The Drug War's Southern Front

Colombia, cocaine, and U.S. foreign policy.

Timothy Pratt from the April 2000 issue

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By 1995, FARC's forces had swelled to nearly 8,000. In the last five years, the group has doubled again. At 71, Pedro Antonio Marin, still called Sureshot, may be the world's oldest Marxist-in-the-mountains.

For at least 50 years, those mountains have also been home to right-wing paramilitary forces. The most recent army, founded in the '80s, is Colombians United in Self-Defense (AUC), led by Carlos Castaño, a man in his 30s who permits only photos of his back in the press. The comandante and his troops--who Castaño claims "would die for me"--have a single-minded military mission: to hunt and kill guerrillas and anyone who supports them. In the last several years, their forces have doubled; they now have close to 7,000 men.

Castaño has ordered the massacre of entire towns where, he always insists to journalists afterward, "We had information that there were guerrillas, there was kidnapping, there were combats, they were holing up in people's houses." He avers, "By killing one rebel, we save others whom they were going to kill later." AUC, he insists, is not paramilitary; it's just "self-defense forces." It is financed, he says, by "the people who have no police, no army, no state. They are fishermen, lumbermen, freight companies, businessmen, small cattle ranchers, and large landowners...plus the money from the coca growers."

Regarding the latter, the comandante explains, "Listen, that's the nature of the economy here. The FARC finance themselves with the same money. So I have to take their sources away and finance my troops. [But] the self-defense forces don't produce drugs, or protect laboratories, or export drugs. For a long time now, there's a tendency in Colombia to treat our problems and solutions as if it was all about narcotics and nothing else."

AUC's military stronghold is in northern Colombia; it is staffed, in part, by former officials from the armed forces. At least one of these says he was trained at Georgia's notorious School of the Americas. Human rights organizations in Canada and the United States, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have expressed concern over the links between the Colombian army and AUC. Some Clinton administration officials and members of Congress have urged withholding aid from the armed forces until those links are investigated.

The army has responded to these concerns in recent months by taking human rights courses with U.S. advisers at the Tolemaida military base, south of Bogota. Meanwhile, Castaño's group is trying to distance itself from the army. At its last national convention, held three years ago, a document leaked to the press complained how "participation by members of the Armed Forces in our operations has become a big headache."

In the same meeting, the AUC leadership called for a bigger political presence, given that "the movement...is still at the margin of politics and the law, even though many of our collaborators, founders, helpers, backers, and leaders are part of the day-to-day political process."

From 1998 to 1999, U.S. funds for Colombia tripled. Because of the army's bad reputation, the new money went almost entirely to the nation's police. And atop that police force is Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, a self-described "country boy" who has been key to much of Washington's recent thinking about Colombia.

Serrano has been a policeman for 37 of his 57 years. He was head of the anti-narcotics division when a special police unit shot Pablo Escobar off a Medellin rooftop in 1993. In 1994, he became chief of police and set after the Cali Cartel. Within three years, he had captured its leaders and several other kingpins, and had purged his force of 8,000 corrupt officers as well.

Along the way, Serrano made more than a few friends in Congress, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, and other American law enforcement agencies. His allies include House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.), drug czar Barry McCaffrey, and former DEA director Thomas Constantine. In 1997, Hastert even gushed that Colombia's top cop deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

Even more remarkably, Serrano, unlike many high-level Colombian visitors to Capitol Hill, speaks no English. "They all seem to understand my gestures and expressions," he says with a grin.

For Serrano, resolving la situacion is simple, though not necessarily easy. "Drugs are the devil," he says. "If we get rid of drug trafficking, then we can reach peace." Reminded of the country's long history of violence--and of his own description of Santander, his birthplace, as an area "where people kill each other for nothing"--Serrano insists that "things have gotten much worse after the onset of the cartels. This society fell apart after drugs came on the scene."

Of course, it's the international drug war, and not the drugs themselves, that's led to the violence. The fighting probably reached its height at the onset of the '90s, when Pablo Escobar led a terrorist campaign against legalizing extradition of drug traffickers to the United States. In the first three years of this decade, annual homicides in Colombia reached 28,000.

Nonetheless, the general's friends, including drug czar McCaffrey, agree with Serrano's assessment of the problem. At least a decade ago, the U.S. adopted a two-pronged approach to its South American drug war: Spray the poppy and coca fields, and jail or kill the drug bosses and others in the complex chain of supply. McCaffrey and company are sure this strategy will eventually work, if only given more time and money.

But there are dissenters. In the media, the universities, and even the government, a growing group is saying that the war on drugs simply isn't working.