BY ALLEN JENNINGS
Colombia reached the brink of all-out war as the government threatened to end three-year-old peace negotiations with the left-wing guerilla organisation, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Buoyed by increased US weaponry and funds, Colombia's President Andres Pastrana suddenly announced on January 9 that the peace negotiations had ended. He gave the FARC two days to withdraw its forces from the demilitarised zone that was established in 1998 to foster the peace process.
Just minutes after Pastrana's deadline expired, FARC negotiators offered a proposal aimed at defusing the threat. While Pastrana responded almost immediately, saying the proposal was "unsatisfactory", he gave the FARC two more days, until January 14, to come back with an alternative proposal that would promise "concrete" results towards a cease-fire.
Meanwhile, some 13,000 army troops, supported by the navy and air force, amassed on the borders of what the FARC call the "liberated zone", an area two-thirds the size of Tasmania (42,000 sq kms), with a population of some 100,000. Top Colombian general, Fernando Tapias, announced that the army was ready for all-out war.
FARC combatant Mauricio, who lives in San Vicente del Caguan, the principal town in the liberated zone, said that the FARC was pulling back from the towns, but warned that, "If the government wants the rural areas, even a place five minutes from here, they'll have to fight for it."
With some 35,000 lives already lost in the war over the last decade, the scene was set for a bloodbath. The situation was so serious that Ecuador's President Gustavo Noboa, fearing a massive escalation of the conflict, announced that his troops were reinforcing Ecuador's northern border with Colombia.
'War on drugs'
On January 8, the day before Pastrana's announcement, US ambassador to Colombia Anne Patterson handed 14 Black Hawk combat helicopters to the Colombian military. She pledged "unfailing support for the country's war against drug producers". Valued at US$14 million each, Colombia now has a fleet of 29 Black Hawk choppers, which can be mounted with machine guns and modified to launch rockets and mortars.
For more than a year the US has been funding Plan Colombia, a US$7.5 billion military aid package, which includes the supply of military hardware and more than 1000 US military trainers and pilots.
Amnesty International has described Washington's massive military backing for Bogota as "the same policy that backed death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s".
With 90% of cocaine and some 70% of heroin sold in the US originating in Colombia, Plan Colombia is painted as part of a global "war on drugs".
On the ground, it is Colombian peasants who are the victims of this war. It devastates their fields with herbicides, poisons their water and drives them into deeper poverty. There is a continual threat of massacres from government-backed paramilitary forces. There are more than 1.5 million internal refugees. Trade union activists face murder, relentless repression and subversion charges. All this is on the rise because of the growing US interference via Plan Colombia.
As the BBC News noted, "Washington is calling on the Colombian government to take tougher action against the insurgents, yet it is America's own policies that are generating recruits for these movements".
'War on terrorism'
Now, on top of this "war on drugs" comes the "war on terrorism". In mid-October, Colombia's General Tapias attended the Inter-American Conference Against Terrorism, at which Washington proclaimed the Latin American chapter of its international "war against terrorism".
At this conference on October 15, Francis Taylor, the US State Department's anti-terrorism coordinator, stressed that "all the resources available" will be used in the anti-terrorism campaign in Latin America, including, "as we have done in Afghanistan, the use of military force".
Taylor stated that the FARC and Colombia's second largest armed insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), were on Washington's "terror list". Taylor declined, however, to differentiate between anti-terrorist and anti-insurgency operations in Colombia, in which Washington has vowed not to become involved.
In spite of this promise, the real face of Plan Colombia — a scheme devised to destroy the left — has been quickly unmasked since September 11. During the Christmas recess, US President Bush managed, against congressional opposition, to nominate arch right winger Otto Reich to the position of assistant secretary of state (western hemisphere), the US administration's top advisor on Latin America.
Reich, a devout, anti-Castro Cuban was in charge of anti-Sandinista propaganda during President Ronald Reagan's attacks on Nicaragua in the 1980s, and helped draft laws to tighten the economic blockade of Cuba. On his first day, he openly stressed that US military aid to Colombia should not only be used to fight drugs, but also to defeat the left. Many US politicians support increasing US military aid to Colombia — already at US$2 million a day — and agree that it should be used to combat the Colombian opposition forces.
The FARC is the largest of the armed movements in Latin America, growing in recent years to between 15,000 and 20,000 troops. It has governed the liberated zone currently under threat for the past three years, and, along with other smaller groups, controls 40% of the country.
FARC leaders are ready for peace. They were optimistic when Pastrana was elected on a peace platform in 1998. Since then, FARC leaders have devoted enormous time and effort into negotiating a "Table of Dialogues", the basis for a cease-fire.
However, they argue that they will not agree to peace without justice. They have learned from the history of failed peace processes in Central America and in Colombia at the beginning of the 1990s, which only led to new killings and social injustice.
"Peace in Latin America and the Caribbean begins with resolving the profound economic, political and social crisis; with accepting that the democracy as experienced today by the majority of peoples is not the unique and valid expression of their will", FARC states.
After 37 years of war, the Colombian government knows it cannot militarily defeat this large, disciplined, well-armed and popular force alone.
When the January 14 deadline arrived, under enormous international pressure and facing a resolute FARC leadership, Pastrana agreed to a further six-day extension of negotiations, until January 20. By then, the world was watching, international solidarity protests highlighted the government's warmongering and an agreement was finally reached to extend negotiations by three months, to April 20.
After days of talks facilitated by 10 foreign envoys in Los Pozos, within the liberated zone, government representative Camilo Gomez and FARC leader Raul Reyes read out a 12-point communique in which both sides agreed to "immediately" launch talks aimed at signing a cease-fire deal by April 7, three days before a new deadline for the Colombian army to move into the safe haven. A massacre has, at least for now, been avoided.
Nevertheless, Washington's plans for Colombia are clear. With growing opposition to corporate globalisation throughout Latin America, the threat to US capital and its crony governments in the region is very real. Yet, using the cloak of drugs and terrorism, there has rarely been a more opportune time to attempt to destroy the left in Colombia. A US-backed incursion into the liberated zone, and a massive loss of innocent lives, appears only to be a question of time.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, January 30, 2002.
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