The culmination of two significant events during the past 18 months has dramatically transformed U.S. policy in Colombia. First, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States have allowed the Bush administration to escalate its military involvement in Colombia as part of the evolving global war on terror. And second, the election of Colombia’s hard-line presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe last May has provided the White House with an ally willing to intensify the war against Colombia’s two principal leftist guerrilla groups—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN)—that are on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). These developments have led to the deployment of 70 U.S. army Special Forces troops to one of the most hotly contested parts of Colombia to help the Colombian army combat the guerrillas and protect U.S. economic interests in the region.
Author Archives: Garry Leech
Generating Power and Poverty in Colombia
Many of the communities in Colombia’s remote northeastern department of La Guajira exist on the periphery of the country’s violence. The semi-arid landscape is not conducive to guerrilla warfare and looks more like the southwestern United States than any other part of Colombia. While the region’s geography is responsible for keeping much of the country’s violence at arms length, it is the cause of another form of conflict currently being waged against numerous La Guajira communities: economic globalization. In the early1980s, ExxonMobil—through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Intercor—and Colombia’s state-owned coal mining company Carbocol began extracting coal from the El Cerrejón mine in southern La Guajira. El Cerrejón soon became the world’s largest open-pit mine as it grew to its current size of 30 miles long and five miles wide. This continuing expansion has wreaked havoc on local communities, some of which have already been gobbled up by the mine, and others that are targeted for destruction over the next couple of years.
Plan Colombia’s Killing Fields
A visit to the coca growing regions of southern Colombia clearly illustrates that more than coca is being eradicated by the U.S.-sponsored aerial fumigation. While the spraying has eradicated thousands of acres of coca over the past one and a half years, it has also destroyed the food crops and livelihood of impoverished Colombian farmers in the targeted regions. Recent attempts to more accurately direct the aerial attacks against illicit crops have also failed to protect food crops. And as both the fumigation campaign and the civil conflict intensify, there is evidence of collusion between the Colombian army’s U.S.-trained counternarcotics brigade and paramilitary death squads that are on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
Caught in a Colombian Crossfire
Many Colombians were concerned that President Andrés Pastrana’s recent suspension of peace talks between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) would dramatically escalate the civil conflict. Their fears appeared to be well founded when the Colombian military initiated a massive bombing campaign against the former zona de despeje before sending in thousands of ground troops to retake the zone’s principal towns. The FARC retaliated by launching an extensive bombing campaign against urban targets and the country’s infrastructure. But for indigenous groups in the southwestern department of Cauca, the violence began escalating long before the collapse of the peace process. In recent years, both paramilitary and guerrilla forces have increasingly violated the neutrality of indigenous reserves, known as resguardos.
The Hypocrisy of Colombia’s Peace Process
The Washington-Bogotá axis and the mainstream media in both the United States and Colombia have blamed the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the collapse of the peace process. President Andrés Pastrana used the FARC’s ongoing military activities during negotiations as justification for ordering the Colombian military’s invasion of the rebel safe haven. But while the FARC has been repeatedly condemned for continuing to wage war outside the rebel zone, few questioned the fact that the Colombian military and the paramilitaries were doing exactly the same thing.
Garry Leech 