WHAT
THE HECK
In
November of 1998, the head of the Colombian air force resigned
after seven-hundred
packages of cocaine, containing about 1,500 pounds of
the drug, were found on one of his aircraft upon arrival in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, en route from Bogota. The Hercules
C-130, manned by Colombian military personnel, was on a routine
flight to transport supplies and spare parts to combat the
"narco-terrorists." Gee, that's funny, said Colombian air
force General Jose Manuel Sandoval, but the plane was inspected
and searched by drug-sniffing dogs before takeoff. How in
the heck did that happen?
SMACK
IN THE NOSE CONE
This
was very bad timing, for just a month earlier President Andres
Pastrana had been in Washington solemnly promising that his
country was ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US
in the drug war – if only they would keep the foreign
aid gravy train flowing. And just a week prior to the Fort
Lauderdale incident, three Colombian air force mechanics had
been convicted for a 1996 plot to smuggle 8 pounds of heroin
into the United States – in the nose cone of then-President
Ernesto Samper's private jet. The US revoked Samper's visa
– in spite of the vigorous protests of the Colombian
Congress. They also revoked their previously fulsome support,
and got to work finding a new American stooge, this time a
relatively clean and "democratic" one. President Andres Pastrana
was installed amid high hopes and fresh injections of American
cash. At first it looked as though the thin veneer of civilization
might be restored to an anarchic country, at least to the
satisfaction of the outside world.
CLINTON'S
THREE-WAY
Except
for one small detail: the concept of the restoration of order
does not apply to Colombia. This is a country that has been
plunged into what may be the longest civil war in all of recorded
history. There is nothing to restore. Since 1878, Colombia
has been wracked by open shooting warfare between left and
right, between the Liberal party and the Conservatives. With
the US entering the fray as the patron of Pastrana, a third
force is being created out of whole cloth. So now we have
a three-way struggle, pitting the central government
in Bogota not only against the leftist guerrillas, but also
against the right-wing "paramilitary" groups.
AUTODEFENSA:
THE TEETH OF THE DRAGON
As
the US sinks into the Colombian quagmire, US troops (in the
guise of "advisors") will have to contend with such groups
as the 11,000-strong Campesinas de Cordoba y Uraba
(ACCU), the leading organization of the autodefensa
movement that has arisen as the answer to leftist violence.
Although rather unsympathetically portrayed in Alma Guillermoprieto's
excellent
piece in the New York Review of Books, the story
of how the ACCU "paramilitaries" came into being is told accurately
and fairly. As Guillermoprieto puts it:
"The
paramilitaries first sprang up, like soldiers grown
from dragons' teeth, in regions where the guerrillas made
the mistake of kidnapping the wrong people. In the days before
the FARC started taxing cocaine, they survived in large part
off income derived from abducting, or threatening to abduct,
ranchers and businessmen. Kidnapping as an illegal economic
activity has a long history in Colombia. Many drug traffickers,
for example, got their startup capital through kidnapping
and continued to use it as an additional source of income
and power. (The best account of a kidnap victim's terrorized
life in captivity is to be found in Gabriel García
Márquez's News
of a Kidnapping, about the victims of the trafficker
Pablo Escobar.)"
A
COMPETITION OF THUGGERY
While
the FARC rakes in hundreds of millions a year in extorting
– some would say protecting – the drug dealers and
cultivators who dominate the southern tier of the country,
at least half their income comes from the continuous kidnappings
that are a staple of the ongoing Colombian psychodrama. The
multitude of leftist groups have a competition going to see
which faction can collect the most spectacular ransoms, and
get away with the most daring escapades. This ensures a rather
high level of violence, since the number of leftist splinter
groups is rapidly proliferating. Aside from the FARC, the
group you hear most about, there are several
others, including M-19,
the "autonomes" of the Southern Hemisphere, Ejercito
Popular de Liberacion (EPL), an orthodox Maoist tendency,
the Ejercito
Liberacion National (ELN), a radical outgrowth of Catholic
"liberation theology" that has canonized Che Guevera, Quintin
Lame (MAQL), which claims to speak for indigenous peoples,
and a host of others: Comandos Ernesto Rojas, Corriente de
Renovacion Socialista (CRS), Milicias de Medellin, Partido
Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT) and the Frente Francisco
Garnica. These grouplets battle each other almost as much
as they engage government forces, and this has also had the
effect of turning this into a three-way civil war.
FROM
LEFT TO RIGHT
In
1991, the majority of the formerly Maoist EPL decided to discontinue
the armed struggle: they announced they were turning in their
guns and forming a legal party, Esperanza, Paz y Libertad
(Hope, Peace, and Liberty). The response to this from their
more orthodox Marxist competitors was an armed assault on
the EPL-controlled territory in the province of Cordoba by
the FARC, in which unarmed EPL cadre were executed, including
many of the leaders. Guillermoprieto interviews a young woman
named Rosa, whose ideological odyssey starts out in the EPL,
a New Leftish milieu consisting mostly of university students,
and winds up in the camp of the paramilitaires:
"She
is only one of many defectors from the fanatic left to join
the ranks of the murderous right. The autodefensas
claim that fully one third of their troops are former guerrillas,
and even if one disputes the figures, there is no doubting
the general trend. Rosa's life, however, is unusual even in
Colombia, where reality always seems to flow out of someone's
dream, or nightmare."
A
SOUTH AMERICAN ALBANIA
Rosa
and many of her comrades joined the so-called "death squads"
without really changing their world outlook. This development
is perfectly logical if you abandon the old left-right dichotomy
and begin to see Colombian politics as a South American version
of Albania, where clan loyalties structure society and perfecting
the fine art of the blood feud is the national pastime. Think
of the Code
of Lek, the Albanian codex of systematized revenge, only
with a Latin flourish.
A
WAR OF RETRIBUTION
With
their own martyrs to avenge, the EPL readily joined the autodefensas
in a war of retribution against the FARC, and by extension
all the other leftist grouplets. After all, the ACCU was founded
as an act of revenge, in 1981, in the mining town of Segovia,
where, as, Guillermoprieto puts it, "the FARC kidnapped the
father of a smalltime drug dealer and emerald dealer called
Fiodel Castano, a crime which would turn out to have fateful
consequences." The family offered to pay a ransom, but their
offer was rejected by the FARC as absurdly low, and they were
urged to come up with more funds. Fidel Castano reportedly
wrote the kidnappers that if the family did somehow manage
to raise the money "it would be exclusively to fight against
you." This was the genesis of the paramilitaires.
COLOMBIAN
NEOCONS –
A BLOODTHIRSTY LOT
The
younger brother, Carlos, took over command after Fidel's untimely
death, and went national, allying himself with other local
groups that had sprung up wherever the peasants got tired
of being taxed by multiple guerrilla groups. Banding together
with the developing middle class for their own self-defense,
the autodefensa consists of fed-up peasants and ex-leftists
whose doctrine of class warfare was easily transmuted into
war pure and simple. If the numerous accounts of their savagery
have any credence – Guillermoprieto has them dancing
and singing in the town square as they slit the throats of
FARC-sympathizing villagers – then the old adage about
ex-Commies being as bad if not worse than their former comrades
is once again rather starkly illustrated.
BIG
MOUTH BEN
It
isn't the rock-ribbed conservatives who are crusading for
US intervention on the Republican side, but centrists like
Speaker Hastert and moderate upstate New York Republican congressman
Ben "Big Mouth" Gilman, chairman of the House Committee on
International Affairs. Gilman earned his nickname by braying
loudly for intervention in Kosovo, with a decibel level second
only to John McCain's. In the vanguard of the War Party on
every occasion, from the Straits of Taiwan to Chechnya, here
is a warmonger for all seasons, who made a special push for
100 brand-new helicopter battleships as the solution to winning
the war on drugs in Colombia
CONSERVATIVES
AREN'T BUYING IT
Our
intervention in Colombia is often compared to the early stages
of the Vietnam war, and no doubt the constantly growing number
of American "advisors" – officially up to 200 now –
will bring the word "escalation" back into everyday use. But
this scenario is missing the basic scenery of the cold war,
the painted backdrop of the Soviet bloc looming in the distance.
The mainstream conservatives over at the Heritage Foundation,
however, are not buying the "war on drugs" as a substitute
for the war on Communism that shaped US foreign policy in
the Cold War era. They've heard "it's for the children" too
many times. John
Sweeney's Heritage paper
proposes limited aid with the proviso that no US troops are
directly engaged in the conflict, and warns
that we should tread cautiously:
"The
president and Congress would be wise to remember that America's
involvement in Vietnam began with a few dozen U.S. military
advisors and a small financial investment. . . . If the limits
of US military involvement are not spelled out clearly at
the outset, the risk is great that significant numbers of
US soldiers could be sucked by default into the quagmire."
A
FALSE NOTE
The
idea that it was Colombian drug lords who surreptitiously
imported moral corruption into the streets of America's cities
– along with the thousands of tons of cocaine and heroin
that pour over our porous borders twenty-four hours a day
– just does not ring very true. It is especially unconvincing
to conservatives disgusted by a culture they liken to the
last decadent days of the Roman empire. The idea that "narco-terrorists"
in the Colombian jungles are more responsible for the drug
traffic in America than the glamorization of the heroin-addict
look by the fashion industry – or cocaine by Hollywood
in the seventies and eighties – is laughable. Rather
than blame his own movie mogul friends, our Commander-in-chief
is ready to call out the Marines in yet another "humanitarian"
intervention: yes, and this one's "for the children," you
can be sure.
IT
TAKES A VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
How
many focus groups have told the Clintonians that the all-important
"soccer moms" are worried sick about their kids turning into
drugged-out pupil-less zombies? Rather than blame our soul-destroying
public school system, or their own narcissistic affliction
passed on to their children, our soccer moms are quite willing
to hold the FARC responsible for the zombie-like state of
their troubled and increasingly demented offspring –
or so the architects of this war hope. But will they buy it?
MARCHING
ON PARIS
I
doubt even the fabled soccer moms are dizzy enough to swallow
such drivel, no matter what the focus groups say. And conservatives
will certainly not fall for this flight from responsibility
by the one-hundred-percent American authors of our
own moral decline. If we are to take the stance of the extreme
moral protectionist, and avenge the various forms of moral
corruption supposedly imported from abroad by invading and
stamping out the threat at the alleged "source," then there
is more of a case for an immediate (and massive) military
intervention in France – in retaliation for the export
of such dangerous trends as deconstructionism and other pernicious
literary theories and political dogmas, which have decimated
the American university system.
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