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Blanket Coverage Garry Leech argues there is more to Colombia's troubles than meets the eye. by Garry Leech
Since Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe launched his Democratic Security and Defence Strategy shortly after assuming office in August 2002, the mainstream media in North America and Europe have mostly lauded his successes. Yet whilst President Uribe's strategies have diminished kidnapping and killings, they have also resulted in a dramatic increase in forced 'disappearances' and arbitrary detentions. Under the Uribe administration, human rights abuses by state security forces waging a counter-insurgency war against the country's largest leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), have risen alarmingly. Despite repeated claims to the contrary by the Colombian and US governments, the Colombian military has made little headway against the FARC on the battlefield. In fact, claims by officials in Washington and Bogotá that the rebels are on the defensive are contradicted by figures that show the FARC launched more attacks during President Uribe's first two years in office than during any two-year period under former President Andrés Pastrana. According to the Bogotá based defence think tank Fundación Seguridad y Democracia, the FARC attacked Colombia's security forces an average of twice a day in 2004. That the reality of the country's conflict is rarely reflected in the mainstream media is largely due to the way journalists operate in Colombia. Foreign reporters mostly cover the country's civil conflict from the safety of the capital Bogotá, rarely venturing into dangerous rural zones except on press junkets organised by the Colombian military or the US embassy. Consequently over the past two years --since rebels kidnapped two foreign reporters for eleven days in January 2003-- journalists have become hyperdependent on official sources, which has resulted in an increasingly distorted coverage of the conflict. The mass media has mostly parroted the official Colombian and US lines, primarily trumpeting the decreases in kidnapping and killings under the Uribe administration. Meanwhile, it has repeatedly ignored evidence that the fall in kidnappings has been offset by shift in strategy by the guerrillas that has resulted in an almost corresponding increase in extortion cases --according to the Colombian NGO País Libre. Government officials and the mainstream media also rarely mention Colombia's disturbing upward trend in forced disappearances. More than 3,500 people were 'disappeared' during Uribe's first two years in office --more than the total number of Colombians disappeared during the previous seven years combined. According to the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared (ASFADDES), right-wing paramilitaries and state security forces are responsible for a huge majority of the disappearances. The situation is little better with regard to forced displacement. The Bogotá-based Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES) recently announced that 287,581 Colombians were forcibly displaced by violence in 2004 – a startling 38 per cent increase over the 207,607 the previous year. These statistics suggest that, while urban residents might feel more secure, the lives of rural Colombians continue to be ravaged by violence; an average of 780 people a day are forcibly displaced from their homes. The mainstream media often echoes official claims that the FARC has lost its ideological motivation and are simply terrorists --a convenient label that has been added since 9/11 to the equally useful moniker narco-guerrillas. While it is true that the FARC has utilised strategies such as kidnapping and reckless bombings that have alienated sectors of Colombian society, the rebels still retain widespread support in rural areas that have long been under their control. Most media reports and government statements claim that Uribe's high approval ratings are evidence that he has widespread public support and that the FARC's low ratings illustrate the rebel group's marginalisation. But these reports often fail to point out the flawed methodology used in the polls. Virtually every opinion poll taken in Colombia is conducted by telephone with some 500 people in the country's four largest cities: Bogotá, Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla. Logically, the likely respondents are members of Colombia's middle and upper classes who support Uribe, despise the guerrillas and constitute about 30 per cent of the population. The results are thus clearly not derived from a random sampling of the Colombian population: most urban shantytown dwellers do not have phones. Indeed, the methodology used tellingly illustrates that the opinions of the rural poor still don't count for much. This is not to suggest that the majority of Colombians support the FARC, but the rebels do possess significantly more backing than that acknowledged by the opinion polls, government officials and the mainstream media. In regions where the FARC has been present for decades, such as Caquetá, Meta and Putumayo, the rebel group functions as a de facto government that has developed and maintains close relations with local communities. In fact, it is clear in these communities that local residents are at ease with the guerrillas and that their greatest fear is of the Colombian military. The military is often the only branch of the state with which the peasants have had substantial contact, and that contact has usually consisted of aerial bombings. Just last year in a small remote FARC-controlled village in Caquetá that lay in the path of the Colombian military's ongoing 'Plan Patriota' offensive, two eight-year-old boys told me they were fishing in a river the previous week when army helicopters began machine-gunning and bombing nearby. In these regions, the FARC has implemented its own judicial system and has carried out agrarian reforms. A rare investigative piece that was published by the Washington Post in October 2003 reported that during the previous two years the FARC had broken up ten large ranches in southern Meta and redistributed the smaller parcels of land to subsistence farmers. The guerrillas have carried out similar programs in Caquetá, Putumayo and other regions. The FARC has also implemented a national tax system whereby the income from kidnapping, extortion and the taxation of wealthy landowners and businesses is used to fund military operations. The revenue from taxes imposed on local communities in FARC-controlled regions, however, is turned over to municipal leaders. According to sociologist James J. Brittain, who has conducted extensive research in southern Colombia, this revenue is used to fund local social and economic projects. In contrast to those areas that have long been in FARC-controlled territory, many Colombians living in regions where the FARC only established a presence during the 1990s remain suspicious and fearful of the rebels. In these areas, the FARC has primarily focused on military operations, thereby failing to win the support of local communities. Most residents in these regions are distrustful of all the armed groups: the leftist guerrillas, the military and the rightwing paramilitaries. This is the case, for instance, with the indigenous Embera in the Chocó region of western Colombia. Many Embera villages, located deep in the rainforest and only accessible by river, have been victimised by all the armed groups, although members of one community admitted it is the Colombian army that they fear the most. The army accuses the Embera of being guerrillas and has imposed an economic blockade in the region that prevents sufficient food and medicines from reaching indigenous communities. According to a 2003 UN report, the direct involvement of the Colombian military in human rights abuses has increased since President Uribe assumed office. This has been evidenced in the dramatic escalation of forced disappearances and arbitrary detentions, often resulting from mass arrests of unionists, human rights defenders, social workers and others critical of the government's policies. The actions of the military clearly reflect the attitude of President Uribe who, in September 2003, publicly accused NGOs of being "spokesmen" for the guerrillas actively "politicking in the service of terrorism". There has been little change in the level of politically-motivated killings in rural Colombia; a reduction in crime-related murders has accounted for much of the statistical drop in violence under Uribe. In the past 15 years, according to international human rights organisations and the US State Department,more than 70 per cent of the country's human rights abuses have been committed by right-wing paramilitary groups closely allied to the Colombian military. The 'dirty war' component of the Colombian military's counter-insurgency campaign has been conducted by paramilitary death squads in order to give the Colombian government a degree of plausible deniability with regard to human rights violations. This strategy was clearly evident in Putumayo, which was ground zero for the US-backed 'Plan Colombia', launched in December 2000. Paramilitaries announced their arrival in the long-time FARC controlled region in 1999 by committing numerous massacres that killed hundreds of civilians. As one local peasant told me: "They kill innocent campesinos just because they might be guerrillas." These paramilitary death squads worked closely with the Colombian army during the implementation of Plan Colombia, which targeted both the FARC and coca cultivation simultaneously. The $1.3bn Plan Colombia aid package made Colombia the third-largest recipient of US military aid in the world, after only Israel and Egypt. Washington supplied the Colombian military with more than 60 Blackhawk and Huey helicopters to be used by a 3,000-strong counter-narcotics brigade created, trained and armed by the US Army Special Forces. These US-trained troops, as I personally witnessed, soon began working in collusion with the paramilitaries responsible for conducting the dirty war in Putumayo. The current military situation in Putumayo, however, contradicts the official claims and repeated media accounts that the Colombian military has the FARC on the retreat in southern Colombia. Over the past two years, the guerrillas have methodically recaptured many of the small and medium sized towns in Putumayo that the Colombian army and its paramilitary allies had seized during the early years of Plan Colombia. The Colombian military's current priority in Putumayo is not the protection of rural residents caught in the conflict, but rather to safeguard the oil infrastructure used by foreign companies that signed deals with the government after Plan Colombia's militarisation had secured the region. Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Javier Cruz, commander of the Colombian Army's Ninth Special Battalion in Putumayo, made it clear to me when explaining his mission: "Security is the most important thing to me. Oil companies need to work without worrying and international investors need to feel calm." During the past two years, however, along with retaking numerous towns, the FARC has also increasingly targeted Putumayo's oil infrastructure --carrying out a record 144 attacks in 2003-- to protest the exploitation of Colombia's resources by multinational corporations that have benefited from neoliberal economic reforms. Uribe's approval ratings of over 60 per cent among much of the urban population is mostly due to his 'democratic security' policies that have protected the urban population at the expense of rural Colombians. In sharp contrast, the approval rating for his handling of the economy is a mere 34 per cent. Uribe's continuation of the neoliberal, or 'free trade', policies launched in the early 1990s has contributed significantly to 64 per cent of Colombians now living in poverty --up from 57 per cent in the late 1990s. The government's refusal to negotiate its neoliberal economic agenda was a contributing factor to the failure of the recent peace process with the FARC. Over the past several years, millions have taken to the streets of Colombia's cities to protest economic reforms implemented by the government at the behest of the IMF. The government has responded to such criticism by labeling those opposed to President Uribe's economic policies as subversives, or terrorists. As has historically been the case during Colombia's long civil conflict, it is the rural population and those fighting for social justice that have been the principal victims of the violence, much of which has been perpetrated by the Colombian military and its paramilitary allies. In the past, it was relatively easy to generate international criticism of authoritarian regimes in Latin America --they were headed by army generals adorned in military uniforms. But as ASFADDES spokesperson Gloria Gómez points out, in Colombia, "our authoritarianism wears a suit and tie and was democratically elected". Garry Leech is editor of Colombia Journal and author of Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention. He is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Cape Breton University in Canada |
