In Colombia - A Terrorist Sanctuary?

by Dr. Geoff Demarest, FMSO

This article appeared in Military Review March-April 2002

 

Soon after the entire world expressed solidarity with the US intention to physically defeat terrorism, the predictable waffling about how to define 'terrorist' began. Some governments struggled to find that semantic concoction that would leave the appearance of shared outrage while helping to distract American attention from their own dubious liaisons and detents with outlaw groups. In this regard, the importance of organizational identity was nowhere more transcendent than in northern South America, where the September 11 attacks heightened an already keen attentiveness to US foreign policy. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in a speech to the Venezuelan Congress, asserted that Colombia's two major armed dissident groups, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the larger Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) "cannot be considered terrorist because if they were we could not negotiate with them, because one does not talk with terrorism, but rather combats it."¹ His logic was impenetrable -- governments do not negotiate with terrorist organizations, the Colombian government had been negotiating with these groups, ergo, the FARC and ELN were not terrorists. The Ecuadoran foreign minister, Heinz Moeller, later made a muddled but equivalent comment.² The dissemblance was lost on no one, especially in Colombia. The immediate post-WTC issue of the leading Bogota news weekly, Semana, included a brief, insightful article about what the events meant for Colombia.³ The article noted the early ultimatum of President Bush about punishing terrorists and whoever protects them, then wondered aloud how the United States would define 'protection.'

Back in 1999, the government of Colombia bet its success and maybe the country's future on a plan for negotiated settlement with the FARC and ELN. Together, the two groups annually commit thousands of kidnapings, hundreds of murders, extortions and bombings, helping make Colombia one of the most dangerous and violent countries in the world. About their violent vocation there is no reasonable doubt. Their modus operandi has been to translate ruthlessness into fear, gaining the kind of respect that springs therefrom. Their explicit objective is to take power.⁴

Nevertheless, to find a way out of what may have seemed to the government of Colombia an impasse, President Pastrana agreed to temporarily hand over to the FARC a piece of Colombian territory the size of Switzerland. Officially called the 'despeje' (translatable as 'clearing' or 'clearance'), the area was cleared of all government armed force, leaving it under complete FARC control. Then a 10 kilometer-wide no-man's zone was added around the outside. Ostensibly, the FARC required this concession as an assurance of security in order to begin a course of peace negotiations. The results have been dubious, the FARC having conceded nothing in over two years of talks. Meanwhile, the FARC has actively exploited the natural military advantages of safely occupying such a huge geography in the heart of the national sovereignty.⁵ Protected interior lines have allowed the FARC to greatly increase its effective military presence in areas around the zone, expanding the total amount of territory under its control, at least partial.⁶ To the south this has given special strategic advantage, helping secure the FARC's southern line of communication out of Colombia into Ecuador and Peru. Within the despeje, the FARC has been able to hide and manage its inventory of hostages, step up training, and has apparently been manufacturing bombs and mines. To the northwest, the despeje borders on the mountain approaches to Bogota.

Although under-recognized, an earlier Semana article provided definitive answers regarding the nature of the ELN and FARC, and of the government peace plan.⁷ By 2001 the Colombian president was pressing for a similar zone for the smaller ELN. (The area chosen lies along the middle reaches of the Magdalena River. Aside from dominating the most strategically important line of communication in the country, the proposed zone includes a major coca crop concentration, as well as oil-industry infrastructure.) The Semana interviewer is questioning the Colombian president about ongoing negotiations (not so much with the guerrillas but with local residents who were opposed to the proposed accord) intended to create the new ELN clearance zone. The interviewer asks, "And if there is no agreement, are you going to continue with the clearance zone in that area? The frank answer is troublesome, its logic perhaps the first public expression, beyond recital of abstractions, of the President's reasoning. "The country needs to understand that the ELN is prepared to make peace, but if it doesn't happen, it is prepared to make war. And it has a great terrorist capability."⁸ In a nutshell, a national president states that his country must understand that if he does not give an armed outlaw group strategically important land, the group will hurt the country. In order to avoid violent harm, the president advises the country that it must yield wealth and accept strategic risk. There is no doubt about the correct use by President Pastrana of the term terrorist in his explanation, or about the simplicity of his appeasement.

Coca cultivation in the FARC despeje increased as US-sponsored Plan Colombia coca eradication activities progressed outside it. A major goal of the eradication plan has been to reduce the financial blood flow to the FARC and thereby decrease its capacity for violent action. However, because Colombia had a long-standing policy of not negotiating with drug dealers, the Pastrana government maintained publicly that the FARC was not a drug trafficking organization. The United States deferred to the Colombian president's political expedience regarding the classification of the FARC as to drugs. After all, the DEA was itself always slow to accept publicly the idea that the FARC was a drug trafficking organization. However, since September 11, when terrorist replaced trafficker as America's number one enemy identity, it may be too much for the US to overlook these organizations' terrorist character, and too much for the Colombians to ask the US to do so. During the week of September 5, three Irish Republican Army (IRA) members were captured in Colombia after having provided training to FARC members.⁹ Even in the immediate aftermath of the WTC attacks, the FARC could not moderate its behavior, murdering a popular government official while she was being held in captivity^.10 The FARC mounted a publicity effort in which it expressed sympathy for victims of the New York disaster, but Colombian government security forces made a timely revelation of a tape recording of a senior FARC leader asserting that the FARC would "combat them (North Americans) wherever they may be, until we get to their own territory, to make them feel the pain which they have inflicted on other peoples."¹¹

A mild paradox in the course of US policy regarding the Colombia situation makes the despeje question more interesting still. Another of Colombia's illegal armed organizations, the Colombian Self-Defense Forces (AUC), recently joined the ELN and the FARC on the US Department of State official list of international terrorist organizations.¹2 The AUC's stated purpose is to eliminate the ELN and the FARC, but like them it has been implicated in human rights violations and in the drug trade. The AUC may have been put on the State Department terrorist list in part because FARC peace negotiators demanded the Colombian government demonstrate good will in opposing the AUC. Now it appears that inclusion of the AUC on the list will make it harder for some publicists to overlook the terrorist characterization of the FARC and ELN. The AUC is generally labeled 'right-wing,' while the FARC and ELN are known as leftist.¹³ It might have been arguable to Colombians that leftist or anti-American leanings, rather than organizational behavior, were dominant criteria for selection. With the AUC on the list, that argument is diminished.

The question for the future, then, will not be how to describe groups such as the FARC and ELN. They will keep their rightful place on the terrorist list. The harder question will be how to encourage an allied government not to allow a huge area of land be used as an outlaw sanctuary and training ground for acts of extreme violence. As for Colombia, if the Colombian government in fact believes it must concede national territory to its armed dissidents because otherwise they will commit debilitating acts of violence against the country, then we must ask what the Colombian military can or cannot do to stop them. As a corollary, we should ask what parts or determinants of our own policies have so discouraged the Colombian government, so disabled the government's application of the military instrument of power, that a small outlaw army is able to bully an ally of 40 million persons. Perhaps we fell prey to a notion that the problems in Colombia were essentially political or cultural in nature, and that the military instrument was therefore inappropriate. Popular and plausible theories signaling economic disparities, political inequities and cultural anachronisms as the root causes of conflict may have distracted us from appropriately defining the more immediate requirement.¹⁴ Consider the following list of advantages that the subversives sought and found: Interior lines, rear area security, protected lines of communication, protected financial resource bases, marshaling areas, training areas, access to strategic corridors. These are not societal failures fueling underlying causes of popular discontent.¹⁵ They are military objectives.

Endnotes

7. Semana, "Mi única prioridad no es la paz." Interview with President Andrés Pastrana, Semana, February 26, 2001, p 30.

8. Ibid.

9. Colombia details fresh IRA link to guerrillas,' Financial Times online http://ft.com September 17 2001 20:43. See also "IRA denies sending trio to Colombia," Agence France Presse, Wednesday, 19 September 2001, <http://www.prairienet.org/clm/clmnews_files/010919AFP01.html> The long-standing Cuban government sponsorship of Colombian subversive groups should regain currency as an issue, especially in light of Cuban collaboration with and aid other international terrorist organizations. See, for instance, Ninoska Pérez Castellón, "The Cuban Connection," Latin American Special Report Vol.12, No.11, 30 Sep 01, p. 1.

10. Scott Wilson, "Colombian Guerrillas Kill Popular Official," Washington Post Foreign Service, October 1,2001, p. A16.

11. Luis Jaime Acosta, "Colombian Rebels Plan Strike in U.S.," Reuters, 24 September 2001. According to this article, accessed on the Internet at Colombian Labor Monitor <clm@prairienet.org>

12. Ken Guggenheim"Citing massacre, Powell assails Colombia group as terrorist," Boston Globe, Associated Press 9/11/2001 p. A15.

13. Some ELN members may have been defecting to the AUC. See, in this regard, the official AUC web site, Colombia Libre, at <http://www.colombialibre.net/colombialibre/> which posted an item claiming widespread defections from the ELN to the AUC. The FARC can also be expected to receive members from the ELN if it is, as some analysts contend, crumbling. These possibilities raise questions about the ideological dimension of both the ELN and the AUC. The reported lack of organizational cohesion in the ELN further calls into doubt the decision of the Colombian government to give it a large internal sanctuary.

14. Changes after September 11 are palpable. Francis Taylor, Coordinator for Terrorism Affairs at the US Department of State, stated in early October to attentive South American audiences, that his office was designing an anti-terrorist strategy for Colombia that would complement Plan Colombia. See Sergio Gomez Maseri, "E.U. prepara estrategia antiterrorista para Colombia." El Tiempo (Bogota), 12 October 2001 at http://eltiempo.terra.com.co/12-10-2001/prip_pf_0.html; Clarin, "EE. UU. No descarta intervenir en Colombia" (United States does not rule out intervention in Colombia) 16 October 2001, <www.clarin.ar>.

15. As the ELN describes it, "This complex panorama of the social, political, economic and legal reality and of the opportunities of life denied to the majority of Colombians is what gave rise to and sustains the existence of a guerrilla movement and the inevitability of revolutionary armed struggle. It is not the desire nor the result of individual motives of warlike men, as Colombia's ruling class would have it." <http://www.web.net/eln/ELN/eln.html> Whatever Colombia's ruling class would or would not have, and whatever social injustices exist, objectivity compels one to conclude that, indeed, much of the violence in Colombia is the desire and result of individual motives of warlike men.