A Casualty Decries Colombia’s War on Guerrillas

After Carlos Alfonso Velasquez’s special army unit captured the first key member of the Cali drug cartel ever arrested, Velasquez was sent on an even tougher mission.

Two years ago, the colonel became the second in command in Uraba, an outpost near the Panama border where clashes between guerrillas, private armies and the armed forces annually produce the highest death toll per capita in this violent country. His efforts to implement a strategy for imposing government rule--confronting guerrillas and private armies alike--earned him a summary dismissal.

The end of Velasquez’s 30-year career tells much about why independent observers believe that Colombia is losing the war against the nation’s narco-guerrillas. The army cannot earn the public support needed to defeat the rebels, these observers say, unless it protects peasants and townspeople from both the insurgents and a second, equally violent force--the private armies that ranchers and merchants hire to fight the guerrillas.

Rebels now control half of Colombia’s territory--the half with oil, opium poppies and the coca bushes whose leaves are the raw material of cocaine. As the guerrillas press forward in their most aggressive offensive in a decade, they have taken 70 soldiers prisoner. In two days last week, 30 people died in four attacks, including a bombing in Uraba.

More than half of Colombians surveyed recently by the newsmagazine Cromos believe that the army will “probably never” defeat the insurgents, made up of scattered bands representing varying stripes of Marxism who have been fighting for three decades.

And in January, the U.S. State Department issued a stinging criticism of human rights abuses allegedly committed by the Colombian armed forces in their struggle against the guerrillas. Colombians have suffered greatly in the fighting, and the problem is getting worse, the report found.

“The presence of [private army], guerrilla and narcotics trafficking organizations and the armed confrontations among them, as well as with the armed forces, has displaced 750,000 persons,” the report stated. “This total increased by 25% compared with 1995.”

The alleged abuses and the upsurge in the strength of the rebels are evidence of the same problem, according to critics. The rebels have a clear strategy: to control territory with lucrative products--drugs and oil--that can be “taxed” to enable them to buy arms and keep expanding their rebellion.

And the army’s counterinsurgency strategy?

“I have never seen any strategy for dealing with the guerrillas and with the problems of peasants who live in the areas where guerrillas operate,” said Myles Frechette, who has been the U.S. ambassador here for two years.

Military leaders reply that the armed forces are in a no-win position because they are expected to make up for the government’s overall neglect of social and economic development issues in remote rural areas. Further, they insist that the 6-month-old guerrilla offensive that started in the coca-growing region and quickly spread throughout the country is a testament to the effectiveness of army drug-eradication tactics, not an indication of failure.

“We are hurting them; that is why they are striking out,” said army Cmdr. Manuel Jose Bonett.

Critics, who are not necessarily convinced that the drug-eradication effort has been successful, argue that in any case, the issue is not short-term tactics but long-term strategy.

“In tactics, sometimes there are ties” in the army’s confrontations with guerrillas, Velasquez said. “In strategy, the army has not been effective.”

The army merely reacts to the rebels without taking the initiative, he charged.

“It is like a bullfight, and the army has taken the role of the bull,” he said. “In the history of bullfighting, there are a lot more dead bulls than dead bullfighters.”

Velasquez came to the fight against guerrillas following a scandal that almost destroyed both his career and his marriage. After the unit under his command arrested Cali chief accountant Guillermo Pallomari in 1994 and discovered documents indicating that the cocaine cartel had contributed millions of dollars to the presidential campaign of the eventual victor, Ernesto Samper, a video appeared showing the partially dressed colonel in a motel room with a woman.

He saved himself by proving that she was a Cali cartel plant who had infiltrated his ring of informants for the express purpose of ruining his career. Still, he was removed from the sensitive drug-fighting post and transferred to Uraba in mid-1995.

That was the year 124 people--mostly banana workers--died there in 13 massacres blamed on guerrillas and private armies. The two groups were disputing control of the banana-producing zone by killing civilians who each believed supported the other side.

A veteran of the U.S. Army general staff course at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., Velasquez set out to develop a strategy to stop the killings. He filled his tiny office with books about guerrilla warfare, particularly about Vietnam. He became a familiar figure in the nearby town of Apartado, talking with the mayor, the priest and the merchants.

“Talking with people, I came to the conclusion that the army had lost legitimacy because it did not act against the private armies in the same way it acted against the guerrilla,” he said.

The more he studied and listened, the more Velasquez became convinced that the army had to take a stand against both the private armies and the guerrillas as threats to public safety. Moreover, he came to believe that both sides were in league to produce or transport drugs for his old enemies, the drug cartel in Cali. Leaders of private armies deny the charge.

The army ignored the violence caused by the private armies because they never attacked soldiers and sometimes did kill guerrillas, he said. That helped the army raise its body count--the same measure of performance that proved so ineffective for the U.S. in Vietnam.

“The army was not acting like a peacemaker but as another factor in the violence,” Velasquez said. He proposed a new approach, with new ways to measure success. “The measures should be decreases in kidnapping, decreases in massacres, decreases in political assassinations,” he said.

Starting in October 1995, he sent troops to stake out territory, protecting the most important towns. He began talking with the banana worker unions, long linked with the guerrillas, to help him find the private armies. At army roadblocks, 19 suspected members of private armies were arrested.

Velasquez believed the strategy was working because he began to receive calls from informants advising him about the movements of guerrillas and private armies alike. Then, a new commander arrived at the base in December 1995. He ordered Velasquez to confine himself to administrative duties, lifted the army roadblocks and issued a communique instructing all civilians who had business with the army in that region to report to him.

Velasquez was devastated until he saw a ray of hope last May, he said. An internal army inspection produced an initial report that criticized the new commander for lacking a clear strategy and for not mentioning the private armies as a concern in his analysis, according to Velasquez.

The colonel told the inspector that he had the same concerns and was instructed to prepare a report documenting them, he said. Velasquez said he collected information that showed the new commander did not take an interest in eliminating private armies and presented it to Bonett, the army commander.

“I thought that if a member of the army made the criticism, it would be taken seriously,” said Velasquez, now 46. “I was wrong. They put me on report and kicked me out of the army.”

Army officials would not comment on the story except to say that soldiers and officers are prohibited from associating with members of private armies. Velasquez’s experience coincides with many of the harshest criticisms of the army.

“Even in areas where they had heavy influence, the armed forces seldom restrained [private army] activity and abuses,” the U.S. State Department report found. As a result, the report found that while the armed forces’ share of extrajudicial killings dropped to 8% from 16% in 1995, the number of such slayings nearly doubled--and 59% of them were blamed on private armies, while the guerrillas were said to be responsible for the remaining one-third.

The implication is that the army is letting the private armies do its dirty work, experts said. Frechette said: “Clearly, some military commanders are looking the other way, and Colombian experts on the topic have said so.”

Bonett bristled at such criticism. “I cannot believe that the State Department would just print a bunch of gossip and not even talk to us first,” he said.

Gen. Luis Ernesto Gillibert, deputy director of the national police, was even more emphatic. “That is not true,” he said. “The police are a permanent target for the guerrillas. We are easy prey.” Despite this, he insisted, the police have not resorted to seeking the support of private armies in order to defend towns.

Based on his experience, Velasquez dismissed such objections. “All that is left is for them to say that the guerrilla has infiltrated the U.S. State Department,” he joked.

The problem, he said, is that army commanders are radically anti-guerrilla. “They have become so radical that they can no longer see,” he said. “They look at the guerrilla as a personal enemy.”

With the guerrillas as their enemies, army commanders don’t want to mount a second front against the private armies, he said. “So, they look the other way. The army commits human rights abuses by omission.”

Meanwhile, the guerrillas are working on their human rights record. When rebels attacked the military base at San Juanito in February, they took wounded soldiers to a nearby church and called the International Committee of the Red Cross to report the location.

“The message is clear,” Velasquez said. “ ‘The guerrilla respects human rights.’ They have taken the initiative again.”