News from the FARC Front

     Tom Marks is just back from the FARC front. He reports:
     "Within a day, I was out at Mitu, in the extreme south (Amazon region), which was overrun a year ago, then retaken. Its value is symbolic, as it is a little piece of absolute nothing. Continued harassment by FARC, though, has led to reinsertion of a counterguerrilla battalion, so I was with the guys.
     Shortages of operational funds have really made things tough for COLAR (Colombian Army) of late -- let's be clear, life is tough normally; the service only has 17 choppers; but lately things have been awful -- so I had to keep bumming rides of whatever showed. Milk runs, though, got me to some neat places, among them a CG Bn (9th Bde) right on the edge of the DMZ. It has in the past month, while going through its normal routine, policed up half a ton of coca base. That means nothing in the big scheme of things, but at least it had more to show than simply making sure the g's didn't attack via its sector.
     For that's what FARC uses the DMZ as, a big aircraft carrier from which to sally forth and wreak destruction. Several villages in another AO were hit while I was in-country, with lots of dead -- including the shoeshine guy in front of the municipal hall in one spot. Talks notwithstanding, there has been an upsurge in nastiness of late, especially of torturing to death professional soldiers (and police) who are captured. (Draftees seem generally to be let loose.) This has involved some real "Silence of the Lambs" stuff. Horrible. I have encouraged the government to make greater use of such atrocities, which have become routine, in its psywar campaign.
     On our side, we have no idea what our Embassy antics have cost us; that is, our involvement directly in the sacking of three top COLAR general officers for alleged ties to paramilitaries and such. As always, the bureaucratic needs of policy implementation ran roughshod over reality. We are at this point being tolerated, at best. This does not mean our individuals are not welcomed, but key segments of the Colombian power structure don't want the US and all its domestic political baggage. Bogota is keenly aware that we're not in this for THEM, and we've gone out of our way to make sure we rub that in their faces. It's a very strange way to run a railroad on our part. Still -- do I need to say this? -- what else could be expected from our current way of doing business?
     COLAR itself doing fine. LOTS of changes, both operationally and tactically, to include much greater use of Rapid Reaction force (and standing up, in-house, of airborne capability in 4th Div, taken from 7th Bde assets). Strategically, of course, Colombian armed forces are hostage to the drift which is Command Central in Bogota. The Pastrana referendum idea surfaced while I was there. How that one plays itself out should be interesting. There is no movement in talks with the FARC. They simply fortify the DMZ and do their thing.
     To that end, I will note that I had time to sit down and look at a lot of captured materials. It's striking, for those of us in my generation, how closely FARC's tactics, operations, and strategy, taken from FMLN, in turn read like pages from Douglas Pike and his work on the Vietnamese. We know the Vietnamese worked closely with the FMLN; just how closely seems obvious when one looks at what FMLN has passed on to FARC. Key is the constant interplay between the political and the military (with the Maoist approach, if anything, being regarded by the Vietnamese as too militaristic and parochial in its emphases), with all three "stages" occurring simultaneously as dictated by local circumstances -- but with the greater level of command and control allowed by modern communications (e.g. secure cell phones) being used to coordinate lower levels of activity so that they support or are part of higher levels (e.g. widely dispersed guerrilla attacks having both local objectives and preparing the way for maneuver warfare operations)."

Ronald Hilton - 4/8/00