The Geopolitics of Plan Colombia

Monthly Review, May, 2001 by James Petras

Given these differences, Washington's two-track policy of talking peace and financing alternative crops while escalating the war and promoting crop eradication, is doomed to failure. The carrot of a peace settlement for the commanders, and the war of attrition against the base, will not drive the FARC to settle for a peace accord in which electoral insertion, military institutional continuity, and rampaging neo-liberalism remain in place. The second fallacious assumption of U.S. policymakers is the simplistic analysis they make of the sources of FARC power. Washington's strategic thinkers equate the FARC with the drug trade, building its strength and recruiting fighters with the millions of dollars they accrue, and to the "terror tactics" they practice to intimidate the populace and gain control of swathes of the countryside. The simple equations are: FARC = drugs; drugs = dollars; dollars = recruits; recruits = terror; terror = growth of territorial control.

This superficial approach lacks any historical, social, and regional dimension, thus completely missing the social dynamics of FARC's growing influence. First, it overlooks the historical process of FARC formation and growth in particular regions and classes. The FARC has become a formidable guerrilla formation through the accumulation of forces over time, not in a linear fashion, but with setbacks and advances. Family ties, living and working experiences in regions abandoned or harassed by the state have played a big role in recruitment and movement-building over a thirty-five year period. Via trial and error, reflection and study, the FARC has been able to accumulate a vast store of practical understanding of the psychology and material bases of guerrilla warfare and mass recruitment. Throughout its history of championing land reform and peasant rights the FARC has with considerable success been able to create peasant cadres who link villagers and leaders and communicate in both directions. These historical links and experiences, far more than the drug trade tax, are instrumental in the growth of the FARC. In fact, the role of the FARC sales tax is shaped by its historical-political evolution and not vice versa. The decision to tax drug-traffickers and reinvest the funds back into the movement-isolated examples of personal enrichment to the contrary notwithstanding-reveals the political character of the movement. In areas of FARC control, drugs are not sold or consumed. The FARC protects the peasant producers, while the U.S. political and military allies and banks, commercialize drugs and launder the profits.

Socially, the FARC is inserted in the class structure via interlocking with villagers and defending peasant interests. The FARC recruits from the peasants and the urban poor with whom it works, and with which in many cases it has family ties. To the extent that military/paramilitary depredations uproot villagers they make young peasants available and willing recruits for the guerrilla armies. The same goes with coca crop eradication programs: destroying the peasants' livelihood creates propitious conditions for the guerrilla's call to arms. The guerrilla strength in the provinces is derived not only from the exploitative and abusive rule of the economic elites but from the concentration of state spending and consumption in Bogota (and to a lesser extent the other major cities). The historical urban-rural polarization has contributed to the formation of rural armies, by regional politicians as well as the guerrillas. But the arbitrary and violent intervention in the countryside by the military at the service of the Bogota political elite and the resident landlords increases the distance between the political class and the peasants, many of whom feel closer to the guerrillas. Finally U.S. policymakers over-emphasize the centrality of drug income in the guerrilla war. No one would deny that the drug tax is an important factor, a necessary source of revenue for financing arms and food purchases. But it is hardly sufficient.