From: Colombian Labor Monitor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 10:13:00 -0500 (CDT)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: IN THESE TIMES: An invasion foretold
=============================================
In the past 12 months, according to official
statistics, the paramilitaries have increased
their forces by 81 percent, and have expanded
their influence to 409 municipalities (40
percent of the country).
____________ =============================================
IN THESE TIMES
www.inthesetimes.org
May 14, 2001
An Invasion Foretold;
Terror triumphs in Colombia
---------------------------
By Ana Carrigan
BARRANCABERMEJA, Colombia -- Something dreadful is happening in Colombia.
There will be presidential elections next year and, given the speed and
efficiency with which counterinsurgent paramilitaries are extending their
terror and gaining control of densely populated territories, Carlos
Castano's political ambition to deliver enough captive votes to elect the
ultra-right leader of his choice has become a distinct possibility. Such
an outcome would signify the ultimate triumph of terror. It would install
the first "democratically elected" fascistic dictatorship in Latin
America, backed with mafia funding and support.
Only the United States has the clout to avert such an outcome. But this
would require that the Bush administration abandon Clinton's absurd Plan
Colombia, listen to regional leaders and European allies, and join with
them in giving full support to President Andres Pastrana's peace
negotiations with the guerrillas. The alternative risks igniting a
regional war, from Venezuela to Peru.
Rumor has it that the Pentagon may be having second thoughts about Plan
Colombia. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on April 4,
Gen. Peter Pace, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, said the
paramilitaries were the most serious long-term threat to Colombian
democracy. According to the United Nations, the paramilitaries have
intensified the brutality and frequency of their operations against the
civilian population. They also have infiltrated universities and gained
control of certain labor unions.
In the past 12 months, according to official statistics, the
paramilitaries have increased their forces by 81 percent, and have
expanded their influence to 409 municipalities (40 percent of the
country). For more than 12 months, they have managed to abort the
Colombian government's best efforts to open a second front in the peace
negotiations with the National Army of Liberation (ELN) guerrillas. In the
past three months, they have brought the war to a major city.
Surrounded by rich oil deposits, Barrancabermeja was built on the banks of
the Magdalena River, one of Latin America's greatest waterways, to house
the work force for Ecopetrol, Colombia's state-owned petroleum refinery.
Though little oil wealth remains in the city or the region, Ecopetrol
pumps 75 percent of the nation's oil production from Barrancabermeja's
grimy, polluted river port. Although a combined contingent of army, navy
and police is stationed here to provide security for Ecopetrol, their
protection does not extend to Barrancabermeja's quarter of a million
inhabitants.
On December 22, 140 of Castano's Colombian United Self-Defense Group (AUC)
gunmen entered the impoverished, northeastern sector of the city unopposed
and began systematically to terrorize one working-class neighborhood after
another. By the end of January, after this paramilitary offensive had
chalked up 53 assassinations in the first 30 days of the year, Monsignor
Jaime Prieto, the bishop of Barrancabermeja, described the situation:
"Analyze the reality of this city. What do you see? You see a keg full of
petrol, and right beside it, a naked flame. That's what you call a time
bomb. Barrancabermeja is a time bomb."
The paramilitaries first came to the city in May 1998.
Two truckloads of hooded, armed men drove past army and police checkpoints
and pulled up to a local football field. It was around 10 p.m. on a
Saturday night, and the neighborhood was holding a block party. When
people heard gunfire they assumed, at first, that the revelers were
setting off fireworks. The paramilitaries killed 11 young men that night,
and abducted 25 others who were never seen again, dead or alive. Castano
claimed they were dead and their corpses had been incinerated.
The current onslaught was triggered by the Colombian government's efforts
to establish a demilitarized zone in the region and start negotiations
with the ELN, Colombia's second-largest guerrilla force. A year ago, the
government and ELN leaders agreed to establish a "peace zone" in territory
near the city traditionally controlled by the ELN, but now in paramilitary
hands. Demonstrating his regional control, Castano mobilized mass
demonstrations to block the proposed "peace zone" and threatened to arm
the local population and unleash civil war if the government insisted on
going ahead. Under threats from Castano -- and paid to collaborate by the
regional cattlemen, landowners, narcotraffickers and business leaders who
back him -- 20,000 protesters threw up barricades on the Pan-American
Highway and paralyzed all road and river traffic for 20 days.
By the time the government capitulated, the blockade had cost the country
$ 2 million, and the peace accord with the ELN was back on the drawing
board. Twelve months later, the ELN and the government have agreed to a
reduced "peace zone"; the European Union has offered to invest $ 200
million for regional development once the talks begin; Cuba, Sweden,
France, Spain and Switzerland are collaborating to make the zone happen.
But the government still has been unable to outmaneuver Castano, and the
"peace zone" remains blocked.
As so often in Colombia, the AUC's December incursion in Barrancabermeja
was an "invasion foretold." Back in April 1999, Castano's local commander,
alias "Julian," announced that his forces were in Barrancabermeja and
would take control of the city "by December." AUC actions followed an
established pattern. First, a "black hand" silently, anonymously,
circulates a list of names. Then the killing starts. In Barrancabermeja
the murders began in the summer: 56 assassinations in June, 62 in July. By
year's end, 567 people had been gunned down in the streets, in the shops
and cafes, at their offices and in their homes.
Among the targets of these "macabre human huntsmen," as a local newspaper
described the killers, were doctors, teachers, secretaries, union members,
municipal officials, taxi drivers, church workers, human rights defenders.
The police saw nothing; knew nothing; did nothing. Witnesses were too
frightened to testify. A petrified silence protected the killers. By the
time that gun-toting paramilitary squads appeared openly on the streets,
terror had ruptured the trust on which community solidarity depends.
In the second stage, the gunmen tighten the screws. In Barrancabermeja's
poor areas, they set up road blocks, sealed off streets and went to work.
They had a list of suspected guerrilla sympathizers whom they dragged from
their houses and abducted or shot. Gunmen broke down doors, forced
residents to hand over the keys to their homes and then moved in. They
exploited these captive families to extract information about their
neighbors, provide their meals, run their errands and obey their orders.
They cut the telephone lines and went house to house seizing cell phones.
Then they went for the community leaders.
For 30 years, the guerrillas were a fact of life in Barrancabermeja.
Thirty percent unemployment offered a steady source of rebel recruits;
contraband petroleum, acquired by puncturing local pipelines, provided a
stream of illegal funding; forking over a "protection fee" was a
recognized part of the overhead for doing business in the city. Yet to
describe what is happening in the city today as an urban battle between
guerrillas and paramilitaries is to miss the point.
Since 1998, the focus of the counterinsurgency war has shifted, and
Castano's campaign to win control of Barrancabermeja has revealed the
wider political and strategic agenda behind the AUC's offensive, geared to
destroy the government's peace efforts and impose their own regional
control. In the neighborhoods where Castano's gunmen are imposing their
totalitarian dictate today, the guerrillas have long fled or, seduced by
AUC power, money and weapons, yesterday's rebels have switched sides.
Neglected by successive Colombian governments, the people living here
maintain highly developed, autonomous community organizations. It is these
groups the AUC has targeted for destruction.
Gerardo (not his real name) is a leader in a neighborhood known as
"Communa 7." On the morning of January 30, armed men forced their way into
the local headquarters of a women's organization and demanded the keys to
the building. When the women, who use the building to run a community
kitchen and provide refuge for displaced families, refused to hand
themover, the "paras" gave them until 4 p.m. to leave and ordered Gerardo
to organize a demonstration outside the building to drive the women away.
"It's an order," they said. "If you don't obey, we will know. It's simple.
You work for us. Or you leave town. Or you die."
What about going to the police? Gerardo shrugged. "The 'paras' make fun of
us if we call the police. 'What idiots you are to bring the army and
police here,' they say. 'They work with us, didn't you know."
The city's civilian leaders have no illusions. The government is weak and
unable to re-establish the rule of law or take back control of the
streets. The paramilitaries' totalitarian backers are set to prevail.
"It's the historic Latin American phenomenon," says Bishop Prieto. "In
moments like these an ultra-right appears to impose its own political and
economic model. Based on the logic of force rather than the force of
logic, it leaves no spaces for liberty, much less for human rights, or for
economic and social development based on sustainability and consensus. But
their rhetoric is seductive. It promises peace, security, employment.
People applaud. I've seen it. In moments like these, they'll go along."
A prominent Barrancabermeja human rights defender agrees, adding: "If this
happens in Colombia, we will have 20 years of dictatorship in this
country."
As the AUC closes in, it is this dark vision, bleaker than any yet seen
during the 40-year insurgency, that lies behind any future escalation of
the war. The AUC campaign is driven by powerful economic forces.
Barrancabermeja is the largest city in the Magdalena Medio, a region of
vast potential wealth and strategic importance. The routes connecting the
rest of the country to northern Colombia and the Pacific, and the main
road linking Bogota to the industrial heartland of Medellin and the
Atlantic coast, all pass through Magdalena Medio.
In addition to oil, Colombia's most important deposits of gold and nickel
are buried in the San Lucas mountains north of the city and large cattle
ranches and industrial agriculture dominate in the east. Yet 80 percent of
Magdalena Medio's economy comes from drugs; the fourth-largest drug crop
in the country, some 50,000 acres of coca plants, provides the cocaine
that finances the AUC and underpins the political power of regional
narcotraffickers.
By summer's end, the AUC had routed the ELN from their Magdalena Medio
strongholds, and after October's regional elections, Castano controlled
the local administrations in 28 of Magdalena Medio's 29 municipalities.
Barrancabermeja is No. 29.
Barrancabermeja is a young town, a raunchy, tough, independent,
blue-collar town with an anarchist streak.
It is not the place you would pick to establish the bridgehead of a
totalitarian regime. Pressure on military and police commanders from the
international community and the U.S. Embassy is constant. Ambassador Anne
Patterson has visited Barrancabermeja twice since December, accompanied
both times by Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone. Now the senator and the
ambassador maintain communication with local human rights activists. When
alerted, Patterson calls the Barrancabermeja police chief. Support from
diocesan workers, local activists and international NGOs all have been
crucial to the daily effort to protect lives.
Yet as of the end of March, 200 people had been assassinated since the AUC
moved in, and they are now in control of all but a handful of in the
city's neighborhoods. The AUC is now targeting City Hall. If the current
onslaught succeeds, and the municipal authorities lose their autonomy,
Castano will have gained control of the port, the river, the access routes
to the Magdalena valley -- and the votes of a terrorized population come
election time.
As I said good-bye to Bishop Prieto, he told me: "Colombia's worst enemy
is this culture of illegality which is delegitimizing the government.
Magdalena Medio is the mirror through which we will see whether the state
is capable of eliminating all suspicion concerning its relations with
these paramilitaries. Personally, that is why I feel so strongly about the
ELN 'peace zone.' That is where we will be able to measure the state's
response."
Back in the second week of February, Gen. Martin Orlando Carreno,
commander of the army brigade responsible for the region, attacked the
AUC's regional base, located on a bluff overlooking the river 15 minutes
from the city. The army found two bunkers, classrooms for political
studies, a heliport for a fleet of helicopters, and five cocaine
processing laboratories. Carreno's attack seemed to offer hope that at
least one senior commander was willing to challenge the AUC.
But Castano's forces now have gone on the offensive against the ELN,
blocking their agreement to start peace talks with the government. And
Barrancabermeja is bleeding to death. Eduardo Cifuentes, Colombia's
courageous ombudsman, says the city's human rights defenders are
threatened with extinction: "The conscience of society is being murdered."
Copyright 2001 Institute for Public Affairs
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