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The Dark Side of Plan Colombia
by TEO BALLVÉ

This article appeared in the June 15, 2009 edition of The Nation.
May 27, 2009


A group of workers in the militarized palm fields of Colombia

On May 14 Colombia's attorney general quietly posted notice on his office's website of a public hearing that will decide the fate of Coproagrosur, a palm oil cooperative based in the town of Simití in the northern province of Bolívar. A confessed drug-trafficking paramilitary chief known as Macaco had turned over to the government the cooperative's assets, which he claims to own, as part of a victim reparations program.

Macaco, whose real name is Carlos Mario Jiménez, was one of the bloodiest paramilitary commanders in Colombia's long-running civil war and has confessed to the murder of 4,000 civilians. He and his cohorts are also largely responsible for forcing 4.3 million Colombians into internal refugee status, the largest internally displaced population in the world after Sudan's. In May 2008, Macaco was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking and "narco-terrorism" charges. He is awaiting trial in a jail cell in Washington, DC.

Macaco turned himself in to authorities in late 2005 as part of a government amnesty program that requires paramilitary commanders to surrender their ill-gotten assets--including lands obtained through violent displacement. Macaco offered up Coproagrosur as part of the deal.
But the attorney general's notice made no mention that Coproagrosur had received a grant in 2004 from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). That grant--paid for through Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar US aid package aimed at fighting the drug trade--appears to have put drug-war dollars into the hands of a notorious paramilitary narco-trafficker, in possible violation of federal law.

Colombia's paramilitaries are on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. USAID's due diligence process "did not fail," according to an official response from the US embassy there, because Macaco was not officially listed among Coproagrosur's owners.
Since 2002 Plan Colombia has authorized about $75 million a year for "alternative development" programs like palm oil production. These programs provide funds for agribusiness partnerships with campesinos in order to wean them from cultivating illicit crops like coca, which can be used to make cocaine. These projects are concentrated in parts of northern Colombia that were ground zero for the mass displacement of campesinos.

USAID officials say the projects provide an alternative to drug-related violence for a battle-scarred country. They insist that the agency screens vigilantly for illegal activity and has not rewarded cultivators of stolen lands. But a study of USAID internal documents, corporate filings and press reports raises questions about the agency's vetting of applicants, in particular its ability to detect their links to narco-paramilitaries, violent crimes and illegal land seizures.

In addition to the $161,000 granted to Coproagrosur, USAID also awarded $650,000 to Gradesa, a palm company with two accused paramilitary-linked narco-traffickers on its board of directors. A third palm company, Urapalma, also accused of links with paramilitaries, nearly won approval for a grant before its application stalled because of missing paperwork. Critics say such grants defeat the antidrug mission of Plan Colombia.

"Plan Colombia is fighting against drugs militarily at the same time it gives money to support palm, which is used by paramilitary mafias to launder money," says Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro, an outspoken critic of the palm industry. "The United States is implicitly subsidizing drug traffickers."

Land Theft and the Biofuel Boom

Brig. Gen. Pauxelino Latorre led an elderly farmer through a maze of concrete hallways, past a series of harshly lit rooms overlooking banana plantations and deep into the barracks of the Colombian army's Seventeenth Brigade in Carepa, a town in northwestern Colombia.

Soldiers saluted stiffly as the general barreled by. The farmer--Enrique Petro--poor, in his late 60s, shuffled a few steps behind, trying to avoid eye contact.

Petro was understandably anxious. Criminal investigations had repeatedly linked the Seventeenth Brigade to illegal paramilitary groups that had brutally killed thousands, including Petro's brother and teenage son. As he walked deeper into the barracks, Petro had a sense of foreboding. Latorre opened a door into a building at the back of the base, where Javier Daza, then head of Urapalma, was waiting. In the ensuing encounter, Daza and the general did most of the talking.

It was August 2004. A few days earlier, Petro had complained to the general that Urapalma was growing oil palms on land paramilitaries had stolen from him in 1997, in the nearby province of Chocó. In response, the general had suggested a meeting at the base, and Petro, supposing he had little to lose, had agreed. By the end of the brief sit-down, Petro says, Daza and Latorre had intimidated him into legally validating the seizure of his land. With Latorre's signature on the contract as a witness, Petro lost 85 percent of his 370-acre farm--for which, nearly five years later, he has yet to receive the meager payment.

Petro is one of the lucky ones; he is still alive. According to reports by the Colombian government and nongovernmental organizations, Urapalma has illegally claimed more than 14,000 acres of dense tropical land in Chocó--land seized with the help of people like Latorre and his paramilitary collaborators. Latorre, a graduate of the US Army training academy known as the School of the Americas, was charged last year with laundering millions of dollars for a paramilitary drug ring, and prosecutors say they are looking into his activities as head of the Seventeenth Brigade. Another general, Rito Alejo Del Río, who led the Seventeenth Brigade at the time of Petro's displacement, is in jail on charges of collaborating with paramilitaries; he, too, received training at the School of the Americas.

Government reports, legal documents and testimony from human rights groups show that drug-fueled paramilitaries--often in cooperation with the US-funded military--forcibly displaced thousands of Chocó's farmers in the late 1990s, killing more than a hundred. Since 2001 Urapalma and a dozen other palm companies have seized at least 52,000 acres of the depopulated land in Chocó, most of it held collectively by Afro-Colombian farmers like Petro.

The damage may be just beginning. In 2005 Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, citing surging markets in food and biofuels, urged the country to increase palm production from 750,000 acres to 15 million acres--an area the size of West Virginia. Critics point out that many of the new palm growing regions exhibit patterns of narco-trafficking and paramilitary violence similar to that in Chocó, including massacres and forced displacement. A report by the international organization Human Rights Everywhere found violent crimes related to palm cultivation in five separate regions--all of which fall within Uribe's initiative. Almost all of these regions have also been targeted for palm cultivation support by USAID.

The US agency administers Plan Colombia's alternative development program from its headquarters in the massive bunkerlike compound of the US Embassy, on one of Bogotá's busiest streets. Oil palm, or African palm, is one of the few aid-funded crops whose profits can match coca profits. Since 2003 USAID's alternative development contracts have provided nearly $20 million to oil palm agribusiness projects across the country.

Almost half the palm oil produced in Colombia is exported each year--mostly to Europe but also to the United States. The government now has its sights on the stalled US-Colombia free trade agreement, whose passage by Congress--seen as likely, with President Obama's explicit support--would allow Colombian palm oil to enter US markets duty-free. Although the oil finds its way into various US food imports, Colombia is banking on the burgeoning market for biofuels.

"We are at the dawn of a grand new development in energy: biodiesel production from African palms," president Uribe said in 2005 as he announced the initiative. The country has roughly doubled its acreage planted in palms since 2001, the year Colombia became the world's fourth-largest exporter of palm oil--and the year palm companies arrived in Chocó.

Human rights groups have long accused palm companies in Colombia--Urapalma in particular--of cultivating stolen lands. Jens Mesa, president of Fedepalma, the national palm growers' federation, says these charges are grossly overblown. Mesa complains that the Chocó companies, which are not in the federation, are exceptions that have unfairly stigmatized the industry.

Nonetheless, the Congressional Black Caucus has frequently expressed its concerns about the palm industry, which is concentrated in areas with large Afro-Colombian populations, to the Uribe administration. Worried that Congress will withhold Plan Colombia funds or block the trade deal, the Colombian government has begun to take these charges more seriously. In late 2007, Attorney General Mario Iguarán announced an investigation into allegations that twenty-three palm company representatives in Chocó, including Urapalma's, worked with paramilitaries to seize community-owned land. Around the same time, Senator Patrick Leahy attached an amendment to Plan Colombia funds that prohibits the financing of palm projects that "cause the forced displacement of local people." Congress will soon debate Plan Colombia funding for 2010, the first foreign appropriations budget penned by the Obama team. In the bill's current draft, Leahy's amendment is marked for deletion.

Sean Jones, until mid-May USAID's director for alternative development in Colombia, recognizes that the country's palm oil industry has "two faces." One is the law-abiding companies, he says, but "there is this ugly face of African palm, too, where you have some really nasty players out there."

Paramilitaries and La Violencia

Even in Colombia, with its tremendous geographical and cultural diversity, the jungle province of Chocó is considered exotic. Chocó's tropical rainforests, wedged into the northwest corner of the country where South America joins Panama, are among the most biodiverse on the planet. But most Colombians still see it as a violently contested backwater. Torrential downpours nourish low-lying mountain ranges, which feed hundreds of rivers and swamps that stretch veinlike across the landscape. Most of these waterways flow into the large Atrato River, which snakes its way north through the rainforest until its delta empties into the Caribbean gulf. Locals call this area Urabá.

The farmers of Urabá most affected by the palm business live near two lush tributaries: the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins. In 2000 the government's rural land management agency, Incoder, awarded collective title to 250,000 acres here to slave-descended black communities, who enjoy the same territorial rights as indigenous peoples under Colombia's Constitution.

But the government, in an effort to attract global investors, has also branded Urabá "the best corner of the Americas." And in recent years, palm companies have taken more than 20 percent of the land fronting the two rivers--the most habitable and agriculturally viable part of the territory.

In the late 1980s this part of Colombia became a base for paramilitary groups, or "paras," founded by three brothers from the Castaño family: Fidel, Vicente and Carlos, who came up through the ranks of the infamous Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar. The Castaños received generous logistical and financial support from businessmen, wealthy landowners, drug traffickers and members of the army. They collaborated so closely with the Colombian military's dirty war against guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch referred to them as the army's "sixth division."

Fueled by zealous anticommunism, warlords like the Castaños slaughtered thousands of innocents accused of harboring guerrilla sympathies.
By the mid-1990s, human rights reports show, the paras turned their violence to an economic purpose: gaining lands and businesses, eliminating opponents and protecting their most lucrative activity, drug trafficking. The Castaños and their allies became Colombia's undisputed cocaine barons, earning them top spots on the US government's most-wanted lists. The warlords began a bloody march into Urabá.

First, leaflets appeared warning all guerrilla collaborators to leave, and towns were riddled with paramilitary graffiti. Uriel Tuberquia, one of Enrique Petro's campesino neighbors, recounts that in the months before the paras arrived, rumors coursed through the community that the mochacabezas (decapitators) were coming, a reference to the gruesome way paramilitaries would dismember the bodies of their victims.

When the paras finally came, they killed Tuberquia's father as he grazed his cattle. "They shot him from behind, at long range," says Tuberquia, staring into the palm fields. "My dad never got a proper burial. He's just buried there, somewhere, underneath all that palm."

In October 1996 the paras had a macabre coming-out party in Chocó, with the murder of eight campesinos in the tiny town of Brisas on the Curvaradó River, an hour's walk from Petro's farm. What followed was a crescendo of terror locals simply call la violencia. In February 1997 the military, backed that year by $87 million in US support, teamed up with its "sixth division" to hammer northern Chocó. Army helicopters and fighter jets rained bombs and high-caliber gunfire on the jungle communities, while the paras "cleaned up" behind them. Military and paramilitary roadblocks cropped up everywhere. International human rights groups documented massacres, torture, murders and rapes. Paramilitaries capped off the year by slaughtering thirty-one campesinos a week before Christmas.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, the 1997 offensive forced some 17,000 people from their homes. In the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó basins alone, 140 farmers have been confirmed killed or disappeared, all but four by soldiers or paramilitaries. By 1997 Petro had already lost his brother and two sons to la violencia--one killed by the FARC.

Paramilitaries repeatedly warned him he'd be killed if he didn't leave his farm. He tried to stay on, but after another son left, Petro abandoned the land.

"They said they came here to clean out the guerrillas," recalls Petro, "but it was us, the campesinos, they cleaned out." In interviews, several survivors tell me that when the violence began, paras came to their farms with the same chilling offer: "Sell us your land, or we'll negotiate with your widow."

By 2001, when the paras announced they had gained definitive control of Urabá, Petro and the other campesinos were scattered. Some were hiding out in the jungle; others had left Chocó entirely. Though paras prevented them from visiting their farms, the campesinos heard rumors that their lands were being planted with palm.

Gustavo Duncan, a security analyst at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá, says the paramilitaries' turn to palm was the obvious business decision: "Palm was a perfect way to consolidate their militarized social control over a territory and invest capital accumulated from drugs into a profitable business." According to an affidavit by a former Urapalma employee who cooperated with the attorney general's investigation, the main bridge between the Castaños and investors was Hernán Gómez, an early ideological mentor of the Castaño brothers and husband of Urapalma's current CEO. The affidavit states that Gómez, who did not return multiple calls to his home, helped the Castaños recruit wealthy narcos with experience in the palm business to invest in Urapalma.

As farmers began trickling back to their homes after 2001, many found their lands razed and planted with palm saplings. Companies like Urapalma had posted signs on the land with big block letters: Private Property. A permanent paramilitary presence terrorized the area.
Petro spent five years without seeing his farm, taking refuge in the nearby town of Bajirá. He returned only in 2002, to a devastating sight. "All the work of my youth was gone," he says. "One hundred ten head of cattle, nine horses, my wife had tons of chickens, pigs... everything gone."

Urapalma had plowed his pastures for palms. A year after his arrival, he says, shortly after he began working his land again, "the paramilitaries came to kill me." Petro had left for town that morning, and so he avoided harm. But he returned to find his home ransacked and covered in graffiti. The paras' slogans are still visible on the walls of his dilapidated house.

USAID and Palm

Three months after the paras vandalized Petro's home, Urapalma submitted a grant application to the Bogotá offices of ARD Inc., a thirty-year-old rural development contractor based in Burlington, Vermont, with offices in forty-three countries. On its website ARD describes itself as guided by "Vermont's ideals of leadership in environmental affairs and local participation in government." USAID, a major source of ARD's revenue, has $330 million in active contracts with the company.

In January 2003, ARD began administering $41.5 million for USAID's Colombia Agribusiness Partnership Program (CAPP). Urapalma was one of the first palm companies to send an application; the Macaco-linked Coproagrosur received its $161,000 grant the following year (a third of which was returned, unspent). ARD's quarterly reports show that Urapalma requested $700,000 in financing to cover the planting of palm on some 5,000 acres in Urabá--the epicenter of stolen land. The grant application began working its way through ARD's process.

USAID officials refer to Urapalma's proposed project as a "strategic alliance" and typically call such efforts "community driven." "Without our support," said an embassy official, "farmers would have a weaker ability to negotiate fair alliances with the industrial processors." But according to documents from the Colombian attorney general's 2007 investigation, obtained by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, palm companies in Chocó set up these partnerships to legitimize illegal land acquisitions after the fact--often through fraud and coercion.

The investigation files include an affidavit by Pedro Camilo Torres, a former Urapalma employee who from 1999 to 2007 handled the company's loan applications, including the USAID grant proposal. His affidavit charges that Urapalma created campesino "front" organizations to secure phony land titles and gain access to public funds.

The most notorious case of fraud involves Lino Antonio Díaz Almario, who allegedly in 2000 acquired 14,645 acres--an impossible fortune for a poor campesino--and immediately sold these lands to the Association of Small Palm Oil Producers of Urabá, an organization started by Urapalma. But Díaz had been dead since 1995, when he drowned in the Jiguamiandó.

Urapalma's proposed USAID project, as summarized in an ARD report, referred to "Afrocolombian Associations." According to Torres's affidavit and eyewitnesses cited by the attorney general, all of Urapalma's campesino organizations were set up by Teresa Gómez, whom the US Treasury identifies as the "financial manager" of the Castaños' vast narco-paramilitary federation. She managed at least two other paramilitary-affiliated NGOs and is wanted for the murder of a campesino leader in Córdoba province who had clamored for lands seized by the Castaños.

Phone calls and messages left with Urapalma's staff over months were not returned.

Urapalma never received the grant money in question, an outcome that Susan Reichle, USAID-Colombia's mission director, says vindicates the agency's "due diligence." Reichle says her team has developed a "land protocol and a whole process to really ensure, to the best of our abilities and through several layers of investigation, that this land is clean land."

But, she admits, "unfortunately, you'd love to say it's 100 percent--you're never going to be." Sean Jones, who became head of USAID's alternative development programs in Colombia in 2006, contradicts Reichle, pointing out that Urapalma's application stalled because the company failed to submit paperwork on land titles.

According to CAPP's quarterly reports, a joint USAID-ARD "review committee" had advanced the Urapalma proposal as far as the penultimate stage of the process--the last step before awarding money--by January 2005. Roberto Albornoz, who has headed ARD's agribusiness program in Colombia since the inception of the USAID contract, says his staff conducted due diligence but never turned up evidence of suspicious activities. He confirms that the project was "put on hold" in April 2005 only after Urapalma stopped submitting documentation. Albornoz says his staff did not learn of Urapalma's questionable past until they came across a magazine article published five months after the proposal was put on hold.

When pressed as to why ARD screeners failed to suspect the company of illegal activity, Jones echoes Albornoz: "The allegations around Urapalma weren't coming up in the press at that point."

But the forced displacements and massacres in Urabá were already in the public record. In July 2003, a month before Urapalma's USAID application, the national daily El Tiempo reported that "the African palm projects in the southern banana region of Urabá are dripping with blood, misery and corruption." The Washington Post picked up the story two months later.

In declassified cables from the US Embassy, US officials in Bogotá sounded the alarm about the paramilitaries' stranglehold on Urabá as early as 1996. A cable from that year states, "The Castaños have profited greatly from their activities, reportedly acquiring thousands of acres of land in northern Colombia." The cable refers to growing paramilitary control of entire regions and specifically mentions Urabá.

In 2003, five months before Urapalma's grant request, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights singled out Urapalma for collusion with paramilitaries in Urabá: "Since 2001, the company Urapalma SA has initiated cultivation of the oil palm on approximately 1,500 hectares of the collective land of these communities, with the help of 'the perimetric and concentric armed protection of the Army's Seventeenth Brigade and armed civilians'"--i.e., paras. Soldiers and paras undertook armed incursions, the court concluded, to "intimidate" communities into "join[ing] in the production of oil palm or evacuat[ing]."

Albornoz says ARD's screeners cross-referenced company records with Colombian and US government databases of people linked to the drug trade. But the company had evident narco links: in its corporate registration papers, Urapalma lists as its founding investors two brothers from the Zúñiga Caballero family, which Colombian authorities charge is a paramilitary-connected clan with links to the Medellín and Cali drug cartels.

Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

While USAID eventually tabled Urapalma's proposal, the agency awarded one grant to Coproagrosur, the company surrendered by Macaco, and another to Gradesa, which refines palm oil for domestic consumption and export--much of it to the United States. According to ARD reports and USAID documents, the agency's grant to Gradesa helped support a project in Belén de Bajirá, Chocó, the Urabá municipality that is home to Urapalma--and to the land formerly farmed by Enrique Petro. USAID appears to have supported Gradesa's involvement in refining palm oil from the Chocó killing fields.

USAID insists it has never funded a palm project in Chocó.

Representatives from USAID, Gradesa and ARD deny that the Gradesa project was based in Belén de Bajirá, despite three years of references to the town in internal and public documents. USAID representatives say that the locale was referenced erroneously after Gradesa mistakenly mentioned it in a status report. "The error went unnoticed," USAID's press attaché explained by e-mail, "because our main interest centers on information related to hectares, families, employment and budget invested."

In any case, at the time USAID awarded Gradesa a $257,000 grant on December 19, 2003, corporate filings show that the same two Zúñiga brothers who'd invested in Urapalma, Antonio and Carlos, also sat on Gradesa's board. (Carlos appears on a Colombian government list of narco-traffickers as early as 1987.) In March 2005, Colombia's attorney general announced that he was seizing the Zúñigas' stake in the firm and filed criminal charges against the brothers for using Gradesa to launder narco-dollars. According to a Colombian narcotics official, that stake was 50 percent; a recent interview with Gradesa's CEO revealed that the brothers had owned this stake since the early 1990s, long before the USAID grant. The attorney general's case is now plodding its way through Colombian courts, the government's fifth attempt to pin drug-laundering charges on the Zúñigas.

Despite this pending legal action, USAID approved a second Gradesa grant in 2007, this one for $400,000--monies from a new five-year, $182 million contract with ARD. In a written response, a US embassy official said that since USAID received no formal notice of the case against the Zúñigas, "there was no way that USAID could have been aware of the link between Gradesa and the Zúñiga investigation." The official said "no red flags were raised" in the due diligence process for Gradesa's second grant and that as the Zúñigas were no longer "shareholders, investors or managers" they did not qualify as "recipients."

Permanent Displacement

Life has not improved much for Petro or his fellow refugees. In April the government returned 3,200 acres--just 6 percent of the stolen land--to some farmers along the Curvaradó River. Twelve years after they were forced to flee, the rest remain displaced. The government says it is pressing the palm companies to return the remainder of the lands voluntarily, but locals have heard such promises before. Meanwhile, the companies are shipping out palm kernels by the truckload. Petro has only a fraction of his farm left, part of which he turned into a makeshift "humanitarian zone," a village of wooden shacks called Caño Claro, populated in recent years by as many as a dozen displaced families at a time.

More than 2,500 people still scrape by in a handful of these humanitarian zones, which dot the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins, though none enjoy legal recognition by the government. In some cases, all that separates these refugees from their palm-covered former farms is a cratered dirt road patrolled by paramilitaries, now in civilian clothing, and army soldiers. Children scamper around the camps with bloated bellies from illness and malnutrition, their families torn from their source of subsistence. Of late, reprisals and violent threats toward those demanding the return of their lands have increased.

One day last October campesino leader Walberto Hoyos was shot and killed execution-style near the Curvaradó River, his neck and face pumped with bullets by a paramilitary gunman. The next morning, the residents of Urabá woke up to find their towns riddled with fresh graffiti and leaflets announcing the formation of a new paramilitary group, an eerie reprise of events leading up to la violencia.

The Dark Side Of Plan Colombia?

Was there a bright side?

No one told me about the pluses. Presumably because there are none.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish ... 5101.shtml

Neoliberalism needs death squads in Colombia
By Hans Bennett
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 8, 2009, 00:22

In her new book, Blood & Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, author Jasmin Hristov writes: “For roughly forty years, the Colombian state has been playing a double game: prohibiting the formation of paramilitary groups with one law and facilitating their existence with another; condemning their barbarities and at the same time assisting their operations; promising to bring perpetrators of crime to justice, while opening the door to perpetual immunity; convicting them of narco-trafficking, yet profiting from their drug deals; announcing to the world the government’s persecution of paramilitary organizations, even though in reality these ‘illegal armed groups’ have been carrying out the dirty work unseemly for a state that claims to be democratic and worthy of billions of dollars in US military aid.”

As the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, Colombia has long been the US’ most important ally in Latin America. Simultaneously, Colombia has also become the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator, with Colombia’s numerous paramilitary organizations recently taking center stage, as they’ve gradually become directly responsible for more human rights atrocities than the formal military and police. In the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” poor people and dissidents are massacred, assassinated, tortured, and disappeared, among other atrocities—done to eliminate particular individuals and to “set an example” by intimidating others in the community. 97 percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished.

In recent years, a variety of human rights organizations, as well as mainstream academics and journalists have found it impossible to ignore the astronomical human rights violations. However, even though these groups have accurately reported on the actual atrocities, Jasmin Hristov argues that in their reports, the atrocities are largely de-contextualized from the powerful forces in Colombia and the US that directly benefit from this repression. According to Hristov, this mainstream presentation serves to mask the fact that US and Colombian elites directly support (via funding, training, supervising, and providing legal immunity for) state repression carried out by the police and military, as well as illegal paramilitary groups that are unofficially sanctioned by the government. Whether it is murdering labor organizers or displacing an indigenous community because a US corporation wants to drill for oil on their land, Hristov passionately asserts that death squad violence is purposefully directed towards sectors of society that stand in the way of the ruling class’ efforts to maintain economic dominance and acquire more resources to make even more profit.

In her book, Hristov does make a convincing argument that Colombia’s notorious death squads are inherently linked to maintenance of the country’s extreme economic inequality. Particularly since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s that have increased poverty, Colombia’s poor continue to resist their oppression in many different ways. In response, state repression on a variety of levels is needed to terrorize unarmed social movements and other community groups and activists.

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov seeks to expose the rational motivations behind state violence for capitalism’s economic elites in the US and Colombia. In meticulous detail, Hristov shows how the super-rich benefit from state repression and how the violators of human rights have essentially become immune from any consequences for their actions. If death squads are truly to be abolished in Colombia, we must look honestly at how and why they exist today. Hristov’s new book is a powerful tool for exposing who truly calls the shots.

Neoliberalism or neopoverty?

Hristov asserts that “it is not a mere coincidence that during the era of accelerated neoliberal restructuring, the deterioration in the living conditions of the working majority has been accompanied by an increase in the capabilities and activities of military, police, and paramilitary groups, as well as the portrayal of social movements as forces that must be monitored, silenced, and eventually dismantled.” The scandalous epidemic of poverty in Colombia is key to understanding Colombian politics, and why the upper classes so fear political organizing among the poor, who could mount a formidable opposition to the status quo if allowed to organize unrestrained by state repression.

When neoliberal policies were adopted by the Colombian government in the 1990s, it dramatically increased poverty, and made an already terrible situation worse. Hristov writes that the “essential components of neoliberalism are trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Trade liberalization entails the removal of any trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas. Privatization requires the sale of public enterprises and assets to private owners. Through the removal of government restrictions and interventions on capital, deregulation allows market forces to act as a self-regulating mechanism . . . Austerity requires the drastic reduction or elimination of expenditures for social programs and services.”

She argues that the “main cause that led to the official adoption of neoliberal policies by the developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere was the pressure to service their external debts in the late 1970s. In order to receive loans from the World Bank (WB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nations had to agree to a program of structural adjustment that included drastically reducing public spending in health, education, and welfare,” and much more.

Because Colombia had less debt than other Latin American countries, “major neoliberal restructuring did not begin until 1990, under President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-94), when the country began to receive massive amounts of US military aid . . . In addition to the significant social damage wrought by these policies, by the mid-1990s Colombia had to almost double its borrowing from the IMF because of the economic crisis brought on by the market liberalization,” writes Hristov.

These drastic reforms have intensified since current President Alvaro Uribe came to power in 2002. After the IMF loaned $2.1 billion in 2003 on the condition that the reforms be accelerated, Uribe “privatized one of the country’s largest banks (BANCAFE), restructured the pension program, and reduced the number of public-sector workers in order to cut budget deficits, as required by the international lending institution. Uribe also closed down some of the country’s biggest public hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs, and denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors,” reports Hristov.

These are a few of the statistics compiled by Hristov, who writes that “in a country of 45 million, around 11 million people are unable to afford even one nutritious meal a day. According to statistics from 2005, 65 percent of Colombians are unable to regularly satisfy basic subsistence needs. In rural areas, the poverty rate is as high as 85 percent . . . In 2000 it was estimated that half a million children suffer from malnutrition and close to 2.5 million children between the ages of six and seventeen are forced to work . . . Furthermore, there has been a notable decline in school attendance, literacy, and life expectancy as well as access to child care and education over the past couple of years.”

Blood, capital, and the state coercive apparatus

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov details many horrifying ways in which the rich are empowered by violence from what she identifies as the “state’s coercive apparatus” (SCA). She argues that “two intertwining motifs run throughout Colombia’s history: (1) social relations marked by inequality, exploitation, and exclusion and (2) violence employed by those with economic and political power over the working majority and the poor in order to acquire control over resources, forcibly recruit labor, and suppress or eliminate dissent.”

Dating back to the European conquest of the Americas, Hristov asserts that violence has been central to the creation of modern-day Colombia’s government and economy. She writes that “starting in the late 1500s, the conquerors began clearing the indigenous population from territories with desirable characteristics—mineral deposits, fertile soil, access to water, transportation routes, and so on. The separation of the indigenous from their means of subsistence allowed the formation of a local colonial elite who transformed what used to be the native inhabitants communal lands into large estates or haciendas. The creation of landless peasants facilitated the supply of labor for the Spaniards’ ventures, such as mining and agriculture.”

State violence supporting the economic elite continued, but became much worse in the 1960s under the direction of the US military. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights reports that in the 1960s, “during the Kennedy administration,” the US “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.” This “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine . . . not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game . . . the right to combat the internal enemy . . . this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.”

As Edward Herman, co-author of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism explained in a previous interview with Upside Down World, US support for repressive governments in Colombia and throughout Latin America was, and still is, part of a general policy towards third world populations. Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Herman and co-author Noam Chomsky argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights.

In the 1960s, the US and Colombian governments launched Plan Lazo, designed to target the “internal enemy.” Hristov writes that “the military aid that was part of Plan Lazo (and all subsequent programs, including those in place today, such as the Patriot Plan) were given on the condition that Colombian forces would use terror and violence, since these formed a legitimate part of the overall anticommunist offensive. In 1966 the field manual US Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while antiguerrilla should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was acceptable and was justified as a necessary response to the alleged terrorism committed by rebel forces.”

Hristov asserts that while the US handled the “financial and ideological aspects” of building and strengthening the SCA, locally the Colombian elites also played a key role. “It implemented many of the policies suggested by the US counterinsurgency manual in order to discipline the civilian population through measures such as press censorship, the suspension of civil rights (to permit arrest on mere suspicion), and the forced relocation of entire villages. President Guillermo Leon Valencia (1962-66) boosted the anticommunist campaign by declaring a state of siege whereby judicial and political powers were transferred to the military while the latter was freed from accountability to civilian authorities for its conduct.”

With US financing and supervision, the Colombian armed forces have since become one of the most renowned human rights violators in the world. This despicable conduct eventually created significant local and international opposition, and under this pressure the SCA has been forced to adjust. In response, the responsibility for repression has shifted more towards paramilitaries, whose activities are officially independent of the government. In this situation, when paramilitaries target the “internal enemy,” the same goal is accomplished as if the government itself did it, yet the government cannot be officially linked to the violence.

The paramilitarization of Colombia

The size and strength of paramilitary death squads in Colombia has steadily increased since they were first established in the 1960s. According to Hristov, the paramilitaries are now responsible for about 80 percent of human rights violations in Colombia, compared to 16 percent by the rebel guerrillas. The paramilitaries’ evolution, Hristov argues, is the result of “perhaps the most creative and intelligent effort by an elite-dominated state to counteract revolutionary processes . . . The Colombian parastatal system represents neither a traditional centralized authoritarian regime, as those that existed in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, nor merely a collection of autonomous armed bands dispersed over rural areas, each ruling locally, as in Mexico. What we see in Colombia is a mutated SCA that has assumed a nonstate appearance.”

The function of the paramilitaries in Colombia was explained well by Captain Gilberto Cardenas, former captain of the national police and former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit in the Uraba region. In 2002, testifying against the commander of the Seventeenth Brigade of the Colombian armed forces, Cardenas told representatives of the United Nations and Colombian authorities that “The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and the police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, the [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces . . . members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.”

The paramilitary system first began in the mid-1960s when the Colombian government passed legislation that authorized citizens to carry arms and assist the military in repression. Hristov argues that “paramilitary forces entered the scene to perform two main functions.” The first was to participate in combat at a local level, as described by the 1966 US Army Counterinsurgency Forces field manual, which stated: “paramilitary units can support the national army in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations when the latter are being conducted in their own province or political subdivision.” Second, Hristov writes that paramilitaries “were intended to monitor and gather intelligence on the rebels, their civilian supporters, and social organizations by establishing networks throughout the country.”

While these early paramilitaries did play some role in state repression, it would not be until the 1980s that they really began to increase in size and influence. Hristov writes that “the 1980s were the golden age of paramilitary development, as many new groups formed, expanded, and rapidly acquired financial and military strength . . . This second wave of creation enacted by large-scale landowners, cattle ranchers, mining entrepreneurs (particularly those in the emerald business) and narco-lords took place in a particular context, characterized by five main features: a shift in the state’s (unofficial) policy toward the partial privatization of coercion; the state’s fusion with the elite; a legal framework that had set the ground for the design, training, equipping, and administration by the state military of armed bodies outside its institution; a prevailing anticommunist ideology; and militarized patches of the country that served as models to emulate.”

This second wave was given another boost in 1994 with the creation of the Community Rural Surveillance Associations (CONVIVIR) by current President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who was the governor of the department of Antioquia at that time. Hristov writes that Uribe made CONVIVIR into “a replica of the original paramilitary bodies designed in the 1960s. As it had thirty years ago, now the civilian counterpart of the SCA was to take on a central role in the Dirty War under a legal mantle. By the time CONVIVIR was outlawed, in 1999, most of the numerous paramilitary self defense bodies had united, attaining an organizational and military capacity unsurpassed by paramilitary forces in any other Latin American country.”

In August, 1998, just before the legislation supporting CONVIVIR was abolished, hundreds of members publicly announced that they would be joining the AUC paramilitary network, which became the most prominent paramilitary network in Colombia. The AUC had been created in 1997, mostly under the leadership of Carlos Castano and his paramilitary group, the ACCU, which became the largest group in the AUC federation. Others that operated in this loose confederation of paramilitary groups included Bloque Cacique Nutibara, the Bloque Central Bolivar, and the Bloque de Magdalena Medio.

Following official “peace negotiations” between the AUC and the Colombian government which began in 2002 with an official AUC ceasefire agreement, the AUC officially disbanded in February 2006, as part of an overall public disarmament of many paramilitaries throughout Colombia. However Hristov argues that “there are many factors challenging the legitimacy of the peace process. First, during the entire period of the cease-fire announced by the AUC, its groups regularly engaged in military actions against civilians, thereby committing human rights violations (and such activities continue to take place). Second, often those who claimed to be demobilizing were not the real paramilitary combatants but hired criminals, or drug dealers who had bought the AUC franchise. Third, large quantities of arms that should have been turned over were not. Fourth, fighters who are officially considered demobilized are in reality already active militarily in new organizations, where their skills of terrorizing the civilian population for economic gains are necessary and valued.”

Since 2006, there have been several government initiatives that give the formal appearance of the Colombian government working to combat paramilitaries. Hristov explains that “early in 2007 the Supreme Court began investigating numerous connections between paramilitaries and important state actors, such as senators, representatives, deputies, councilors, and mayors. As time went by, the public learned of more and more cases in which the legal (state officials with their political authority and legitimacy) and the illegal (paramilitary groups with their economic and military power) had entered into alliances to advance their mutual interests. Through mid-2008, 38 percent of members of Congress have been implicated in this parapolitica scandal.”

While Hristov recognizes some importance in these recent investigations, she feels that their real impact has been extremely limited. She argues that “despite all the cases that have been exposed, parapolitica is not likely to be eradicated from the Colombian political system. On the contrary, the flood of revelations about politicians’ connections to the paramilitary actually allows serious crimes, such as complicity in massacres, to get buried under waves of minor offenses, and eventually the entire issue becomes just another corruption scandal.”

In their 2009 report on Colombia, Human Rights Watch concluded that there are many “threats to accountability for paramilitaries’ accomplices,” reporting that “the Uribe administration has repeatedly taken actions that could sabotage the investigations. Administration officials have issued public personal attacks on the Supreme Court and its members, in some cases making accusations that have turned out to be baseless, in what increasingly looks like a campaign to discredit the court. In mid-2008 the administration proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have removed what are known as the ‘parapolitics’ investigations from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, but it withdrew the proposal in November. The administration also blocked what is known as the ‘empty chair’ bill, which would have reformed the Congress to sanction parties that had backed politicians linked to paramilitaries.”

Hristov concludes that the centrality of paramilitaries to Colombian politics will not be disappearing anytime soon, mostly because repression has been necessary to enforce the country’s stark social/political/economic injustice. Hristov argues that the paramilitaries have become an essential tool of repression, and because Colombia’s poor majority will continue to resist this outrageous poverty, the paramilitaries’ repression will continue. Seen in this context, the recent demobilization process is only a tactical restructuring of paramilitaries and the SCA, similar to their restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s. Hristov sees this restructuring as an “adaptation response” to “assure its future survival” in the face of “the reality of resistance and opposition by numerous sectors of society against further dispossession,” with the state’s ultimate goal being “the institutionalization of paramilitarism and the legalization of capital accumulation through violence.”

War on narco-terrorists?

Since the official end of the Cold War in 1989, US rhetorical justification for allying itself with and providing military aid to the Colombian government has shifted from fighting “communism” to fighting “narco-terrorism.” Hristov argues that official rhetoric may have changed but it’s still easy to expose this fraudulent war on narco-terrorism as actually being a war against poor people. Concerning the so-called war on terrorism, how can the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator fight terrorism? Then, similar to the absurd notion of a terrorist fighting terrorism, how can a government heavily complicit in the drug trade claim that it is fighting a war on drugs?

The Colombian government’s multi-faceted complicity in drug trafficking extends all the way to current President Uribe, who was listed by the Pentagon itself, as one of the most wanted international drug traffickers. A declassified National Security Archives report dated September 23, 1991, explicitly accused Uribe of being a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of Pablo Escobar. This report states further that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the US and Colombia. These individuals are also contracted as ‘HIT MEN’ to assassinate individuals targeted by the ‘extraditables,’ or individual ‘narcotic leaders,’ and to perform terrorist acts against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”

It’s not just the Colombian government! Hristov argues that the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) “has in reality been converted largely to an instrument of drug traffickers and paramilitaries.” To support this assertion, she cites a 2004 memorandum issued by a lawyer at the US Department of Justice named Thomas M. Kent, which accused the DEA of extreme misconduct. Kent states that strong evidence of misconduct is routinely ignored by the control agencies of the Department of Justice. Hristov summarizes key points made in Kent’s memorandum, including “to supplement their $7,000 monthly salary, some DEA agents have managed to negotiate with Colombian drug dealers . . . DEA personnel have been implicated in the killing of informants . . . Members of the AUC [paramilitaries] have been assisted by DEA agents in money laundering . . . DEA agents have participated in the extortion of drug traffickers awaiting extradition.”

On another note, Hristov makes the important point that drug trafficking and the rise of paramilitaries have both fed each other in two key ways. “First, the groups involved in trafficking needed to protect their laboratories, illegal cultivation, and clandestine airstrips in rural areas stimulated the emergence of local armed groups outside the state. Second, many drug dealers had begun to invest their capital in millions of hectares of the best agricultural land in the country . . . and they needed armed forces to protect their lands.” Hristov adds further that “the preexisting concentration of land ownership in the hands of the elite and the displacement of impoverished peasants was aggravated dramatically by this trend.”

To further expose this fraudulent “war on drugs,” it should be noted that the US government has a long history of complicity in drug trafficking, particularly in Latin America. While author William Blum has written the definitive short article on the topic, Alfred McCoy has written the most comprehensive book, titled The Politics of Heroin, documenting the CIA’s relationships with drug traffickers around the world, including in France, Italy, China, Laos, Afghanistan, Haiti, and throughout Latin America. In 1989, a Senatorial Committee chaired by Senator John Kerry documented that during the 1980s, while working with the anti-Sandinista “Contras,” the CIA and other branches of the US government were complicit in trafficking cocaine into the US from Latin America. The Kerry Committee concluded a three year investigation by stating in their report that “there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region . . . US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua . . . In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.”

The Kerry Committee’s report and the story behind it has been analyzed well by authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their book Cocaine Politics. In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News (later expanded and made into a book in 1999) which directly tied Contra cocaine traffickers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses (both protected by the US government) to Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross, who played a key role in starting the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The mainstream media launched a smear campaign attacking Webb’s story that eventually caused even the Mercury News to denounce Webb. However, several prominent journalists came to Webb’s defense and challenged the mainstream media’s smear campaign, including Norman Solomon, Robert Parry, and Counterpunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Unmasking the unholy alliance

The relationship between the US and Colombian elite is truly an unholy alliance. With US President Barack Obama praising the Colombian government and attempting to build several new military bases in Colombia, it is more important than ever to expose the truth about who supports death squads and why. Hopefully Blood & Capital will receive the attention that it deserves, and Hristov’s meticulous research can be used to truly disarm the state coercive apparatus in Colombia.




-Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist whose website is insubordination.blogspot.com. This article was first published at UpsideDownWorld.org on September 3, 2009.

Plan Columbia: Cashing In on the Drug War
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 2vCg&hl=en

I can't read about Plan Columbia or watch a vid like above without being overwhelmed with a profound feeling of anger, disgust and revulsion at the incredible contempt for life and arrogant presumption of superiority by which it has been promoted as a 'solution' to the problem of narco-trafficing and drug-crime -- issues which are only aggravated by Plan Columbia. The largescale poisoning of rural Columbian peoples and the destruction of millions of acres of equatorial forestland, farms, rivers and valleys is an enormous crime which amounts to US state-subsidized genocide.

The Columbian Congress was never even consulted; Instead, Columbia's executive in collusion with elite businesspeople and military interests wrote-off on the plan, while in the US Congressional debate centered around the numbers of new helicopter orders that would be apportioned for Connecticut and Texas to disperse the toxic cloud of secretly-enhanced Roundup formula prepared by Monsanto according to the recommendation of the Rand Corp. study authorized by the Pentagon -- as initial plans providing far-more cost-effective, practical solutions such as crop-substitution subsidies and drug-treatment gave way to the US's heavy military lobby -- with predictably ruinous, disasterous results: Coca and poppy harvests actually doubled and tripled as plantings were diversified.

It is hard to see how the program could be a bigger failure even if that were to be its planned result. Truly a flagship demonstration of government policy totally disconnected from reality, causing enormous devastation and achieving nothing of benefit while squandering billions, essentially working at cross-purposes for the reward and enrichment of its own small group of fanatical supporters.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/05/ ... -colombia/

January 05, 2012

The Wikileaks Revelations

The AFL-CIO and Colombia

by ALBERTO C. RUIZ


Ernesto Guevara “feels that in social and political matters the role of Latin America has been one of neglect. As an example of this, he remarked on one occasion, ‘Five thousand workers are shot down in the Bolivian highlands, and maybe there is one line in the New York papers, which mentions that there is labor unrest in Bolivia.’ He wonders if the United States so-called international labor unions would take an interest in the South American worker and if it might help to raise the living standards of the Latin Americans to a level which might come closer to that of the North Americans.”

–CIA biographical report on Che, 1958

(as reproduced in Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder).


Many of us have wondered the very same thing about “the so-called international labor unions” in the U.S. and whether they would take a real, sincere interest in the workers of Latin America. For some time, it has appeared that, for whatever its faults in other countries such as Venezuela, the AFL-CIO has taken a bona fide interest in the workers of Colombia. Specifically, it has seemed that the AFL-CIO has taken a good line in opposing the unprecedented anti-union violence in that country – “the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist” as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has opined each year for the past many years. The diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, however, show a more equivocal role.

First, some background on Colombia. Since 1986, around 2900 unionists have been killed in that country. According to the ITUC, which itself relies upon the well-respected National Labor School of Colombia (ENS), 51 unionists (out of 90 worldwide) were killed in 2010. In 2011, there were at least 28 labor leaders assassinated, while hundreds more (including 600 teachers) were threatened with physical harm, including death. The Colombian government, in an attempt to paint itself in the best light and to win Congressional passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (which it successfully did this past October) has tried to take issue with these figures. It has done so by claiming that some of the unionists in these figures were killed, not because they were trade unionists, but rather, for other reasons – e.g., as the result of common crime or crimes of passion.

And so, for example, the Colombian government took the position that in 2010, only 37 of the unionists killed in Colombia (out of the 51 total) were killed because they were unionists, and that this should be the figure used when tallying up the victims. However, even if we took this as the correct number of unionists qua unionists killed in Colombia in 2010, this would still mean that Colombia accounted for over 40% of the entire world’s trade union killings – hardly anything for the Colombian government to brag about. Still, the fight over these numbers is highly contentious, and for serious reasons of policy.

Another important background issue is the very nature of unionism itself in Colombia. The view of honest human rights and labor rights groups is that unions in Colombia, while representing diverse views from the far-left to the far-right, and everything in between, are peaceful, civilian actors in Colombia and merit protection from armed violence in Colombia. This is indeed the official policy of the United States government which in fact provides aid for union protection in Colombia. This can be viewed as inconsistent with the U.S.’s continued policy of providing massive aid to the Colombian military which itself carries out anti-union killings and which is aligned with right-wing paramilitaries which carry out the lion’s share of anti-union killings in Colombia. However, the point is that the U.S. government, particularly the State Department, does not officially question the legitimate, peaceful aims of the Colombian labor movement.

On the other hand is the Colombian government which, especially under President Alvaro Uribe who held office between 2002 and 2010, attempted to rationalize and even legitimize the killing of unionists by attempting to portray unionists generally in Colombia as being aligned in some way, either in fact or at least in outlook, to the left-wing guerillas in that country. This stigmatization of the Colombian union movement has not only served to justify union killings, it has indeed encouraged them. This is so because the right-wing paramilitaries, which are themselves closely aligned to the military, have the propensity to kill anyone they view as even potentially aligned, again if merely in thought, to the guerillas. And so, this stigmatization serves as a green light to the paramilitaries to carry out extra-judicial killings of unionists. That is why it is so dangerous in Colombia to accuse someone of being a guerilla. Similarly, accusing someone of being a communist is equally dangerous given that guerillas and communists are viewed as one in the same by paramilitaries in Colombia.

In short, the varying ways in which unionists are portrayed in Colombia is not simply an academic one; it is quite literally a matter of life and death.

This brings us to the Wikileaks cables. There are about a dozen Wikileaks cables which reflect meetings between the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center and the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, and they are quite revealing. For example, there is an embassy cable from August 11, 2008, entitled, “COLOMBIAN UNIONS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE ARMED CONFLICT.” And, in this cable, the Solidarity Center’s Rhett Doumitt [the same AFL-CIO staffer directly involved in aiding and abetting forces that carried out the coup against President Chavez in 2002] professes strong views on this subject to the U.S. Embassy, in particular to Ambassador Brownfield.

Thus, in this cable, Mr. Doumitt is said to have “complained of a ‘Stalinist’ approach taken by Communist and other hard-left labor leaders within the CUT,” the largest labor confederation in Colombia. The cable continues:

In 2006, they [the CUT] affiliated with the Social Democratic international confederation, which later became the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Even then, RHETT DOUMITT of the AFL-CIO affiliated Solidarity Center said the Communists literally ‘turned the lights out’ at the convention in a last ditch attempt to block this affiliation.

Further in the cable, DOUMITT complains that the politics of the labor movement in Colombia impede positive, practical advances on labor issues. In the April 22 monthly ‘labor dialogue’ meeting with President Uribe, the confederations focused discussions on the investigations of the Colombian congressmen associated with the parapolitical scandal. CGT (Confederacion General de Trabajadores Democraticos) International Relations Secretary Jose Leon Ramirez notes there was no discussion of labor issues at the meeting. Still, DOUMITT says the unions have made progress in moving away from their traditional polemic cold war perspectives.

Another cable from another meeting indicates identical complaints to the Embassy by Doumitt about the Colombian labor movement elevating its political concerns – e.g., about the “parapolitical” scandal which involved scores of politicians collaborating with the paramilitaries who, among other things, have been hunting down labor leaders – over purely labor concerns. In this cable, dated February 5, 2009, Doumitt complained that “the public’s perception that the unions value politics over pocket book issues for workers also limit union membership. Doumitt complained that the politics of the labor movement in Colombia impede positive, practical advances on labor issues, but noted that some unions are moving away from their traditional socialist ideologies.”

Still, in another cable dated September 5, 2008, Doumitt seems to side with the Colombian government in terms of the debate over the figures of unionists killed in Colombia. Thus, the cable states:

RHETT DOUMITT of the AFL-CIO affiliated Solidarity Center told us paramilitary violence against unionists subsided after the last paramilitary block demobilized in 2006. Recent murders of unionists are largely related to common crime. . . .

The tenor of these cables is repeated in other Latin American countries, such as Ecuador, where the Embassy reported on a meeting with Solidarity Center officials who told the Embassy “that unions [in Ecuador] generally have a bad reputation all around. Younger workers see them as either communist or irrelevant, and most Ecuadorians seen them as essentially selfish actors.” In a January 22, 2007 cable emanating from Peru, and entitled, “GOP [Government of Peru] Wins Battle Against Radical Teacher’s Union,” the local AFL-CIO representative is cited as siding with the government in this legal victory which, among other things, limited the number of teachers (from 314 to 30) who could engage in full-time union activity and still receive their teachers’ salaries. Thus, the cable states: “According to Oscar Muro of the local chapter of the AFL-CIO, the fund sometimes aids teachers in need but is often misused. He further said that 30 subsidized representatives was a generous number given that no other union in the country has such a high number of positions as a percentage of membership.” Finally, in a cable out of Managua, dated January 23, 2007, and involving meetings with various anti-Sandinista NGO’s, the cable explains that unions can play a role in challenging the policies of President Daniel Ortega, and that “[t]he Ambassador offered to meet with independent unions and suggested that Huembes [a union leader from a non-FSLN union] contact the AFL-CIOregional representative in Guatemala to seek his guidance.”

What these cables portray is an organization, the AFL-CIO, which is beholden to the U.S. State Department and which is reporting to it on a regular basis. Among other things, it is reporting on the perceived blemishes of the union movements in those countries in which it operates. And, as during the Cold War, the “blemishes” it is reporting on in many instances revolve around the left-wing, and possibly socialist or communist, nature of these unions. Of course, the AFL-CIO is reporting on this to the U.S. government which is hostile to such left-wing institutions and which is indeed bent on wiping them out. The cable emanating from Nicaragua actually shows the Ambassador himself calling upon the AFL-CIO for help in agitating against Sandinista President Daniel Ortega.

This type of conduct by the AFL-CIO is particularly dangerous in the case of Colombia where trade unionists are being threatened and killed in record numbers by state and quasi-state actors which receive their support from the U.S., and where the U.S. is such a powerful, intervening force.

At worst, such red baiting of the union movement in a country such as Colombia to that countries’ military backer (the U.S.) serves to put the lives of unionists – who the AFL-CIO actually claims to protect – in danger.

Further, such conduct on the part of the AFL-CIO has an adverse impact on U.S. policy. For example, in the case of Colombia, undermining the union movement in the eyes of the U.S. government only serves to undercut the cause of the U.S. and Colombian unions who desperately attempted, and succeeded for several years, to prevent passage of the Colombia FTA, largely on the grounds that Colombia should not be rewarded for anti-union violence. This message was greatly compromised — and possibly fatally so as seen in the ultimate passage of the FTA under Obama — by the AFL-CIO’s representative in Bogota who, at least as reflected in the cables, portrays the Colombian unions’ concerns as unworthy, either because the unions are themselves somehow unworthy because they are communist-ridden or too political (that is, too concerned about government officials collaborating with paramilitary death squads), or because the issue of violence isn’t the big deal those unions are claiming it is.

In short, the AFL-CIO continues to do the work, not of a true internationalist union, but of an imperialist organization which sees itself aligned with U.S. foreign policy in challenging the movement for radical change and for socialism in the world. I can say that, as someone who believes in the cause of socialism – a cause more relevant than ever in light of the current global crisis of capitalism – this is not what I want those speaking in labor’s name abroad to be doing. I would submit that the U.S. labor movement would be better off, instead of presumptuously telling unions in other countries what they should be doing and what political line they should be following, to instead focus on its own efforts at organizing workers and in agitating for real change in this country – efforts at which it has been woefully inadequate since the 1930’s when, oh yes, it was being spurred on by militant socialists and communists.


Alberto C. Ruiz is a long-time unionist, peace activist and socialist.

How the Drug War Spread Across the Entire World

By Emily Dickinson, Washington Monthly
Posted on January 16, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153766/ho ... tire_world


The sun was barely setting over a colonial villa in rural central Colombia as Álvaro Uribe Vélez, by any measure Colombia’s most transformative modern president, recited lines of poetry to a small crowd beside a courtyard fountain. The former head of state, who left office in August 2010, projects the air of a financier in his official portraits. But today he was dressed like a paisa—with a traditional sombrero, a white handmade cloth draped over his shoulder, and a walking stick given to him by citizens of a nearby town.

On that perfect summer evening in early July, Uribe liked one particular verse—about a beautiful woman with enchanting eyes—so much that he recited it over and over to the dozens of locals seated in a circle around him. Also in the audience was the Colombian celebrity Catalina Maya, an actress and model, who sat perched on an armchair, her body twisted over its back to regard Uribe. Women and girls were crammed onto the villa’s steps, and housemaids pretended to continue working as they peeked for glances at the expresident, who every so often locked eyes with a new member of the crowd.

Álvaro Uribe is a well-loved man. During the eight years in which he led Colombia, he won the hearts of millions of his countrymen, from those in small villages to the most elite urban circles. And the reason why these millions adore Uribe largely boils down to one word: security. Uribe still casts a powerful spell over his former constituents because he used his time in office to smash a four-decades-old guerrilla insurgency with an overwhelming show of force—and in so doing made countless Colombians’ lives immeasurably safer.

When Uribe took office in 2002, Colombia was the murder and kidnap capital of the world, the source of nearly all global cocaine, and an economic weakling. The government had staggered through four decades of armed conflict with leftist rebels, most notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and had tried everything—even negotiations—to end the strife. Nothing seemed to work until Uribe came along. Unlike previous presidents, Uribe believed—and managed to convince the country—that if Colombia fought with all its military might against the guerrillas, it could win. Determined to make a hard break from the past, he ended a fraught peace process that his predecessor had initiated with the rebels. Then he dispatched tens of thousands of troops to retake control of Colombian soil, focusing on securing the cities and highways. Uribe found an eager partner in the United States, which supplied state-of-the-art weapons and intelligence to aid in the dismantling of armed groups. Eventually, he also convinced the United Autodefense Forces of Colombia (AUC)—a private paramilitary force of some 30,000 fighters that had emerged to protect local elites and landowners from the guerrillas, only to become just as wrapped up in drugs and violence as its enemies—to demobilize.

By the time Uribe was reelected in 2006, a conflict that had long threatened to break the Colombian state suddenly seemed as if it might be drawing to an end. The murder rate had fallen by 45 percent, and the kidnapping rate—which hovered near 3,000 people per year in 2002— plummeted more than fourfold. Even drug interdictions were up to the point that traffickers started looking for alternative routes into the United States (though Mexico) and Europe (through West Africa). By the end of his second term, Uribe began talking about “the end of the end” of the guerrillas.

Colombia’s incredible turnaround and the strategy credited with bringing it about have become not only a rare success story in the drug war, but also its most formidable brand and export. The governments of Mexico and several other Central American countries that have been plunged into violent confrontation with drug gangs have tried assiduously to replicate their South American peer’s strategy. With U.S. support, Mexico has deployed troops, militarized its police, and fought tooth and nail to regain control of its farthest-flung states. Honduras, which has the world’s highest murder rate, and Guatemala are flying in Colombian experts to advise them. Even in far-away conflicts such as Afghanistan, U.S. policy makers have looked for a model in the Andes.

There are two problems, however. The first is that none of these places, despite years of effort, has yet seen the kind of transformation that Uribe brought about in Colombia. In fact, so far, the momentum runs in the opposite direction. The case of Mexico is particularly striking; roughly 50,000 lives have been lost since the country’s experiment with a Colombian-style militarized drug war began in 2006. The Citizen’s Council for Public Security in Mexico recently estimated the kidnapping rate at three times that of Colombia’s darkest days. Cartels are growing more sophisticated and violent, not less, despite the numerous leaders the government has picked off. By November 2011, 80 percent of the population polled by the public opinion firm Consulta Mitofsky said they believed security to be worse than just a year ago. A mere 14 percent believed that the government could beat the drug gangs.

The second problem is that, in Colombia itself, Uribe’s strategy has reached a point of sharply diminishing returns. Having largely defeated what was, at bottom, a sweeping leftist insurgency against the state, and having decapitated a relatively cohesive paramilitary force, Colombia now faces a hydra-headed, apolitical, essentially criminal set of groups vying for turf and control over what’s left of the drug trade. None of these groups is as powerful as its precursors, but nor do they seem to be susceptible to the same strategic countermeasures. And violence is starting to drift upward. “If you look at the trend lines on homicides and kidnapping, it looks like a backwards J,” explains Adam Isacson, director of the Regional Security Policy Program at the Washington Office on Latin America. “They drop really sharply from 2002 to 2006, then there’s a stagnation. In 2008 and 2009 several of those measures start to creep back up again.”

The idea that sheer military might and political will can beat back the narcotics trade is a powerful one. Uribe’s ideas and tactics have spread to every corner of the globe marred by the drug trade and nearly every institution that is fighting organized crime. Which means that if those ideas are misguided—or, perhaps more dangerously, misunderstood— then so too is nearly every fight in the drug war.

On the day of his visit to the countryside, Uribe woke well before dawn, driving off in his motorcade at six a.m. to make the three-hour trip from Medellín to a small mountain town called Támesis. On the winding road through alternating alpine coffee fields and orange trees in the tropical plains, Uribe pointed out the results of his time in office. “During the first years of my presidency, I received news twice a day about this road and kidnappings,” he told me. “Eight years ago, it was impossible to cross.”

Now almost sixty, Uribe speaks in a voice that is at once brash and familiar. When he talks—as he does almost constantly—his words come out as simple sentences, clean and well crafted without an extraneous word. His considerable charisma is of an austere variety. He doesn’t smoke or drink, which is unusual in a country proud of its rabblerousing parties. He is famously demanding, but often refuses to delegate. While in office, he won a reputation for calling his force commanders’ cell phones at five a.m. when he wanted an update. “Security policy needs strong direction,” he told me as we drove.

Behind Uribe’s sense of conviction, and his public persona, is a harrowing personal history. While most of Colombia’s presidents have come from a small group of Bogota elite, Uribe came from the countryside, where his family lived in intimate proximity to the country’s endemic violence. His father was killed by FARC guerrillas in 1983 on the family farm, not far from Támesis, when Uribe was thirty-one years old. Uribe dedicated his presidency to making sure the guerrillas paid for his loss—and the losses of so many of his countrymen. Many Colombians seem to regard him with the kind of gratitude you might reserve for someone who has pulled you back from the edge of a cliff.

As Uribe made his way by car from Medellà n, hundreds of people from the countryside around Támesis were converging on a sniper-guarded gymnasium in the town, where the former president was scheduled to take part in a meeting of local civic leaders. Just after ten a.m., a tanned coffee farmer named Pedro Antonio Restrepo sat expectantly crouched near the edge of the bleachers there, his skin crinkled from years working outside in the sun. His eyes were wide with excitement. “I am an enemy of politics 100 percent,” Restrepo told me. “But I had to come to see Uribe.”

A decade ago, Restrepo lived under the gun. His land fell under the purview of the paramilitaries, which ran a mafia-like protection racket in the area. While their official name, the United Autodefense Forces of Colombia, suggested that these armed groups were a cohesive liberating force, freeing the countryside of the guerrillas that had pillaged, kidnapped, and massacred for so long, the paramilitaries had become as oppressive and dependent on the drug trade as FARC. Restrepo paid “taxes” to that local regime. If he didn’t have the cash, the paramilitaries who knocked on his door would wait, guns in hand. “Go to town and sell a bag of coffee to get the money,” they would tell him.

When Uribe came into office, his security strategy began with the recognition that the paramilitaries and guerrillas were taking advantage of the many spaces in his country— places like Restrepo’s coffee-farming community—where the state simply didn’t have a presence. If Uribe wanted to eliminate these illicit networks, Colombia needed to impose sovereignty over its own territories. It had to go in with troops, smash the rebel or paramilitary presence, and establish control. Then, with the rebels chased to the bush, the military assault would shade into a regime of police patrols and institutions—in a word, a state. He called his strategy “democratic security.” (If he had crafted it later, after the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps Uribe would have simply called it counterinsurgency, or COIN.)

The task Uribe had set before himself was essentially one of nation building, something he knew would be neither cheap nor easy. Making aggressive use of American aid was essential. Uribe’s predecessor had already secured a $1.4 billion aid package from the United States as part of the Plan Colombia policy, a legacy of the Clinton era; the new president worked to make it his own. “Plan Colombia was essentially an antidrug policy,” explains Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “The trick in the Colombian case was to take aid intended to go after the drug war and to use it in a much more rational way: to build the strength of the state.” The whole aid package eventually grew to the size of $8 billion.

Uribe found a willing and like-minded partner in George W. Bush, who often referred to the Colombian president as “mi amigo.” A true coproduction of American aid and Colombian strategy, Uribe’s “democratic security” became the centerpiece of the U.S. government’s international counter-narcotics plan. America supplied helicopters, weapons, intelligence equipment, expertise, and military trainers, and even footed some of the bill for gas. It also helped fund new military and police brigades created specifically to root out traffickers and interdict drugs. The military streamed into every corner of the country, burning cocaine labs and catching guerrilla leaders in its path. One of the biggest legacies of Uribe’s time in office is sheer military manpower: today there are nearly 270,000 soldiers patrolling the country, as well as 162,000 police officers— meaning that the total number of security forces has been bumped up by more than 100,000 people since 2002.

As the aid poured in, Colombia reciprocated by going out of its way to cooperate with U.S. goals. In a move that would have made many South American governments squirm, Colombia let the United States vet and polygraph certain military recruits. Even more controversially, between 2002 and 2008 Colombia extradited 951 of its citizens to face criminal charges in the United States. Previous presidents had balked at foisting off their problems, and citizens, on a foreign justice system; Uribe embraced it. On American soil, the suspects often found themselves locked up on trafficking convictions with stiff sentences. Frequently, this was helpful for Uribe—his government was relieved of having to try some of its most contentious and despicable cases—but it also meant that many of the perpetrators of Colombia’s worst human rights violations, including massacres, murders, and rapes, would likely never be held accountable for those crimes at home.

According to his critics, this wasn’t the only compromise Uribe made on human rights in his all-or-nothing quest to quash the guerrillas. In October 2008, for example, it emerged that the Colombian military—under intense pressure to crack down on FARC—had been murdering civilians to boost its body count. (Declassified CIA files have since revealed that the practice of killing “false positives” dates back as far as a decade before Uribe’s term.) In rural areas too, there were concerns that the military’s all-out assaults on the guerrillas were displacing and killing far too many civilians. To this day, Colombia is home to the largest single population of internally displaced people—between 3.5 and 5 million in a population of 46 million. Union and community leaders have also been targeted by armed groups of every sort for their activism, and Uribe, in his brash style, often came off as complacent about this fact, or even complicit. “Uribe called us terrorists,” remembers Franklin Castañeda, a spokesman for the country’s National Victims’ Movement. That kind of rhetoric made their activists targets of paramilitaries eager to weed out any potential leftist or guerilla influence. A number of U.S. senators and congressmen raised concerns about human rights abuses, and for five years they held up a free trade agreement with Colombia because of it. But others in the U.S. government were more interested in the dramatic reversal that Colombia seemed to be pulling off—and the example it might set for a world of newly troubled battlegrounds. By 2009, homicides in the country were down 40 percent, kidnappings were down more than 80 percent, and terror attacks were down 75 percent. “I know that Plan Colombia was controversial. I was just in Colombia, and there were problems and there were mistakes, but it worked,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented a month after Uribe left office. “And we need to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.”

Today, Restrepo says that the paramilitaries in his area are gone—a fact he attributes to the former president’s security policy. After I interviewed him at the gym in Táme- sis, he beseeched me to thank Uribe for him. “If there’s any way that you can relay the message,” he pleaded. When I later pointed him out in the crowd to Uribe, Restrepo’s smile glowed with bashful pride.

Many of the Uribe government’s admirers today are in Central America and the Caribbean, where a new front of the drug war is roaring, and again, U.S. counter-narcotics assistance is ratcheting up. There’s a tremendous amount of interaction between Colombia and these countries, says Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue. “If you talk to the ambassadors here, they’ll tell you that there’s just a lot of Colombians coming through and playing a helpful role.”

For America’s neighbor to the south, Uribe’s success story is particularly of interest. Speak with Mexican analysts of almost any political stripe about the drug war these days, as I did on a recent trip to Mexico, and Colombia almost always comes up. Mexico, it is often said, is passing through the same difficult phase that its Andean peer overcame. “I do think it would be possible to lower the violence—look at what happened in Colombia,” Arturo Borja, an economist at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Instruction, told me. “In Colombia, they resolved the problem of violence and took away the power that the drug-trafficking organizations had.… [Colombia was] a fragile state in the 1980s and 1990s, but now they’ve turned things around.”

In many ways, that sense of admiration has led to imitation. Indeed, when Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, explained his strategy to the New York Times in October it read like a page straight from a “democratic security” handbook. “Essentially, our strategy has three main components,” he said. “The first is to fight, debilitate, and neutralize armed groups…. [T]he second component is more important, which is the recuperation of the institutions of security and justice such as the police, the public ministers, the judges…. [T]he third element is the reconstruction of the social fabric [in a] society marked by a lack of opportunities.”

The tactics are similar as well. Much as Uribe did with the Colombian military, over the last four years the administration of President Calderón has dispatched 50,000 soldiers across the country to break up organized crime. He has also upped extraditions to the United States and tried to rebuild the country’s army and police forces. Colombia is even training Mexican policemen and prosecutors, based on their decades of experience fighting the war on drugs. The United States, keen on these changes, has begun to help Mexico in many of the ways it did Colombia: with intelligence, law enforcement expertise and training, and equipment.

On June 8, 2011, the governor of Chihuahua— Mexico’s most violent state—welcomed Uribe to Ciudad Juarez, ground zero for the drug war, and vowed to follow the Colombian model in cracking down on organized crime. In office, Uribe was a vocal supporter of Mexico and Calderón; now he writes in their favor on his prolific Twitter feed. The two presidents signed an accord in 2009 affirming their commitment to ending organized crime.

And yet, for his trouble, Calderón has wound up with crashing public approval ratings and a growing protest movement that has questioned his tactics. It’s not hard to see why. Elevating casualty figures have topped 50,000 over the last five years, and states that never saw significant cartels before are now falling like dominoes to the drug lords. The violence has also taken a particularly gruesome turn; bodies often turn up mutilated, bearing messages of warning for anyone who dares cross the assailants’ paths, said Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime in Mexico City. “In Mexico—and this is unique— those criminal organizations are using violence … with the aim of terrorizing and sending a clear message to everybody: ‘Here we rule, and if you don’t abide by my rule, this is what’s going to happen to you.’ ” Journalists and human rights activists who ask troubling questions are often among the first targets for armed groups.

Why has Mexico’s experiment in Uribismo fared so poorly? One way to answer that question is to take a closer look at how “democratic security” has worked out over the long run in Colombia—and, more importantly, how it hasn’t.

Uribe left Támesis by midafternoon that day in July, stopping to make a surprise visit in another small town on the way back to the city. After nightfall, on the last leg of the drive back to Medellín in his motorcade, a radio report relayed the dispiriting news that FARC had just bombed a rural police station. The report was consistent with the group’s newfound penchant for low-cost, high-impact terrorist attacks.

By the time Uribe left office, FARC had been forced to go back to the drawing board. Driven out of urban areas, short on manpower, and increasingly reliant on narcotics trafficking, the group’s then leader, Alfonso Cano, decided that FARC couldn’t contest the Colombian military anymore. So the group returned to its terrorist origins, undertaking high-profile attacks executed by small cells of guerrilla fighters called pisa suaves, or “light-treading” units. In other words, the government’s all-out war on FARC was a success, but a qualified one. “It was very effective— democratic security and the U.S. assistance with Plan Colombia—against a guerrilla force made up of entities resembling an [army] battalion,” says León Valencia, executive director of the Colombian think tank Nuevo Arco Iris, which released a study on FARC last August. Now the rebels have adapted—but the government’s strategy largely has not. In the first six months of 2011, FARC undertook 10 percent more military operations than they did in the previous year, many of them headline-making massacres and bombings.

Still, setting FARC back by more than a decade, and sending it packing into the jungles, is undeniable progress. It is the vacuum created by the formal dissolution of Colombia’s paramilitary force, the AUC, that has sent parts of the country into wrenching bouts of instability. In a complex demobilization process aimed at disbanding militias of some 35,000 men between 2003 and 2007, Colombia attained visible success in clearing out the upper ranks of the paramilitaries. Top leaders were often extradited to the United States to face tough, drug-related sentences. But when it came to draining the middle and lower ranks, the results were more murky. A significant number of the fighters, it is widely believed, simply returned to their work under new, criminal auspices. Others passed the reins to relatives or friends, leaving illicit networks essentially intact. What’s clear is that Colombia, once riven by clashes between FARC and the AUC, has seen a wild proliferation of smaller violent groups that behave very differently from their forebears.

Where there was once a single, cohesive political entity representing paramilitary groups—the AUC—there are now innumerable criminal bands competing over the same objective: to terrorize their way into controlling the drug trade. Like the paramilitaries before them, they thrive when they can infiltrate local governments and become territorial barons. But unlike the paramilitaries, these new groups have neither political aims nor ideologies to control or direct their violence. They have even been known to make alliances with FARC when convenient.

In Medellín, I met a middle-aged woman named Doli Posada who described this new landscape. “There are so many people who are afraid to leave their neighborhoods these days,” she told me, referring to the barrios that creep up from the mountainous city’s high line. In the community where she lives, her neighbors are being asked, once again, to pay armed groups taxes to provide “security.” After a few brief years of calm, today they feel anything but safe. According to many accounts, violence in the barrios took off when Medellín’s once dominant crime boss, a former paramilitary known as “Don Berna” (his real name was Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano)—was extradited to the U.S. in 2008. After Uribe’s military had beaten back FARC, Don Berna had been able to solidify his control over the city and pacify it. Now that he’s gone, new, smaller gangs have sprung up to fight over who gets to fill the vacuum. “By seriously crippling the competing guerrillas, the government had given a monopoly to Don Berna,” wrote Francis Fukuyama and Seth Colby in a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine. “It was peace achieved through market dominance, not demilitarization.”

And the problems are not just in Medellín. An hour’s flight from Bogota, on the Pacific coast, the town of Buenaventura is reeling. During the height of summer, gangs held frequent gun battles to control several of the barrios that have access to the ocean in this seaside port town—the knotted creeks of the coastline are perfect for getting cocaine out of the country fast. In the licit markets too, prices here are much higher than in even the posh areas of Bogota, and the armed gangs controlevery market, from cocaine all the way to eggs, milk, and ripe plantains.

To make matters worse, many of these mid-level criminals with roots in the paramilitaries have a long history of infiltrating and co-opting local governments. For years, the paramilitaries’ political aims conveniently aligned with those of the state: both groups wanted to defeat the guerrillas. So in many places, the price for security gains against FARC was a blind eye toward paramilitary criminal networks. By 2006, the AUC had become so powerful and so influential that its fingerprints were everywhere in the state itself. High-level representatives, including governors, congressmen, senators, and mayors, had all signed electoral pacts with the AUC that year, with the paramilitaries promising to guarantee a certain number of votes in exchange for influence with the new candidates in office. “When you have that level of penetration, demobilization isn’t going to work completely,” says Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, a political scientist who worked as a consultant for an anti-corruption commission during Uribe’s tenure and is coauthor of the forthcoming book Drug Trafficking, Corruption, and States. “You can’t destroy all the relationships.”

Officially, the government of Colombia doesn’t buy into the story that remnants of the paramilitaries have become the new torment of the nation. The government calls the post-AUC groups “BACRIM” (an acronym for “bandas criminales emergentes,” or “emerging criminal bands”)— a categorization that portrays them as separate from the past. Joshua Mitrotti Ventura, general manager of the current president’s high council for reintegration, says that less than 10 percent of BACRIM members who have been apprehended can be traced back to the demobilization process: “The BACRIM don’t necessarily correspond with the AUC; the majority are new people.”

Yet Uribe saw the BACRIM coming, according to an American diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks that recounts a conversation he had with the U.S. embassy back in 2004. “Uribe speculated that splinter groups of narcotrafficking organizations will follow in the wake of the paramilitaries,” the document says. And when I asked him about the BACRIM in November, he acknowledged the link to demobilization in an e-mail: “In accordance with police reports, 11 percent of BACRIM members and 50 percent of kingpins come from demobilized people.” Then and now, Uribe believed that the same military strategy could combat these new groups. “I consider that these organizations must be confronted the same as Colombia does against narco terrorist guerrillas,” he wrote to me in November.

Yet a traditional military solution would seem profoundly ill-suited to this new threat. The Colombian research institute Indepaz estimates that the various BACRIM groups, which have emerged and multiplied at a rapid clip, claimed 7,100 fighters in 360 municipalities by the end of 2010. In cities like Buenaventura, the gang names are so numerous that residents have stopped trying to learn them. Worse, they are integrated into civilian populations, meaning that no blunt military instrument can flush them out. “The BACRIM have more access and ability to operate in population centers,” explains the Washington Office on Latin America’s Adam Isacson. “They are far more able to infiltrate at the local level.”

Across many of Colombia’s cities and towns, the violence looks less like the end and more like a new beginning of conflict. “Lots of people think that Uribe ended the paramilitaries, that narcotics trafficking went down,” says Salcedo. “But when you look, it’s really only been a reconfiguration [of the armed conflict].”

To be sure, this reconfiguration has been kind to many Colombians in many parts of the country, especially elites, who no longer fear that FARC is about to topple the state. But residents in parts of Medellín and Buenaventura, among other places, now say that the calm of the mid-2000s was little more than a cruel illusion. “There is permanent dispute for control” of the narcotics trafficking routes, says Victor Hugo Vidal, an activist for the Process of Black Communities working and living in Buenaventura. “When that fight for dominance is ongoing, the violence increases. And when someone becomes dominant, the violence goes down.”

Colombia is still objectively less violent than it was ten years ago, but the statistics are beginning to slip. In the first three months of 2011, 8,245 people were displaced by fighting—1,000 more people than had been displaced in the entire previous year. Most of the displacement took place along the Pacific coast, increasingly the hub of drug trafficking, and hence armed group, activity. And Medellín’s homicide rate has doubled since 2007. Among the most ghoulish indicators of new trouble in Colombia is the rate at which criminal gangs are picking off human rights defenders. The activists—or anyone who speaks out against crime—have become a nuisance to the armed groups. And their deaths are reminiscent of nothing so much as the slaughter of journalists, family members of victims, and other activists in Mexico.

At a very basic level, Colombia circa 2002 faced a very different set of problems than what Mexico faces today—and Uribe’s “democratic security” strategy was tailored to the former. Drug trafficking was linked to an armed insurgency that, however corrupted over the years, still rested on an ideology and concrete political goals. FARC and the paramilitaries both cared about territory for its own sake. Mexican cartels, on the other hand, are less bothered by symbolic gains and are happy to operate near or even within state institutions.

The very natures of the two states are different as well. “Colombia had never been in control of its territory, so the real challenge was to assert state authority for the first time,” explains Shannon O’Neill of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In Mexico, that’s not the problem. The government has a presence in every small municipality; the question is, who do they report to? It’s a very different challenge; Mexico’s challenge is corruption.”

Mexican institutions are hollowed out in a way that Colombia’s never were. Colombia’s police are national, and were never terribly corrupt. The 400,000-strong police force in Mexico is divided between federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and the closer to the ground you get, the more the drug cartels have been able to infiltrate. Often unpaid, underequipped, and terrified by the security situation, the local police take bribes or work as informants. “The infiltration of cartels is everywhere,” says Walter McKay, a former Canadian policeman who has worked for the last three years as a consultant on security reform in Mexico. “It’s not just in the police. The entire apple is rotten.” When I corresponded with him in November, Uribe acknowledged Mexico’s challenges on this front.

Indeed, while Colombia was building institutions from zero in many of its most desperate communities, Mexico urgently needs to cleanse its state—a task that is impossible when it’s that very state that the government is trying to defend. “It’s as if you are fighting with your enemy only to realize halfway that the arm you’re using isn’t working,” explains Eduardo Guerrero, a political analyst and former advisor to the Mexican presidency. Calderón’s response has been to circumvent these troubled institutions by creating a federal police force that is more than 30,000 strong and heavily vetted to be clear of illicit ties.

In recent months, Guerrero has produced striking evidence of the mechanics of why military tactics are failing to stop—and perhaps are even exacerbating—the conflict in Mexico. One of the major tactics of the Calderón administration has been to decapitate the cartels, much as Uribe did with major FARC and paramilitary leaders. Yet just as the paramilitaries did, the cartels have reacted to the loss of their leaders by fragmenting, rather than disappearing. In 2006, there were just six major cartels operating in Mexico; by 2010 that number had doubled, wrote Guerrero in Nexos magazine in June. Local trafficking organizations exploded during the same time frame, from eleven to 114. Unsurprisingly, nearly every crime indicator—from kidnapping to theft to murder—also went up during that time.

In other words, for all the differences between the problems Uribe faced when he took office in 2002 and the problems Calderón started tackling in 2006, the violent challenges that threaten both countries right now are increasingly similar. And in both places, these are the very threats that have proven resistant to military solutions. Yet at exactly the moment when this orgy of violence is spreading, the United States and Mexico are looking to up the ante on the current tactics. As America’s role is winding down in Colombia, its role in security is being ratcheted up in Mexico, through the Merida Initiative, to fight the drug war there. The United States is training Mexican forces, providing them with helicopters, and helping with wiretaps. This summer, for the first time ever, officers from the Central Intelligence Agency started to work with the Mexican authorities—in Mexico—to organize and plan countercartel operations.

Perhaps this U.S. attention would be better appreciated if it were the only option. But many analysts insist that the Mexican drug war demands new approaches. It would go a long way if the United States itself would clean house; a U.S. Senate report concluded last June that nearly threequarters of the weapons used in Mexico’s conflict come from American dealers. Meanwhile, a recent report from the Washington Office on Latin America—which calls Colombia’s experience a “cautionary tale” for Mexico—argues that the focus needs to shift from attacking the bad guys to protecting civilians. That means, first and foremost, more and better police. Underfunded, corrupt, and disempowered by the military, the police today provide only a veneer of pedestrian security. The latter investigate an appalling 8 percent of the crime reported— including the murders of victims the Mexican government is tallying as criminals. In 2010, the United States started to explore ideas like cleaning up the police force and strengthening the judicial system—but when those items were cut in the 2011 budget, the focus shifted back to the military.

None of this is to say that the experience in Colombia provides no lessons at all, argues Michael Shifter. In some ways, Mexico’s failure to win with its Uribe-like strategy may have been partly a problem of misinterpretation, or mis-execution, rather than a refutation of the theory itself. Uribe, for instance, can truly claim credit for rallying national morale in Colombia around the country’s existential struggle with FARC. As president, he made the case to Colombians that their country was facing a do-or-die scenario: fight back or become a narco-state. With his rhetoric and resolve, Uribe won support both from paisas and from the elites, who had for years been prone either to flee the country or to purchase their security from paramilitaries. Calderón, by contrast, is walking a tightrope—telling his citizens that there’s a crisis while still reassuring tourists that there’s nothing unsafe about Mexico—and he is fast losing his country’s faith. “When they say in Washington, D.C., that Mexico should do what Colombia did,” says Adam Isacson, “I think they are just nostalgic for this country whose elite was all on the same page as Washington.”

On the morning of November 5, 2011, Uribe’s successor made a long-awaited announcement: the main leader of FARC, nom-de-guerre Alfonso Cano, had been killed. Colombian troops had bombed the commander’s location in the forested southern province of Cauca, an epicenter of the violence in recent months. His death was immediately hailed as the most significant blow to the organization in FARC’s decades-long history. And it was particularly timely: the eccentric former anthropologist had been the brain behind FARC’s recently updated strategy—the transition from army-like force to terrorist cells. (Fittingly, when Cano died, he appears to have been moving through the jungle with just a handful of fellow operatives.)

Ending Cano’s dark legacy was also a symbolic coup for President Juan Manuel Santos, who had taken flak early in his term for being soft on security. In fact, for months before, Uribe—under whom Santos had served as defense minister—had backhandedly accused his successor of letting the country slip. “What I have found from moving from town to town is that there are many people with the idea that there are some symptoms of insecurity,” Uribe told me in July. They felt “that instead of improving to some degree we are going a little bit backward from the point we had been.”

If Colombia is backsliding, Uribe believes it can only mean one thing: that the country has walked away from “democratic security.” I asked him if he thought Santos had done just that, and he hesitated to answer, saying that he needed to be diplomatic: “My impression is that they are the same [in their] determination but maybe they have changed some points.”

But perhaps continuity was exactly the problem, as Santos has found out the hard way. When the new president came to office, he drafted a defense strategy that looked much like his predecessor’s—as the electorate that elected him had come to expect. But as the indicators turned sour, the new president started to rethink. After a year in office, he swapped defense ministers and announced a new plan to combat the resurgent FARC. He named the BACRIM a primary enemy of the state, and created a new, more holistic defense plan that seeks to build up economic and social institutions in addition to security. He disbanded the national intelligence agency, which had been discredited by an earlier scandal that had revealed it was tapping the phones of journalists, opposition figures, and even then President Uribe. A victim’s compensation law also won Santos praise—a first step, perhaps, in redressing years of suffering. Yet whether the new government can keep pace with the changes in this conflict is now more than ever open to question. And for the first time in almost a decade, Uribe might not be the best person to answer it. If FARC melts away even further, that may mean one thing: more BACRIM, fighting for market share. Colombia is still the source of 80 percent of the cocaine that arrives in the United States, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Should the guerrillas’ trafficking machinery wither altogether, someone with a gun will inevitably pick up the slack. For the last several years, it has been not just the BACRIM but also the cartels to Colombia’s north—in Mexico and the weaker states of Central America—that have stepped in to fill the void. These states will have to fight back, one way or another.

In its time and place, democratic security was an inspired strategy, albeit far from a perfect one. Until the demand for drugs dries up, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras— even far flung narco-conflicts like those in Guinea-Bissau and Afghanistan—will have to find their own medicine.

Yet if there is a lesson to be learned, perhaps it is as much for the United States as it is for these theaters of the drug war: the violence won’t stop until the narcotics trade does. Short of that, all that Washington—or anyone—can hope for is damage control. Off the main streets of Bogota and Mexico City, the damage is real. And not even Uribe knows the cure.



Elizabeth Dickinson is a freelance journalist. She previously served as assistant managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and Nigeria corespondent for theEconomist.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/16/ ... -colombia/

February 16, 2012

The CIA, Cocaine and Death Squads
The U.S. War for Drugs of Terror in Colombia

by DANIEL KOVALIK

I just had the pleasure of reading an important new book entitled, Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia. This book, which was ten years in the making, is written by Oliver Villar & Drew Cottle and published and published by Monthly Review. The premise of the book is that, despite the U.S. claims that it is engaged in a war against drugs in Colombia, it is in fact engaged in an anti-insurgency war against the left-wing FARC guerillas – a war which does not seek to eradicate coca growing and cocaine production in Colombia at all.

Rather, the U.S. war effort (which has cost U.S. taxpayers over $7 billion since 2000) is designed to ensure that the allies of the U.S. in Colombia — that is, the Colombian state, paramilitaries and wealthy elite who are favorable to U.S. business interests and to the U.S.’s desire for exploitation of Colombia’s vast resources — are themselves able to monopolize the drug trade so critical to their survival.

This thesis is well expressed in the Forward by Peter Dale Scott:

The CIA can (and does) point to its role in the arrest or elimination of a number of major Colombian traffickers. These arrests have not diminished the actual flow of cocaine into the United States, which on the contrary reached a new high in 2000. But they have institutionalized the relationship of law enforcement to rival cartels and visibly contributed to the increase of urban cartel violence. The true purpose of most of these campaigns, like the current Plan Colombia, has not been the hopeless ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA. This confirms the judgment of Senate investigator Jack Blum a decade ago, that America, instead of battling a narcotics conspiracy, has in a subtle way . . . become part of the conspiracy.

These may seem like wild claims at first blush, but the authors put this in context by reminding the reader of the history of U.S. war efforts since World War II, many of which have been financed, at least in part, through alliances with drug traffickers. The litany of this is a long one, with the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) forming a strategic alliance with the Sicilian and Corsican mafia after World War II to prevent possible communist uprisings in Europe and to smash left-wing unions; the CIA’s assisting the Kuomintang with its opium trafficking operations to fund their joint anti-communist efforts in Asia; the CIA’s actual trafficking of opium out of Laos, Burma and Thailand to help fund the U.S. counter-insurgency effort in South East Asia; the CIA’s support of “the chief smugglers of Afghan opium, the anti-communist Mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan” in their efforts against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, leading ultimately to Afghanistan becoming one of the largest opium suppliers in the world (a status only briefly interrupted when it was under Taliban control); and the Reagan Administration’s funding the Nicaraguan Contras (after such funding was outlawed by Congress) by, among other things, cocaine smuggling operations.

The book quotes the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) which concludes that, today, “the biggest heroin and cocaine trading institutions in the world are the militaries of Burma, Pakistan, Mexico, Peru and Colombia – ‘all armed and trained by U.S. military intelligence in the name of anti-drug efforts.’” In the case of Colombia, while the U.S., to justify its massive counterinsurgency program, vilifies the FARC guerillas as “narco-terrorists,” this title is more befitting of the Colombian state and its paramilitary allies.

Indeed, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who had been both the darling of the Bush and Obama Administrations, had himself been ranked by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency as number “82 on a list of 104 ‘more important narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels . . . .”

As the book explains, the U.S.’s own Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has concluded that the “FARC involvement in the drug trade mainly involves the taxation of coca, which does not involve cocaine manufacturing, trafficking, and transshipment.” As the UNDCP explains, some FARC fronts are not involved in even the taxation of coca, and still others “’actually tell the farmers not to grow coca.’” In terms of the actual trafficking in drugs, it is the friends of the U.S. who are largely responsible for this. Thus, as the book notes, quoting the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, while there is “no evidence of FARC involvement in drug trafficking,” there is indeed “extensive drug smuggling to the United States by ‘right-wing paramilitary groups in collaboration with wealthy drug barons, the [U.S.-funded] armed forces, key financial figures and senior bureaucrats.” And yet, the U.S. war in Colombia is focused upon destroying the FARC, and, to the extent it is aimed at the manual eradication of coca crops, this eradication takes place almost solely in areas under FARC control, leaving the big-time drug traffickers alone.



As for the right-wing paramilitary death squads, which carry out the vast majority of terrorist acts against civilian targets in Colombia, while the U.S. has accurately designated them as “terrorists,” these paramilitaries are an integral part of the military and government which the U.S. is funding and an integral part of the U.S. effort to defeat both the guerilla insurgency as well as any peaceful resistance to U.S. imperial aims. And so, not only is the paramilitaries’ drug running tolerated by the U.S., but also their very terror. And, what terror it is.

The book, citing Colombian investigative journalist Azalea Robles, claims that 250,000 Colombian civilians have been “disappeared” in the last two decades in Colombia, dwarfing the “disappearances” carried out (also with U.S. support by the way) by the fascist juntas of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in the 1970’s. According to Robles, these numbers have been “systematically reduced” (that is, hidden) by mass graves, like the one discovered in Meta in 2009, and even crematory ovens.

The murder and “disappearance” of such vast numbers of people is part and parcel of the U.S.’s policy — used most famously by the U.S. in Vietnam, El Salvador and Guatemala – to “drain the sea [the civilian population] to kill the fish [the insurgents]” which represent a continued impediment to the U.S.’s designs of super-exploitation of Colombia’s vast natural resources. And, the U.S. view is that, if this policy also forces us to collaborate and even protect forces which are deeply involved in the drug trade, then that is acceptable as well.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to carry out such a duplicitous policy in the interest of a “war on drugs and a war on terror.” As the book properly concludes, this war is, in fact, “a war for drugs and of terror.”


Daniel Kovalik is Senior Associate General Counsel of the United Steelworkers (USW) and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached at dkovalik at usw.org

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Ha, I was searching for where to post that, found this thread finally, and saw you'd posted it. Thanks.

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just yesterday I was thinking, "hmm, don't hear much about Columbia anymore..."

Don't forget the prosecution of Chiquita.