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FARC and a smaller rebel group called the National Liberation Army (ELN) fund their insurgency in part by taxing and protecting the drug trade. Kidnapping and extortion are their other main sources of income, and human rights violations against civilians are common. Official peace talks between the FARC and the government began in January, but little progress has been made because the guerrillas haven't taken the process seriously. Few people in Colombia are sympathetic to the guerrillas these days.

But the civil war has not brought out the best in the Colombian security forces, either. Human rights organizations have long criticized the military and police for carrying out a "dirty war" -- killing, torturing and abducting people with real or perceived links to left-wing guerrillas. Civilians unlucky enough to live in a village suspected of harboring insurgents have been the most frequent targets, although street children, drug addicts, prostitutes and transvestites have borne the brunt of "social cleansing." And Colombia's security forces are committing these human rights violations with training and equipment supplied courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.

The State Department reports that the involvement of the security forces in such abuses has actually declined in recent years, particularly since a notorious Army intelligence unit was disbanded in May 1998. But the decline has been accompanied by a significant increase in human rights violations perpetrated by paramilitary death squads.

That's no coincidence. For decades, Colombian security forces have worked hand-in-hand with paramilitaries, who also oppose insurgent guerrillas -- supplying personnel, intelligence, "black lists" and even backup on the battlefield. But public criticism and a law passed by Congress withholding U.S. aid from human rights violators have made the Colombian government sensitive to allegations of abuse. The result: "Now the paramilitaries do their dirty work," says Robin Kirk, Colombia researcher for Human Rights Watch. The dirty war has been outsourced.

Over the next few weeks, as Congress debates proposals for increasing military aid, human rights workers say lawmakers should keep these links in mind.

"There are mountains of evidence" of collaboration, says Carlos Salinas, Latin America advocate for Amnesty International. "And it happens to this day," he adds, citing a June incident when FARC guerrillas attacked a region controlled by Carlos Castaņo, the notorious leader of a right-wing paramilitary alliance, and the Colombian army airlifted soldiers to the region to combat the guerrillas. Congress' own research service published a report last month noting that such collaboration continues.

"The only people who don't seem to know about it are Colombian and U.S. officials," Amnesty's Salinas says.

Another chilling specter haunting military-centric aid proposals is that paramilitary groups have proven ties to the drug trade. The Drug Enforcement Administration last winter identified Castaņo himself as a trafficker. Castaņo has even admitted he has accepted money from coca growers, although he insists he is not a drug trafficker. "It's the money that finances the FARC," he told a reporter for the Colombian daily El Espectador. "I have to take that money from the FARC and finance myself."

That's why winning the war against the guerrillas -- whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table -- will do little to stem the flow of drugs into the United States. The drug trade is notoriously resilient. The guerrillas are just the traffickers' "defenders of the moment," as the Center for International Policy's Isacson puts it. Get rid of the guerrillas tomorrow, and the drug lords will simply create their own private armies, as they did in the 1980s. Or maybe they'll offer Castaņo the job.

Increasing U.S. aid to Colombia's military without a plan to deal with the paramilitaries amounts to giving the death squads a free lunch. Even providing assistance only to battalions whose members have been vetted for past human rights abuses and paramilitary links -- as has been proposed -- will not prevent future abuses unless Pastrana also gets serious about prosecuting those who violate humanitarian law. And the proposals currently on the table in Washington would do little to help him do so.

"The United States," says Isacson, "is about to make an enormous mistake."
salon.com | Oct. 8, 1999

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