Colombia's war: drugs, oil and markets

Christian Century, Nov 7, 2001 by Tom F. Driver

In the name of the "war on drugs" much of Colombia is being subjected to terror in the form of massacres, assassinations, rapes and the spraying of poison from airplanes. When in August 2000 Congress approved President Bill Clinton's request for $1.3 billion to implement "Plan Colombia," the faith-based organization Witness for Peace decided to send a delegation of 100 people to see for themselves what was happening there, and I signed on. We feared that U.S. involvement would add to the violence in an already war-ravaged land, would create a situation similar to that of El Salvador in the 1980s or even lead to a debacle like our involvement in Vietnam. The trip confirmed these fears--and more.

Plan Colombia, which President George W. Bush renamed the Andean Regional Initiative, is being sold as a key component of the war on drugs. The propaganda for it is so effective that even critics of U.S. policy in Colombia assume it is true. For example, NBC's August 31 Dateline devoted a full hour to a skeptical look at what the U.S. is doing in Colombia. The program's host, Geraldo Rivera, suggested that it will be impossible to stop the flow of drugs as long as demand for them is so high in the U.S. and warned of the danger that we might be drawn into a civil war. Though both points are important and valid, the program was notable for what it did not say.

Rightly calling attention to the extremely high level of violence in Colombia, Rivera failed to mention the group responsible for 70 percent of that violence: the paramilitary forces which, although ostensibly private and illegal, receive aid and cooperation from Colombia's army and hence, indirectly, from the U.S. Neither did Rivera mention the 2 million people who have fled from the fighting and the aerial fumigation of their farms.

These internal refugees, unemployed, living in squatters' communities in the cities to which they have fled, are the principal result of the war so far. Many Colombians believe that they are its intended result, that the real aim of the war against insurgents and against drugs is really to get small farmers off their land in order to make room for development. Under Colombia's coca fields is oil. Paramilitaries terrorize people into leaving their land, and labor organizers are the group most targeted for assassination. More than 1,000 have been killed in the past 12 years, 200 so far this year.

Colombia is a prime instance of U.S. military clout being used to serve the interests of corporate-led globalization. Because the campaign is such bad news for the poor of Colombia (and the rest of South America), and because it increases the level of terror in the world, it should be of great concern to America and its churches--all the more so since our own experience of terror on September 11.

To understand what is going on in Colombia, one needs to begin by looking at the country's long history of violence. The Spanish conquest in the early 16th century enslaved Indians to work in mines and on plantations. As a result of the subsequent importation of African slaves Colombia now has the third largest black population in the Americas, after Brazil and the U.S.

The country's violence has grown out of such endemic social factors as the severe, often brutal, exploitation of labor; the deep poverty of at least 60 percent of its people--though the land itself is rich in natural resources and the economy is productive; and the political disempowerment of more than 90 percent of its citizens. A small white ruling class controls Colombia's political life and holds most of its wealth. As a result of huge amounts of military spending, the national debt is massive. This social structure, an extreme form of what characterizes several other parts of Latin America, is such a formula for social unrest that Colombia will experience continuing violence as long as it remains unchanged.

Factionalism within Colombia's ruling class, moreover, has led to repeated episodes of warfare. Between 1899 and 1902, Conservatives and Liberals fought the savage War of the Thousand Days. Between 1946 and 1958 these factions fought again in an epoch known as La Violencia--a conflict satirized in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. A fratricidal orgy that cost an estimated 200,000 lives, La Violencia precipitated the current time of troubles. Outraged that Colombia's factional wars did nothing to relieve the suffering of the poor, reformers became rebel guerrillas.

Formed toward the end of the 1950s, two of these groups remain active today: the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces), which draws its primary strength from campesinos in the south, and the ELN (Army of National Liberation), whose strength is greater in the north among oil workers, indigenous groups defending their habitat against encroachment by the oil industry, and the Afro-Colombian population.

The guerrilla activities in turn led to the creation of Colombia's most deadly force today: the paramilitaries, made up of mercenaries easily recruited with a bit of pay, a uniform and a gun from among Colombia's desperately poor young people. At first they were financed and used by large landowners to defend their property against guerrilla incursions. Later they were also used by drug lords to protect their illegal activities. More recently they have been employed by the Colombian army to do the dirty work of terrorizing the campesinos and community leaders who are the real focus of the present war.