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NCC Group Visits Colombia, Comes to Share its Dream of Peace


From PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>
Date 21 Dec 1999 20:06:12

21-December-1999 
99432 
 
    NCC Group Visits Colombia, 
    Comes to Share its Dream of Peace 
 
    by John Filiatreau 
    for the National Council of Churches 
 
BOGOTA, Colombia - Five peacemakers from the National Council of Churches 
of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC) encountered very few optimists during a 
recent "listen-and-learn" visit to war-torn Colombia. Even those who 
claimed to see a glimmer of hope for peace in the country said they saw it 
only dimly and in the far distance. 
 
    What the U.S. visitors did encounter in nearly everyone they met in 
Colombia was a near-universal dream of peace, an indistinct but warming 
vision of a more rewarding life that might ensue, if someone, someday, 
actually managed to stop the killing. 
 
    By the end of their four-day excursion, the NCC visitors had come to 
feel that Colombia's national dream of peace - and its citizens' weariness 
of war - might be common ground enough to bring some of the warring parties 
to the table for talks. 
 
    The purpose of the tour was to learn whether the NCC can play a 
constructive role in facilitating communication among the parties in the 
nation's 35-year-long civil war, thereby advancing the cause of peace. The 
answer, in general if not in the details, was yes. 
 
    An estimated 35,000 people have been killed in the conflict in just the 
past 10 years. 
 
    In the NCC group's meetings with spokespeople for all sides in 
Colombia's long civil war, the principal topic of conversation was the 
prospect of peace after two generations of murder and mayhem. The 
interviews were uniformly disheartening. 
 
    The top U.S. diplomat in Bogota said the making of peace "will be a 
long, long, long, long process." A foreign diplomat remarked that the 
combatants "are not in a hurry to make peace." A political activist in the 
capital commented, "Peace is not just around the corner." 
 
    A Swedish diplomat, asked whether he could see any positive aspects of 
the situation in Colombia, came up with one: "The incredible resilience of 
the Colombian people, who somehow, in the midst of violence and terror, 
hang on to the dream of peace. They don't give up." 
 
    In October 1997, 10 million Colombians - about a quarter of the 
population - went to the polls in a non-binding election to express their 
desire for a peaceful end to the civil conflict. In October 1999, 12 
million took to the streets to protest the continuing violence and to 
demand that the government and the guerrillas agree to a cease-fire. 
Colombian President Andres Pastrana is said to have won last year's 
election because he managed to identify his candidacy with the people's 
dream of peace. 
 
    The NCC team, led by the Rev. Oscar McCloud, pastor of Fifth Avenue 
Presbyterian Church in New York City and coordinated by the Rev. Oscar 
Bolioli, director of the NCC's office for Latin America and the Caribbean, 
met with the U.S. ambassador in Bogota, Curtis Kamman; Msgr. Alberto 
Giraldo Jaramillo, president of the Roman Catholic Episcopal Conference of 
Colombia; Gen. Fernando Tapias, the commander of Colombia's armed forces; 
Dr. Jose F. Castro, the country's chief public defender and human-rights 
"ombudsman"; Bogota-based diplomats from Spain and Sweden, two countries 
with long experience in Colombia; the chiefs of United Nations missions in 
Colombia on human rights and on internal refugees; officials of the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Army of National 
Liberation (ELN), the two largest guerrilla groups opposing the national 
government; and a group of more than 20 leaders in Colombia's civil 
society, including labor officials, educators and directors of 
non-government organizations (NGOs). 
 
    Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, the NCC's general director, had been scheduled 
to lead the delegation, but became ill and was unable to travel to Bogota 
for the Nov. 29-Dec. 2 tour. The participants, in addition to McCloud and 
Bolioli, were the Rev. Dr. Rafael Malpica-Padilla, program director for 
Latin America and the Caribbean of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 
America; the Rev. Arturo M. Fernandez, a member of the General Board of 
Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church; and Samuel Lobato, a 
regional representative for Latin America of the NCC's Church World Service 
and Witness program. 
 
    Bolioli said the trip was an effort to capitalize on the "credibility" 
the NCC has achieved in Latin America without seeming to trump the efforts 
of local and regional religious organizations. 
 
    "It was not and is not our intention to become directly involved in 
Colombian affairs," Bolioli said as the tour drew to a close. "We came here 
to try to open new channels of communication, to help Colombians work 
together better for peace. And I think we accomplished what we set out to 
do." 
 
    The first conclusion drawn by the NCC group was that the more one 
learns about Colombia, the more confused one is apt to become. 
 
    "We knew before we came that the situation here was very complicated," 
McCloud said after the second day of meetings, "and every conversation 
we've had so far has only reinforced that impression." 
 
    "Sometimes even myself, I don't understand what's going on," Gen. 
Tapias admitted. 
 
    The government, which says it wants peace and was elected on a peace 
platform, is fighting a hard-line Marxist guerrilla army, which says it too 
wants peace - but also demands "justice" (meaning, among other things, 
political and land-ownership reforms) for Colombia's campisanos, or 
peasants. 
 
    The countless private armies known as "paramilitaries" or "self-defense 
forces" represent the country's wealthy landowners and blue-bloods, who 
profess to want peace, bitterly oppose land-reform and share-the-wealth 
proposals, and may or may not be allied with officers of the Colombian 
military. The Colombian military and these right-wing allies of theirs are 
said to be responsible for about three-quarters of the "human-rights 
abuses" reported in Colombia. 
 
    All these combatants have one thing in common - a steady and generous 
source of cash: The country's drug cartels, which make hundreds of millions 
of dollars a year selling cocaine, mostly to consumers in the United 
States, and want to continue doing business in relative peace, and 
therefore are happy to pay "taxes" and "protection money" to the forces 
that control various parts of Colombia through which the traffickers have 
to move "product." 
 
    Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the head of the White House Office of National 
Drug Control Policy, says the "narco-guerrillas" in Colombia - meaning 
FARC, ELN and the right-wing paramilitary forces - together collect about 
$600 million a year in tribute from the drug trade. (Although you wouldn't 
expect McCaffrey to say so, there is every reason to believe that the 
Colombian military exacts a similar toll.) McCaffrey has told reporters 
that differentiating between U.S. anti-drug and anti-guerrilla efforts in 
Colombia is "counterproductive." 
 
    According to a study by the U.S. Embassy staff in Bogota, about half 
the guerrillas' income is from drug payoffs - but they make almost as much 
from kidnappings for ransom. (About 2000 people have been kidnapped in 
Colombia this year.) 
 
    Tapias, taking his cue from McCaffrey, said last month of FARC: "Not 
only do they levy a security tax, they are now selling coca paste to drug 
traffickers." 
 
    When violence breaks out among the various standing armies in Colombia, 
the people most likely to be killed, injured and tortured are unarmed, 
peace-deprived peasants who have refused to join one of the armies, been 
accused of befriending "the enemy," or gotten caught in cross-fires. Until 
they are killed, many make a subsistence living by growing coca for sale to 
the drug cartels. They say that's the only way they can feed their families 
in the midst of Colombia's deepest recession in 70 years, with unemployment 
and inflation both above 20 percent. 
 
    Tapias told his NCC visitors that 792 Colombians had been killed by 
guerrillas and 605 by paramilitaries in the first nine months of this year. 
Spokesmen for the public defender's office blamed "80 percent of the 
killings" on the paramilitaries, which they said also are largely 
responsible for the two million "displaced" Colombians who are refugees in 
their own country. They said government troops were often involved in the 
private armies' atrocities in the past, but are implicated less often 
today; they credit Tapias for getting rid of officers with close ties to 
the paramilitaries, which were outlawed in 1989. 
 
    The United States, which says it also wants peace in Colombia, has 
spent billions of tax dollars, and proposes to spend billions more, to help 
the Colombian government eradicate coca crops with toxic herbicides and 
wage high-tech war on the drug barons - and secondarily on the guerrillas, 
now the supposed No. 1 Communist threat to the Americas (having supplanted 
Cuba). 
 
    U.S. and Colombian authorities say the way to make peace is to put the 
drug sellers out of business, thereby depriving the guerrillas of essential 
financial support. (They claim, citing poll results, that the rebels have 
scant popular support.) Tapias says he could put the guerrillas out of 
business in three years or less with the right kind of U.S. support against 
the drug traffickers. 
 
    "If we cannot eradicate the narco-traffickers, no peace process can 
succeed," Tapias said. "The amount of money these people (the guerrillas) 
receive is beyond imagination, more than the security forces' budget. 
Cutting off that source of income is the only way to motivate the 
guerrillas to seek peace." 
 
    He noted that the drug merchants, "a source of jobs in a country 
without enough jobs," don't care about public opinion because they can 
survive without public support: "Thanks to the narco-traffickers, they are 
totally independent," he said. 
 
    The guerrillas say the only way to make peace is to redistribute the 
nation's wealth and return much of the land to the peasants. 
 
    The one thing that seems clear about the conflict is that neither side 
is likely to achieve a military victory anytime soon. Meanwhile, each side 
presents itself as the vanguard of peace. 
 
    In a meeting in the jungle south of Bogota, a FARC officer told the NCC 
group: "FARC has been searching for peace from our birth. But peace is not 
possible unless it comes along with social justice. Peace is not possible 
until we solve the problems that gave rise to the conflict." 
 
    The NCC delegation had talks with Commandante Raul Reyes, one of seven 
members of FARC's ruling secretariat; "Inga," a veteran guerrilla officer 
who also is the daughter of the guerrillas' military commander, Manuel 
Marulanda Velez, also known as "Tirofijo" ("sure shot"); and a rebel 
officer named "Fernando." 
 
    Reyes, asked about the killings of three U.S. indigenous-rights 
activists in northeastern Colombia last March, said FARC takes 
responsibility for what he called "a very big mistake, a barbaric act." He 
offered a public apology and said an internal investigation of the case is 
nearly finished. All that remains, he said, is for FARC to decide how the 
three soldiers responsible will be punished. 
 
    Asked about the threat of U.S. military intervention in Colombia, 
"Fernando" replied: "For more than a century, the United States has already 
been intervening in our country. Remember - Panama was part of Colombia." 
 
    The rebels said they "are not interested in persecuting any church or 
religious group," and contended that they have acted against religious 
people "only in cases of collaborators (with the enemy), cases in which our 
people have been killed because someone has opposed us under cover of the 
church. ... where someone has used (religious) institutions to destroy what 
we are building." The rebels said they hoped to create communication 
channels with NCC/CWS (Church World Service) to deal with difficult cases 
and avoid mistakes. 
 
    "Fernando" asked the NCC group to go home and refute "the big 
disinformation about the peace process and who we are - tell people in the 
States that they are not the enemy." 
 
    In June, a Colombian newspaper, citing U.S. State Department sources, 
reported on a purported U.S. plan to block the spread of Colombian 
guerrilla activity to neighboring countries by (1) supplying aircraft and 
intelligence to border forces in Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and 
Venezuela, to help them keep the Colombian rebel forces under control; and 
(2) pinning a "narco-guerrilla" label on FARC and ELN, implying that they 
are involved in narcotics processing and peddling. 
 
    The State Department has said consistently that the United States will 
not be drawn into Colombia's battle against the guerrillas, but will 
continue to be involved in the war on drugs. Many Latin Americans suspect 
that U.S. officials are tarring the guerillas with the drug-dealer brush to 
justify a deepening of its commitment to counter-insurgency operations. 
 
    In August, in testimony before a Congressional committee, Drug 
Enforcement Administration (DEA) Chief Donnie Marshall said his agency 
doesn't regard the Colombian guerrillas as drug traffickers. He conceded 
that FARC and ELN are "associated with" drug sellers, "providing protection 
or extorting money from them;" but said the DEA has never "come close to 
the conclusion" that they can reasonably be called "drug-trafficking 
organizations." 
 
    Pastrana has called the charge that the guerrillas are drug traffickers 
"ridiculous." 
 
    Also in June, during a meeting of the Organization of American States 
(OAS), U.S. representatives proposed the creation of a multinational force 
- "a group of friendly countries" with political and economic ties - to 
safeguard the security of the Western Hemisphere by intervening in internal 
conflicts that threaten democracy in Latin America. 
 
    Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela all 
vehemently rejected the proposal. Later, U.S. representative Victor Marrero 
told reporters: "We never hoped that the proposal would be approved at this 
session; we just wanted to put the matter on the table for discussion. But 
this topic is not dead." 
 
    Gen. Tapias and Colombian Minister of Defense Luis Ramirez traveled to 
Washington in July and asked for $500 million in counter-narcotics and 
counter-insurgency aid. The next day, McCaffrey proposed a $1 billion U.S. 
contribution to "emergency drug supplemental assistance" for fighting the 
anti-drug war in South America, including $570 million for Colombia. 
 
    In September, Pastrana visited New York and Washington to promote "Plan 
Colombia," a multi-billion proposal to curb narco-trafficking, end the 
civil conflict and revive the economy. The plan includes police and 
military aid. Pastrana said he would seek substantial contributions from 
"donor countries," principally the United States. 
 
    Colombia is now the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid. 
 
    Earlier this month, Colombia showed off its new Rapid Deployment Force 
(RDF), the first fruit of its plan to upgrade its military. It also has 
created a new anti-narcotics battalion and a brigade to patrol the nation's 
rivers. The RDF includes troops from three mobile counter-insurgency 
brigades, a Special Forces group trained by the United States, and an 
artillery unit. It is supported by aircraft, including 15 U.S.-made 
Blackhawk helicopters. 
 
    The war continues. When someone is reported killed or "disappeared," 
which happens nearly every day, a number of "the usual suspects" are almost 
equally plausible: the army, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, the 
"narco-traffickers," U.S. agents or advisors, political terrorists, common 
bandits - all groups that say they want peace in Colombia. 
 
John Filiatreau, a reporter for the Presbyterian News Service in 
Louisville, Ky., accompanied the NCC delegation on assignment by the NCC. 

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