Guerrillas in the midst

Ron Chepesiuk

Mr. Chepesiuk's book on the United States' anti-narcotics campaign 1981 - 1997 will be published this year in English by McFarland and in Spanish by Circulo de Lectores.

THE hostage siege at the Japanese Embassy in Lima focused worldwide attention on Peru's Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). The siege ended only when Peruvian commandos stormed the compound, killing the 14 guerrillas and liberating the 72 hostages. Meanwhile, a more ominous political development was taking place in neighboring Colombia, where, in the year in which the world observes the thirtieth anniversary of the death of revolutionary icon Che Guevara, the country's long-standing Marxist guerrilla movement has emerged as a big player in the most capitalistic of enterprises: the multibillion-dollar international drug trade.

Colombia's guerrillas, who have been trying to overthrow the government since Guevara's time, continue to espouse Marxist ideology, but most Colombians no longer take the rhetoric seriously. Today, these "revolutionaries" rely on their connection with the drug trade to fill the money gap left by the demise of their former financial backer, the Soviet Union.

"It has become big business to be a guerrilla in my country," President Ernesto Samper explained in an interview at the Presidential Palace in Bogota. "The romantic ideal of Che is a thing of the past." In fact, the guerrillas have raised hundreds of millions of dollars through their drug activities.

Many Colombians hoped that perhaps their country had turned a corner in the battle against its drug traffickers, when the vicious Medellin Cartel collapsed following the December 1993 shooting of its godfather, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, by the police, and after relentless pressure by the authorities led to the capture of the leaders of the Cali Cartel.

But recent drug busts have shown that the guerrillas have almost completely filled the vacuum in the drug trade. In February, for example, Colombian antinarcotics police seized eight tons of cocaine and shut down a huge drug-processing complex in the southeastern state of Guaviare. This lab alone, which was protected by members of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest guerrilla group, had the capacity to produce nearly half the cocaine shipped to the U.S. annually by Colombian drug traffickers.

U.S. and Colombian authorities saluted the bust as a major blow to the country's drug-distribution network, but the next month, the anti-narcotics police disabled two more gigantic heroin and cocaine processing centers in the departments of Guaviare and Tolima. They confiscated 35 tons of precursor chemicals utilized in the manufacture of cocaine and two tons of processed cocaine ready for shipment abroad.

The guerrillas are involved in the drug trade in a variety of ways. They impose a 10 per cent tax on drug shipments that traffickers move through their territory, and they will often protect the trafficker's laboratories for a fee. They supervise coca cultivation and run their own cocaine processing and distribution operations in remote parts of the country. The guerrillas are also believed to play a major role in opium cultivation, Colombia's newest growth industry, a development that has made the country one of the world's top three heroin-producing centers and sparked concerns in the United States about a possible heroin epidemic.

The guerrillas were believed to be behind the violent protests that rocked Colombia last August. Coca farmers were angry that the government had initiated a program to burn and spray their coca fields without offering any compensation other than promises of low-interest loans to grow substitute crops. The farmers can make much more money selling their coca and poppy crops to drug traffickers than they can by growing legitimate crops.

"The guerrillas don't share an ideological relationship with the drug traffickers," explained Leonardo Gallego, head of Colombia's anti-drug police. "But their alliance has produced a lucrative trade-off: cocaine and heroin is exported and weapons are imported." Gallego noted that the guerrillas can pay their troops the equivalent of $300 to $400 a month, while professional soldiers in the Colombian army make a little more than $200 a month.

The guerrillas were an insignificant threat a few years ago, but drug money has made them a force to be reckoned with. In his book The Cartel of FARC, an investigation of guerrilla involvement in the drug trade, Luis Alberto Villamarin Pulido put FARC's 1995 earnings from criminal activities (drug trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion) at $395 million. Drug trafficking brought in $213 million, or 54 per cent of the total amount.

The guerrillas now hold sway in large parts of Colombia -- perhaps as much as 50 per cent of the country. "In certain areas they are the law and authority," explained Juan G. Tokatlian, a sociology professor at the National University in Bogota and an expert on Colombian politics.

Three years ago, I wouldn't have hesitated to travel outside Bogota, but such a trip today would be dangerous, perhaps even foolhardy, given that guerrillas now routinely cut off highways in certain parts of the country, stopping autos at roadblocks, looking for possible kidnap victims -- especially foreigners -- whom they could hold for ransom. They will shoot on the spot anyone whom they suspect of working for security forces.

The reaction of the U.S. Government to this development has been ambivalent. From afar, U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey has echoed Colombian government officials by declaring the country's guerrillas to be the third cartel. Here in Bogota, the U.S. embassy sings a different tune. "The guerrillas are nothing but bandits and are only interested in money," U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette said. He added: "I wouldn't call them a cartel, though -- that is, a criminal organization that distributes drugs in a systematic manner."

Ambassador Frechette's caution is understandable. To assign the role of the Third Cartel to the Colombian guerrilla movement could lead to added pressure from the country's military for more assistance, but the United States is already under fire from human-rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who charge that American military equipment intended for anti-drug operations in Colombia has been diverted for use against the guerrillas and that the anti-guerrilla campaign has led to massive human-rights violations.

But in this country where drug trafficking dominates politics, it is now almost impossible to distinguish between the guerrilla as political revolutionary and the guerrilla as drug trafficker. "Often, the army will chase a regiment in some remote part of the country and stumble upon a cocaine laboratory," explained one Bogota-based U.S. official. "What's the army suppose to do? Turn around and walk away?"

On June 15 the guerrillas strengthened their position in the drug trade when the Colombian version of the better-publicized Peruvian hostage melodrama ended. In return for the release of seventy soldiers the guerrillas had held since last August, the Colombian military surrendered to the rebel demands and retreated temporarily from a jungle region in the state of Caqueta. The area in question -- about the size of Jamaica -- is the principal area for growing coca, the raw material for cocaine. Reports indicate that since the army retreated, gasoline, petrochemicals, and other basic materials needed for the production of cocaine have flooded into the area.

According to the government's agreement with the guerrillas, the military's withdrawal from the area is temporary, but as Tokatlian explained, "The deal shows the power of the guerrillas and the weakness of the [Colombian] government. Right now, there are some very upset generals in Colombia."

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning