U.S. Military Aid

     Tom Marks is very much involved in Colombia. He writes
     "David Crow appears to have stated the heart of the "liberal view" when he advocates the "conversion of guerrillas into legitimate political forces" in Colombia -- by all means short of force. Therein lies the dilemma: such means are laudable but will not work. For once an insurgent movement becomes a going concern, the dynamic which obtains is quite different from that which may have given it life initially. It becomes an alternative social structure, able to recruit, assign, promote and control. The mistake of the liberals is to equate existence with legitimacy. This simply is not so.
     What better way to show this than to point out the fallacy in the "rebels control a significant part of national territory, mostly in the south." Sources (including the UN) differ on the fraction of the Colombian population which is in the savannah and jungle south of the river valleys ("the south"), but most put it at ~4% of the national total of ~40 million. For the sake of argument, since 4th Division Area of Operations (AO), which is a majority of the area, puts the AO population at ~2 million, let us put the entire non-sierra population at 4 million. Is there any source which claims the insurgents control "all" of those? "Half"?
     I think it is clear what I'm driving at: the insurgents "control" territory in areas where there is little there -- save, in many cases, coca/poppy/marijuana and a transplanted work force. The "insurgents control 40%" figure first surfaced, as best I can tell, in a "made up" map in the Washington Post, which has since been reprinted. The figure itself is repeated endlessly without any attempt, by any source, to my knowledge, to check it on the ground. To the contrary, when situation maps are examined, they tell quite a different story. Even the Demilitarized Zone, though indeed the much-cited "size of Switzerland," in reality has a population of less than 100,000 -- with a growing number, according to the UN, fleeing the area.
     Perhaps of most importance, insurgent numbers did not "surge forth" during the National Front era -- true, that period is when the likes of FARC and ELN appeared, but the present insurgents, especially FARC, did not become a serious concern until the 1990s and their linkup with the drug trade. Thus they -- and insurgency/counterinsurgency -- cannot be separated, as David advocates, from narcotics/counternarcotics. That we continue to pretend such a division can be made is the canard peddled to us by a variety of actors, official and unofficial.
     I would argue there are times when "humanitarian assistance" won't do it. The insurgents as groups (this term to make clear that leadership and manpower invariably have varying agendas, which are not necessarily overlapping) are not agrarian or national reformers any more than were the Viet Cong or Filipino CPP or whomever. They are political actors. They produce more deaths and more displaced than the "paramilitary groups" bogeyman David cites. Indeed, one of the signal successes of the human rights agenda has been to deflect attention to the symptom (the popular reaction against insurgency) rather than to the cause (insurgency).
     Certainly Colombia's democracy is imperfect, but I think much of the commentary on it is over-wrought, ethnocentric, and more than a little under-researched. And, yes, it has been a significant factor in producing alienation, particularly through repression of leftist actors who have endeavored to work within the system. Still, alienation and insurgency are not the same phenomenon, and the one does not necessarily lead to the other. For that ideology, motivation, and group dynamics must also be examined. The US policy may not be "right," but certainly much that is being advanced as reporting on the Colombian situation is wrong. We can talk of nothing until the government actually exercises its writ within its national territory. This will come about only through a combination of military and socio-economic-political means."

Ronald Hilton - 3/8/00