Drug war on U.S. streets is fought in Colombia

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 24, 1997 | by Jamie Dettmer

Continuing with Insight's series of exclusive reports on the international narcotics trade, Senior Editor Jamie Dettmer reports this time from the coca-growing highlands of the Republic of Colombia.

COLOMBIA

The police major lowered his head and crossed himself as the Huey's rotor blades sped up. The helicopter -- with six heavily armed policemen and an Insight editor on board -- heaved itself into the Amazon's sultry afternoon air, hovered and then ascended, banking above the green-colored roofs of the squat Colombian National Police barracks at San Jose del Guaviare. Ahead there was another Huey and behind five more helicopters -- all spiked with M-60 machine guns.

Heading south to spray coca fields the combat mission quickly left the ramshackle town of San Jose behind and with it the River Guaviare, a meandering muddy mass of water that stretches from central-southern Colombia all the way to Venezuela. The thick rainforests of Colombia's vast thinly inhabited Amazon region beckoned.

Maj. Horacio Galeona, a thickset man with a ready smile and a penchant for talking about the "beautiful women of Colombia," wasn't being melodramatic when appealing for divine protection. Twenty days previous, two of Galeona's pilots were killed when their Huey was shot down. A week before, 13 policemen on foot patrol were ambushed by leftist guerrillas. Those not immediately killed were finished off with shots to the head and their bodies set on fire. Almost every day Galeona's men are involved in fierce firefights with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's longest-running insurgency, which has a new lease on life thanks to drugs.

"My family in Bogota flashes across my mind each time I take off," says 25-year-old Lt. Bertran Currea, the major's chief air officer.

Until last year, when Galeona's 1,000-strong unit moved in, San Jose was a thriving cocaine boomtown -- if boom and town aren't words too dignified for a higgledy-piggledy settlement that's accessible only by air and boat. There are no paved roads. When the police moved in 12 months ago, coca-leaf growers left San Jose and moved deeper into the Amazon. The locals begrudge the police presence because profits are down. The town is one of the front lines in a grim conflict that will determine Colombia's future and have a major impact on the country's regional neighbors -- Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.

What happens here in Colombia's Amazon and to the country's Andean north, where opium fields carpet the lower reaches, also will have serious drug consequences for the United States -- and, even further afield Europe.

While there is much to celebrate in Latin America these days -- and President Clinton did so on his recent trade-oriented trip south to Venezuela Argentina and Brazil -- there still are dark clouds dotted around the continent. The darkest, Insight discovered on a trip in October, loom above Colombia, the Andean nation of 36 million that produces 60 percent of the heroin and 80 percent of the cocaine seized on U.S. streets.

Colombia has much to offer Latin America. It has the potential to become the Switzerland of the continent -- if it were a crime-free environment. But it is being engulfed in a violent free-for-all that's draining the lifeblood from its democratic institutions and turning a huge part of the country -- in fact, currently about half -- into an ungovernable anarchy. Colombia's successes in the late eighties and early nineties in destroying the Medellin narcotrafficking cartel and disrupting the more discreet Cali cartel (with American help) now are being replaced by shuddering defeats, prompting the president of the national congress, Amilkar Acosta, to recently call for the introduction of a state of emergency.

Foreign observers, diplomats and U.S. military experts told Insight Colombia is facing its biggest crisis since the 1940s and 1950s when the country was torn apart between liberals and conservatives in a bloody civil war known as "La Violencia." Powered by hereditary hatreds that only passingly were connected with ideology, 300,000 Colombians lost their lives in that conflict. Hostilities only came to an end when a four-year military dictatorship was imposed.

Now, Colombia once again is beset by a host of powerful lawless groups, including a new generation of drug smugglers from the Pacific coastal town of Cali, FARC and two smaller, leftist revolutionary organizations, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the People's Liberation Army, or EPL, both of which specialize in bombing gas pipelines and extorting cash from oil companies.

That isn't all. Ultraviolent right-wing paramilitary units tied to the army are employed by powerful landowners in the north. Like FARC, they are implicated in narcotrafficking and are growing in strength and ambition. Early in October, paramilitaries turned their guns on government officials for the first time and murdered an 11-man federal prosecution team that was trying to seize a local drug baron's ranch 36 miles from Bogota.