#Plan Colombia

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Plan Colombia and the FARC

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Plan Colombia’s success reducing coca cultivation and strengthening Colombia´s democracy was tackled in two earlier articles, here I ask how it helped the fight against the FARC guerrillas.

When Plan Colombia started in 2002 the terrorist group stood 18,000 strong. Today they are a much smaller, more dispersed, yet still dangerous guerrilla group, currently in negotiations with the Colombian government to end their near 50 year fight.

While Plan Colombia originally focused on stemming the flow of illicit substances into major American cities, the events of 9/11 and the election of President Uribe, who campaigned for hard line measures against guerrilla groups, changed the rhetoric. And over 75% of Plan Colombia’s funding has been devoted to military and police assistance.

A success?

But despite this spending and while there have been high profile successes against the FARC throughout this period, the illegal group´s ability to adapt, innovate and remain a significant threat is notable.

When Plan Colombia began, Colombia was considered a failing state, and there were those who saw the FARC as a serious challenge to the authority and longevity of the Colombian state. The ability of the armed forces to halt the guerrilla´s progress was far from guaranteed. They were fighting against a well oiled and well funded military machine in the FARC.

Academic Jim Rochlin explains Plan Colombia´s work as a process to transform the Colombian military from an immobile, vulnerable and predictable force into a rapid, all terrain military machine capable of defeating a highly successful and well funded guerrilla group.

Plan Colombia sought to provide the Colombian military with a better level of equipment, training and intelligence capabilities. It was essential the military were trained for fighting in difficult terrain; high mountains and rivers.

Plans Patriota and Victoria

In 2004, President Uribe responded by enacting Plan Patriota which saw the deployment of 17,000 soldiers in an effort to debilitate the FARC. Plan Patriota´s success was mixed. During the operation of this plan, the FARC´s military capacity was shown with devastating effect. A 2006 attack on a bus full of innocent civilians in southern Colombia became an emblem of the group´s ability to strike at the heart of the nation.

Plan Victoria however, had far greater success. A key factor in this success was the role of intelligence and surveillance. A long standing problem in the Colombian military´s fight against the FARC was their inability to locate and target the guerrilla’s group’s senior leadership.

Colombian officials would often use the ‘impenetrable jungles’ as an excuse for such limited action where raids were impossible and bombing attacks too indiscriminate. Under Plan Colombia however, real time surveillance equipment was available to the Colombian military and included the use of heat sensors capable of detecting human activity, land radar systems, command and control systems for radar, the translations of intelligence analyses, improved logistical support and night vision goggles.

Such increased capabilities came to fruition in 2008, a year in which the FARC suffered numerous losses. An attack by the Colombian military on a FARC camp in Ecuador of that year saw the killing of the group´s second in command, Raul Reyes. The attack relied heavily on Plan Colombia’s heightened intelligence and surveillance capabilities and remains one of the msot successful hits against the rebel group.

The FARC suffered further serious setbacks in March 2008 when the group’s leader, Manuel Marulanda died of natural causes and the secretariat’s youngest member, Ivan Rios was murdered by one of his own bodyguards in exchange for a monetary award offered by the Colombian government.

The Santos regime has continued where the Uribe administration left off in terms of hitting the FARC secretariat. In September 2010, top military chief Mono Jojoy was killed in one of the first acts of the new government, and a year later Alfonso Cano, then leader of group was also taken out by the army while many assume Santos was negotiating in secret with the FARC to establish the talks today ongoing in Cuba.

The FARC’s control and command communications has also been weakened as a result of Plan Colombia, and the FARC’s declining membership can be attributed to this, along with demobilisation programmes. In 2002 for example, FARC soldiers numbered approximately 18,000 while today they are estimated at 8,000.

Despite such a drop in numbers, and a four year period in which the FARC suffered severe military setbacks, the guerrilla group still pose a significant threat (if not to the state itself as they once did). They have adapted to the increasing capabilities of the Colombian military and continually launch counter attacks due to their weaker position. (i.e. they are less able to launch military offensives).

This is highlighted by their response to the military’s successes of 2008. The FARC adapted, dispersing into smaller units in an effort to avoid surveillance and initiating more defensive, guerrilla like attacks. These include multiple pipeline bombings in the Putumayo municipality immediately after the death of Raul Reyes, and the execution of Luis Francisco Cuéller, the governor of Caquetá in December 2009.

In 2010, the FARC were responsible for the killing of 460 members of the security forces – and alarmingly – 2011 produced more casualties than 2002, when their membership was at its height.

Such attacks included a bomb blast in Antioquia, the use of mortars at a police station in Cauca and the continued use of mine’s throughout rebel controlled areas. In February of this year, seven members of the Colombian military were killed by the FARC and only this week, the FARC are accused of kidnapping two Spanish nationals, although they deny this.

What next?

The topography offered by Colombia is a key reason that the FARC have been able to successfully adapt their tactics in the face of Plan Colombia, and remain a live threat. Despite significant funding, the Colombian military have found it very difficult to control the remote and sparsely populated regions.

As such, despite the FARC being the military weaker side, Colombia´s geography mitigates the government’s advantage somewhat, thus making the rebels able to endure for longer periods. The rugged terrain of Colombia, with its high mountains, dense forests and other inaccessible landscapes, favours smaller guerrilla units as they are harder to detect and defeat. They can retreat to such terrain where they are protected from an enemy with increased capabilities and thus find it easier to regroup, rearm and continue fighting.

The FARC´s current leader, Timochenko has taken the rebels into negotiations with the Colombian government (although it is understood Cano himself initiated these talks) in an apparent effort to bring an end to a conflict that stems beyond the FARC’s inception in 1964.

That this is a sign of weakness by the FARC or by Santos himself is arguable, yet while negotiators mediate in Havana, the FARC and the Colombian military continue to battle back home. There is a long way to go before Plan Colombia objective of defeating the FARC can be realised. Many see the current state of play as a form of stalemate in which a negotiated end to the conflict is the most effective way out.

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Plan Colombia years: A tainted success?

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Plan Colombia was sold to the US public as a counter narcotics initiative, a plan to reduce the flow of cocaine from rural Colombian to urban America.

But the blurred distinction between the drug trade, the guerrilla groups and the paramilitaries (a distinction that virtually disappeared post 9/11, as President Bush launched his ‘War on Terror’), meant Plan Colombia was never solely about cocaine, but also about taking the fight to the illegal armed groups of the right and the left.

Particularly so following the inauguration of Alvaro Uribe as president in 2002, who unlike his predecessor Andrés Pastrana was unwilling to negotiate with the guerrilla groups and set about using the money to push the FARC back.

Almost as soon as it began to function, Plan Colombia had evolved into a strategy to secure Colombian democracy, reducing the production of cocaine meant cutting off the “gasoline” which fuelled the guerrillas and helping to defeat those had left the international community to view early 2000s Colombia as a failing state.

Plan Colombia´s tainted success?

In my first article on Plan Colombia I showed how production of cocaine has been reduced, and in the third article I will explore how the policy achieved success in reducing the threat posed by the FARC.

But while both these successes are undeniable, Plan Colombia will always also be tainted by the numerous human rights abuses that were carried out in its name – abuses by the Colombian military, the paramilitary groups, and the politicians with links to the latter.

These abuses ensure that while, yes, the immediate threat to democracy has passed, lasting and real damage has been done to the country´s institutions.

I will look briefly at three key criticisms – the Justice and Peace Law, the Parapolitics, and the False Positives scandals.

Justice and Peace Law

In 2005, President Alvaro Uribe passed the Justice and Peace Law in an effort to demobilise the paramilitary groups. Such groups were generated from wealthy land owners in the 1980’s in opposition to the leftist movement of the FARC and ELN. They soon became actively involved in the drug trade, however, and have only added to the complexity of the Colombian conflict.

The Justice and Peace Law called on demobilised paramilitary soldiers to provide a full record of their crimes in return for conditional amnesties. Failure to provide this detailed account would render the amnesty void and thus result in full punishment.

Supporters of the law point to its impact in achieving the successful demobilisation of several thousand paramilitary soldiers.

Critics on the other hand, argue that despite these achievements, the law has allowed – 1. High level drug traffickers to bypass prosecution, 2. Former paramilitaries to legalise properties that they acquired by violence. And worse still, civilians continue to be victimised by newly formed neo-paramilitary groups, such as the Aguilas Negras.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) has expressed concern at the ‘institutional frailty’ of the Justice and Peace Law. The report cited failure in the following areas:

A lack of interest in victims’ rights by the Uribe government.

Inadequate support for the institutional response

The persistence of the armed conflict – that the violence has not abated

And the inability to prevent the emergence of the new illegally armed groups.

Human Rights organisations remain concerned that the paramilitaries have not been held accountable for their crimes, and that by underreporting their illegally obtained assets, the militants have avoided paying adequate justice to their victims.

Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, argues too that the law has been incredibly slow in its implementation, revealing that until 2009, the law had not punished anybody, and that it had failed to return land and property that paramilitaries stole from hundreds and thousands of families.

And finally, in March 2010, a UN report claimed that ‘…the Justice and Peace Law has not achieved the transitional justice intended for paramilitary crimes.’

Parapolitics

Links between paramilitaries and politicians were uncovered in late 2006, in a scandal known as Parapolitics.

Initially 3 congressmen were arrested for their role in establishing paramilitary groups in the department of Sucre. Of the 268 congressmen from the period between 2006 and 2010, a staggering 128 were accused of having paramilitary ties.

Alvaro Uribe’s second cousin, Mario Uribe was arrested and convicted in early 2011, while the total number of politicians, businessmen and officials being investigated runs into the thousands.

False Positives

The False Positive scandal is the extra judicial killing of innocent civilians by the Colombian military – civilians who once murdered were later dressed in guerrilla uniforms (as a way of  increasing their body count against the FARC).

The motivations for such atrocities were said to be the awards offered by President Uribe for successes against the guerrilla group.

A report by the International Federation of Human Rights indicates that there were over 3000 cases of extra judicial killings in between 2002-2008. It must be pointed out, however, that these figures are disputed.

The most shocking case is alleged to have occurred in 2008. 19 young men from the Soacha region were said to have been promised employment by the Colombian military, driven hundreds of miles from their homes, only to be executed as if they were guerrilla soldiers.

No full marks for Plan Colombia

So despite the military advances, the Plan Colombia years do not emerge as a spotless success.

If the universal truth of political science that the primary role of the state is to provide security to its citizens then Plan Colombia can be said only to have had partial success.

The execution of innocent civilians as False Positives, the links between the ruling class in congress and the paramilitaries, and the legally questionable demilitarisation of these paras all taint the period which began in 2002.

Democracy is build on justice and on institutional stability, impunity and injustice are her enemies.

Without justice for the victims, Colombia will only fragment further.

Photo, Confidencial Colombia

Category: Comment, News Review
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Plan Colombia: A success?

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Plan Colombia has seen the United States provide approximately $8 billion worth of aid to Colombia since 2000.

Over the course of three articles I will look at how (and the what extent) Plan Colombia has worked to strengthen democracy, combat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and in this first piece, reduce  coca cultivation and trafficking.

When President Pastrana presented Washington the original version of Plan Colombia in 1999, the Colombian state was at a breaking point. The internal conflict had pushed the economy into crisis with the unemployment rate at a staggeringly high 18.2% and GDP retreating by 4.2%. The worst figures this side of the Great Depression.

Pastrana saw Plan Colombia as a way of reviving Colombia and issues such as coca cultivation were secondary concerns that would resolve themselves after peace had been achieved. The American Congress however had a different idea and  reformed Plan Colombia into an anti narcotics initiative, focusing aid on reducing the production and trafficking of cocaine from Colombian fields into major American cities.

Has it worked?

There are inconsistencies between the figures the United States and the United Nations have on coca cultivation but it´s clear Plan Colombia has reduced cocaine production. The UN shows that in 1999, 680 tonnes of cocaine were produced in Colombia; by 2011 (the latest figures available) this had reduced almost 50 per cent, to 345 tonnes. The US reports even more favourable results, suggesting a reduction from 520 to 195 tonnes over the same period.

Despite these positive results, initial efforts to stem cocaine production were not so successful. When Plan Colombia began, aerial eradication campaigns saw over 380,000 hectares of coca fields fumigated between 2000 and 2003.

The strategy was successful in reducing the hectares of land cultivated with coca crops, yet it  failed to stem cocaine production throughout this period. In 2007 for example, after seven years of continuous spraying increases, the UN statistics showed that cocaine production had risen to 600 tonnes per annum.

Why? Colombian coca farmers played the game and knew how to compensate for the effects of the aerial eradication campaign – they reduced the size of their fields, made their plots harder to find, and increased their per hectare crop yield. In short, innovation delayed the success of aerial eradication.

Farmers were forced to innovate, as for many there was no viable economic alternative to coca production. Worse, the attempts to resolve these economics have been weak, and played second fiddle once Alvaro Uribe was elected in 2002. Uribe undeniably achieved great success using Plan Colombia in his fight against the FARC,  but his relentless focus on tackling the security issues meant economic development plans were something of an after thought. Military funding and action eclipsed efforts to resolve the socio-economic factors behind illicit crop production.

Positive inducement schemes were introduced by Alvaro Uribe however, and ran from 2005 -2009. The objective was to create jobs with economic potential for rural families in conflict prone areas.

Despite the USAID mission in Colombia reporting ‘significant progress’ through 2010, the scope of the success has been limited by both the (restricted) size of the programme and security concerns.

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the alternative development programmes were – unhelpfully – not located in areas where the majority of coca is grown. And US experts, Jason Spellberg and Morgan Kaplan argue coca farmers have not been taught how to generate wealth independently.

But production has reduced in more recent years

Yes; analysts attribute this to a switch in focus from aerial eradication campaigns to more intensive, manual eradication. This strategy is more effective than aerial fumigation as it both kills the plant directly, and has the knock on effect of building a more significant government presence on the ground.

Risks, are however, higher as the military are more exposed. FARC and ELN guerrillas work to sabotage efforts, routinely laying mines and IED’s in coca fields. Such dangers may explain why manual eradication has been on a downward trend since 2010, despite its proven success.

Production is also down because of the increase in the presence of the security forces and the fact the guerrilla groups have been pushed back from areas they once controlled.

Statistics compiled by the US and the UN suggest Plan Colombia has been effective in reducing the production and trafficking of cocaine. The discrepancy in figures between the two bodies  however, troubles us. To understand the full success a more transparent and detailed methodology for data collection is needed.

Of course Plan Colombia has other aims too…We´ll look at those over the coming days.

Photo, Open Briefing

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Bojayá massacre, Uribe and Plan Colombia

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The massacre of Bojayá represented a low point in war in terms of mistreatment of the civilian population in Colombia, but its horror marks an important moment in the nation´s recent political history ocurring at a turning point in the battle against the FARC guerrillas.

Plan Colombia and elections

The genocide occurred in May 2002, while in February the then President, Andrés Pastrana Arango had called off the four year long peace talks with the FARC, citing a lack of political will on behalf of the guerrillas,

The tragic events in Bojayá occurred during an election campaign in which a fringe-candidate with a “mano dura”/hardline law-and-order agenda, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, emerged on the national stage. The massacre served as political fodder for the then candidate to further paint the FARC as genocidal narcoterrorists needing to be militarily defeated.

Uribe later won the 2002 elections in the first round/without needing a run-off, an historic first in Colombian politics. As President, Uribe (and Pastrana as well beforehand) used the genocide as part of a campaign to get the FARC on “terrorist” lists in the European Union, the United States, Canada and other countries so as to legitimate a military rather than a political solution to end the armed conflict.

Meanwhile, in 1999 Andrés Pastrana had negotiated with Bill Clinton a multi-billion dollar aid package which, although partially focusing on economic development, was mostly military aid. The deal, which was at first framed around fighting narcotrafficking and the War on Drugs was known as “Plan Colombia” and made Colombia the no. 2 recipient of US military aid in the world, behind Turkey.

Following the attacks of September 11th 2001, and after the genocide and the election of Uribe in 2002, the Plan Colombia money was used also to fight the FARC and was seen as a strange convergence between the interests of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

Plan Colombia politics were used to professionalize the army, leading to an historic high in military spending, known domestically as “Plan Patriota”/the Patriot Plan. This plan expanded the presence of the Army into the most marginal and peripheral areas of Colombia in order to fight the guerrillas. The knock on effect of this expansion was to  increase – rather than reduce – violence in the Chocó region in subsequent years.

As Plan Colombia was rolled out, concern grew within the State Department and the US Congress about links between the Colombian Army and the Paramilitary AUC who fought against the FARC.

Survivors´ voices ignored, or forgotten?

Uribe had been warned of the US distaste, and in response, as part of a “reparations” package, constructed ‘The New Bellavista’ (a new church and housing development). All this was done to a more modern and western style, totally foreign to the Afro-Colombian tradition of the local population. And strangely when inaugurating the “New Bellavista”, President Uribe gave his speech exclusively in English.

Many community members (whose language is of course Spanish), felt that the government was using Bellavista – as a community and a project to “show off” as part of its reparations agenda. An affront then, that it seemed as though the government was directing its initiatives to improving its international image and not the people who had actually been affected by the massacre.

Worse still, many of the economic aid projects established by the government and the NGOs were seen as unsustainable; creating dependency rather than development. All of the initiatives in ‘New Bellavista’ were considered by the displaced population in Quibdó to ignore their needs.

Last year, as the 10th anniversary of the massacre was marked, much attention was given to how the community still lacks a medical centre and other basic needs. This, despite the Constitutional Court having declared the community entitled to such investment as part of the reparation package. So, 11 years on and the community stills appears forgotten, the victims of the war not properly attended to, or represented.

There is, too, very little comfort to be taken from the way in which justice has been dealt. 36 members of the FARC-EP, including members of the Secretariat, have been involved in judicial processes concerning the massacre, but only 8 have been convicted. No charges have been brought before the AUC paramilitaries, and least of all now given the legal benefits afforded to them as part of their 2003-2006 demobilization.

Part three of this report will look at the challenges the community still faces, and offer a view for the future.

Simon is the owner of the website The Banana Plutocracy

Photo, El Tiempo.

Category: Comment, News Review