Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

U. S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia

Oliver Villar, Drew Cottle

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781583673089
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work?

Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a “narco-state” under the control of a “narco-bourgeoisie” which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

1. From Coca to Cocaine

According to Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, a former coca farmer, and a longtime advocate for cocaleros, “Coca is not cocaine.”¹ This is a view shared by many Latin Americans, including Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who has publicly stated that he chews coca every morning for its apparent health benefits.² Morales argues that it is a mistake to link the livelihood of cocaleros with drug trafficking. Time magazine has reported that “the Evo phenomenon is partly a result of what Latin American critics call Washington’s anticoca ‘fundamentalism’—a heavy-handedness that seems to blame the remote cocaleros, or coca farmers, more than the addictive appetites of Americans.”³ Significant cultural, historical, and economic differences exist between coca and cocaine.⁴ This chapter argues that Colombia’s cocaine trade is largely a product of the nation’s history. The legacy of Spanish colonization and the pattern of land ownership in Colombia have ensured that coca continues to be cultivated. The ongoing civil conflict in Colombia since 1964, too, has played a major role in enabling the cocaine trade to flourish.

The Legacy of Spanish Colonization

Before Colombian capitalism, the Spanish conquistadors established feudal systems to regulate labor, such as the encomienda, concierto, and mining mita.⁵ Under Spanish colonialism, landowners and merchants were dominant in Colombian economic life, their power based greatly on the commercial exploitation of the coca plant, which was widely used by Europeans for medicinal purposes. The Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León recorded: “There has never been in the whole world a plant or root or any growing thing that bears and yields every year as this does . . . or that is so highly valued.”⁶ Indians were forced from their highland villages to work in steamy lowland coca plantations. The Spaniards fed them coca leaf to nullify the need for food, water, or sleep, and to reduce resistance to their living and working conditions. To supply great quantities of coca leaves, coca plantations—cocales—were established. Long hours of brutal slave labor produced high death rates.⁷ The coca slaves died in large numbers from poor nutrition, exhaustion, and European diseases. By 1650, the Inca population had fallen to four million, from ten million in the mid-1500s.⁸ In the sixteenth century another Spaniard, Hernando de Santillán, wrote: “Down there [in the coca plantations] there is one disease worse than all the rest: the unrestrained greed of the Spaniards.”⁹ The colonizers’ lack of concern was shown by their decision, in 1573, to tax the “sinful” commodity.

Another system of colonial exploitation, the hacienda, introduced a rural class structure consisting of Spanish landlords and landless peasants. The peasantry resisted the colonization of their land by the foreign property owners. Some of them, along with Afro-Colombians escaping slavery, rural workers escaping the haciendas, and poor settlers seeking a better life, fled to the slopes and plains of the Andes becoming colonos (landless workers). For the exploited classes, land meant freedom. However, the landlords had no use for freedom; when the bourgeois revolutions inspired by Simón Bolívar swept Latin America, the landlords of Colombia pledged their allegiance to Spain.¹⁰

The agrarian class conflict that began in the early nineteenth century has persisted into the present. The hacienda system created its own “grave diggers” as poor peasants (or campesinos in Spanish) struggled for land.¹¹ Complex class conflicts in the early twentieth century created minifundias (smallholdings) in the highlands, mixed patterns of production along the slopes, and latifundias (large estates) on the plains.¹² From 1875 to 1930, 450 major confrontations between the poor peasantry and landlords over land occurred in Colombia.¹³

From La Violencia to the FARC

A watershed in Colombian history known as La Violencia (1948–1958) erupted when the oligarchy split along political, ideological, and regional lines in their struggle against the landless workers and peasantry.¹⁴ From the late 1940s, this power struggle within the Colombian ruling class determined the fate of Colombian politics. Old rivalries between the two major political parties in parliament, the Liberals and Conservatives, were consolidated. Amid the parliamentary infighting, a Liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, made a populist appeal against the oligarchy, pitting the “real country” against the “political country.”¹⁵ Gaitán sought the support of the shopkeepers and professionals of the petite bourgeoisie, as well as the landless workers and peasantry. For the oligarchy, populism in any form was tantamount to communist subversion and was seen as a direct threat to their class interests. This nationalist expression was demonstrated through conflict between industrialists and unions. It reached a climax when Gaitán was gunned down in Bogotá on April 9, 1948. His assassination was the first covert action by the CIA in Colombia and spurred a major uprising called the Bogotázo.¹⁶

Liberals and leftists blamed the Conservative government for Gaitán’s murder. Workers and the lumpenproletariat, the middle class, and small traders stormed the city, attacking police stations and government offices, the symbols of a political system that excluded and impoverished them, instigating La Violencia.¹⁷ Landowners urged the military to fire on the insurgent crowds. Communists and radicalized liberals were on death lists. The country was convulsed by the upsurge, and liberal landowners organized campesinos into guerrilla armies. Paramilitary groups of civilians and police, such as the aplanchadores (“flatteners” from Antioquia Department), chulavitas (volunteers from Chulavita in Boyaca Department), and the infamous pajaros (“birds” or assassins for hire from Valle and Caldas), carried out military operations against the masses.¹⁸

In the unremitting struggle over land, trade unions retaliated against state violence by organizing armed self-defense groups in the mountains. The Moscow-aligned Colombian Communist Party organized a broad peasant resistance, including the foundation of guerrilla base camps.¹⁹ With the support of the United States, the Colombian military responded by attempting to systematically destroy these “Red” bases, while survivors fled and regrouped in the sparsely inhabited mountains and jungles of the interior.²⁰

With U.S. guidance and aid, the counterinsurgency campaign against the rebel campesinos began on May 18, 1964, when the Colombian armed forces surrounded and attacked Marquetalia, the principal rebel agrarian community.²¹ Labeling the autonomous communities “independent republics,” the Colombian government sent 16,000 troops (one-third of its army), accompanied by tanks, helicopters, and warplanes, and carried out bombing campaigns against the department of Marquetalia. The Colombian Communist Party and peasant rebels retreated to the agricultural frontiers in Amazonia, where the state had a limited presence.²² Modeled on the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, “Plan Lazo” sent “hunter-killer units” to assassinate peasants, whether armed or unarmed. Between 1963 and 1966, Colombian state forces used U.S.-supplied helicopters, vehicles, communications equipment, and weapons to destroy the rebel communities in Marquetalia, Rio Chiquito, El Pato-Guayabero, and Santa Barbara. The first military air assault on Marquetalia was in a U.S. helicopter piloted by a Colombian and accompanied by a U.S. Air Force instructor.²³

La Violencia ensured that land ownership by the oligarchy remained unchanged in Colombia. The landless remained landless, and the power of the oligarchs continued to dominate the nation’s politics. For the urban elite, particularly the industrialists, La Violencia was an economic success. Capital accumulation was so great that President Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958–1962) concluded that “blood and capital accumulation went together.”²⁴ Political opposition was outlawed and repressed.

Rewarded by the United States with investment and loans, Colombia saw a huge expansion in commercial agriculture and dominant landowners became highly represented in the government. Colombia became a showcase for the Alliance for Progress, an anti-communist aid and development program begun in 1961 by the Kennedy administration to reward U.S. allies in Latin America and to offset the radicalizing effect of the Cuban Revolution. The United States moved along two Latin American tracks in the early 1960s: overthrow Cuba and neutralize revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. The Alliance for Progress was promoted as an economic solution to poverty, but its ultimate purpose was to deepen U.S. economic penetration of Latin America.²⁵ Colombian initiatives conformed to the Alliance emphasis on “self-help,” and both U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, singled out the Colombian programs for praise in spite of growing corruption and mismanagement. Stevenson noted that Colombia continued to face problems associated with communist infiltration, bandit-like violence in the countryside, and economic dislocation, but he expressed optimism in the Colombian response to the American assistance.²⁶

The political repression experienced in Colombia and other Latin American countries during the Cold War led left-wing intellectuals to seek a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. Political movements arose across Latin America, turning to the success of the Cuban Revolution for inspiration. In Colombia, these political developments culminated in the founding of the FARC in 1964 by La Violencia veterans Jacobo Arenas and Manuel Marulanda Vélez, then Chief Commandant of Central High Command, and other armed guerrilla groups such as the ELN, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and M-19 soon after.²⁷

Between 1970 and 1982, the FARC expanded from the 500 who survived the earlier wave of state terror to a peasant-guerrilla army of 3,000. The campesinos stood at the forefront of the Colombian struggle. The emerging cocaine phenomenon provided Colombia’s poorest campesinos with an opportunity to grow a cash crop in the form of the coca plant. In the areas pacified by the state, the campesinos faced repression and ruin. Forced off the land to make way for agricultural exports and confined mainly to the lowland regions southeast of Bogotá they helped colonize, their agricultural subsistence grew increasingly precarious. Displaced and ignored by the state, the peasant guerrillas were left with no option but to cultivate coca as a cash crop. No legal crop, like coffee, sugar, or bananas, offered the advantages of growing and selling coca, which requires neither fertilizers nor pesticides. Not only did coca find a ready market of local traffickers with a fixed price, but the constant demand made it the ideal cash crop for the peasant guerrillas. At the FARC’s Seventh Conference from May 4 to 12, 1982, the guerrillas outlined the emergence of a revolutionary situation in Colombia. For the first time since the guerrilla movement in Marquetalia, this FARC conference proposed a clear strategic and operational concept for a Marxist insurgency and changed its mechanisms of leadership and command. The conference announced, “From now on, we officially call ourselves: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army, FARC-EP.”²⁸

From the beginning of La Violencia, U.S. political and economic support to Colombia created a form of Colombian dependency. Colombia’s political dependence on the United States deepened the four-decade war against the FARC and continued into the U.S. war on drugs and war on terror. These campaigns provided the United States with the pretext to condemn the FARC as “narco-terrorists” and the main threat to Colombia.

Forty-eight percent of Colombian land is owned by wealthy absentee landlords, who make up 1.3 percent of the population.²⁹ Poor peasants, who account for 68 percent of the population, own approximately five percent of the land. Wealth and influence are concentrated in the hands of the compradores, with a 1998 study estimating that 42 percent of the arable land is owned by the drug cartels, integrating drug traffickers into Colombian agribusiness, military defense, and politics.³⁰

At the end of the 1990s, the FARC’s power and influence extended to over 60 percent of Colombia.³¹ In less than three years, over 93 percent of all regions of recent settlement in Colombia had seen guerrilla activity.³² In the department of Cundinamarca, which surrounds the capital city of Bogotá, FARC was active in 83 of its 116 municipalities. Some areas are formally organized by the FARC, with schools, medical facilitie...