (MAS) was founded with money from the Medellin cocaine cartel following the abduction of a member of the powerful Ochoa family.   The cartel arranged for training for the paramilitaries in Colombia and Israel by British and Israeli mercenaries.  The first paramilitary units in the coca growing region of Putumayo were recruited and funded by Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and trained by former Nicaraguan Contras.  AUC founder Carlos Castano was a Medellin cartel mercenary who turned on his former bosses in a bid for power.

In 2000 and 2001, Castano, who had not yet been indicted by the U.S., boasted that the AUC received 70 percent of its funding from cocaine traffickers.  After his indictement, Castano became much quieter about his role in cocaine trafficking.

A secret report prepared for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe during the lead up to the so-called peace negotiations between the AUC and the Colombian government confirmed Catano's claim.    On June 25, 2003, Scott Wilson reported in the Washington Post that:

"A six-month review commissioned by President Alvaro Uribe to evaluate the possibility of peace talks with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC and listed by the United States as a terrorist organization, reports that 'it is impossible to differentiate between the self-defense groups and narco-trafficking organizations.' The review also contends that paramilitary leaders seek to exploit peace talks to protect their drug-trafficking profits.  [ . . .]

"The government report states for the first time officially the scope of drug trafficking by the paramilitary forces. Through a handful of drug kingpins posing as paramilitary commanders, they control about 40 percent of Colombia's drug trafficking. The AUC 'sells its franchise' to regional drug traffickers, who rely on the group for security in exchange for a cut of profits.

"The report also estimates that as much as 80 percent of the AUC's funding comes from drug trafficking. Members of the group have said in interviews that up to 10 percent of the drug proceeds go toward the war effort, with the rest enriching individual commanders. Colombia accounts for as much as 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States."

Not only did the Uribe administration ignore this report, but they entered into negotiations with the factions of the AUC under the direct control of Catano and Mancuso, which were most directly involved in cocaine trafficking, while leaving dissident commanders who opposed the groups involvement in narcotrafficking out in the cold.  (See Scott Wilson's "Commander of Lost Causes: Colombian Paramilitary Takes Stand Against the Drug Trade."  Washington Post, July 6, 2003."

The U.S. also conducted secret meetings with representatives of Mancuso and Castano as reported by Narco News's Luis Gomez and others.  

PLAN COLOMBIA, PLAN PATRIOTA AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF AUC CONTROL OF THE COCA MARKET

Furthermore, there is significant annecdotal evidence that in driving the FARC out of Putumayo, the U.S. backed Colombian military has helped the AUC consolidate its control over the coca market in southern Colombia.  In December of 2000, Robert Collier reported in the San Francisco Chronicle that:

"Since early last year, when the army started a gradual
offensive to try to take back rebel-dominated
Putumayo, the paramilitaries have been right behind
them, working in silent tandem. "

Collier also quoted an AUC commander who told him that "We were invited here by many businesses, including the drug traffickers."  FARC "taxes" were increasing the cost of doing business for the traffickers.

At the same time, crop fumigations continued to keep the price of coca and coca paste artificially high, benefitting the paramilitaries who were increasingly planting large scale coca plantations on land abandoned by the victims of massacres and fumigations.

In 2001, Ricardo Vargas wrote in an open letter to then U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson that fumigations and military actions in southern Colombia were actually bolstering the cocaine trade:

"With the suspension of the fumigation and military actions in the coca-growing regions, in the very short term there would be overproduction of coca leaf, with the consequent dramatic fall in the price of coca paste, which would lead to a diminution in the total area planted, an effect not yet attained after 25 years of fumigation in Colombia. It is clear that the fumigations and interdiction actions are the main factor supporting the good price for the raw material used to manufacture cocaine, with the consequent effect of stimulating an increase in the areas planted in coca. Without Plan Colombia the international community would begin to understand that in Colombia, it is not the guerrillas who took the place of the Medellín and Cali drug cartels. Rather, the drug trafficking organizations diversified and proliferated, and these dispersed groups are now the ones who keep up the major demand for raw material for producing illegal psychoactive substances. "

Plan Colombia and its successor Plan Patriota served as a diversionary tactic, allowing the U.S. and Colombian governments to look tough on drugs by targetting coca producers in FARC controlled regions while maintaining the profits of wealthy traffickers with links to the paramilitaries (and the Uribe government.)

The U.S. and Colombian governments have never been interested in really dealing with cocaine trafficking.  It comes as no surprise therefore that Simon Trinidad, who has only a marginal and indirect relationship to the cocaine trade, has been extradited to the U.S., while Salvatore Mancuso, whose indictement served as a diversionary tactic to make the U.S. appeal impartial in Colombia's civil war, and who has much deeper ties to narcotraffickers, remains free in Colombia.

Al is definitely right that "The 'human rights bureaucrats' who have long straddled the fence with dishonest posturing that claimed revolutionary violence in defense of the poor and paramilitary violence in defense of wealth are moral equivalents are participants in this double standard."  And I think that sometimes this false equivalence is more than just a matter of misguided attempts at fair-mindedness. I remember during the last round of failed negotiations with the FARC, Human Rights Watch seemed to have a propensity for releasing reports about FARC attrocities whenever the Pastrana administration was debating whether to renew the authorization for the demilitarized zone where the talks were taking place.

And certainly the FARC has never carried out anything remotely resembling the systematic campaign of massacres and assasinations that the AUC has mounted.

However, I think we also have to be careful not to fall into the trap of romanticizing the FARC.  (Let me say before going any further that I don't think Al has ever said or done anything that could be construed as romanticizing the FARC.)   The Workers World Party and other Marxixt sects tend to take the position that anyone opposed to US imperialism is a legitimate revolutionary -- their backing of the FARC is right in line with ther past support for Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and the North Korean government.  And they routinely ignore the fact that the FARC does inflict real suffering on the people they claim to be liberating by carrying out forced recruitment in indigenous communities, forcing campesinos off their land for refusing to pay their "taxes,"  executing deserters, and using indiscriminate gas canister bombs that have a propensity for veering off course and killing civilians instead of hitting their intended targets.  I have met victims of all of these abuses.

I also think that the FARC of 2005 is very different from the FARC of 2004.  The wholesale slaughter of Patriotic Union Party members in the 1980's claimed the lives of many of those who represented the more humane tendencies within the organization.

That being said I also know that in many areas people depend on the FARC and the ELN for defense against the paramilitaries.  Following the AUC's Mapiripan massacre of 1997 the main criticism people in the region had of the FARC was that they didn't come quickly enough to stop the paramilitaries.  

We need to be clear-eyed about the FARC in both directions -- neither denying their very real violence nor allowing discussion of that violence to distract from our focus on the wholesale, systematic war against the poor being waged by the AUC and the Colombian military with the backing of the US.