James J. Brittain
The US and the Colombian state have, since the 1960s, implemented a coercive socio-economic and military campaign to destroy the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). However, this half-century effort has resulted in an immense and embarrassing failure for Washington and the Colombian capitalist ruling class.
To respond to the failure, and the subsequent increase of the FARC-EP and its mass base, the rulers of the two nations have reformulated their politico-economic and military operation directed against the FARC. Part of the reason for this is that international observers have recognised that levels of coca cultivation, processing and export have not only stabilised but have increasingly been taken over by the right-wing AUC paramilitary organisation.
In light of this fact, the US-Colombia coalition has slowly moved away from the facade of a "war on drugs" and directly into a focused armed campaign against the FARC insurgency and its mass base using the post-9/11 rationale of the "war on terrorism".
US military personnel are now providing intelligence and logistical support alongside 17,000 Colombian troops carrying out Plan Patriota, an anti-guerrilla offensive in southern Colombia.
Last June, Inter-Press Service reported that a May 2004 memorandum to the US Congress from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) think-tank described Plan Patriota as "the most ambitious counter-insurgency offensive ever undertaken by the Colombian government". The memorandum noted that unlike Plan Colombia — also financed by Washington — Plan Patriota "makes no pretense of furthering US counter-drug objectives".
In their 2003 book, System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer argued that, in calling the FARC terrorists, the US and Colombian governments can justify "maximum intervention in all regions against any opposition", adding "under the Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine, half of Colombia is a haven for terrorists and thus subject to total war".
On November 11 newly appointed Colombian army chief General Reinaldo Castellanos told Associated Press that "our activity and the force with which it must be carried out has to compel [the rebels] to sit down under the conditions set out by the government". However, in a November 25, 2004 article on the Counterpunch website, Jenna Michelle Liut, a research associate at the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs think-tank, observed that the aim of joint US-Colombian military operations is to "to shut down the country's largest insurgent group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), by capturing and killing its members and reclaiming land they currently occupy".
Confirming this, AP reported on November 11 that Castellanos himself has be alleged to have had his troops try to hunt down insurgents and kill them, therefore negating any possibility for peace negotiations.
The AP article also reported that "the Colombian government is winning in its offensive against the Marxist rebels in their jungle strongholds" and that "under the 'Plan Patriota' offensive" the "government forces are driving deep into rebel strongholds" throughout southern Colombia.
Claims such as this have since become commonplace in the mainstream media.
In a November 22 article on the ColombiaWeek website, Phillip Cryan argued that such claims ignore "compelling evidence to the contrary". "Colombia's most respected military analyst, Alfredo Rangel Suarez, says the 17,000-strong FARC is merely biding its time until the offensive runs out of steam".
Suarez told Cryan that "it's essential not to lose sight of the kind of war the FARC is carrying out. This kind of war does not seek to openly confront the Armed Forces but rather to exhaust them."
Further evidence that the FARC guerrillas retain their striking capacity was provided by attacks they carried out in early February. On February 2, Reuters reported that "Colombian Marxist rebels, long thought to be on the retreat, ambushed and killed eight soldiers on Wednesday in their second deadly blow to the armed forces in two days, the army said".
On February 9, Reuters reported that "Colombian Marxist rebels ambushed and killed at least 20 Colombian soldiers on Wednesday in the deadliest attack on the armed forces in years, the army said".
On February 12, Associated Press reported that attacks by FARC guerrillas "have killed almost 50 soldiers in less than two weeks" and that these attacks "have shaken confidence in government claims it finally has the upper hand against leftist insurgents after 40 years of warfare...
"Since President Alvaro Uribe launched an offensive called Plan Patriota a year ago against the FARC's southeastern jungle strongholds, the rebels have been in a tactical retreat, experts say. They have melted into the jungle ahead of advancing government troops and been hesitant to engage them directly anywhere in the nation.
"All that changed with the rebel attacks this month, said Alfredo Rangel, an analyst and former adviser to the defense ministry."
"It is the beginning of the end of the FARC's retreat", Rangel told AP.
The FARC's "tactical retreat" was a conscious response to the initial implementation of Plan Patriota. While the US and Colombian governments publicly claimed that the Plan Patriota offensive was aimed at fighting the FARC guerrillas, in reality it was aimed against the FARC's rural mass base.
Unlike many revolutionary movements created in Latin America during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the FARC did not form within classrooms or churches. Rather than being led by lawyers, doctors and priests; their members come from those who support it, the peasants, who account for 70% of its membership. The connection that the FARC has maintained with the rural peasants for four decades is central to its success, and it is this connection that Plan Patriota is aimed at weakening.
The Plan Patriota offensive has been carried out against suspected rebel-held territories, not the rebel fighters themselves, thus resulting in numerous non-combatant causalities, displacements and deaths.
The March 29, 2004, British Guardian, for example, reported that Colombian government forces had "carried out dozens of raids and detained" people in southern Colombia not on charges of rebellion, murder or guerrilla-warfare but "on suspicion of giving food and support to the rebels".
In response, the FARC guerrillas utilised their "ability to dissolve into the mountains and jungles like mist" — as a March 2004 AP report put it — to limit the opportunity for the US-Colombian military forces to enter into peasant-inhabited areas that are, or at one time were, supporters of the insurgency.
The Colombian military has a horrendous record of committing human rights abuses against non-combatants. Therefore, the FARC has chosen to limit its immediate visible presence in rural towns and villages in the hope of diminishing the chance of injury against the rural populations that support the FARC.
Despite this "tactical retreat", the FARC insurgency has not been marginalised by Plan Patriota but, on the contrary, has increased. According statistics complied by Alfredo Rangel Suarez, between 2002 and 2004 the FARC mounted 900 attacks on Colombian government forces. During the entire presidency of Uribe's processor, Andres Pastrana Arrango, from 1998 to 2002, the FARC mounted 907 attacks.
Based on my own direct observations of the FARC's activities during the last two months of 2004, it was more than apparent that the FARC has actually increased the size of its combatant forces throughout southern Colombia. In December alone, the FARC was increasing the size of its movement, on average, by 100 newly trained combatants per municipality. This is extraordinary and surpasses all increases the insurgency has had in the past.
[James J. Brittain is a sociology lecturer at the University of New Brunswick, Canada.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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