|
Columbia vs. Ecuador – Why now?
A question to readers here with regard to the recent crisis between Ecuador, Columbia and Venezuela.
Last weekend Columbia invaded Ecuador and killed some Columbian rebels there. This was of course a blantant infringement of Ecuador’s sovereignty and the whole issue is threatening to escalate.
The Independent has some answers and background to Why has Colombia invaded Ecuador, and why is Venezuela joining the fight?.
A lot of the conflict is a right/left issue where the hard right government in Columbia, backed by the U.S., is positioned against leftish governments of Ecuador and Venezuela, who seem sympathetic with the left wing FARC rebels.
But the Independent account is missing one important question.
Why has this happened now?
The operation was done with U.S. intelligence support and likely with some of the hundreds of U.S. military ‘trainers’ in Columbia supervising the issue. Columbia receives some $750 million per year from the U.S. most of which is for military purpose.
It is therefore inconceivable that such an operation, which was certain to escalate into an international brawl, could take place without clearance from Washington.
So what is the bigger plan behind? Why was this operations started right now?
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 know? 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
INFOMERCIAL: For rememberinggiap, which seems to live in France: do you know interesting blogs like MoA in French language? I’ve tried to find something, but so far the found ones tend to be dead boring. I’ll Thank any suggestions.
Posted by: Colombianonymous | Mar 6 2008 0:16 utc | 15
|
