Colombia's Hell : Fear grips a nation

National Review, Dec 6, 1999 by Anthony Daniels

The end of the Cold War has not only made the purchase of arms on the international black market much easier for the ELN and the FARC-who are liberated from the need to find sponsors and patrons-but has made the United States less anxious about the prospect of a guerrilla takeover. At the height of the Cold War, concerns about Colombia's human-rights record might have been considered something of a luxury, obstructing the primary goal of preventing another country from falling into pro-Soviet hands; but now such concerns have moved center stage in the elaboration of policy. And it is the activities of the extremely ruthless paramilitary organizations, for whose existence and conduct the Colombian government is blamed, that exercise the human-rights lobby.

The fact is that the guerrillas in Colombia are opposed not so much by the army as by paramilitary groups organized and funded by landowners. Many of these are narcotraficantes, who bought their land from ranchers intimidated by the guerrillas into selling their property, and who are no strangers to the organization of violence. The paramilitaries operate on the principle that the only effective response to revolutionary terror is even greater counter-revolutionary terror, and the army looks on their activities with benevolent neutrality. The lesson of the Guatemalan insurgency has been learned: that if counter-revolutionary terror is sufficiently brutal, the guerrillas lose sympathy and support, for their claim to represent and protect the interests of the peasantry is exposed as a sham.

The paramilitaries are most numerous and active where the guerrillas are most numerous and active. The army does not oppose them because they are doing its work for it, and in any case it is in no shape to fight on two fronts at once. But the covert or implicit use of brutal paramilitary organizations has its costs. The image of the Colombian government, both within and outside the country, is severely tarnished. Thanks to residual guerrillophilia among the Western intelligentsia, who believe that rebellion in distant countries is its own justification, human-rights groups are inclined to blame governments more than the insurgents whose activities predictably bring about the catastrophic situation.

What do the guerrillas want? One of the FARC's comandantes told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the FARC wants to rule Colombia, a statement that was greeted almost with shock in the country, as if it were a sudden revelation. But the leader of the FARC, Mario Marulanda Velez, known as Tirofijo, has been a guerrilla for 50 years-and no one lives such a life to earn the opportunity to lose next year's elections. Far from being the freedom fighters of the romantic imagination, the guerrillas are inveterate enemies of freedom.

If they won, thus establishing the first government founded on kidnap, the rest of the world would no doubt come to an accommodation with them. But their victory could herald the start of yet another disastrous wave of revolutionary violence in Latin America, just as the tide seemed to have turned against it forever.