The U.S. Continues Its Strategy of ‘Eternal War’

When I last visited Colombia some months back, the editor of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s news magazine Cambio lamented that his country seemed “ripe for eternal war.” The news last week that Colombia’s sputtering “peace process” was salvaged from collapse at the last moment does little to alter that grim assessment.

The 3-year-old peace talks between the government and leftist guerrillas will continue. But with no truce in place, so will the mutual murder, mayhem and kidnapping that has turned this Andean nation into one of the most violent places on Earth. Regrettably, U.S. policy does nothing except accelerate and encourage the bloodletting.

Under its so-called Plan Colombia--a $1.3 billion, multiyear effort pushed through in the last phase of the Clinton administration in the name of the war on drugs--the Bush White House now pumps more than $2 million a day into the counter-narcotics conflict. Countless federal drug and intelligence agents act as adjuncts to the Colombian military. A couple of hundred or more U.S. military advisors train and counsel three new elite battalions of the Colombian army. Dozens of hi-tech U.S. combat helicopters, including a squadron of 14 battle-ready Black Hawks, are being shipped to Bogota.

Along with them come an unknown number of private-contract U.S. pilots and helicopter technical crews. Another batch of private-contract Americans fly the crop dusters that spray toxic herbicides over the coca-rich countryside. Supporting this operation are four new so-called “forward operating locations,” or FOLs--U.S .military intelligence outposts--in Ecuador, Aruba, Curacao and El Salvador.

Now word comes that the Bush administration is considering U.S. military aid that would be earmarked, not for counter-narcotics assistance, but for counter-insurgency, that is, for the government’s war against the guerrillas. Already last year, one U.S. Embassy official admitted to me that the line between the two struggles is “ambiguous.” Those who have worried that U.S. intervention in the Colombia drug war would eventually drag us directly into that country’s civil war now have genuine cause to be alarmed.

It’s no accident that Colombia is simultaneously the world’s largest cocaine producer and home to the hemisphere’s most dogged guerrilla insurgency. Both the drug trade and the guerrilla movement have grown out of social and economic injustice endemic in rural areas of the country. A political and economic oligarchy has monopolized much of recent Colombia history. Disenfranchised subsistence farmers have found in coca production their only salvation. Others have sought a better world through armed struggle or organized crime. And all sides have an interest in the cash-rich coca trade.

With a certain sense of irony and resignation, Colombians lump all rifle-toting groups--from the army and police to various guerrilla groups, counter-guerrilla paramilitary death squads and criminal gangs--under the rubric of “armed actors.” They might as well add the U.S. to that roster.

For 38 years, the guerrilla insurgency has raged. Colombian President Andres Pastrana, whose term is up in August, has taken a two-track approach to the crisis. While accommodating the U.S., he has also--to his credit--aggressively pursued peace parlays with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents, an 18,000-strong guerrilla army that is flush with coca dollars. To the open dismay of U.S. officials, Pastrana granted the guerrillas a Switzerland-sized safe haven, which has been the venue of the talks.

The negotiations have been bumpy and inconclusive. Neither side has given very much. The government demands that rebels cease their tactic of kidnapping and that they stop using the safe zone as a staging area for military operations. For their part, the guerrillas demand the government do more to reign in right-wing death squads, which have carried out a string of horrific massacres.

Then last week, Pastrana stiffened. Giving the rebels a 48-hour ultimatum, he demanded they either meet a series of his demands or abandon the safe haven and face a large military offensive.

Ultimatums from any side hardly seem the remedy for what ails Colombia. In order to achieve a lasting peace, all “actors” in the conflict will have to make concessions of sizable proportions. The guerrillas will have to recognize that while their call for social justice widely resonates in Colombia, their real political support is narrow and weak because most Colombians are appalled by their involvement in the coca industry and are horrified by their use of often barbaric military tactics. As a result, the guerrillas have no future other than as one more political party.

On the government side, Pastrana will have to show some real grit in confronting and eliminating the right-wing death squads that often work as allies with the army. But more important, Pastrana will have to make what Italian leftist politicians call the “historic compromise”--convincing the Colombian elites that the future of their country rests on their willingness to accept radical economic and social reforms that close the gaping class divide that rends the nation weak and keeps it at war with itself.

For all this to work, the U.S. would have to scale down its current military posture and redirect its military assistance to economic development. But that possibility seems as distant as the other two. Few Colombians failed to see the stark symbolism in the fact that Pastrana’s ultimatum last week came just one day after an elaborate ceremony was staged to receive the latest shipment of U.S. Black Hawk gunships, during which U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson renewed the U.S. pledge to provide military support. To underscore the hard-line U.S. policy, the White House last week made a “recess appointment” of ultra-hawk Otto J. Reich as assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs. As Colombia teetered on the abyss of all-out war, the peace talks were, nevertheless, rescued. Round-the-clock negotiations carried out by United Nations special envoy James LeMoyne and, at the final moment, supported by foreign diplomats brought both sides together just four hours before the deadline. Now Pastrana has issued another ultimatum, giving the rebels until today to agree to a cease-fire.

To the embarrassment of U.S. diplomacy, credit for salvaging the peace process should go squarely to LeMoyne. A former New York Times foreign correspondent, and armed with nothing more than fluent Spanish, a working knowledge of the region and a mandate from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, LeMoyne kept the dialogue alive.

One can only imagine what the government of the United States--with its enormous power, wealth and prestige--could accomplish if it followed LeMoyne’s example and put all its efforts in Colombia into the work of a lasting peace, instead of into a seemingly endless war.

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Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to The Nation and a columnist for L.A. Weekly. His latest book is “Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir.”