Open Forum: U.S Colombia Policy: A Willful Myopia
Smyth, Frank
Carlos Castafio is not a name that comes up much in the debate over whether to escalate U.S. drug-war aid to Colombia. But U.S. policy-makers and politicians should be mindful of...
...officials accused him of having protected the Cali cartel...
...Colombian civilian investigators later linked the perpetrators of the attack to a group of paramilitaries based at Puerto BoyacA on the Continued on page 48 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 Magdelana river...
...It is the rightist paramilitaries who are linked to the highest levels of the drug trade...
...The U.S...
...In fact, alliances between rightist paramilitaries and drug cartels is an old story in Colombia...
...Last year, four Israeli officers were indicted in BogotA for their alleged involvement in terrorist crimes...
...officials like McCaffrey and Gilman have come to mimic Colombian military officers who have long exaggerated the importance of the country's guerrillas to the drug trade while ignoring the action of the paramilitaries...
...They were fighting over whether Colombia should extradite people like Escobar to the United States to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges...
...There is no doubt that Colombia's leftist guerrillas, too, are deeply involved in the drug trade...
...The judicial police report accused Major Jorge Alberto Lazaro, a former local army commander who graduated from the U.S...
...officials of turning a blind eye to counterinsurgency efforts that also involved human rights abuses...
...The Extraditables," as they called themselves in unsigned communiques, terrorized Colombia with attacks like the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers...
...The former army commander in Cali, Gen...
...That raises the question: When looking at Colombia, do U.S...
...Increasing military aid to Colombia will not curb the drug flow, although it will boost Colombia's bloodletting...
...Other paramilitary leaders and military officers have been linked to even higher levels of the drug trade...
...interviews to journalists from a ranch compound in northwestern Colombia that has been attacked by guerrillas, yet Colombian military commanders say they cannot find him...
...One reason may be that the Colombian military has long collaborated with the country's paramilitaries against the guerrillas...
...Castafio is not only the top commander of Colombia's rightist paramilitary groups, he is also "a major cocaine trafficker," according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA...
...military aid to provide $600 million to help Colombian defense forces fight off the powerful leftist "narco-guerrillas," while Rep...
...Colombia is currently the fourth-largest recipient of U.S...
...Naval intelligence, DEA and CIA observers all report that among Colombia's irregular armed groups only the paramilitaries dominate the storage and internal transport of heroin as well as cocaine...
...The U.S...
...Hernando Camilo Zufiiga, resigned as the military's chief-of-staff in 1996 after U.S...
...In 1994, when U.S...
...The paramilitaries control many if not most processing laboratories throughout the country...
...By 1996, Loaiza was one of seven top cartel leaders apprehended by Colombian forces backed jointly by the DEA and the CIA...
...He was linked to many paramilitary atrocities including the notorious Trujillo chainsaw massacres near Cali, according to a governmentsanctioned truth report...
...policy, leading it to aid the Colombian government's fight against leftist rebels...
...But McCaffrey only buried the audit...
...military and intelligence presence in Colombia is larger now than it was in El Salvador a decade ago, making it the largest U.S.backed counterinsurgency effort since Vietnam...
...This article is drawn from a longer piece that appeared on the Website of IntellectualCapital.com...
...Barry McCaffrey, wants to double current U.S...
...They now produce the raw coca leaf used to make about half of the world's cocaine...
...Following U.S.-backed eradication efforts that have reduced coca production elsewhere in the Andes, Colombian peasants protected by leftist guerrillas today grow coca in areas comprising at least one-third of the country's terrain...
...drug-war aid to Colombia was just beginning to escalate, Amnesty International accused U.S...
...In 1995, the Colombian judicial police reported that paramilitaries working clandestinely with local army commanders were protecting peasants growing poppy plants to make heroin in the Magdalena valley...
...Their misleading claims only lead the United States into another counterinsurgency quagmire...
...But the guerrillas still earn just as much money, maybe more, through kidnappings and other forms of extortion against wealthier Colombians...
...training or arms...
...This bias directly shapes U.S...
...Southern Command in Panama, ordered an internal audit that found that 12 of 13 Colombian military units cited by Amnesty International as abusers had previously received either U.S...
...politicians see only red...
...After the paramilitaries were outlawed in 1989, the Colombian military went on secretly collaborating with them for political reasons at the same time that the paramilitaries went on secretly collaborating with the country's drug cartels to profit...
...foreign aid in the world after Israel, Egypt and now Jordan...
...But the view held by the Administration and its chief drugwar official only reflects a Cold War bias that is wrong...
...He has also served as a research consultant for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International...
...Meanwhile, McCaffrey began publicly saying that because of the guerrillas' increased involvement in the drug trade, counterinsurgency and counterdrug measures had become "two sides of the same coin...
...McCaffrey, then-chief of the U.S...
...School of the Americas in 1981, of collaborating with illegal paramilitaries financed by the suspected paramilitary leader and drug trafficker, Victor Carranza, who was later incarcerated and still awaits trial on charges of murder as well as commanding illegal paramilitary groups...
...Henry Loaiza, known to his confederates as "The Scorpion," was the cartel's underboss in charge of security...
...Instead, people from the Clinton Administration's drug czar to its opponents in Congress have focused only on the role played by Colombia's leftist guerrillas, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in the drug trade...
...drug czar, Gen...
...Unlike its leftist guerrillas who have always been outlawed, paramilitaries operated legally there until 1989, when the government outlawed them because their movement had been taken over by Pablo Escobar, the late drug lord of the once-feared Medellfn cartel...
...Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) recently succeeded in pushing the Administration to arm Colombia with Blackhawk helicopter gunships to help in the fight...
...I later obtained the audit and broke the story in coordination with Amnesty International...
...Colombia's complex situation may look simple to McCaffrey, a soldier who has been fighting Marxist guerrillas since Vietnam...
...In effect, the paramilitaries became an armed wing of the Medellin drug lords, who had declared war on the Colombian state...
...The military has not apprehended Castafio even though the DEA's then-chief of operations, Donnie Marshall (now the agency's acting administrator) said in 1997 that Castafio is "closely linked" to the Henao Montoya organization, which he told Congress is "the most powerful of the various independent trafficking groups" to emerge since the demise of the Cali cartel...
...policy-makers and politicians should be mindful of the alliances that he and other rightist paramilitaries have made with Colombia's drug syndicates, including the ones that are now ascendant after the mid-1990s decapitation of the once-powerful Cali cartel...
...Castafio has given many Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in The Progressive, The Washington Post The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal...
...They further revealed that Escobar had financed Israeli, British and other mercenaries who taught his paramilitary forces techniques like altitudesensitive detonation...
Vol. 33 • November 1999 • No. 3
