Last year the US Air Force commissioned the RAND Corporation
to prepare a review of the situation in Colombia. In early
June the Santa Monica-based
RAND think tank (progenitor of many a blood-sodden
scenario in the Vietnam era) submitted its 130-page report,
called "The
Colombian Labyrinth: The Synergy of Drugs and Insurgency
and Its Implications for Regional Stability." The
other report is a paper written by Gabriel Marcella, titled
"Plan
Colombia: the Strategic and Operational Imperatives."
Marcella is a former chief adviser to the Commander-in-Chief
of the US Southern Command who now teaches on national
security matters at the US Army War College.
Together, the two reports reach the same conclusion:
the US needs to step up its military involvement in Colombia
and quit forfeiting options by limiting its operations
to counter-narcotics raids. Along the way, both reports
make a number of astonishing admissions about the paramilitaries
and their links to the drug trade, about human rights
abuses by the US-trained Colombian military and about
the irrationality of crop fumigation.
RAND argues that the drug war approach is on the brink
of not only failing, but of prompting a wider conflict
that might require the insertion of US troops. "If the
Pastrana administration falters, either in its counter-narcotics
or counterinsurgency approach, the US would be confronted
with an unpalatable choice. It could escalate its commitment
to include perhaps an operational role for US forces in
Colombia, or scale it down, which would involve some significant
costs, including a serious loss of credibility and degradation
of the US's ability to muster regional support for its
counter-narcotics and political objectives."
The RAND study draws heavily from a December 2000 report
by the World Bank, titled Violence
in Colombia: Building Sustainable Peace and Social Capital,
which concluded that the quid pro quo for Colombia getting
any future large infusions of international financial
aid will depend on their successful suppression of the
FARC and other rebel groups. Another World Bank memo describes
the FARC's fundraising strategy as a "loot-seeking" assault
on "primary commodities": cattle ranches on the eastern
plains, commercial agriculture in Urabá, oil in Magaldena,
gold mines in Antioquia and the coca fields of Putumayo.
RAND cites a former CIA analyst as saying that the FARC
has invested its "taxes" on these industries into "a strategic
financial reserve," which will enable them to "sustain
an escalation of the conflict." While the FARC peasant
army has doubled over the past decade, it still only numbers
about 7,000 fighters – 2,000 fewer than the paramilitary
death squads.
Both RAND and the World Bank point to the horrifying
level of "social intolerance killings," which for men
aged 14-44 reached a level of 394 deaths per 100,000 last
year. In all, Colombia endures 30,000 annual murders,
double the number for the entire United States in 1998.
Slightly more than 23,000 murders have been linked to
"illegal armed organizations" since 1988. The implication
is that the FARC is responsible for these killings and
one has to dig deep into the RAND analysis to discover
otherwise. In fact, according to statistics compiled by
the Colombian government, about 3,500 people were killed
by the guerrillas and 19,652 by paramilitaries and "private
justice" groups.
The leader of the AUC
(United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia), the central
command for the 19 paramilitary "fronts," is a sadistic
scoundrel named Carlos Castaño, who supervises a killing
program right off the pages of the
CIA's Phoenix Program's operations manual. The RAND
report details how Castaño's AUC routinely executes "suspected
guerrilla sympathizers" in order "to instill fear and
compel support among the local population." When that
strategy fails to deliver, the AUC simply launches an
all-out attack on the villages and slaughters the inhabitants.
RAND dispassionately notes that the AUC justifies these
atrocities, in language that even Bob Kerrey might admire,
as a legitimate way to "remove the guerrillas' supply
network."
The robust ties between the paramilitaries and the Colombian
military (not to mention the CIA and the Pentagon) are
cursorily dispensed with by RAND in a brisk few sentences,
concluding that, given the circumstances, such relations
are only natural. RAND fails to note that many of the
leaders of paramilitary groups were once officers in the
Colombian military, some of them trained at the School
of the Americas. Although there are nearly as many paramilitary
fighters as there are guerrillas, there is a gross and
telling disparity between the numbers of paramilitaries
(76) versus guerrillas (2,677) killed by the Colombian
military.
The RAND study makes a great effort to legitimize the
role of the paramilitaries, remarking that "the term paramilitaries
is an unsatisfactory rubric to describe the autodefensas,
although it has gained widespread currency [so widespread,
in fact, that it is used throughout the RAND report]....
It has no particular descriptive value in referring to
the autodefensas and (perhaps intentionally) might convey
the implication of quasi-political status." With such
sinister nonsense, and despite the murders and the drug
trafficking, RAND attempts to portray many of the paramilitaries
as performing necessary self-policing functions in the
absence of strong state authority, a kind of benign civic
group "based on the neighborhood watch concept."
Although 20 pages are devoted to discussion of the FARC's
ties to the drug trade, the RAND report spends only a
single paragraph on the links of the paramilitaries and
the narco-traffickers. But this paragraph is as damning
as it is brief. RAND grudgingly admits that Castaño's
group derives "a considerable extent" of its income from
the drug trade and notes that eight of the AUC's 19 death
squads also serve as protection gangs for the cocaine
industry.
Castaño himself has boasted to CNN's International Division
of his relationship with the drug lords. He said that
70 percent of the funds for the AUC come from the drug
trade, with the remaining 30 percent, the RAND report
notes in a stark parenthesis, "coming largely from extortion."
The Colombian government under Pastrana (though not the
Colombian generals) takes the public position that the
paramilitaries are at least as big of a threat as the
FARC and the ELN, and is moving, rhetorically, at least,
to suppress them. RAND condemns this approach as "unwise
and shortsighted." Better, RAND concludes, to mimic the
Peruvian or Guatemalan counterinsurgency models and fashion
the death squads into "a supervised network of self-defense
organizations."
This "Peruvian model" was created by Vladimir
Montesinos, the head of Peruvian intelligence, recently
extradited from Venezuela to Peru and imprisoned in a
high security prison he himself had helped to design.
Montesinos, a longtime CIA asset, won his spurs with his
bloody tactics against the Shining Path rebels but fell
from grace when it came to light that he had organized
a shipment of arms from Jordan to the FARC. The CIA was
so enraged that it engineered his downfall.
According to Peruvian sources, the shipment of guns was
originally intended for the paramilitaries in Colombia
(arranged with full CIA approval) which the wily Montesinos
sold for a higher price to the FARC. This story rings
true – Jordan is essentially a US colony, so it's likely
that a weapons shipment from there would have to be for
a US-approved customer.
Even more menacingly, RAND suggests that the Colombians
could reconfigure the paramilitaries into roving National
Guard units that will hunt-and-kill guerrillas. RAND hints
that this may already be under way with US help. There's
no question that the Colombian military, under the eye
of US advisers, is taking a more aggressive tactic, employing
hunt-and-kill squads supervised by School of America-trained
officers. The RAND analysts were particularly excited
with the results of Operation Annihilator II, a bloody
raid on FARC strongholds in Sumapaz. RAND notes approvingly
that the body count from Colombian military strikes rose
from 364 in 1999 to 506 in 2000.
Plan Colombia is inadequate to the task of eradicating
cocaine or the FARC, RAND warns. Moreover, RAND advises
that the US contribution to the effort – $862.3 million
a year – is too paltry to make much of a difference.
RAND calmly ridicules the requirement for human rights
training and monitoring, which is attached to the US aid
package. "There is a question of the practical limitations
on the Colombian government's ability to prevent human
rights violations in the context of an armed insurrection,"
the RAND analysts comfortably contend. To buttress this
assessment, RAND points to the US experience in Vietnam,
arguing that the slaughter of civilians is simply a cost
of doing business during wartime and that "even with disciplined
troops, the chain of command will ultimately break down
at times under the stress of combat."
Of course, most of the US massacres in Vietnam were the
result of troops carrying out official policy, such as
the Phoenix missions, and not the actions of crazed grunts
going on killing sprees. The same is true in Colombia,
where in the past two years alone where 477 police and
military officers have been found guilty of human rights
abuses by civilian courts.
The thrust of Plan Colombia's cocaine suppression campaign
– and the bulk of US aid – is aimed at Colombian troops
seizing coca fields under FARC control in the Putumayo
district. This "southern strategy," RAND admits, is a
thinly veiled effort to re-channel anti-drug efforts into
a full-blown assault on a major FARC stronghold, with
US helicopters doing the brunt of the air assaults and
US advisors providing aid to the fledgling Colombian military
in this riverine region and "for improved radar, airfields
and intelligence collection."
But RAND warns that by targeting coca production, particularly
with the widespread use of toxic fumigants, the Colombian
military, and its US advisors, may actually end up bolstering
the FARC's public standing in the region. "According to
the governor of Putumayo, about 135,000 of the district's
314,000 inhabitants depend directly on the coca crop for
their livelihood. Intensified coca eradication would probably
be resisted by the local population...."
RAND rightly notes that the aerial fumigation of coca
crops is backfiring politically. "Absent viable economic
alternatives [such as crop substitution and infrastructure
development], fumigation may simply displace growers to
other regions and increase support for the guerrillas."
RAND concludes that the only solution is the elimination
of the threat to the "stability" of the region posed by
the FARC and the ELN. It also advises the Pentagon that
"the Colombian government, left to its own devices, does
not have the institutional or material resources to reverse
unfavorable trends." One of those trends is the resurrection
of the domino theory, called here the "spillover effect."
RAND suggests that if the US doesn't intervene, the Colombian
situation "will metastasize into a wider regional upheaval."
It is up to the US to act as the "deus ex machina" in
this conflict.
Aside from stepping up direct military aid to Colombia,
RAND urges the Pentagon to expand the US military presence
in the bordering nations, including "helping Panama fill
the security vacuum in its southern provinces."
The Marcella paper is a more distilled version of the
RAND report. Marcella, a specialist in South American
matters at the Defense War College, suggests that the
future US role in Colombia become more like US operations
in El Salvador than Vietnam – which, we surmise, means
the deployment of death-squads-by-proxy. Remember that
the firm of Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld has lately reassembled
the old gang that directed such mayhem and misery in Latin
America during the 1980s: John Negroponte, Otto Reich
and Elliott Abrams. Marcella approvingly invokes the Thatcherite
English theorist John Dunn: "there cannot be political
control without the capacity to coerce."
Copyright
© 2001 Alexander Cockburn
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