The Clinton administration is proposing an escalation in United States foreign aid to Colombia so large that it will predictably alter the course of domestic politics and internal violence in that country. Colombia is already the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt, having received $289 million in 1999. As the current aid bill now stands before Congress, the government of President Andrés Pastrana would receive $1.574 billion in direct economic assistance during the next three years. About one fifth of the funds ($274 million) would be spent on assistance in economic development and general improvements in the country’s legal and human rights situation. The rest of the money would arrive in Colombia in the form of military training funds and equipment.
This military help is being presented as indispensable to the fight against the cultivation of coca leaf in southern Colombia and the consequent export of cocaine to the United States. Most of the parties involved—the State Department officials who will shepherd the aid package through Congress, the gung-ho young men in the US embassy in Bogotá who will get to supervise all the hardware, the Colombian army brass who are waiting for the assistance with the fervor of a cargo cult—claim, officially at least, that the funds are not intended for use in the war the Colombian state has been fighting for forty years against the world’s most entrenched guerrillas. The question is how such use is to be avoided.
Colombia, which has a population of just under 40 million, is a country approximately the size of Central Europe. It is divided roughly into five regions: the lush Caribbean and Pacific coasts; the two-pronged Andean range, traversed by the Magdalena River Valley; the eastern grasslands; and the jungle lowlands that extend south to the Amazon River, where Colombia borders Brazil. Bogotá (population 6.4 million) and most of the prosperous cities, including Medellín, are perched in the mountains. Here the population is mostly white and mestizo. In the rich coastal plains and in the Magdalena River Valley, many people are black and mulatto.
Fewer than two million people live in the grasslands and the jungle, but between them these adjoining areas account for more than half the national territory—that is to say, an area roughly the size of France. There are almost no roads—dirt or otherwise—in this part of the country, and it is in fact such uncharted territory that maps from the national geographic institute still show the legend “insufficient relief data” printed over large areas. Most of these two regions’ inhabitants are recent arrivals: land-hungry peasants who carved out clearings for themselves over the last half-century or so. It is here, in the outermost regions of the departamentos of Putumayo, Caquetá, Meta, Guaviare, and Vichada, that the coca-growing boom has taken place in the last decade.
The US military funds, if approved, will be used for drug interdiction operations and for a special antinarcotics brigade, and also for Blackhawk helicopters, speedboats, and planes in which to transport the battalion’s soldiers to the coca fields hidden in the jungle. Here troops will provide protection for police department fumigation teams, whose job it is to spray nontoxic herbicide on the illegal crops. Why should two thousand or so highly trained and equipped soldiers be needed? Because in these parts of the country, the coca farmers are protected by an army of guerrillas, as many as 20,000 in total, who have been waging war on the Colombian state with increasing success. It is here, in the midst of this guerrilla territory, that the Colombian military has built headquarters for the new brigade, one battalion of which was trained last year with the help of US military advisers. It is here that, against all the odds, the violent convergence of guerrillas and US aid, US-trained troops, and US advisers is, according to the Clinton administration, not supposed to happen.
1.
In August of 1986 I traveled with a Colombian writer and a local television team to the headquarters of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, the largest, oldest, and richest guerrilla group in Colombia. At the time it was only one of at least a dozen militant armed organizations. After some twenty years of fighting, a truce with the FARC had been declared by the government of Belisario Betancur, and our trip was one result. In response to the truce, the FARC had created a legal political party, the Unión Patriótica, and at its makeshift office in Bogotá a few small groups of journalists were able to negotiate expeditions to Casa Verde, the guerrilla headquarters in the departamento of Meta. I knew very little about the guerrillas or about Colombia at the time. It was surprising to discover, for example, that our destination was barely sixty miles from the capital as the crow flies. It was even more astonishing to learn that for years the army had been unable to dislodge the FARC from that nearby stronghold.
I understood why, though, as soon as we began our trip: we drove through the night from Bogotá over impossibly bumpy and steep roads to the town of Sumapaz, which sits on the slope of the Andes that opens southward into the jungle. From that point some members of our group were provided with splaybacked mounts, while those of us deemed hardiest by our guide—a guerrilla who happened to be a renegade priest—were invited to walk. At more than 10,000 feet above sea level, we trudged across the páramo of Sumapaz, a breathtaking expanse of icy swamp that seems to sit on the top of the world. Once, when a persistent freezing rain cleared, we were able to see the tips of snow-capped volcanoes more than one hundred miles away, and a double rainbow in a canyon at our feet. Around us we saw bizarre frailejones, which look like stubby, furry palms, and orchids and tree ferns, wild ducks and occasional herds of sheep. At night taciturn shepherds shared their tiny, freezing homesteads with us, and we lay wide-eyed in our sleeping bags through the night, praying for dawn to arrive so that we could recover a little warmth by moving through the icy drizzle. The páramo was inhabited, but there were no roads, no schools, no electricity, no sign at all that the state knew or cared about these citizens.
By the third day mounts had been found for everyone, and the poor beasts struggled down canyons and across foaming rivers with us, then up again, then down, down, down into lush cloud forest. In a clearing we came upon a small community of polite, efficient youths in uniform, including many young women. Their barracks were well constructed. There was a campaign hospital and a spotless butcher shop, and what I recall as a rudimentary schoolhouse. A stream had been dammed and channeled to provide water for the common kitchen and the laundry area, and these gray waters were used, in turn, for latrines that can fairly be described as delightful, for they were raised on stilts above the running water, and were cozy and immaculate. I was taken upstream to another cabin perched above the riverflow, where I was left alone with a cauldron of hot water to bathe and change into clean clothes. And then at last my colleagues and I were taken into the presence of the leaders of the FARC, Jacobo Arenas and Manuel Marulanda.
The legendary Marulanda—more commonly known as “Tirofijo,” or Sureshot—founded the FARC and remains to this day its military leader. Now seventy-two, he has the distinction of being the world’s oldest living guerrilla. Jacobo Arenas, who died in 1990, was the co-founder and chief ideologue of the FARC, having joined forces in his early, Communist youth with the landless rebels and converted them to Marxism. At the time of our visit he was sixty-two years old.
One of the mysteries of the FARC’s success, I decided after our first meeting, was how it had grown and endured despite the total absence of charismatic leaders. Jacobo Arenas was visually impenetrable, permanently wrapped as he was in a military cap, dark glasses (his eyesight was weak), and a thick woolen scarf that seemed to have lived with him for as long as the war had lasted. He was friendly (he offered immediately to play a game of Scrabble with us) and starved for conversation, but his own was hardly scintillating, even though he proudly described himself as an intellectual. Mostly, it seemed to us, he was obsessed with plots against him and his forces—bizarre plots involving CIA offers and infiltrators, government booty for his head, all-seeing antennae directed from great heights against Casa Verde, gifts of Chinese urns wired for sound. Given the realities of the cold war and the CIA, his tales may well have been true, but the narrative was so fervid that a colleague and I could not shake off the impression of having been submerged in someone’s delirium.
Marulanda was a different sort of character. He lived in his own little compound a short walk from central headquarters, surrounded by an elite guard. Although we knew that he was in charge of military training and combat operations, he acted as if his main concerns were the chickens and the vegetable patch in his front yard. Stocky, almost irritatingly modest and of few words, he carried on one shoulder the white fringed towel worn by the rural people, the campesinos. Sometimes he used it to cover his head against the sun. Sometimes he took it off to swat a fly or two. He gave us a rather sketchier version of a discourse we had already had from Arenas (who pointed out a little too often that although Marulanda might be a campesino, he liked to read books).
In Colombia, Marulanda instructed us, the proletariat and the campesinos were allies in the struggle against imperialism and the unjust and oligarchic national state. The FARC fought for justice and equality. Although initially campesinos like Marulanda himself might have joined the fight only in order to defend their land, they were increasingly concientizados, and were now fully involved in the long, arduous struggle for socialism. When I tried to draw him out on his battle exploits the conversation languished. “What about this scar?” I asked, pointing to a dent above one eyebrow. “I got that when my mother asked me to grind some cocoa beans and a screw in the cocoa mill flew off,” he replied. Our group of visitors ended up spending much more time in Arenas’s snug little cabin, where Arenas was happy to chat about old times and national politics—although it strikes me now that for someone with such frail access to communication and political information, he was remarkably uncurious about whatever news we might have had to offer.
