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Columbia – FARC and Uribe
by Colombianonymous
lifted from a comment
As a Colombian, or rather a human being born an raised in colombian
soil, certainly not a fan of the FARC, but neither a fan of the mafiosi
gang that at the present rules the country, I want to try some attempts
on clarification on this issue. It’s not an easy task since Colombia is
a place largely ignored by and isolated from the outside world.
Before starting, a couple of caveats.
First: I don’t have much of a clue of the specific question of the
post, namely, Why now? In spite of this, I’ll try to give some
potentially useful information about what’s going on.
Second: This post will be real long, and I’m dead sure that
nevertheless, there will be scores of issues not addressed. Sometimes I
feel that I could write a book or more about the unlovely colombian
mess (If I had the time and money that I haven`t). Probably some of my
hypotheses won’t be easy understood, but nonetheless, here I go.
1) It seems to me that the strongest "unwritten rule" that
impregnate -or better, contaminate- the colombian polity is that:
respect for the strong, contempt for the weak. This apply to all the
actors in the mess: government, guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug lords
and so on, albeit in different ways.
2) As said above, this social sin, so to speak, of the colombian
society as a whole has also tainted the guerrillas, specially the FARC,
with catastrophic consequences for a lot of people, and ultimately for
the guerrillas themselves, which seems to be by now in or near a state
of strategic defeat, and at the mercy of the Colombian Army (I’ll argue
below).
Based on the above, I will discuss the notion that the FARC are a
left-wing organization, which in my view isn’t totally accurate.
Despite the "R" in their name that supposedly stands for
"Revolutionary", Since their constitution in 1964 the FARC, as far as I
know, never tried seriously to build a revolutionary project. It never
embarked in things like land redistribution or creation of
non-capitalist productive structures. In spite that for a long time
they had a territorial domination over large swats of colombian land,
and so they could easily have tried. In place of that, they sought to
keep the capitalist structure of production taking what could be called
the parasite role in it. In other words they didn’t try to end the gap
between rich and poor in their zones of influence, but rather took the
greater amount of wealth from the rich. Mainly for self-profit and
without thinking in redistribution of money or land.
At least since the death in 1990 (of natural causes) of Jacobo
Arenas the principal ideologue of the FARC, the situation toook a turn
for the worse. The political of the guerrilla aims went down and the
financial up. In that situation the FARC used two main forms of
financing: widely indiscriminate kidnapping and drug trafficking. The
first alienated many middle class sectors of the population from the
guerrillas, while the second alienated the guerrillas themselves from
the population that they claimed to represent. Making money for the
military apparatus became a goal far more important that the
consolidation of a political movement.
Circa 1994, when the FARC were 30 years into armed struggle, these
situation were somewhat consolidated. It could be resumed like that:
the FARC didn’t made a quick sweep to power like the final phase of the
Cuban revolution (1956-1959) nor consolidate a mass movement like Mao
Zedong’s Red Army (1927-1949). In 1994 they were a well trained, well
equipped little infantry army, but one widely alienated of the
population. Their attitude in their then numerous zones of influence
were often of landlords rather than of freedom fighters. The above is
important for understand how were the FARC basically defeated since
1994.
Since that year, a wide alliance of anti-guerrilla sectors
consolidated a counter-insurgency model similar to the classical
developed by the US army in the Cold War context, based in an
unrecognized but evident military cooperation between the "official"
army and death squads basically known as paramilitaries or
"paracos/paras" in local lingo. The model worked more or less as
follows:
Step 1: the army massed forces for offensives in the borders of
areas of guerrilla influence. Confronted with an unfavorable
correlation of forces, and lacking a mass movement of popular support,
the guerrillas withdrew
Step 2: With knowledge and complicity, and under a military
umbrella, the "paras" reached the towns with reputations of sympathies
with the guerrilla and made widespread, gory and indiscriminate
massacres. Generally of men of military age but often also of women,
kids and the elderly.
Step 3. Many inhabitants fled in terror and others were forcibly
expelled by the paras. Once the zone was "secured" only two kinds of
people remained: the openly sympathetic with the paras and the ones who
resigned to lived there under their rule.
It was general knowledge that any confrontation wit the paras meant
death, Often under gory torture. And that there was no possible help
from the "legal" authorities since they were enthusiast participants of
the project. Obviously under such tight social control infiltrations
from the guerrilla became more and more unsuccessful and in numerous
zones stopped all along.
In spite of this same sequence being played again and again, the
FARC never seriously tried to build a mass armed movement capable of
withstand these vicious assaults, neither defended the population
themselves and basically abandoned the inhabitants to their terrible
fate. One of the main FARC leaders, Alfonso Cano, even had the chutzpah
for said in the height of the massacres that it was up to the
population the task of defend themselves. When the FARC fought against
that sinister clique, was almost always in defense not of the people,
but of the coca plantations. By the way, in these confrontations the
guerrillas scored numerous tactical victories, specially against
isolated "paras" squads that were often wiped out, since they were
designed for terrorize unarmed population and not for real fight.
In spite of these tactical victories the overall tendency continued
to be the gradual expulsion of the FARC of the densely inhabited zones
of Colombia. This way, the army/paras clique progressively won access
to a vast pool of cannon fodder, that at the same time was denied to
the FARC. By 2002, this processus has resulted in a strong army/para
control over the most populated zones, with still strong presence of
the FARC in vast swathes of territory sparsely populated, from wich
thay mounted attacks, sometimes very successful in army/police/paras
units, generating the perception that they were a danger out of
control. For several reasons, they were hugely unpopular, but still
feared, by a great majority of the population.
3) Enter Alvaro Uribe. our beloved first midget of the nation. At 5
ft. 4 inch (1.62 mts.) and with a slender built, at first sight he
would be an unlikely leader. But he is more like an Al Capone, a
despicable criminal but also a capable one. One little anecdote for
your understanding of Uribe. Asked in their first year of mandate about
the death of a 2 year old girl cubbed to death in a para massacre that
also took the lives of the rest of their family, our flamboyant
commander-in-chief answered literally: "In that area resides a lot of
guerrilla". This is the man loved and respected by a wide majority of
the Colombian people. His popularity, more than 6 years into power, is
Putin-like. I’d wish that that was a bad dream, rgiap was right and Uribe wasn’t respected and admired by the bulk of the colombian
population, the "Colombian street", but he is, as Jesse James and the
KKK were in their day and for similar reasons.
In the elections of 2002 the main political issue was the opposition
to the FARC. their total indifference at the annihilation of their
potential supporters; reckless kidnappings in the (previously low
politicized) middle class and somewhat respectful behavior toward the
upper echelons of the elite, with which the guerrillas wanted to
negotiate in an equal-to-equal basis(so it wasn’t about revolution but
about power) brought as a result the indifference and/or hostility
towards this guerrilla of a wide majority of the colombian population.
This way, a lethal processes of social conservatization was
consolidated. Akin to the one that took place in Peru because the mad
Khmer Rouge-like actions of "Shining Path". Like that one, the
colombian also generate suspicion and rejection of the majority of
things leftist. It was this wave the one that ride Uribe to the
presidency.
With a personal blood feud with the FARC, which killed his father
circa 1983, and with the majority of the population willingly or not
inside the army/paras dominated territory, the Uribe team took 3
interrelated steps.
A) A process of desmovilization/disarming/whitewashing of the main
paras’ squads, that took place between 2003-2005, and silenced the most
vocal critics of the dismal human rights
records in Colombia
B) A process of massive upsizing and upgrading of the "official"
armed forces. In the Uribe’s years, since 2002, they had practically
doubled in size and now amount to 400.000 or more armed men (roughly
250.000 army 150.000 police -these last ones also heavily armed with
assault rifles-). The upgrading was specially strong in the air force
that acquired modern technology, which allow it to achieve increasingly
lethal bombardments in the guerrilla infantry (like the one that killed
Raul Reyes past Saturday and started the current imbroglio). After
decades of procrastination, the army under Uribe rule stop to be a
corrupt and inefficient institution, and became a corrupt but efficient
one.
C) At the same time, this improved army go on a continuous, 24/7
offensive, lavishly funded by the USA, specially in the years of the
combination Bush/Republican Congress. It took a lot of casualties (that
the army could nevertheless afford), but progressively the army made
the FARC retreat to increasingly isolated territories, with less
population for replace the combat losses and increasing logistical
challenges, that had to be resolved more and more trough the crossing
of frontiers and probably the help of some authorities in neighboring
countries.
The FARC leaders took pride in having resisted the offensive of the
first presidential period of Uribe (2002-2006). But alas, the latter’s
success in diminish the visibility and scope of influence of the
guerrillas give him space for reforming the constitution, allowing
presidential reelection (previously forbidden), and win a second term
in a landslide. The chains of military disasters for the FARC since
roughly September 2007 (of which the death of Reyes is but the last)
suggest that in the first Uribe period the army also achieved a
widespread infiltration of the FARC structure. The nail in the coffin
seems to be the incapacity and apathy of the FARC for find any form of
anti-aircraft capacity, like the one that achieved the FMLN in El
Salvador. without it, the guerrillas are more and more like fish in a
barrel.
4) And so, finally, now what?? There are tons of additional things
to said, but this stuff already look like a journal article and I have
invested almost my whole labor day in it!! I’ll try to close with some
observations toward the near future:
At international level, I seriously hope that there won’t be formal
war. Modern war is a incredible expensive business and none of the
three involved countries could possibly afford it. It seems to me that
behind the chest-beating that is the norm in the "Colombian street"
these days, Colombia is trying to downplay the crisis.
Nevertheless, There are possible dangers ahead for Chavez’s
socialists projects, and sadly they come mainly from the stubbornest of
Chavez himself. The discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of
Chavez’s projects is an issue that I wont address right now. But toward
Colombia, Chavez is betting the very wrong horse. Is more probably that
the FARC will be vanquished that they regain some type of popular
support and/or military initiative anytime soon, and although the
Colombian army couldn´t possibly threat Venezuelan territory (SIDENOTE:
a commentary in a Yahoo news story about Colombia as a "formidable
[military] foe made me LOL yesterday. In spite of the victories over
the FARC, I don’t believe that the colombian army had the capacity or
guts for engage in conventional war. In this respect, like the rest of
Colombian society, their only formidable asset is their capacity for
lick ass)
But undercover operations like bombings and the like are another
stuff. It seems that colombian agents had been behind past harassments
of that nature in Venezuelan territory. Chavez has been excessively
hot-headed in this issue, and the support to the FARC, in the sorry
state that this organization has put itself into, could only result in
a costly waste of energy and resources
I´ll address the domestic side of the issue in another occasion, if
there are time and interest. Enough to say that, unfortunately, as long
as the FARC continued to be a factor in the colombian life, they’ll
stain and illegitimate the struggles for social equality and made the
colombian society even more reactionary. which makes me fear in my
conspiracy-theory side that the colombian powers-that-be will try to
keep that guerrilla it in some state of life-support in order to keep
their free hand. Hope being wrong.
Ecuador: Colombia used U.S. weapons in attack on FARC camp
QUITO, March 6 (Xinhua) — Colombia used U.S.-facilitated electronic weapons and technology in its attack on a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) camp in Ecuadoran territory, Ecuadoran Defense Minister Wellington Sandoval said on TV Thursday.
Five U.S. “intelligent bombs” were used by Colombia in Saturday’s attack, he said. The raid resulted in the deaths of 21 FARC rebels, including second-in-command Raul Reyes.
Sandoval said only the U.S. army possessed the kind of bombs used by Colombia in the attack, reiterating that no other military force in Latin America had comparable electronic equipment.
wsws: Latin American crisis triggered by an assassination “Made in the USA”
US role in Reyes’s assassination
Colombian officials have openly acknowledged the role of US intelligence agencies in instigating and coordinating the March 1 targeted assassination. General Oscar Naranjo, commander of the national police told reporters it was no secret that the Colombian military-police apparatus maintained “a very strong alliance with federal agencies of the US.”
The Colombian radio network, Radio Cadena Nacional (RCN), reported Wednesday that Reyes’s location was pinpointed by US intelligence as a result of monitoring a satellite phone call between the FARC leader and Venezuelan President Chavez. The February 27 call—three days before the raid—came after the FARC released to Venezuelan authorities four former Colombian legislators—Gloria Polanco, Luis Eladio Perez, Orlando Beltran and Jorge Eduardo Gechem—who had been held hostage for nearly seven years.
“Chavez was thrilled by the release of the hostages, and called Reyes to tell him that everything went well,” RCN reported. Presumably, the CIA or other US intelligence agencies were also tapping phone calls between Reyes and French officials over the proposed release of Betancourt.
Another Colombian station, Noticias Uno, cited intelligence sources as saying that they had received photographs from “foreign spy planes” pinpointing the location of Reyes’s camp in Ecuador.
The Colombian police commander insisted that, while relying on US intelligence, the March 1 attack was an “autonomous operation.”
This claim is improbable to say the least. US military “trainers” are attached to the elite counterinsurgency units that would have been employed in the ground attack that finished off the survivors of the aerial bombardment.
As for the air raid itself, Ecuador’s Defense Minister Wellington Sandoval reported the attack included the use of five “smart bombs” of the type utilized by the US military. “It is a bomb that hits within a meter of where it is programmed, from high velocity airplanes,” he said. He added that to target Reyes with such weapons, “they needed equipment that Latin American armed forces do not have.”
Both Washington and the right-wing regime in Colombia were determined to stop any further hostage releases in order to further efforts to politically isolate the Chavez regime and to enforce the Bush administration’s proscription against negotiations with “terrorists.”
At the same time, the bombs dropped on the FARC encampment were undoubtedly also meant as a message to Sarkozy not to meddle in Yankee imperialism’s “backyard.”
the following is from a media roundtable w/ u.s. secgen gates & JCS chair mullen on the 5th. choose your words carefully, gentlemen.
Q A question about Colombia, sir. I wonder if you could tell us, did the U.S. military have any role in helping with the intelligence that led to the strike in Ecuador against the FARC commander? And is there any change in the status of our trainers that are in Colombia based on the mobilization on the Venezuelan border, any of the other sort of changes that are going down in the wake of this strike?
SEC. GATES: Well, I would just say that we are very supportive of President Uribe’s efforts to deal with the FARC terrorists. We have a good relationship with them.
He has — the Colombians have been successful, and we are certainly — we certainly applaud those successes.
In terms of impact on our trainers, I’m not aware of any, but Admiral?
ADM. MULLEN: No, there isn’t any at all with respect to my — at least to my knowledge, there’s no impact at all on our trainers tied to this event.
Q Just to follow up, do we routinely help with the intelligence in addition to training with the campaign against the FARC?
ADM. MULLEN: We’ve had an operation — I mean, we’ve supported President Uribe in Colombia for many, many years sort of across the board from a training perspective and other perspectives. And I’d stay away from — the details of any additional support, except to applaud their success in terms of impacting significantly on the FARC in lots of ways.
again, good links at latin america news review
Posted by: b real | Mar 7 2008 7:49 utc | 23
ips: Manta Air Base Tied to Colombian Raid on FARC Camp
MANTA, Ecuador, Mar 21 (IPS) – Military and diplomatic sources see a link between the Manta air base, operated by the United States in Ecuadorean territory, and this month’s bombing raid by Colombia on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuador.
The U.S. air force was granted a 10-year concession in 1999 to use the base, located in the port city of Manta on Ecuador’s northern Pacific coast, in its counter-drug trafficking activities in the region.
A high-level Ecuadorean military officer, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS that “a large proportion of senior officers” in Ecuador share “the conviction that the United States was an accomplice in the attack” launched Mar. 1 by the Colombian military on a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) camp in Ecuador, near the Colombian border.
…
The information gathered by IPS from military and diplomatic sources indicates that the Manta air base played a role in locating, and carrying out reconnaissance of, the FARC camp in Ecuador.
Ecuadorean Defence Minister Wellington Sandoval said there should be an investigation of whether the Manta air base was used for the attack on the rebel camp in Ecuador. According to the agreement signed by Washington and Quito, it is the Ecuadorean armed forces that should carry out such a probe.
The Manta air base lease clearly stipulates that the base can only be used for counter-narcotics operations.
Sandoval said he cannot provide any information until an investigation has been conducted.
The military source who spoke to IPS said that what should be verified “above all are the flights from the base in the 20 days prior to the bombing, who was on them, the routes they took, and what they were investigating. This data should be complemented by other inquiries and information.”
On Mar. 13, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister María Isabel Salvador said she had had “a conversation with (U.S.) Ambassador Linda Jewell who ensured us that the planes (at the base) were not involved in any way” in the bombing of the FARC camp.
But the military source said that “the technology used, first to locate the target, in other words the camp, and later to attack it, was from the United States.”
Sandoval declared that “equipment that the Latin American armed forces do not have” was used in the Mar. 1 bombing.
“They dropped around five ‘smart bombs’,” the kind used by the United States in the First Gulf War (1991), “with impressive precision and a margin of error of just one metre, at night, from planes travelling at high speeds,” said the minister.
The military source said that “an attack with smart bombs requires pilots who have experience in such operations, which means U.S. pilots. That’s why I think they did the job and later told the Colombians ‘now go in and find the bodies’, which is when Colombian helicopters and troops showed up” at the site of the raid.
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The military officer said the bombing raid in Ecuadorean air space was actually led by “U.S. pilots, possibly from DynCorp,” a U.S.-based private military contractor that has contracts under Plan Colombia.
colombia journal: Bush Administration Fails to Acknowledge Existence of New Paramilitary Groups in Colombia
(March 17) The US State Department released its annual human rights report last week and one of its implications with regard to Colombia is particularly startling: There are no new paramilitary groups in Colombia! The politicization of the latest edition of the report is most apparent in its de-politicization of Colombia’s new armed groups by denying that they are actually “paramilitary groups.” This is a political strategy on the part of the Bush administration that allows it to blame virtually all of Colombia’s political violence on the guerrillas and makes it easier to refute allegations of links between the Colombian military and paramilitaries—after all, there can be no such links if the paramilitaries do not exist.
The US State Department’s annual human rights report does not refer to Colombia’s new paramilitary groups as “paramilitaries,” but rather as “illegal” or “criminal” groups. The report states that the last United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) bloc demobilized in August 2006 and suggests that the only remaining paramilitaries in Colombia are those individual members of the AUC that refused to demobilize. This strategy seeks to legitimize the Colombian government’s demobilization process by implying that, besides a handful of AUC holdouts, there are no longer any paramilitaries in Colombia.
In reality, there is a wealth of evidence showing that there are dozens of new paramilitary groups waging a dirty war in Colombia. Numerous human rights groups have shown that new paramilitary groups operating under names such as the New Generation or the Black Eagles do indeed exist and that they are responsible for a significant percentage of the country’s political violence. In 2006, the Colombian NGO Indepaz reported that 43 new paramilitary groups totaling almost 4,000 fighters had been formed in 23 of the country’s 32 departments. Last year, the OAS estimated that there were 20 new paramilitary groups with 3,000 fighters operating in Colombia.
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Despite all this evidence showing that the new armed groups are indeed paramilitaries, the State Department insists—as does the Colombian government—on referring to them as “illegal” or “criminal” groups. The Uribe administration illustrated its attitude towards the new paramilitary groups last week after they killed six organizers of the March 6 protests against State and paramilitary violence. Ivan Cepeda, director of the human rights organization called Movement of Victims of State Crimes, recently reported that the Black Eagles paramilitary group had emailed a death threat to those organizations involved in planning the protest. However, Colombia’s Interior Minister Carlos Holguin publicly dismissed the political nature of the threat, claiming that the Black Eagles are a “criminal organization.”
The State Department’s annual human rights offerring makes clear that the Bush administration is using the same playbook as the Colombian government. In the report, the term “illegal groups” appears 35 times to describe the new organizations and the State Department never once refers to them as paramilitaries. The report claims that the new armed groups are not focused on fighting Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, stating, “The new illegal groups, which the government also described as new criminal groups, … focused primarily on narcotics trafficking and extortion rather than fighting the FARC or ELN. In these circumstances, it was often difficult to determine responsibility for abuses committed.”
This description of the new groups suggests in no uncertain terms that, from the perspective of the State Department, they are primarily engaged in criminal, rather than political, activities. Therefore, by implication, they could not be waging a dirty war against suspected guerrilla sympathizers nor could they be engaged in the country’s armed conflict. Furthermore, the last sentence in the quote seeks to mask the human rights abuses perpetrated by the new paramilitary groups. However, by referring to the new “illegal groups” 35 times in its human rights report—often in reference to their having committed killings, forced displacement and numerous other atrocities—the State Department makes evident that these groups are responsible for a significant portion of the country’s human rights violations.
from winifred tate’s counting the dead: the culture and politics of human rights activism in colombia
The United States has been the primary model and ally for the Colombian military for the second half of the twentieth century. This relationship began in earnest with Colombia’s provision of a battalion to fight alongside the United States during the Korean War, the only Latin American country to do so. In the context of the ongoing domestic “unrest” of La Violencia, the decision to send troops was viewed by some as pandering to the United States and a convenient means for the Conservative president to rid the corps of Liberal officers, but it undoubtedly left a lasting legacy. Exposed to the U.S. army’s weaponry, training and structure, the Colombians excelled on the battlefield and returned with a new vision of a professional military, including new ideas of military command structure, doctrine, intelligence, and communications. … Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was “extensive collaboration between [the] U.S. and Colombia in developing the latter’s internal security apparatus”.
The U.S. military apparatus was central in defining Colombian military doctrine throughout the cold war, as it did throughout Latin America. Based on a paradigm that became widely known as the National Security Doctrine and taught by the United States to allied militaries, this counterinsurgency doctrine had a fundamental role in shaping Colombian military doctrine and operational response to guerrillas.
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The U.S. military began putting human rights pressure on its Colombian military allies in the late 1990s, during efforts to expand military assistance from the Colombian National Police to the armed forces. … Colombian military compliance was encouraged by linking human rights vetting with military perks such as international training missions; Colombian military officers were routinely treated to a trip to Disney World during their U.S. training, for example.
Posted by: b real | Mar 27 2008 4:56 utc | 57
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