A rchive Date
[ 23-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Colombia ]
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[A Latin American Lebanon
By ERIC MARGOLIS
Contributing Foreign Editor
January 30, 2000
Colombian Judge Luz Nagel was our guest two weeks ago on TVO's Diplomatic Immunity.
This smart, courageous lady had survived three assassination attempts - including one in which a burly attacker armed with a submachine gun burst into her Bogota office. Judge Nagel managed to draw a pistol and shoot her assailant before he could fire.
War, anarchy and random violence are engulfing Colombia. "How," I asked the judge, "can your country be saved?" Her reply stunned me. "What we need in Colombia," she replied, "is General Pinochet."
She was referring, of course, to the tough old general - a political prisoner of Britain's socialist government - who crushed a Marxist revolution in Chile, and restored his nation to order, prosperity, and democracy.
Say "Latin America" and North American minds go blank. Our neighbours on this immensely rich, fascinating hemisphere might as well be on another planet. But, as this column warned from Bogota in 1998, Colombia is now forcing its way into our consciousness as an unavoidable crisis that demands decisive action.
Colombia supplies 80% of the billions of dollars in cocaine and heroin entering North America. Vast narco-profits have corrupted governments across Latin and Central America, and Mexico. Miami has become the Casablanca of North America.
Unable to staunch the inflow of drugs, the Clinton administration has declared yet another "war" against narcotics. But almost everyone knows such wars are futile. One might as well try to ban nicotine, the "gringo" addictive alkaloid we sell to Latin America. The only way to stop the drug trade is to legalize it, or adopt the Iranian solution of executing anyone convicted of drug dealing.
Drugs, however, are not really the primary concern: far more urgent is the threat of fast-disintegrating Colombia turning into a Latin version of strife-torn 1980s Lebanon - or, far worse, another Vietnam. Colombia is now a big-time crisis.
This lush, rich nation of 37 million, which produces oil, gold, emeralds, coffee and perhaps the world's most beautiful women, has been in civil war for 52 years. From 1948-58 "La Violencia" - a mindless carnage between political and economic factions - cost 250,000 lives. Marxist rebellions, backed by Cuba, erupted in the 1960s and have continued to the present, costing 23,000 lives and consuming up to 4% of Colombia's annual output.
This month, President Bill Clinton requested US$1.6 billion from Congress to buy helicopters for the Colombian Army and raise two new counter-insurgency battalions. This makes Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. But even these large sums won't end the multi-faction war in Colombia.
Plundering and money-making
Two extremely vicious Marxist groups - the FARC and smaller ELN, with 20,000 guerrillas between them - now control 60% of Colombia. They earn US$200 million annually from kidnapping, extortion, and protecting drug producers. Plundering and money-making have replaced Marxism as the rebels' main motive.
President Andres Pastrana's well-meaning but struggling government barely controls Colombia's cities. During my last visit, people were being kidnapped in downtown Bogota in broad daylight. From 1990-94, 2,300 people were kidnapped for ransom by guerrillas.
Colombia's 144,000-man armed forces are ineffective, immobile, and on the strategic defensive. Half its soldiers are conscripts who are exempted from combat. As a result, the government uses 5,000 rightist paramilitaries to fight the leftist bandit armies. Add in drug gangs from the scores of cocaine mafias that replaced the now defunct centralized Medellin and Cali narco-cartels. All sides in this extremely dirty, chaotic war routinely massacre civilians.
Washington's big worry is that Colombia's anarchy could spread to neighbouring Panama, which was part of Colombia until detached by the U.S. in 1903, and even close the Panama Canal, which has now reverted to Panamanian control. And to neighbouring Venezuela, America's principal foreign oil supplier, itself highly unstable and in the throes of a populist military revolution.
Bandit armies
Colombia's bandit armies could easily extend their operations into cocaine-producing northern Peru, which already has two Marxist insurgencies and to unstable Ecuador, which has just suffered a coup; and to the forgotten little states of Guyana and Surinam, turning the entire northern rim of Latin America into a war zone resembling Indochina in the 1960s.
Alas for Colombia and the U.S., Gen. Pinochet is unavailable for a second rescue mission. Meanwhile, the U.S. is steadily getting sucked into the Colombian war. The CIA, DEA, FBI and Special Forces have large numbers of men already deployed undercover in Colombia. More U.S. "advisers" and technicians are to soon follow. It seems only a matter of time before the U.S. is forced to commit combat units to shore up the disintegrating Colombian Army - good morning, Vietnam.
A far better strategy is for the Organization of American States to send a large combat force to restore order in Colombia before the war becomes a continental crisis. The ABC powers - Argentina, Brazil and Chile - should provide the core of the intervention force's ground troops, with contingents from Mexico, and, yes, Canada. Let the U.S. provide command and control, intelligence, air support, transport, logistics, finance, and a modest number of combat troops. This is the only realistic solution to a problem that can no longer be ignored.
Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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