Colombia Seeks Peace as It Prepares for War

Call it FARCland. Colombians do.

During 18 months of negotiations between the government and the FARC, as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia is known, a “peace city” has sprung up here in southern Colombia’s deforested jungle. The government has built an amphitheater for weekly public hearings. Blue-and-white tents and a Red Cross station surround it, lending a summer camp atmosphere. The guerrillas have added a thatched-roof souvenir store that sells revolutionary music cassettes and FARC T-shirts, baseball caps and scarves.

This is where Colombia is seeking peace. The Tres Esquinas military base, just 70 miles away, is where Colombia--with U.S. help--is preparing for war.

“This is war against drug traffickers,” said Brig. Gen. Mario Montoya, commander of the 12,500 Colombian troops who form Joint Task Force South, based at Tres Esquinas.

But the drug war isn’t that simple, Montoya said: “It is virtually impossible to conduct anti-narcotics operations that do not involve guerrillas or anti-guerrilla operations that do not involve drugs. The two are intimately linked.”

When President Clinton visits Colombia next week, he will land in a country demoralized by a well-earned reputation as a major cocaine supplier and exhausted by half a century of nearly continuous fighting.

He will be seeing a nation where shifting alliances and betrayals have left all sides so cynical that, even as they make one more desperate effort to find a political solution to their conflict, they are building up arms and arguments to escalate an already brutal war that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in the last decade alone.

In a way, a new $1.3-billion U.S. anti-drug aid package is also a bid on both war and peace.

Washington has promised $93 million to help reform government agencies, such as courts and police, into institutions that Colombians can trust more than guns to resolve disputes. The United States will invest an additional $90 million in community services, such as roads and water, that the Colombian government has long neglected.

At the same time, the U.S. will spend $644 million mainly on “the push into the south,” the triangle where about half the world’s cocaine grows. Here in the coca bushes, the players in Colombia’s civil war meet: left-wing guerrillas, the right-wing private armies that pursue them, the drug traffickers who finance both sides, and the peasants caught in between.

U.S. support is already evident in Tres Esquinas. Americans donated the metal scaffolding for six new barracks, and a U.S.-trained anti-narcotics battalion has been operating from the base since late last year.

The proximity of the promise of peace and the threat of all-out war are a fitting culmination of the contradictions with which Colombians have been living for decades.

For example, this is a democracy so progressive that city dwellers can appeal directly to the Supreme Court if they believe that the government has violated their rights. But it is also a nation so nearly feudal that peasants in remote villages cannot even count on government protection from frequent massacres by armed groups disputing territory.

The public hearings here in Los Pozos reflect the civilized side of Colombia trying to wrest control from the barbarous elements.

Each weekend, people ranging from trade unionists and students to government officials make the pilgrimage to Los Pozos to discuss items on the lengthy agenda of social and economic problems. Their proposals are presented later to the government and rebel representatives negotiating in private.

“The hearings have provided the chance to talk with people longer, to hear them better and, above all, for them to present their points of view on government policies that affect them,” said rebel spokesman Raul Reyes. In the evenings, participants meet with FARC representatives in small circles to ask about the guerrilla movement.

“One of the problems with the conflict is misinformation,” said Carlos Antonio Lozada, a spokesman for the FARC negotiating team. “This permits people to take away a firsthand impression of what the FARC is politically and militarily.”

One recent weekend, as street vendors and health care workers attending the public hearings had their pictures taken with the rebel delegates to the peace talks, other members of the FARC were destroying the northern town of Arboleda during an attack on the police stations there.

The country’s kidnapping rate is soaring, now numbering eight people a day. Ransoms, along with “taxes” on illegal drug production, are a significant source of revenues for the insurgents, both the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN, which is only beginning to talk peace with the government.

The only solution that the FARC has offered to end abductions is for everyone with more than $1 million in assets to voluntarily pay “taxes” to the guerrillas in return for immunity from kidnapping. Such replies are trying the patience of international diplomats, who are being asked to help Colombia find a solution to its conflict.

“For this [peace] process to make any progress, we believe the FARC has to make some definitive and long overdue moves,” British Ambassador Jeremy Thorp said in a statement after European diplomats met with guerrilla negotiators here in late June. “The United Kingdom cannot accept kidnappings, forced disappearances and extortion, or the recruitment of children for ‘military service’ in the guerrilla [forces]. These are serious violations of human rights and must stop.”

The conflict that began as a fight to open Colombia’s elitist democracy has degenerated from military attacks to sabotage to terrorism, says a political scientist at Los Andes University in Bogota, the capital. He is speaking only on condition of anonymity, because university analysts are routinely attacked, often fatally, by gunmen who disagree with their views.

“Drug trafficking has been the major factor in stimulating Colombia’s problems,” he said. That is why many Colombians, discouraged by the slow-moving peace process, have begun to turn their hopes to the anti-narcotics base at Tres Esquinas, even though guerrillas warn that U.S. military aid will escalate the fighting.

The now-defunct Medellin and Cali drug cartels introduced illegal narcotics to the jungles outside the base 15 years ago when they opened crystallizing laboratories to process coca paste from Bolivia and Peru, troop commander Montoya says. Law enforcement success in halting shipments from those countries forced drug traffickers to grow more coca in Colombia.

As of January, 180,000 acres of coca were growing in the region, 62.5% of Colombia’s total, according to law enforcement estimates. Montoya says he suspects that the figure will increase to 220,000 acres by January.

FARC leaders acknowledge that they “tax” coca production but deny any further involvement in drug trafficking.

“That is a lie, a lie!” Montoya said. “They are in the business.”

The guerrillas took over the drug laboratories when the Medellin and Cali cartels were crushed, he says. Now they’re in a bidding war with right-wing paramilitary groups that are trying to get a share, Montoya says.

As evidence, he plays a scratchy recording that he says is an intercepted rebel radio communication. On the tape, a man and a woman are talking about prices and intimidating sellers.

The battle for control of the region’s cocaine production now involves 10 FARC fronts with 1,736 troops and two paramilitary forces with a combined strength of 240 fighters, Montoya says.

Attacking narcotics crops will cut into the source of two-thirds of the funding for illegal armed groups, predicts an international narcotics expert whose life has been threatened in Colombia. “It’s going to cause them [financial] discomfort,” he said. “They have other ways [such as kidnapping and extortion] to get funding, but this is going to cut them down to the most dedicated” fighters.

Still, Montoya isn’t promising any fast solutions. He estimates that he will need two years to put a cap on cocaine expansion and two more years to achieve a decline.

Similarly, U.S. officials in charge of the American effort to support development plans that will provide farmers an alternative to illegal crops warn that achieving results may take five years or longer.

While Montoya and his troops attack drug crops and traffickers with U.S. fumigation equipment and training, another American program will ask small farmers--an estimated one-third of coca growers--to pull out their coca bushes in exchange for health clinics, roads and help in finding another way to make a living.

The U.S. effort is scheduled to start a pilot program this month in Putumayo, not far from Tres Esquinas. Americans will have to carry out the program through local agencies because the U.S. government forbids its employees to venture into the dangerous area.

A U.S. official who participated in similar programs in Peru and Bolivia says the success of this effort will depend on the success of fumigation.

“Alternative development alone doesn’t work,” he said. “Nothing is as profitable as coca or [heroin] poppies. That is why you need both the carrot and the stick.”

He added: “All we [the United States] can do is provide some of the expertise and the money. Only the political will and the commitment of the Colombian people can make it work, not just our $1.3 billion.”

Nevertheless, Colombians desperate for peace are clearly counting on that money and, perhaps more important, U.S. interest in their drawn-out conflict. Recalling how the United States pressured the right to negotiate an end to Central America’s civil wars, a political scientist at the National University in Bogota said:

“It would be good if our army became so dependent on the United States that they would have to listen to them. Unfortunately, the FARC doesn’t have to listen to anyone.”

* Darling was recently on assignment in Colombia.