LAST AUGUST, FOLLOWING THE ASSASSI- nation of Colombia's front-running presidential can- didate Luis Carlos Galen, George Bush went on television to announce an emergency $65 million loan to help that nation fight the drug traffickers who took responsibility for the killing. Bush also sent stockpiled military equip- ment and a crew of military advisers. It was already becoming clear that the cocaine-producing nations of the Andes had surpassed Central America as a foreign policy priority. Since then, hundreds of millions more have been approved. In the rush to battle its new enemy, the administration and the Congress have conveniently swept under the rug any questions about the recipients of this aid, or about the real nature of the conflict into which the United States is wading. No one is asking about Colombia's 30-year-old counterinsurgency war, nor about the army-linked death squads which have murdered over 8,000 citizens since 1986, nor about the documented ties between military officers and the barons of the drug trade. For this Report, we set out to probe these issues, and the answers we found are disturbing. The United States is not supporting an embattled democracy, under siege from ruthless drug dealers. It is supplying the means for the armed forces, in league with the drug barons themselves, to continue the slaughter of the country's trade unionists, community organizers, peasant leaders and other grass- roots activists. COLOMBIA, AS OUR TITLE IMPLIES, HAS EN- tered a period of profound instability. In part, be- cause of the drug barons' quest for power and influence. Much more so because Colombia's people are no longer willing to put up with abuse at the hands of the economic and political elites. Colombian democracy, writes British political scientist and author Jenny Pearce, quoting Gab- riel Garcia Mdrquez, is made of paper. Behind marvelous words lies a system which, by means of 40 years of nearly uninterrupted state of siege, defends the autocratic rule of family-based oligarchies, and excludes the vast majority from any effective participation. The violence for which the country is rightly infamous, is not caused primarily by cocaine-pushing thugs. It is, Pearce argues, better under- stood as the result of the elite's desire to preserve its privileges. Thousands of Colombians joined trade unions, peas- ant leagues and community organizations in the 1970s, forming by the 1980s massive and combative movements to demand basic rights and an opening in the hermetic political order. Violence at the hands of local elites, and the refusal of the national political class to make demo- cratic reforms, led many of them to turn to an option-guerrilla warfare-which offered some defense against rapacious bosses and landowners (including the drug barons) and their allies in the armed forces. These paramilitary forces, decrying the hesitation of the national political elite, launched a dirty war to battle rising guer- rilla strength by murdering alleged sympathizers. Colombia's six guerrilla armies have some 12,000 combatants and wield influence over large areas of the countryside. Most of them have overcome early sectari- anism and sought to bring their struggle to the political plane via a negotiated solution to the war. The nation's third political force, the Uni6n Patri6tica, was founded by the largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Over a thousand members of the UP have been murdered since 1985, including most recently its presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, gunned down at the BogotA airport on March 22. MEASURE OF COLOMBIA'S VIOLENCE DOES indeed result from the drug barons' battle against ex- tradition to the United States. The assassination of Liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galin, which prompted Bush's speech last August, the murder of the editor of a major daily, of several attorney generals, of dozens of judges, magistrates and politicians, and random bomb- ings in the major cities, can all be attributed to this. Though dwarfed by the thousands of deaths caused by the dirty war, it is this violence which most worries the political elite, because it is directed at them. Marc W. Chernick, assistant director of the Institute for Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University, points out that Colombia's drug war is not the same as that waged by the United States. While the Bush administration is ostensibly concerned with stemming the flow of cocaine to the United States, for the traditional Colombian elite it is a battle over political turf with the cocaine nouveau riche, which in many realms has already been integrated into the upper class. The lion's share of the multi-million dollar U.S. aid package is going to Colombia's armed forces, an institu- tion which has maintained close ties to the Pentagon ever since it sent a battalion to fight in Korea in 1950. The military is far more concerned with fighting guerrillas than with fighting drugs. Moreover, after nearly a decade of working together to wage the dirty war, officers and drug lords have become close allies. By throwing money, equipment and advisers at the Colombian armed forces, the Bush administration, rather than put an end to the drug problem, seems bound to involve the United States in the dirty war against the Left.
