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Special Interest: Colombia

News and Views

See also:  Action Alerts!  and News ^{(Nov. 27)}

Link: Rights Commission Deplores Colombia's Record
Inter-American Commission for Human Rights
December 2001

Link: Colombian Military Violates Agreement:
Deadly Fumigation Returns to Putumayo
Witness for Peace
November 2001

Article: "Hopes dim for ending Colombia's guerrilla war"
By Martin Hodgson
The Chistian Science Monitor, Oct. 4, 2001

Article: "It's the Real Thing: Murder"
By Aram Roston
The Nation, Sept. 3, 2001

Information: "Violence in Colombia: A Timeline"
By Erna von der Walde and Carmen Burbano
NACLA Report on the Americas
Vol. XXXV, No. 1
July/August 2001

Article: "The Colombian Connection: U.S. aid fuels a dirty war against unions" 
By David Bacon
InTheseTimes.com, July 23, 2001

Article: "Scorched Earth: U.S. Chemical Warfare in the Colombian Rainforest"
By Sean Donahue
Zmag.org, January 2001

"Hopes dim for ending Colombia's guerrilla war"

By Martin Hodgson

The Christian Science Monitor
Oct. 4, 2001

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1004/p7s2-woam.html

Recent outbreaks of violence threaten the sluggish peace process, which faces a crucial Sunday deadline.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - Even before this week, many Colombians had grown tired of the country's slow-moving peace process. After three years of intermittent contacts with the two main guerrilla factions, President Andrés Pastrana has little to show for his efforts and fighting continues throughout the country.

A weekend of violent guerrilla defiance, followed by the Tuesday murder of a lawmaker have pushed talks with the largest rebel army to the brink of collapse.

Against the backdrop of a US-led campaign against terrorism, Mr. Pastrana may find it increasingly difficult to justify negotiation with any of the country's armed factions - three of which are included on the State Department's terrorist blacklist.

In the new global context "there will be a tendency to see things in terms of good guys and bad guys, and a strong skepticism of negotiating with groups which are designated as terrorists," says Michael Shifter, Vice-president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think-tank.

US officials were already skeptical about Pastrana's decision to cede a huge swath of jungle and savannah to the largest rebel group as a condition for talks. The president's critics say that the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have converted the safe-haven near the Ecuadorian border into a state within a state.

Their worst fears seemed to be confirmed Saturday, when machine gun-wielding rebels barred the path of Horacio Serpa - a leading contender in next year's presidential elections - as he tried to lead thousands of supporters to a campaign rally inside the zone.

Hours later, troops in northern Colombia found the bullet-riddled body of Consuelo Araujo, a popular former culture minister kidnapped by FARC rebels on September 24th.

The two incidents came at a crucial moment in the peace process: by midnight Sunday President Pastrana must decide whether to renew the rebel safe-haven. "Through their defiant acts, the FARC have notified the country that they are determined to discredit a political solution to the conflict,'' Pastrana said.

Colombian senators suspended debate on all subjects other than the peace process after opposition legislator Octavio Sarmiento was shot dead Tuesday, allegedly by members of the paramilitary umbrella organization known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, the FARC's bitter enemy.

After the recent violence, several prominent politicians have called on Pastrana to suspend the peace process, and on Tuesday, the country's largest national newspaper, El Tiempo, published an opinion poll showing that 61 percent of those consulted believed that the peace process should be abandoned. In the same newspaper, one columnist said that Colombians "must respond to the FARC with the same firmness and valor as the Americans did to the attack on the World Trade Center."

According to political analyst Marco Romero of Bogotá's National University, Colombian hawks were quick to use the September 11 attacks as a justification for a tougher stance against the guerrillas.

"Colombian warmongers have used (the attacks) as excuse to throw fuel on the fire. They see it as moment to harden positions, to stop making concessions and play a strategy of war," he says, adding that elements within both the guerrillas and the government still believe that they can improve their negotiating position - or even win a victory - through military force.

In the past two years, Washington has plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into equipment and training for the Colombian armed forces in the name of the war against drugs. Both rebels and right-wing paramilitaries fund their campaigns with drugs kickbacks.

Now, it seems that the rebels fear that America may release more aid in the name of the campaign against terror. In a statement shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, FARC accused the US of using the "painful events" as an excuse to unleash a "global witchhunt."

Neither the FARC nor the National Liberation Army (ELN) has ever struck within the US, but both are on the State Department's blacklist of terrorist organizations, as is the AUC. The FARC has said it considers US military advisers as military targets, and it often bombs pipelines and railways serving US firms in Colombia.

But the group's anti-imperialist rhetoric has been tempered with a degree of political pragmatism: In the past FARC commanders have also met with State Department officials and US congressmen.

"There's a strong distinction between the anti-imperialist discourse we hear from Colombia's guerrillas, and the actual threat that they pose to the US," said Inter-American Dialogue's Michael Shifter.

However, Washington was angered by recent allegations that members of the Irish Republican Arm (IRA) had visited the FARC's haven to teach bomb-making skills to the Colombian rebels.

Some US lawmakers are already making a link between the Colombian conflict and America's wider agenda.

Referring to the murder of Ms. Araujo, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska told CNN that "this sea around us of terrorism and terrorist acts are maybe not part of the same conspiracy, but nonetheless, the civilized world is at war against that."

For more information, go to
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1004/p7s2-woam.html

 

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"It's the Real Thing: Murder"

By Aram Roston

The Nation
Sept. 3, 2001

 

By vocation, Gustavo Soler is a heavy equipment operator at a coal mine in northern Colombia; by choice, he's a labor activist. Hunched over a borrowed wooden desk in an office in Barranquilla, his stocky forearms resting on a file folder, he acknowledges that his life is at risk, and that one day men with guns may come for him. Three months before, they came for his predecessor as union president--who was killed on the spot--and for the union's vice president, dragged away and apparently tortured before he was murdered. No one has been arrested, but it's commonly accepted that the killers were members of the country's brutal ultrarightist paramilitaries.

 

Soler and the dead men, who all worked at the huge La Loma mine in the remote Cesar province, had together been something of a thorn in the side of their employer, Drummond, a company based roughly 2,000 miles away in Birmingham, Alabama. They demanded better working conditions and accused Drummond of violating Colombian labor laws. Before the men were killed in mid-March, Drummond appears to have had ample warning that their lives were in danger.

 

What is perhaps most disturbing about the Drummond case is that it is not unusual. Union activity at other Colombian worksites, including several run by American companies, has been greeted with terror. Take the case of Luis Adolfo Cardona, a wiry man with a delicately trimmed mustache who used to earn about $200 a month as a forklift operator at a factory in the western area of Urabá. When the paramilitaries came for him, he says, he was so scared his hands and feet were trembling, but he escaped. A friend and fellow union organizer was killed on the plant grounds, and the entire work force was forced to renounce the union. The plant where Cardona worked is American-owned; it produces 50,000 cases of Coca-Cola per month.

 

Activists in Colombia, and now American labor leaders, are becoming increasingly concerned about the situation. In July, the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund filed suit in US court against Coca-Cola and some bottlers in Colombia on behalf of their workers, alleging that the companies "hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces." The companies deny the charges.

 

The US government, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role in the explosive politics of the country. Amid images of coca growing in the hills and thuggish guerrillas treading silently on jungle paths, the $1.3 billion in US anti-drug aid provided by Plan Colombia is sending Black Hawk helicopters skimming the tree line and clouds of chemicals fumigating illicit bright-green crops. But the elephant in the room, as the policy grinds forward, is US corporate involvement in Colombia. The United States is Colombia's biggest foreign investor. As the State Department put it in a report, "savvy global companies understand clearly the strategic potential of the country," and "with risk comes opportunity and competitive advantage against the less bold." That risk, for US companies, is posed by the left-wing guerrilla groups ELN and FARC--themselves responsible for myriad abuses, according to Human Rights Watch. But the majority of atrocities are committed by the right-wing paramilitaries, which, as the State Department report notes, "have not targeted US interests."

 

On the contrary, in some cases paramilitary acts appear to have aided those interests. High on the list of paramilitary targets are Colombia's union leaders, because of their ideology, their apparent interference in the machine of commerce, their generally left-wing politics and their advocacy for peace. And American firms--including Drummond--have roundly cheered a US aid plan that, according to many in Colombia, allows the paramilitaries to thrive. "We've always supported Plan Colombia," Drummond spokesman Mike Tracy says. "We just think that it's in the best interest of the government and the business community in Colombia, and the general population."

According to the United Federation of Workers (CUT) in Colombia, last year at least 129 union activists were murdered. By one count, so far this year more than sixty have been assassinated. Numbers twenty-two and twenty-three were the aforementioned co-workers of Gustavo Soler, Drummond employees Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasita, president and vice president of the coal miners' union, respectively.

The rich deposits of low-sulfur coal in Cesar province first caught Drummond's attention in the early 1990s. According to a high-ranking former Colombian military officer, it was in that period that the paramilitaries began aggressive operations in Cesar province, fighting FARC and killing suspected FARC sympathizers. The paras, who have since grown into an efficient fighting force of more than 8,000, now dominate the region.

Doing business in a war zone, Drummond got what it might have expected--violence. Since serious production began, Drummond has endured repeated attacks by leftist guerrillas, chiefly against the company's 200-kilometer rail line, which carries 40,000 tons of coal a day from the mine to "Puerto Drummond" on the coast. Still, Drummond's CEO, Garry Neil Drummond, says business is good. "We believe in the future of Colombia," he said recently. As for the violence, "the problem is manageable."

The firm has tried to keep a happy face on its operations, literally: Its logo in Colombia is a caricature of a chubby, smiling coal miner named Drumino, wearing a bright-yellow shirt, blue pants and a bright-blue mining helmet. It's the company's answer, announced Garry Drummond, to the prototypical Colombian coffee-bean picker Juan Valdez. "This is Drumino, coal miner, saying hi," the character says in one company publication. "I am uncomplicated and hard-working, cheerful and optimistic."

In the real world, labor relations have been tense at the best of times. "Relations are not good," says Gustavo Soler. Early on, workers joined a union called Sintramienergética. Disagreements with management at the mine ran the gamut: salaries, working conditions, health coverage, schedules and even food. Hardly gourmet diners, the miners, who believed that the man contracted to provide meals was a paramilitary sympathizer, say he prepared inedible slop. Union leaders also say they resented the lie detector tests some were forced to take, with questions like "Are you supporting the guerrillas?"

Even more ominous were the repeated anonymous threats against the labor leaders' lives. There was a rebel attack against the company's rail line in April 2000. "That was when the fliers started to appear," Soler says. The anonymous fliers began by extolling the coal mine. "The multinational Drummond is a source of income and growth for our city, and for that reason it has become like our heritage." "No al Sindicalismo guerrillero," they read. "No to the guerrilla union."

Last September, FARC attacked Drummond's rail line again, blowing up a locomotive and taking three employees hostage. The threats to the union escalated. Another anonymous flier found its way around town: "We know that the heads of the union have a clear nexus with the subversion.... down with the guerrilla union. down with the subversion that is against investment in the country."

There is no evidence that the union had anything to do with attacks against the company, but being accused of sympathizing with guerrillas in para country is like being called a government witness in a mob social club. So it is not hard to imagine the fear the union leadership lived with at that point. In fact, there's virtually a record of it: letters the union wrote to anyone they thought would help. On September 28, union president Locarno wrote to Drummond's human resources department. His letter, on union stationery with a little drawing of a miner's helmet crossed by a hammer and shovel, cited the dangers of traveling and the anonymous pamphlets. He asked for permission for the union heads to stay, between twelve-hour shifts, in the relative safety of the mine. "We hope we can count on your collaboration and your concurrence for the protection of our lives."

Drummond turned him down flat. On October 6, the company replied, assuring Locarno that "the company has made the appropriate authorities aware of this situation," but regretfully letting him know that spending the night at the facility would not be permitted. The union leaders also wrote to the Colombian government asserting that the pamphlets are "putting our lives in danger." They asked for help under a special government program designed to protect union leaders. Interior Department officials refused the request, issuing a finding this past February that the risk was "bajo-medio"--low to medium.

On March 12, at the end of a shift, Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasita left the mine together, in the second of four daily company-chartered buses into town. Union officials say that when the bus passed a toll booth, about ten paramilitaries in a four by four pulled it over. Soler says, "We think that some person from the mine had contact with the assassins because they knew exactly which bus [Locarno and Orcasita] were on." Union officials say a man in the front seat of the paramilitaries' vehicle seemed to pick out the victims, as the workers were lined up seated on the dirt road before him. Locarno's life ended there with a bullet in the head and the chest. Orcasita was taken elsewhere, and his body was found the next day, hands tied.

The company issued a statement deploring the killings and maintaining that it has always had good relations with the union. The company spokesman, Mike Tracy, says, "We are really concerned about the safety of our employees. We feel like we've taken appropriate measures." Now, says Tracy, escort cars accompany the buses taking the workers from their shifts.

Far from the tropical heat of La Loma mine, in Drummond's hometown of Birmingham, John Stewart is, roughly speaking, Gustavo Soler's counterpart in the United States, as president of the United Mine Workers local. He is furious about the killings and riled up about Drummond's Colombia mine. "They're not going to want any union over there," the 59-year-old union veteran says in an Alabama drawl. "That's why they moved there." Stewart says that since 1995, when Drummond began production in Colombia, the company has shut down all but one of its mines in the United States. Drummond says it was no longer economically viable to extract the coal; Stewart claims Drummond went to Colombia for the cheap labor.

"This is a company that has laid off 1,700 American coal miners in the last decade," says Kenneth Zinn of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions, "and has chosen to relocate its production to a place where they murder trade unionists." He adds, "These union leaders were threatened repeatedly by the paramilitaries. The union leaders brought it to the attention of the Drummond executives. Drummond executives chose to ignore those pleadings, and if I were them I sure wouldn't sleep easy at night."

Meanwhile, a loose consortium of US labor leaders has come together to help highlight labor rights violations in Colombia. A new program of the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center plans to bring threatened union activists to the United States for temporary sanctuary, while the United Auto Workers is targeting the Colombian Embassy in Washington with a postcard campaign.

Some US union leaders, weaned politically on protests against US involvement in Central America, see Plan Colombia as a traditional counterinsurgency intervention. "Colombia is a case that smells like those other cases," says Dan Kovalik, deputy counsel for the Steelworkers, who protested against aid to El Salvador's military in the 1980s. But Colombia, he says, has an added dimension. "I mean, look, Colombia is sort of everything we hate about globalization gone to its extreme, right? Companies are there; they're not only oppressing people, they're working with paramilitaries."

Kovalik is one of the lawyers who brought the case against the biggest brand in the world, Coca-Cola, charging that the company and its Colombian subsidiary and bottlers should be held responsible for paramilitary attacks on union leaders and workers. The lawsuit cites one shooting just this past June, a union negotiator gunned down on the street; but Colombian labor leaders have made these charges against Coca-Cola for years. Sinaltrainal, a food and beverage workers' union, alleges that workers have been killed, threatened and harassed at various bottling plants. One high-ranking labor official says simply, "Everyone knows that Coca-Cola works with the paramilitaries."

One striking case cited in the lawsuit was in Carepa, in the Urabá region, in 1996. The story, pieced together from interviews and thousands of pages of files from the official Colombian investigation, highlights troubling questions about the interplay between a company and the armed participants in the war.

While most Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia are owned by Panamerican Beverages, a large publicly traded company, the Carepa bottler is privately owned by a US family whose patriarch, Richard Kirby, used to be president of Panamerican's subsidiary in Colombia. Kirby now lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and according to his lawyer, he has only once, long ago, been to his bottling plant in a region plagued by violence.

Luis Adolfo Cardona, the union's general secretary, says that at the plant, operating the union was impossible. Management, he says, "did not want to negotiate." The local head of the paramilitaries in Carepa was nicknamed Cepillo, "the brush," and, according to Cardona, "the manager kept saying that the hour he talked to Cepillo, we would be killed, we would be finished."

On November 30, 1996, the union submitted its demands for a new collective-bargaining agreement. The workers wanted more money--a 35 percent raise in the first year and another 35 percent the next, bringing the salaries to about $400 a month--better job security and health benefits. Things went downhill from there.

On the morning of December 5, the union's negotiator and plant gatekeeper, Isidro Segundo Gil, was shot ten times, right next to the Coca-Cola sign on the wall, after opening the entrance. Fellow workers said they gathered around where he lay face down in a pool of blood, and saw the killers drive off on motorcycles.

Later that day, Cardona says, he was intercepted by the paras. He says he was told he was being taken to see Cepillo, and it was clear he was going to be killed, so he decided to run for it. The paramilitaries chased him down on a motorcycle, he recalls, but he managed to get to the police station. "They're going to kill me," he says he told the one police officer on duty, "simply because I belong to the union."

While there have been serious allegations of police complicity with the paramilitaries, there have also been acts of extraordinary bravery: police who take on the militias single-handedly. In this case, as the policeman loaded Cardona into a van, Cardona spotted the paramilitaries waiting at the corner and pointed them out. The police lieutenant replied, "Don't worry, I know who all the sons of bitches are." Cardona and his family were sent to safety.

That night the paramilitaries attacked and torched the union's headquarters.

Seven days later, the union workers say, they were brought to the cafeteria in the morning, where paramilitaries, who appeared to have strolled into the plant unimpeded, told them they would have to resign from the union by 4 pm, or they would be killed. Workers later told investigators it was the plant managers, not the paramilitaries, who handed out the form letters that workers were expected to sign. "Dear Sirs," the letters begin, "By this I present my irrevocable resignation from the union Sinaltrainal."

All told, there were forty-three signatures on forty-three letters. As a prosecutor wrote in an internal document, the paramilitaries had achieved their objective: forcing the union out.

It also appears that the company had a relationship with the Colombian Army. According to case documents, after the episode, the ex-manager of the plant told investigators that he had an agreement to pay the army the equivalent of about $500 a month for protection. He said that the man they dealt with was Gen. Rito Alejo del Río, a notorious violator of human rights who managed to surpass even what the military would tolerate, and was forced to resign in 1999. "He was an open supporter of paramilitary groups," says Robin Kirk of Human Rights Watch.

Three years after the killing, in 1999, prosecutors charged the former plant manager and the chief of production with setting up the whole thing: the murder, the abduction of Cardona, the destruction of union headquarters and the forced renunciations. But the case fell apart after the production chief claimed that he, too, had been a target of the paramilitaries, while the plant manager insisted that he hadn't been around. Moreover, the judge in the case decided that since the region of Urabá, where the plant was based, is notoriously dominated by the paramilitaries, the crimes were part of a larger attack on labor rather than a specific corporate conspiracy. The charges were dropped, and the case against the two former plant managers was closed this past April.

Richard Kirby, reached by telephone in Florida before the suit was filed, declined to comment. "I'm not political and I'm not interested in politics," he said. "As I understand it, I think that the matter was examined. I think I would say it was put on the shelf, wouldn't you?" After the suit was filed, Kirby's lawyer said the allegations were baseless. Emilio Urrea, the general manager for Kirby's company in Colombia, explained that the paramilitaries forced the union renunciations on their own. Urrea said he can't rule out involvement by the former on-site plant manager, but he insisted the US owners had nothing to do with it. The suit in the United States charges that there were human rights violations at other plants in Colombia as well; like Kirby, Coca-Cola and the other companies that were sued vigorously deny the allegations.

So who is responsible? If this were Alabama--Drummond's headquarters--or Atlanta, Coca-Cola's home, the same events would obviously lead to public outrage. But this is Colombia, where such violent transactions are relatively minor notches on the paramilitaries' belts. They can be explained away as the symptoms of ideological quirks: The paramilitaries hate unions; they attack them; it makes no difference what the company did; this is all part of a larger war. According to this logic, if the paras thought they were doing the corporations a favor by attacking their unions, then it is hardly the companies' responsibility.

While union activists acknowledge there is no direct proof that the companies commissioned the killings, they insist that this does not mean they are innocent. Héctor Fajardo, the CUT's general secretary, who has survived three assassination attempts, says, "The companies benefit, even if it's indirectly."

Three months after the Drummond killings, when I interviewed Gustavo Soler, he was preoccupied with his cell phone, which wasn't working properly. He tested the phone, he tapped it, he checked the battery and he looked at the display.

His obsession became understandable when I asked him about the steps taken for his protection. He grinned with embarrassment and, shrugging, he held up the cell phone in his left hand. "This is my security," he said. It was given him by the Colombian government. Evidently, if the paramilitaries arrive, he's supposed to use it to call for help.

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

For more information, go to www.thenation.com.

 

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"Violence in Colombia: A Timeline" 

By Erna von der Walde and
Carmen Burbano

NACLA Report on the Americas
Vol. XXXV, No. 1 July/August 2001

 

1948
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a populist leader of the Liberal Party, is assassinated in Bogotá. This unleashes a violent riot known as “El Bogotazo” in which 1,500 people die and 20,000 are injured. the partisan civil war between the Conservatives and the Liberals intensifies as a consequence of the assassination of Gaitán.

1948-58
La Violencia lasts for 10 years as liberal and Conservative armies and guerrillas fight each other. Over 300,000 people are killed and many more are focibly displaced.

1951
Liberal peasants organize self-defense groups against the conservative “pajaros,” who massacre them to steal land. One of the leaders is Pedro Antonio Marín, who changes his name to manuel Marulanda Velez, and is more commonly known as “Tirofijo” (Sure Shot).

1953
With the backing of the two parties, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, head of the armed forces. leads a coup to oust President Laureano Gómez. Rojas Pinilla rules as a dictator, brutally suppressing all opposition.

1955-57
Liberal guerrillas, known as “common liberals” (as opposed to party-led liberals) ally with Communist guerrillas who had emerged in the 1920s as self-defense groups. this alliance leads to the creation of the “Independent Republics.”

1958
The Liberal and Conservative Parties agree to share power as a way to pacify the nation. This arrangement is called the national Front and lasts for 16 years. The two parties alternate in power; all other political actors are excluded. The Liberal-Conservative violence is contained but there is renewed struggle by the excluded groups.

1964
The government bombs the town of Marquetalia, Tolima and the surrounding areas to eliminate an independent republic. The offensive receives the assistance of the U.S. military which seizes the opportunity to try out napalm.

1960s
Camilo Torres, known as the “revolutionary priest,” creates the People’s United Front which denounces the exclusionary practices of the National Front after he fails to mediate between the government and the guerrilla group of “Tirofijo.” Camilo concludes that the current system can only be reformed through violence.

The Communists and “common liberals” mobilize to become the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

A second guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), emerges following Cuban-style foco theory.

The Popular Liberation Army (EPL), a third guerrilla group inspired by Maoism, forms and spreads towards the Atlantic Coast.

1966
President Carols Lleras Restrepo, a Liberal, orders the destruction of the archives of La Violencia in an attempt to erase the painful past.

1970s
A second generation of revolutionaries emerges: an urban guerrilla group called the April 19 Movement (M-19); an indigenous guerrilla force named after the Indian prophet Quintín Lame, Worker’s Self-Defense (ADO), and the Worker’s Revolutionary Party (PRT).

Colombia becomes a major producer and exporter of marijuana. Drug traffic becomes an essential part of the national economy and of the livelihood of excluded groups.

1974
End of the National Front. Alfonso López Michelsen, a Liberal, wins the first free election with the highest turnout in Colombian history. Social upheaval continues.

1978
The government isses the Public Safety Statute, an anti-terrorist piece of legislation, based on the “dirty war” tactics of the Argentine army. The Statute affords ample freedom to security forces and unleashes a wave of generalized repression. Disappearances, torture, and political assassination become common.

1982-86
President Belisario Betancur Cuartas, a Conservative, initiates a peace process with the guerrilla and a gneral amnesty plan for all armed groups.

1985
The Patriotic Union (UP), the political arm of the FARC, is founded to seek political power. The UP wins 14 political posts in 1986 and, within a month, three of its legislators are assassinated. (Within a decade, 3,000 UP activists are killed, decimating the movement.) EPL supporters create the Popular Front and run for municipal elections.

1985
In November, the M-19 seizes the Palace of Justice in downtown Bogotá to denounce the government for breaking the terms of a cease-fire. M-19 fighters, 11 Supreme Court justices, and 90 civilians are killed.

1986
The peace process with the guerrillas is over. The guerrillas retreat to the mountains to weather the assault unleashed against them by the Army, drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary groups.

Drug traffickers become a powerful economic force as landowners. Subject to extortion and kidnappings by the guerrilla, they form their own self-defense groups with the acquiescence of the military. The military, in turn, use the legal right to arm civilians and form paramilitary groups as a counterinsurgency strategy. They self-defense groups and the paramilitaries carry out massacres against union members and civilians accused of supporting the guerrillas.

1989
President Virgilio Barco Vargas, a Liberal, declares a war on drugs, advocating severe repression and extradition to the United States. Over 10,000 people are detained.

1989
Several leading drug traffickers are arrested or killed and their propery seized. Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel, the most powerful in the country, responds by unleashing a wave of terrorist attacks.

1989
Liberal presidentail candidate Luis Carlos Galán is gunned down by assassins at the service of the Medellín Cartel.

1990
The M-19 agrees to a cease-fire and forms the political party Democratic Alliance M-19. Its leader, Carlos Pizarro, runs for president but is murdered during the campaign.

1990-94
Liberal César Gaviria rises to the presidency and initiates the process of constitutional reform. He changes the policy towards drug traffickers, lifts the state of siege and rejects extradition as a means of countering the drug traffic. The Medellín Cartel’s front organization, known as the “extraditables,” declares a truce. Escobar gives himself up in June 1992.

1993
Pablo Escobar escapes from the comfortable “prison” he had demanded from the government. He launches another terrorist campaign as the debates over extradiction continue, pressed by the United States.

A new group, “Los Pepes,” (Victims of Pablo Escobar), emerges. Connected to the Cali Cartel, Los Pepes carry out acts of terrorism against Escobar’s organization and collaborate with the security forces. The authorities rely greatly on Los Pepes in the search for Escobar who is finally killed in Medellín in December by an elite armed unit.

1994-98
Under the presidency of Ernesto Samper Pizano, the country is “decertified” by Washington for the alleged involvement of drug money in the electoral campaign.

1995
The paramilitary groups form a federation led by Carlos Castaño and funded by his drug trafficking activities. It is called the Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC).

Violence and displacement of civilian populations in the countryside increases sharply. Over 25,000 homicides take place in Colombia in 1995.

1996-98
The paramilitaries and drug traffickers move into the FARC-controlled coca cultivation areas in the south.

The ELN collects taxes from multinational oil companies in oil-field areas, also located in the south.

The paramilitaries are believed to be responsible for 60% of political killings, the guerrillas for 25%, and the military for 10%. In August of 1998, the United Nations High commissioner for Refugees establishes an office in Bogotá.

1998
Conservative Andrés Pastrana wins the presidential elections. Prior to his inauguration, Pastrana arranges a meeting with FARC leader Manuel Marulanda to explore the possibility of peace talks. Pastrana agrees to a withdrawal of army troops from five towns in the guerrilla-controlled territory of San Vicente del Caguán.

1999
Pastrana’s administration proposes an ambitious path to establish a negotiated peace, without a cease fire. Peace talks with the FARC begin on January 7.

The ELN unsuccessfully requests a withdrawal agreement similar to the one conceded to the FARC.

The AUC issue a collective death-threat by declaring Colombian human rights advocates as military targets. Later in the year, in a television interview, paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño proposes that the paramilitaries be included in the peace talks.

2000
The Clinton Administration proposes a $1.3 billion dollar military aid package for the Andean Region. The package is approved by Congress. Plan Colombia receives $860 million, mostly for military and police activities. The plan is launched in August with the training of Colombian battalions by U.S. Special Forces.

Erna von der Walde teaches Spanish literature at New York University. Carmen Burbano is a staff assistant at NACLA.

For more information, please visit NACLA at www.nacla.org.

 

NACLA Timeline -- Sources

Jaime Arocha et. al., Colombia: violencia y democracia. Informe presentado al Ministerio de Gobierno (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1987).

Alvaro Camacho, Álvaro Guzmán, María Clemencia Ramírez, Fernando Gaitán, Nuevas visiones sobre la violencia en Colombia (Bogotá: FESCOL, IEPRI, 1997).

Center for International Policy, “The Peace Process in Colombia:
            Timeline of Recent Events"   
            <<www.ciponline.org/colombia/timeline.htm>>.

Colombia Human Rights Network. “An Overview of Recent 
            Colombian History.” 
            <<www.igc.org/colhrnet/timeline.htm>>.

Javier Giraldo, The Genocidal Democracy (Monroe, ME: Common
            Courage Press, 1996).

German Guzman Campos, Orlando Fals Borda y Eduardo Umaña Luna, La violencia en Colobmia. Estudio de un proceso social (Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1962).

Jorge Orlando Melo, ed., Colombia Hoy (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo
             Editores, 1995).

Gonzalo Sánchez, Guerra y política en la sociedad colombiana (Bogotá: El Áncora Editores, 1991).

Gonzalo Sánchez, 2000. “El compromiso social y politico de los
             intelectuales.” Paper presented at the XXII Congress of 
             the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, March 
             2000:        
       <<http://www.colombia-thema.org/mars00/p-sanchez.html>>.

Gonzalo Sánchez y Ricardo Peñaranda, Pasado y presente de la violencia en Colombia (Bogotá: Fondo Editorial CEREC, 1991).

Fernando Viviescas y Fabio Giraldo, eds., Colombia: el despertar de la modernidad (Bogotá: Foro Nacional por Colombia, 1991).

 

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"The Colombian Connection: U.S. aid fuels a dirty war against unions"

By David Bacon

InTheseTimes.com
July 23, 2001

 

In mid-March, Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Orcasita were riding from their jobs at the Loma coal mine in northern Colombia. Locarno and Orcasita were president and vice president of the union at the mine, a local of Sintramienergetica, one of Colombia's two coal miners' unions. As the company bus neared Valledupar, 30 miles from the mine, it was stopped by 15 gunmen, some in military uniforms.

They began checking the identification of the workers, and when they found the two union leaders, they were pulled off the bus. Locarno was hit in the head with a rifle butt. One of the gunmen then shot him in the face, as his fellow workers on the bus watched in horror. Orcasita was taken off into the woods at the side of the road. There he was tortured. When his body was found later, his fingernails had been torn off.

Leading a union often means losing a job, even blacklisting. In many countries, it can bring imprisonment by governments who view unions as a threat to the social and economic elite. But the most dangerous country by far is Colombia, where labor activism is often punished with death. By mid-May, 44 Colombian trade union leaders already had been murdered this year. Last year, assassinations cost the lives of 129 others. According to Hector Fajardo, general secretary of the United Confederation of Workers (CUT), the country's largest union federation, 3,800 trade unionists have been assassinated since 1986. Out of every five trade unionists killed in the world, three are Colombian.

U.S. energy, trade and military policies are contributing to the devastation of the country's labor movement. Bush administration energy policies encourage the use of coal in U.S. power plants, and millions of tons are now mined for export by U.S. corporations in the midst of Colombia's civil war. Free market economic reforms, pushed by the International Monetary Fund, are provoking a wave of resistance by Colombian labor, which is being met by violent repression. And U.S. military aid provided by Plan Colombia supports activities by right-wing paramilitary groups, who in turn target trade union leaders.

The Loma mine is owned by Drummond Co., a multi-national corporation based in Birmingham, Alabama. Drummond opened the mine in 1994, and it is now Colombia's second largest. At first, according to Ken Zinn of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), Drummond promised its U.S. workers that it wouldn't import Colombian coal to compete with its U.S. operations. But since 1994, Drummond has closed five mines in Alabama, laying off 1,700 members of the United Mine Workers. Its one remaining U.S. mine employs about 500 miners.

Alabama used to export coal --13 million tons in 1996, mostly from Drummond mines. Last year's exports totaled only 3 million tons. But 5 million tons of Colombian coal crossed the Alabama State Docks in Mobile last year. It was bound for plants operated by the Alabama Power Co., a division of the Southern Co., which also operates generating facilities in Florida and Mississippi. The plants were formerly fueled by Drummond's U.S. mines. Another half million tons went to the Alabama Electrical Cooperative. At the Loma mine, production rose 4 million tons in 2000, to a total of 11.8 million, after the company built a huge drag line. The company expects to sell 15 million tons next year, and 25 million tons by 2006. For Drummond the transfer has resulted in substantial savings on labor costs. A union miner in Alabama earns $18 an hour, or $3,060 a month, plus benefits.

At the Loma mine, wages range from about $500 to $1,000 a month. Mineworkers Vice President Jerry Jones says Drummond transferred operations to Colombia "knowing that country's hostile political climate and egregious human rights violations."

Colombia is the world's fourth-largest coal exporter -- it shipped 30 million tons of coal in 2000, worth $794 million. Coal is the country's third-largest source of export earnings. Last year the government's mines in central Colombia were privatized as part of economic reforms mandated by the IMF, and sold to a consortium of South African, Swiss and British investors for $384 million. The formerly state-owned Cerrejon Norte mine, the largest export mine in the world, is now operated as a joint venture between the government and Exxon Mobil Corp. Conditions for Colombian miners are some of the world's most dangerous. An April 27 blast at the Cana Brava mine in Santander province killed 15 miners. In October 1997, another explosion buried 16 coal miners alive in El Diviso mine, near Cucuta.

Drummond clearly sees an interest in supporting a Bush administration policy that encourages the increased use of coal in electrical generation. And it sees U.S. military intervention in Colombia in its interest as well. "We are in support of the Colombian Plan and the U.S. efforts in the drug war," Mike Tracy, a Drummond spokesman, told journalist Stephen Jackson, writing in the Latin American Post.

That support translated into a $50,000 donation by Drummond to the Republican National Committee last July; $25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Campaign; and $20,000 to the National Republican Senate Campaign last October. Overall, the coal industry dumped $3.8 million into the 2000 elections, and gave 88 percent of it to Republicans. In turn, the Bush campaign pursued a "cars and coal" strategy to win mining states, among others, based on an industry-friendly perspective. (And after the election, the administration dropped a campaign pledge that it would back carbon-dioxide emissions reductions from coal-fired power stations. That policy change has a big impact on the Alabama plants burning Colombian coal.)

On November 3, Bush told a crowd in West Virginia, where he would beat Al Gore four days later, that "coal is going to energize America." He didn't promise, however, that it would be mined in the United States.

Colombia's rightist paramilitary army, the United Self-Defense Group (AUC), was blamed for the murders of Locarno and Orcasita by the local police commander. According to Ken Zinn of the ICEM, the AUC had issued a number of death threats against the leaders of the union at the Loma mine, accusing them of being in league with the country's main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). "In the conflict a lot of assumptions are made quickly,'' explains Rafael Albuquerque, who represents the International Labor Organization in Colombia. "One of those assumptions is that many union leaders support the guerrillas."

The region has been the scene of intense conflict between the FARC and the AUC. The guerrillas allegedly levy a 10 percent tax on coal moving by rail out of the mine, which Drummond has refused to pay, and the 215-mile rail line to Puerto Drummond on the coast was bombed five times in the last year. In response, company President Gary Drummond visited Colombian President Andres Pastrana last year to demand increased protection.

Locarno and Orcasita themselves had repeatedly pleaded with the company for protection. In a meeting just a week before the assassinations, the union demanded that Drummond provide security for its workers, and that the company abide by a previous agreement allowing them to sleep overnight at the mine. The company ignored the agreement and refused to allow the men to stay. Protesting the deaths of their leaders, 1,200 miners at Loma briefly stopped working.

The mining union leaders have not been the only targets of the AUC. On March 22, just days after the murders in Valledupar, two leaders of the Colombian electrical workers union, Andres Granados and Jaime Sanchez, were gunned down. In mid-March, Eugenio Sanchez Diaz, a union activist in the oil town of Barrancabermeja, was dragged from his home and shot in the street. On the last day of March, Jaime Alberto Duque Castro, leader of the El Cairo Cement Workers Union, was kidnapped by armed gunmen. Another union leader, Ricardo Orozco, vice president of the Colombian Hospital Workers Union, had his name on a list of 50 union leaders in Barranquilla, which was circulated by the paramilitary death squads. He was shot by a gunman in April, and his death was followed by two days of national labor protest.

Robin Kirk, who monitors human rights abuses in Colombia for Human Rights Watch, says that there are strong ties between the paramilitaries and the Colombian military. "The Colombian military and intelligence apparatus has been virulently anti-Communist since the '50s," she says, "and they look at trade unionists as subversives--as a very real and potential threat. Generally they see groups on the left as linked to the ideology that led to the formation of guerrilla groups."

Violence against trade unionists is part of a larger context of violence against community leaders and human rights activists. According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, 6,000 Colombians were killed as the result of social and political violence in 2000. The CCJ attributes 80 percent of the killings to the paramilitaries, 15 percent to the guerrillas and 5 percent directly to the government. But Roberto Molino of the CCJ says that "in the case of the paramilitaries, you cannot underestimate the collaboration of government forces."

The Colombian government also views union activity as a threat because it challenges its basic economic policies. The Pastrana administration is under pressure from the IMF and World Bank to cut the public sector budget, causing mass terminations, along with cuts in education, health care and pensions. In January, finance minister Juan Manuel Santos announced measures that would close many state agencies, laying off 42,000 workers. The money would be used to pay the country's debt to foreign banks and lending institutions, making Colombia more attractive to foreign investors. In March, the General Confederation of Democratic Workers organized a 24-hour strike of 700,000 workers, including 300,000 teachers and education employees, protesting the layoffs. On June 7, tens of thousands of Colombian workers took to the streets in marches across the country opposing the IMF.

The Colombian Federation of Educators (FECODE) struck on May 15 for 48 hours over Santos' proposal to cut the education budget by $340 million. FECODE President Gloria Ines Ramirez predicted that the cuts would deprive 500,000 Colombian children of an education, and 3 million people have already signed petitions opposing them. Heath care workers also joined the strike. "We will not allow the government to make budget cuts for two of the most important necessities for our poorest sector simply to pay interest on the foreign debt," Ines declared.

Being a teachers union activist in Colombia is as dangerous as being a coal mine leader. Since 1986, 418 educators have been murdered. In just one week in early May, Dario de Jesus Silva, a 22-year veteran teacher in Antioquia, and Juan Carlos Castro Zapata, another school worker in the same province, were assassinated. Both were activists in the teachers' union ADIDA. On May 14, Julio Alberto Otero, a university lecturer and union activist, was also killed.

The IMF mandate for privatization has been just as bitterly resisted. The union for workers at the government corporation EMCALI, which provides garbage, water and electricity to Cali city residents, has fought the company's sell-off. One of the union's activists, Carlos Eliecer Prado, was killed in May. "Colombian trade unionists have been targeted by dark forces moving inside the state," a union statement warned. "They seek to silence through assassination, eviction or terror those who are against privatization and those who defend human rights."

The wave of death and violence is made possible by growing U.S. aid to the Colombian armed forces. Under Plan Colombia, the United States has funneled more than $1 billion into the country, almost entirely in the form of military assistance. Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world. The money funds a dirty war against all critics of the Colombian social and economic order, including unionists.

This spring, the United Steelworkers sent a formal delegation to Colombia in the wake of the murders of Locarno and Orcasita. The delegation met with leaders of the CUT. After the delegation made its report, Steelworkers President Leo Gerard warned the U.S. government, "We are strongly opposed to the amount of military aid being sent to the Colombian army when trade unionists and innocent people are being killed by the very military forces we are financing."

The Steelworkers' criticism follows a position taken by the AFL-CIO last year, which also called for ending military assistance. Labor's strong reaction to the Colombian murders stands in contrast to its relative silence during the Reagan administration-sponsored wars in Central America in the '80s. During that era, Cold War anti-communism led AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland to try to suppress widespread criticism of U.S. foreign policy in union ranks. Kirkland and other labor conservatives accused most Colombian unions of being too left-wing. In turn, the Colombians, like many Third World labor federations, accused the AFL-CIO of supporting only anti-communist unions that defended U.S. foreign policy.

Today, U.S. unions want relations with all sectors of Colombian labor, and use a single standard in calling for the defense of unions under attack. "Trade union rights are human rights, and our union will fight to protect them everywhere," Gerard says. "We demand that the Colombian government protect all trade unionists in their country and do everything in its power to bring these assassins to justice."

For more information, go to InTheseTimes.com.

 

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Scorched Earth: U.S. Chemical Warfare in the Colombian Rainforest

By Sean Donahue

Zmag.org
January 2001 

 

Note: This article is based on my trip to Colombia with a delegation from the Cololmbia Support Network in January. Some names have been changed for the protection of the people I met.

LA HORMIGA, COLOMBIA -- Manuel was working in his fields when the planes came, spraying "Roundup Ultra" over his fields of corn, bananas, yucca, and plantain. He didn't have time to run for cover and in the weeks
since he was sprayed, Manuel's vision has deteriorated and he has developed a strange rash on his back. All the plants in his field have dried up or turned yellow. The corn was just ready for harvest when the
planes came. The whole crop was ruined. The U.S. and Colombian governments claim that the planes spraying herbicides over southern Colombia are only targeting coca crops. But it's clear that there was never any coca in these fields. Manuel is 74 years old and now that his crops have been destroyed he has nothing to eat and no way to make money. He rented the land he farmed and he can't pay back the money he owes. Holding a bunch of rotten bananas in his hand, he says, "I don't grow coca. Why did they do this to me?"

Ironically coca seems to be the only thing still growing in La Hormiga. Not far from Manuel's fields, our delegation of journalists and human rights
activists from the U.S. finds a field of coca bushes. They have been damaged by the herbicides, but they are still growing and the coca crop is definitely salvageable. Nearby the trees and the grasses are dying. Monkeys scurry through the branches of desiccated trees searching for fruit.

The yucca cooperative was devastated by the fumigation too. Fifty farmers had banded together to form this small cooperative which gave the people of La Hormiga some small chance of moving out of the coca economy. But the yucca crop was destroyed. 

Near the entrance of the cooperative, we meet Maria, a middle aged woman with four children who lost everything when she lost her crops.  She hasn't eaten for days. She wants to try to get to the city to find some food for her children, but the right wing paramilitary group that controls the town stole and trashed her car. The paramilitaries have already
killed five of her brothers. The police and the military offer no protection -- the soldiers at the local army base have lunch with the paramilitaries
every day.

At the army base, Gen. Mario Montoya, a former counterinsurgency Instructor at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA who now commands all the military forces in the Putamayo region, gives us a power point presentation about the military's war on drugs in southern Colombia. Each slide says "We are in a war . . . and we are winning."  Gen. Montoya shows us that each year more and more coca is being
eradicated. What he neglects to mention is that since the U.S. and Colombian governments started fumigating coca fields in 1992, the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia has tripled.  His
presentation bears an eerie resemblance to Pentagon briefings prior to the Tet Offensive that used body counts to explain how we were winning the war in Vietnam.

COCA IN PUTAMAYO

"For us coca was a sacred plant, but the white man made that sacred plant our enemy."-- Indigenous leader in Putamayo

La Hormiga is located in the southern province of Putamayo, which has become ground zero in the  war against coca production in Latin America.

Putamayo lies between the Putamayo and Caqueta rivers, major tributaries of the Amazon. It is second only to the Amazon region of Brazil in its biological diversity. The lush rainforests are home to countless
rare species of plants, animals, insects, fish, birds, and mammals. Despite the rich supply of water and the rich biodiversity of the region, the soil in Putamayo is very poor. In the rainforest, microorganisms help
to decompose leaves, feeding nutrients back to the plants through their roots. But the topsoil itself is very thin, and if the forest is cleared what nutrients remain in the soil are quickly depleted.

For centuries the indigenous people of the region practiced a form of crop rotation that allowed them to grow food, medicinal, and ritual crops fairly successfully. They grew coca in small quantities for ritual use -- shamans would chew the leaf to achieve a trance, which allowed them to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

Violence and poverty have forced many Colombians to flee their homes, and Putamayo is the last place left for many people to run. In the 1980's and 1990's, Putamayo was colonized by people who began to clear
the forest to grow coca to sell to cocaine traffickers -- because coca was the only crop that fetched a high enough price for a family to make enough money to support itself. U.S. policies had destroyed the markets for Colombian coffee and wheat. As Noam Chomsky reports:

"Colombia was once a major wheat producer. That was undermined in the 1950s by Food for Peace aid, a program that provided taxpayer subsidies to U.S. agribusiness and counterpart funds for U.S. client
states, which they commonly used for military spending and counterinsurgency. A year before President Bush announced the 'drug war'  with great fanfare (once again), the international coffee agreement was suspended under U.S. pressure, on grounds of 'fair trade violations.'  The result was a fall of prices of more than 40 percent within two months for Colombia's leading legal export."

Colombia is now a net importer of coffee. Coca cultivation quickly depleted the soil, so farmers had to begin using herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides to protect their crops and chemical fertilizers to make them grow. 

Workers came to pick and process the coca for a few dollars a day.  Desperate, rootless, and solitary, many of these workers brought alcohol and drunken violence to Putamayo, and alcoholism began to infect many communities. The coca boom began to lead to the destruction of families.

The coca economy brought armed groups into the region. The FARC, the larger of Colombia's two leftist guerilla armies, increased its presence in the region and imposed a "revolutionary tax" on coca growers. People who couldn't pay the tax had to flee the FARC. Right wing paramilitaries, funded by cocaine traffickers and wealthy landowners, came to the region to buy and process coca and to fight the FARC. The military came to fight the FARC, and used the paramilitaries to do the dirty work of carrying out massacres and assassinations against people suspected
of sympathizing with the guerillas. (This same pattern has emerged wherever the U.S. has trained and armed militaries fighting guerilla movements. Death squads that appear to operate separately from the
military are established to avoid the appearance that U.S. money is being used to commit human rights abuses.)

The paramilitaries are responsible for the vast majority of the killings and disappearances in Colombia. They operate on classic counter-insurgency principles developed by the U.S. in Vietnam and
perfected by U.S. trained militaries and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980's. Chairman Mao said, "The people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims." The paramilitaries act to "dry up the sea" by killing or chasing away people and communities suspected of sympathizing with the FARC -- which includes anyone who speaks out for economic justice and anyone who gives members of the FARC food,
shelter, or medical care. (Of course the FARC will often demand food, clothing, and medical care at gunpoint. Whether the aid is voluntary or coerced matters little to the paramilitaries.) The drug traffickers who back the paramilitaries seize the land that's left behind after people are murdered or displaced and use it to establish coca plantations or to set up cattle ranches to launder their cocaine profits. The paramilitaries are paid with the proceeds.

The indigenous people and the poor are caught in the middle of this war, under attack from all sides. As one indigenous leader said "Now we are strangers in our own land and they are killing us." 

The coca economy has devastated the culture and ecology of Putamayo.  Fr. Pablo, a parish priest in Putamayo said:

"The traffickers scored a goal against us when they brought us coca.  It has brought a change in culture, turned a culture of life into a culture of death. Before the coca there weren't even police. Then came the coca, the guerillas, and the army."

However, the "solution" the US and Colombian governments are proposing for the coca problem may do more damage than the coca trafficking itself.

FUMIGATION: THE "CURE THAT KILLS"

"Fumigation is like chemotherapy, sometimes you end up killing the patient."  -- Gonzaolo de Francisco, National Security Adviser to Colombian President Andres Pastrana

In November 2000, Congress passed "Plan Colombia," a $1.3 billion plan to fight cocaine production in Colombia.  Over 75% of the money in the package was earmarked for military and police aid to the governments of Colombia and its neighbors. There is little or no talk of going after wealthy cocaine traffickers or cracking down on the paramiltaries, whose leader, Carlos Castaño, admits that 70% of his
income comes from cocaine trafficking. Instead, Plan Colombia is focussing on eliminating coca production in southern Colombia through forced crop eradication, and on launching a military offensive against the FARC to minimize resistance to forced eradication. The only way peasants can avoid having their crops fumigated is to get everyone in their town to agree to pull up all their coca plants in 12 months. Families
are offered roughly $1,000 to invest in planting legal crops. But since the average harvest from a 5 acre coca field brings the farmer a little over $4,000 (the cocaine produced from these crops will fetch $800,000
in the U.S. or Europe) and no other crop fetches a high enough price for a family to support itself, most farmers choose to take their chances with fumigation.

The State Department has hired Dyncorp, a private company based in Reston, VA, to carry out a crop fumigation program in Colombia. Crop dusting planes (Turbo Thrushes and OV-10 Broncos) piloted by
Colombian police and mercenaries hired by Dyncorp fly low over forests and fields, spraying "Roundup Ultra," an herbicide manufactured by St. Louis based Monsanto (the same company that supplied the U.S. military with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.)  U.S. pilots, most of them Vietnam combat veterans, make as much as $90,000 a year, tax free, working for Dyncorp in Colombia. The planes are escorted by helicopter gunships -- Huey's or Blackhawks supplied by the U.S. -- that protect the crop dusters from guerilla attacks (the FARC is extremely well armed and does have anti-aircraft weapons.) In late February U.S. and
Colombian officials confirmed that U.S. pilots working for Dyncorp had been involved in a gunfight with the FARC when the FARC shot down a fumigation plane.

Why contract a job like this out to mercenaries? U.S. law currently prohibits U.S. soldiers from engaging in combat in Colombia. There are no such restrictions on private contractors from the U.S. Dead mercenaries also don't require military funerals. U.S. soldiers coming home in flag-draped coffins might evoke memories of the Vietnam War, drawing unwanted scrutiny to U.S. operations in Colombia. And if mercenaries commit human rights violations, the U.S. government can deny knowledge and responsibility.
 
The herbicide being used in Colombia, Roundup Ultra, is not recommended for use in aerial fumigations in the U.S. Monsanto began to dominate the herbicide market in the late 1960's when it began marketing an herbicide called "Lasso." The U.S. military renamed "Lasso" "Agent Orange.". When Agent Orange was banned in the U.S., Monsanto developed "Roundup" to replace "Lasso." Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been linked to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a particularly deadly form of cancer. The "inert" ingredients in Roundup Ultra can cause rashes, vision problems, headaches, and respiratory problems. According to a fact sheet prepared by the Colombian organization Acción Andina, "Doctors in Japan have certified cases of poisoning, mainly through accidental swallowing of Roundup, but also through occupational exposure. The symptoms of acute poisoning include gastrointestinal pain, massive loss of gastrointestinal fluid, vomit, excess lung fluid, pulmonary congestion or failure, loss of
consciousness, destruction of red blood corpuscles and kidney damage or failure. Following repeated fumigation, the Yanacona Indians in Cauca are suffering many of these symptoms. The dwellings in this community have been sprayed indiscriminately, children being the most affected." The herbicide can remain in the soil for as long as a year. There is some evidence that the herbicide may kill the microbes and fungi that form the basis of the nutrient cycling system in the rainforest. Putamayo is the second most biodiverse region in the Americas. Mayor Manuel Alzate of Puerto Asis told us "You are poisoning the lungs of the world." 

The U.S. Embassy claims that the fumigation planes only target large coca plantations, and that they use satellite maps and Global Positioning System guidance to precisely target coca crops. Even if we assume this is true there are several major problems. The herbicides being used were designed to be applied from the ground. When sprayed from a plane, the herbicides can drift a considerable distance on a windy day. In December U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone and his aides were accidentally sprayed during a fumigation demonstration when the herbicides drifted. Southern Colombia is also full of streams, rivers, and lagoons. Roundup Ultra takes a long time to break down in the water and is toxic to fish. Finally, peasants often intersperse food crops with their coca plants to try to get the most out of a piece of land, so the fumigations have tended to simultaneously destroy peasants' primary source of food and their primary source of income.

Indigenous people have been hit particularly hard by the fumigations.  A few weeks before our delegation visited Colombia, the Cofan reservation near the Ecuadorian border was fumigated. The Cofan weren't involved in commercial coca cultivation, but they did grow a small amount of coca for ritual use. Their food crops, medicinal crops, and ritual crops were all destroyed. The surrounding forest was killed too, and
the dead leaves and branches had become fire hazards. The tribe had to sell all its cattle because the grasses in the pastures were killed by the herbicides. The streams that tribe depended on for drinking water were all poisoned. People were developing strange digestive and respiratory problems. Many had fled to Ecuador. A few remained on the reservation.  A representative of the tribe told us "Our elders are crying. They think that the Earth has been murdered." Fr. Pablo, who had surveyed the devastation said "This is a disaster whose gravity will be felt by our children. They are the ones who will need the wood of the trees that were killed, the species that were lost, birds, butterflies, water creatures.  Another grave consequence is the death of the people's hope and this hurts me most."

Why was the Cofan reservation fumigated? Gonzalo de Francisco, National Security Advisor to Colombian President Andres Pastrana suggested that the government was helping the Cofan retake their land
from coca farmers who had invaded their territory. The Cofan clearly weren't looking for that kind of help. A local organizer involved in the fight against the fumigations suggested another motive to us in hushed tones at the airport in Puerto Asis: There are oil reserves and mineral deposits underneath many of the indigenous reservations. Colombia's constitution
prohibits forcing indigenous people off their land. But if the indigenous people were to leave their land voluntarily, corporations could come in and exploit the resources. Like the U'wa in the North, the Cofan have a long history of resisting oil exploration. Rendering their land sterile and uninhabitable could very well serve the interests of the oil companies.
There is not yet sufficent evidence to back up this theory, but it certainly fits the pattern of terror in Colombia.

PLAN COLOMBIA: DESIGNED TO FAIL?

"The old dogs they got a new trick: it's called criminalize the symptoms
while you spread the disease" -- Ani Difranco

"We look on in great pain when we see how the farmers are trampled on like cockroaches while the big traffickers walk the streets of New York and L.A."  -- Fr. Pablo

To add insult to injury, fumigation doesn't reduce coca production. Last year coca production in Colombia increased for the eighth year in a row. In 1992, 41,206 hectares of land were under coca cultivation in Colombia, and 954 hectares were fumigated.  In 1999, 43.135 hectares were fumigated, but 122,500 hectares were in production -- this despite the fact that in 1997, 52% of the 79,100 hectares of land that were in coca production were fumigated.   As Dr. Ricardo Vargas Meza of Acción Andina writes:

"Despite the intensity of the fumigation, the total area planted continued to grow. The situation is paradoxical, considering that Peru, which was the leading world producer of coca leaf in 1992, reduced its coca crop from 155,000 ha in 1992 to 51,000 ha in 1998 without dumping a single liter of glyphosate on Peruvian soil. We know that the anti-drug policy was not the cause of this reduction. The change merely reflected the change in the monopolistic structure of the drug trafficking business that had been prominent up to mid-1995, when the main supplier of coca paste for the Colombian cartels was Peru. The structural change in drug trafficking meant moving from the centralized model to the decentralized, flexible structures of the today's organizations that export drugs from Colombia, who obtain the raw materials they need within Colombia: This is the stimulus to the current demand for coca paste and poppy latex."

The primary effect of fumigation is to drive coca producers deeper into the rainforest, destroying more land.

And yet while the U.S. is pushing forward with a fumigation program in Colombia that criminalizes and punishes the peasant class and destroys the environment without showing any effectiveness in reducing cocaine production, Plan Colombia at best ignores, and in many ways strengthens the large drug trafficking organizations that drive the cocaine
industry. One of these organizations is the Colombian Air Force, which many in Colombia call the "Blue Cartel" because it is so deeply involved in drug trafficking. The U.S. has not put any significant pressure on the Colombian government to clean up corruption in the air force. The paramilitaries are also deeply involved in cocaine trafficking, but Carlos Castaño, the head of Colombia's largest paramilitary group claims that the DEA tried to recruit him to help carry out parts of Plan Colombia, and a DEA agent in Miami who served as a translator during the agency's meeting with Castaño has confirmed the story. In some ways this is nothing new, the U.S. military and the CIA have often allowed their allies in the Third World to finance their operations by taking part in the drug trade, and have sometimes taken a cut of the profits themselves for helping to facilitate deals. (See Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey
St. Clair's Whiteout: The CIA, Drug & The Press.) It does seem especially bold, however, for the military/intelligence community to resort to their old patterns of behavior while implementing a plan that is ostensibly an anti-drug program. 

Domestically, a similar pattern emerges. According to Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies: "A landmark study of cocaine markets by the RAND Corporation found that, dollar for dollar, providing treatment to cocaine users is 10 times more effective than drug interdiction schemes and 23 times more cost effective than eradicating coca at its source."  But, Tree adds "The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports that 63% of the need for drug treatment is unmet in the U.S., 3.3 million persons in 1996. [ . . .] We have yet to honor a
commitment made by Congress in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to provide treatment on request to every addict."  Meanwhile, back home our drug war focuses on arresting and jailing drug users and small time
dealers, while big time traffickers avoid prosecution by retaining the best attorneys and laundering their money. 

As German Martinez, City Clerk of Puerto Asis said, "The blind spot of Plan Colombia is that it is attacking only the production. We have to fight
against criminalization of the producer and the addict, the idea that the producer is a delinquent and the addict is a delinquent. If we understand the producer as someone facing social problems and the addicts as someone who is ill then things can change."

The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) which President Bush hopes to negotiate at the Summit of Americas in Quebec this April will probably make matters worse by making it easier for money, chemicals, and trucks to move across borders and making it harder for the government of Colombia to resist U.S. attempts to dump crops on the Colombian market or provides subsidies or programs to help Colombian farmers market food crops. NAFTA has already made it easier for truck loads of cocaine to enter the U.S. from Mexico, and the  FTAA will essentially expand NAFTA to cover the entire hemisphere.

Why does the U.S. insist on pursuing policies that criminalize the symptoms while they spread the disease of cocaine trafficking? Is it because there is more money to be made in making helicopters, herbicides, and new prisons than in running drug treatment centers? Is it because the people at the top of the cocaine trade are wealthy and powerful and have more political influence than peasants, addicts, and small time dealers? Is the war on drugs just a new excuse for the U.S. to get involved in wars of natural resources in Third World nations now that the Soviet Union is gone? Or is true, as some have asserted, that cocaine and crack addiction serve as a form of social control, taking the edge off the despair of people in our inner cities and preventing them from rising up against the economic apartheid that has replaced overt racial segregation in the U.S.? We need to take a critical look at the war on drugs and ask difficult questions before more lives are destroyed. Colombia could prove to be the mirror that allows us to see the disaster our drug war has become -- or it could become our next Vietnam.   We need to make a choice before one is made for us.

Sean Donahue is Co-Director of New Hampshire Peace Action. He is available to speak about U.S. military intervention in Colombia.

 

For more information, go to www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm. 

 

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