In her July 7 Wall Street Journal column titled “FARC’s ‘Human Rights’ Friends,” O’Grady ludicrously suggests that the Colombian military’s recent rescue operation proved successful because the FARC and progressive NGOs are allies. She claims that it is this alleged alliance that made it possible for Colombian soldiers disguised as NGO workers and journalists to simply waltz into FARC territory and convince the guerrillas to handover the hostages. “How else to explain the fact that the FARC swallowed the line without batting an eye?” she writes. She later declared that, given the relationship between NGOs and the guerrillas, “It’s not surprising that the FARC thought a helicopter from an NGO was perfectly natural.” However, O’Grady’s unoriginal hypothesis is nice from a propagandistic perspective, but holds little water when the reality on the ground is taken into account.

For more than eight years I have worked as an independent journalist primarily focusing on US foreign policy in Colombia. Consequently, I have spent a significant amount of time working in that country’s remote rural conflict zones during which I have met and interviewed numerous rank-and-file guerrillas and several high-ranking FARC commanders — Raúl Reyes, Simón Trinidad, Ivan Ríos and Alfonso Cano. And yet, despite the familiarity that these FARC commanders have with both my name and my work as a lefty journalist, I still had to endure terrifying experiences whenever I encountered the rebel group.

For example, in 2001, FARC guerrillas in the city of Barrancabermeja in northern Colombia detained me in a poor barrio and accused me of being an informer for the military — it was no easy task to convince them otherwise. In 2004, I was detained overnight by the guerrillas in rural Caquetá while investigating displacement caused by the Colombian military’s Plan Patriota counter-insurgency operation. And, in August 2006, I was detained by the FARC in eastern Colombia, interrogated and held at gunpoint in a remote farmhouse for eleven hours as they sought to ensure that I was who I claimed to be. In each instance, I was detained by a local commander who was unwilling to make any decision regarding my fate without first conferring with higher-ranking FARC commanders.

The point I am trying to make here is that journalists and NGO workers who have encountered the FARC in rural Colombia know full well that the guerrillas do not take anybody’s claims about who they are at face value. Nor do they automatically assume that if you are a journalist or an NGO worker that you are in any way sympathetic to their cause. In fact, it is just the opposite. The FARC is paranoid about anyone who enters its territories — particularly with regard to journalists and NGO workers — and automatically assumes that such people are threats. And, to the same degree that the Wall Street Journal’s O’Grady and Colombia’s President Uribe accuse progressive NGOs of being fronts for the guerrillas, the FARC believes that the very same NGOs are fronts for capitalist imperialism — as difficult as that might be for O’Grady to accept.

If she had any understanding of how the FARC operates in rural Colombia, O’Grady would have known that César, the rebel commander in charge of the hostages, would had to have been convinced in advance — perhaps by undercover military operatives, as the government claims — that it was a legitimate mission that had been authorized by his superiors before he would hand over the hostages. No local FARC commander would simply assume that an NGO was working with the guerrillas just because they showed up in the region, which is precisely what O’Grady suggests occurred so she could claim it as proof that progressive NGOs work hand-in-hand with the guerrillas.

Consequently, the key aspect in the rescue operation — if it did unfold as the Colombian government claims — was not the fact that the undercover soldiers were impersonating NGO workers and journalists, but the convincing of César that higher-ranking rebel commanders had indeed authorized the hostage pick-up. Without receiving any such advance authorization, it would not have mattered who the undercover soldiers carrying out the operation were impersonating, the local FARC commander would have detained and investigated them. Therefore, while the rescue mission might illustrate the effectiveness of the Colombian military’s intelligence operations, it does not support O’Grady’s and President Uribe’s assertions that NGOs are fronts for the guerrillas.

Because I have had access to the FARC, I am regularly approached by NGOs — both Colombian and international — asking if I could help put them in contact with the guerrillas because they would like to discuss a variety of topics (i.e. child soldiers, kidnapping, landmines, hostage release and other human rights issues) with the rebels. If, as O’Grady and President Uribe claim, NGOs — particularly human rights groups — are fronts for the FARC, why would so many of them lack contact with the rebel group and need help from people like me? Most NGOs I have dealt with over the years, and there are many, do not like the guerrillas, which the FARC is fully aware of and why it is so distrusting of them and often refuses to engage with them. This distrust is illustrated by the fact that, while NGOs are active in rural regions being contested by all the armed actors — the guerrillas, the military and the paramilitaries — they have virtually no presence in the remote rural areas of eastern and southern Colombia that constitute the FARC’s traditional strongholds.

Ultimately, right-wingers like O’Grady and President Uribe want to have their cake and to eat it too. On the one hand, they claim that the FARC has no significant support among the Colombian population. And yet, on the other hand, they claim that all these NGOs support the guerrillas; that the thousands of peasants living in FARC-controlled regions that are victimized by the military’s counter-insurgency operations are sympathetic to the rebels; that the thousands of leftist politicians, NGO workers and community leaders who have been arbitrarily arrested by the Uribe government in recent years are all guerrillas; that many of the leaders and members of the country’s unions are rebels; and that the Colombia’s universities are full of guerrilla sympathizers. These claims represent a contradiction repeatedly voiced by the right that has gone unchallenged for far too long.

The right cannot have it both ways. If the FARC has no significant support, as they claim, then all of those sectors of civil society that are routinely repressed by the government cannot be guerrilla sympathizers. In which case, there must be alternative reason for the State repressing those sectors of the population; and that reason is simply that they dare to non-violently and democratically challenge the government’s security and economic policies. The government conveniently labels these sectors as guerrillas or “terrorists” in order to justify repressing them.

Finally, when people like O’Grady and President Uribe publicly label NGO workers as terrorists, they are endangering the lives of these people by increasing the possibility that the Colombian state security forces and their right-wing paramilitaries allies will target them — which, on second thoughts, perhaps does make the Wall Street Journal a front for state terrorists. Ultimately, such accusations by O’Grady and President Uribe are not only irresponsible, they also illustrate an unwillingness to tolerate the democratic and non-violent expression of political views that differ from their own.

According to the Colombian government, military intelligence operatives infiltrated the highest levels of the FARC’s command structure. These operatives then convinced the guerrilla commander responsible for guarding the hostages that Jorge Briceno (alias Mono Jojoy), a member of the group’s seven-person secretariat, had ordered that three groups of hostages be brought together in preparation for a humanitarian exchange agreed to by the FARC’s Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano. The Uribe administration claims that Colombian soldiers disguised as aid workers and journalists then arrived at the rendezvous location deep in the jungle and retrieved the 15 hostages and captured the guerrilla commander and another rebel without a shot being fired even though there were some 60 other FARC fighters in the immediate vicinity. The government claimed it was an elaborate long-term operation that was conducted flawlessly.

However, there is a far more plausible scenario. The FARC had already decided to unilaterally release the 15 hostages following talks with two European envoys who had arrived in Colombia in late June to meet with high-ranking rebels in the region in which Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano is located. Consequently, it was Cano who gave the order to gather the hostages together from the three separate camps in which they were being held.

Meanwhile, under this scenario, the Colombian government was seeking to bribe FARC commander Gerardo Antonio Aguilar (alias “César”), who was in charge of guarding the hostages, in order to gain their release. The Colombian military had captured César’s rebel wife several months earlier and convinced her to contact her husband to offer him $20 million in return for the release of the hostages.

Ultimately, the coinciding events of FARC commander Cano ordering the hostages to be gathered in one place in preparation for their release, the interception of this information by Colombian and US intelligence services and the bribing of César allowed the Colombian military to exploit the situation and stage a rescue of hostages who would have been liberated anyway. The benefits of such a staged operation for the Uribe administration are clear: the government would receive the credit for the release of the hostages rather than the FARC; and the military could sow seeds of distrust in the ranks of the rebels by claiming it has infiltrated the guerrilla group at the highest levels.

This hypothesis is supported by various sources that have been quoted in the several media outlets over the previous few days and by certain events of the last few months. Several days prior to the liberation of the hostages, the Associated Press and other media outlets reported that two international envoys — Noel Saez of France and Jean Pierre Cotard of Switzerland — were seeking to meet with FARC Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano to gain the release of the hostages. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s press secretary, Cesar Mauricio Velasquez, confirmed the presence of the envoys in Colombia and acknowledged that they had the Colombian government’s permission to meet with the rebels.

According to an unidentified source quoted by Inter Press Service, the FARC Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano agreed to unilaterally release the 15 hostages and ordered that they be brought together in one location. “Their release was planned for this weekend (Jul. 5-6) or the next, as agreed by the Secretariat (FARC’s governing body) and ‘Alfonso Cano’ (their top commander) himself, that’s why they were brought together,” the source claimed. “The (Colombian) armed forces found out, and intercepted their liberation to make it look like a rescue.”

The success of the military “rescue” may well have been guaranteed by the Uribe government’s ability to buy the cooperation of FARC commander César, who was responsible for guarding the hostages. Several months earlier, the Colombian military had captured the wife of César, and according to Swiss radio station RSR, quoting a “reliable source” close to the operation, she was trying to convince her rebel husband to release the high-profile hostages — former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors — in return for a $20 million payment agreed to by the Colombian and US governments.

This claim is buttressed by recent public comments made by Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe that his government had established a $100 million fund to pay to individual guerrilla guards who released their hostages. And then, last month, Uribe publicly stated that his government was in touch with guerrillas guarding the hostages. Perhaps the most compelling evidence that César might have agreed to release the hostages and cooperate with the staged rescue mission is the fact that he and another guerrilla laid their weapons on the ground before boarding the helicopter unarmed. It is common knowledge that FARC guerrillas are trained to never leave their weapons and the fact that César did so suggests that he was quitting the armed struggle rather than following orders he believed had come from his superiors.

The Colombian government has vehemently denied that it paid any money to obtain the release of the hostages. The Uribe administration claimed that the unidentified “reliable source” quoted in the Swiss radio report was none other than Swiss envoy Jean Pierre Cotard and immediately set out to discredit him. However, in their attempt to discredit Cotard, they also validated his credibility as someone who would know such information.

On July 6, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos accused Cotard of providing the FARC with almost $500,000 in funding. Santos claimed that emails in the laptop of the late FARC commander Raúl Reyes suggested that Cotard was responsible for delivering the money to FARC envoys in Costa Rica where it was later seized. Santos did not make the alleged email public and did not explain why the Colombian government had approved Cotard’s role as a negotiator the week before the hostages were liberated if it believed he was affiliated with the rebel group. Ultimately, whether or not the alleged email exists — and if so, whether it does link Cotard to the FARC — it is evident that Cotard has been in a position to obtain sensitive information related to the hostage saga and his comments cannot be summarily dismissed — if he is indeed the “reliable source” quoted by the Swiss radio station RSR.

Ultimately, the government’s version of the how the liberation of the hostages occurred appears too neat-and-tidy and a little far-fetched, even given the FARC’s current disarray. The alternative scenario seems far more plausible: that the liberation of the hostages resulted from a combination of the FARC agreeing to release them, government intelligence sources learning of the planned liberation, the bribing of the guerrilla commander in charge of guarding the hostages, and a staged rescue operation to make the Uribe administration and the Colombian military appear heroic. The staged rescue also allowed the government to steal the positive public relations spotlight that the FARC would have enjoyed through a unilateral release of the hostages and to hide the fact that the Uribe administration paid for the liberation of the captives.

Last week’s rescue mission — assuming it did occur as the Colombian government claims and that a ransom was not paid to secure the release of the hostages — was not the first time that the Uribe administration has used the strategy of disguising state security forces as journalists to gain access to hostages. Only last month, a grenade-toting former soldier took 19 people hostage in the government’s pension office in the Colombian capital, Bogotá. The hostage-taker allowed reporters and camera crews to enter the building so he could publicly state his demands that he be paid a pension for his two decades of military service. Undercover police officers posed as journalists in order to gain access to the building and then successfully subdued the man and freed the hostages.

The tactics used last week to rescue the 15 hostages — including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors — held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) mimicked that earlier operation. The rescue mission also replicated many aspects of a humanitarian operation conducted by the Venezuelan government three months ago that secured the release of four hostages held by the FARC. Participants in that operation included legitimate journalists and NGO workers who arrived at the remote rendezvous point in an unmarked helicopter to receive the released hostages.

According to General Fredy Padilla de Leon, commander of the Colombian army, the soldiers who participated in last week’s rescue operation took acting classes for a week and a half to learn how to impersonate, not only guerrillas, but also journalists and aid workers. After convincing the guerrilla in charge of the hostages that his captives were to be transported to where the FARC’s supreme commander Alfonso Cano was located, the soldiers arrived at the rendezvous point in two white helicopters devoid of markings. Four of the soldiers on board were disguised as aid workers and two others impersonated a television journalist and cameraman in order to convince the rebels that a fictional NGO was helping to coordinate a prisoner exchange.

The tactics used by the Colombian government will undoubtedly increase the risks faced by journalists and NGO workers who operate in the country’s rural conflict zones. Colombia’s armed groups, particularly the FARC, will now be even more distrustful of anyone who claims to be a reporter or aid worker. This is likely of little concern to Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe, who has repeatedly endangered the lives of human rights defenders critical of his security policies by accusing them of being spokespersons for the guerrillas. On one prime time national television broadcast in 2003, Uribe accused the country’s NGOs of “politicking at the service of terrorism.”

Having worked for years in Colombia’s rural conflict zones, I have been detained on several occasions by FARC guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries who have accused me of being an informer for the Colombian military. In a country that is among the world’s leaders in the number of journalists assassinated, such moments are tense and nerve-wracking. Sometimes, it wasn’t easy to convince the armed groups that I was indeed a legitimate journalist and not an informer.

Because of the tactics used in last week’s rescue operation, there is no telling how the FARC might respond to the next legitimate journalist who enters a region under the rebel group’s control. Or how the guerrillas will react in the future when a genuine medical boat belonging to the International Red Cross gets stopped at a rebel checkpoint on a remote jungle river. So while the world is awash in joy over the liberation of the 15 hostages, people should take a moment to reflect on the possibility that journalists and aid workers might be killed in the future because of the irresponsible tactics used by the Uribe administration.

Foreign oil and mining companies operating in Colombia’s rural regions have become enmeshed in the country’s conflict and its related human rights abuses. Many of these companies house Colombian military units on their installations and provide combat troops with logistical support, including the use of company vehicles, helicopters and fuel. This relationship between foreign companies and the Colombian military is particularly troubling given the dramatic increase in human rights violations perpetrated by state security forces in recent years.

According to the Bogotá-based Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), during President Alvaro Uribe’s first term in office (2002-2006), the percentage of the country’s human rights violations directly perpetrated by state agents increased from 17 percent when he assumed office to 56 percent in 2006. The increased role of the state in human rights abuses has paralleled the implementation of neoliberal reforms that have created favorable investment conditions for multinational companies.

In 1999, US Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson visited the Colombian city of Cartagena to address US economic interests in the South American nation. During his visit, Richardson announced, “The United States and its allies will invest millions of dollars in two areas of the Colombian economy, in the areas of mining and energy, and to secure these investments we are tripling military aid to Colombia.” The ensuing tripling of military aid occurred the following year under Plan Colombia, which was presented as a counter-narcotics initiative to the US Congress and the public.

Also in 1999, Colombia experienced its worst economic recession in more than half a century and, for the first time, the country turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout loan. In December of that year — one month before President Bill Clinton announced Plan Colombia — the IMF agreed to lend Colombia $2.7 billion on the condition that the government implement structural reforms that included privatizing state-owned companies, deregulating the economy and opening up the country’s natural resources for exploitation by multinational companies. In essence, the IMF-demanded structural reforms became the economic component of Plan Colombia.

Between 2001 and 2004, as part of the structural reforms, the oil and mining regulations were restructured to provide a favorable investment climate for foreign companies. In 2001, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) assisted the Colombian government in re-writing the country’s mining code. The new CIDA-backed code relaxed environmental regulations on mining operations, extended the length of concessions issued to foreign corporations and, perhaps most importantly, reduced the royalty rates that companies were required to pay to the Colombian government on the resources they extracted.

Under Article 227 of the new code, the royalty rates on coal were reduced from the previous level of 10-15 percent to a mere 0.4 percent. In reference to the new royalty rate, Francisco Ramírez, president of the Colombian State Mineworkers’ Union (Sintraminercol), declared, “With the stroke of a pen, once again the Nation lost enormous sums of money which could have been used to address social problems, like the fact that 80 children in Colombia perish every day from hunger, malnutrition, and curable diseases.”

In the petroleum sector, prior to 2001, foreign companies were required to sign association contracts with Colombia’s state oil company Ecopetrol under which each party would own 50 per cent of the oil produced. However, three years later neoliberal reforms had ensured that multinational companies were no longer required to enter into partnership with Ecopetrol as they were given the rights to 100 per cent of the oil they produced. The Colombian government also reduced the royalty rate that multinational companies were required to pay on each barrel of oil from 20 percent to 8 percent.

The revised contract terms in the oil and mining sectors led to a dramatic increase in the number of new contracts signed by multinational energy companies, causing foreign direct investment to soar. Despite the favorable terms for foreign oil and mining companies and the diminished financial benefits to Colombia under the new contracts, José Armando Zamora, director of the government’s National Hydrocarbon Agency, insisted that the contract concessions “do not represent a loss of sovereignty or the sale of the nation’s resources.”

While the economic reforms in the oil and mining sectors provided favorable investment conditions for foreign companies, the lack of security in rural regions made it difficult to take advantage of the new contract terms. In 2001, for example, leftist guerrillas, demanding that the government nationalize the oil industry, bombed Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum’s pipeline in Arauca in eastern Colombia a record 170 times, shutting it down for 240 days during the year, costing the company $100 million in lost earnings.

One way for companies to avoid having their operations attacked by guerrillas is to pay the “war taxes” demanded by the rebels. Though no foreign oil companies have admitted to directly paying off the guerrillas, Occidental Vice-President Lawrence Merriage has acknowledged that in the past his company’s contractors have met extortion demands in Arauca. When asked about FARC threats and demands in the southern department of Putumayo, Edgar Dyes of Houston-based Argosy Energy claimed he had no knowledge about whether or not the company’s contractors had made extortion payments to the rebels. Interestingly, the FARC has for most part left Argosy’s operations untouched in its offensives against oil infrastructure in that region.

Foreign companies that refuse to pay the guerrillas are dependent on the Colombian military to safeguard their operations. And as Energy Secretary Richardson made clear in 1999, US military aid helps provide the necessary security for foreign oil and mining companies operating in Colombia’s rural conflict zones. Plan Colombia, which represented the initial US military aid package, was soon supplemented with counter-terrorism funding following the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States. By 2003, the newly strengthened Colombian military was aggressively implementing the security policies of President Uribe.

In the southern Colombian department of Putumayo, which has been the principal target of Plan Colombia, the so-called counter-narcotics initiative has provided increased security for US and Canadian oil companies operating in the region. The Colombian army’s principal objective has not been the defense of a civilian population caught in the midst of the conflict, but rather the protection of foreign companies taking advantage of IMF-imposed neoliberal reforms.

As the Colombian Army’s Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Javier Cruz, commander of 1,200 troops in Putumayo, made clear in 2004, “Security is the most important thing to me. Oil companies need to work without worrying and international investors need to feel calm.” The fact that US counter-narcotics aid has helped secure the oil operations of multinational companies was made evident by Cruz when he stated, “We are conducting better operations now because we have tools like helicopters, troops and training provided in large part by Plan Colombia.” Cruz has not only benefited from the use of helicopters supplied by the United States under Plan Colombia, he also acknowledged that he and his troops have access to two helicopters owned by Ecopetrol and the Canadian company Petrobank for use in combat operations.

Petrobank is not the only foreign company providing logistical support to Colombian army units engaged in counter-insurgency operations. According to Captain Wilfredo González, commander of two hundred Colombian soldiers stationed inside the Alabama-based Drummond Company’s Pribbenow coalmine in northern Colombia, the company provides fuel for the helicopters that his troops use to combat guerrillas who pose a threat to mining operations in the region. Similarly, a spokesperson for Occidental Petroleum acknowledged that the oil company provides logistical support to the Colombian Army’s 18th Brigade, which is responsible for protecting oil operations in Arauca.

The oil-rich region of Arauca provides perhaps the clearest example of the relationship between the operations of foreign companies and human rights abuses perpetrated by Colombian soldiers responsible for protecting their investments. Following 9/11, the Bush administration aided Occidental’s efforts to protect its operations by deploying 70 US Army Special Forces soldiers to Arauca to provide counter-insurgency training to the Colombian Army’s 18th Brigade. Over the next 18 months, while the US soldiers were based in Arauca, there was a significant drop in the number of rebel attacks against Occidental’s oil facilities. At the same time, however, the 18th Brigade was not only using its newly acquired counter-insurgency skills against the guerrillas, it was also targeting civilians critical of the Uribe government’s security and economic policies.

In May 2003, soldiers from the 18th Brigade and right-wing paramilitaries entered the Betoyes indigenous reserve in Arauca where they raped and killed a pregnant sixteen-year-old indigenous girl and then cut the fetus out of her stomach before disposing of her body in a river. Two other indigenous people were also killed and more than eight hundred forcibly displaced.

On August 21, soldiers from the army base in Saravena, Arauca, raided homes and arrested 42 trade unionists, social activists and human rights defenders who were accused of being terrorists. Several months later, soldiers from various units of the 18th Brigade rounded up more than 25 opposition politicians in Arauca less than a week before local elections. Among those arrested for suspected ties to guerrillas were the mayor of Arauca City, the president of the regional assembly, a candidate for governor, and five mayoral candidates. Amnesty International accused the Uribe administration of politicizing human rights, claiming, “A lot of it has to do with silencing those who campaign for human and socio-economic rights.” The timing of the arrests, only days before local elections, also led an Amnesty spokesperson to declare, “It is part of a strategy to undermine the opposition’s credibility.”

In August 2004, Colombian soldiers from the same base housing the US military advisors again ventured out into Saravena’s barrios. This time, the soldiers dragged three union leaders out of their beds in the middle of the night and executed them in cold blood. The Colombian army initially claimed that the three unionists were armed guerrillas killed in battle, but an investigation conducted by local and international human rights groups ultimately pressured Colombia’s attorney general’s office into launching its own probe. Deputy Attorney General Luis Alberto Santana later announced, “The evidence shows that a homicide was committed. We have ruled out that there was combat.”

Multinational companies operating in Colombia’s rural conflict zones have also been linked to the country’s right-wing paramilitary death squads, which are closely allied with the Colombian military. In March 2001, a paramilitary death squad stopped a company bus carrying workers from Drummond’s Pribbenow Mine. The armed gunmen pulled two people off the bus and executed them. The victims, Valmore Locarno and Victor Hugo Orcasita, were the president and vice-president of the local chapter of the Colombian union Sintramienergetica, which represents the mine’s workers. Seven months later, paramilitaries took the union local’s new president, Gustavo Soler Mora, from a company bus and killed him.

In 2002, a suit was filed in US Federal Court on behalf of Sintramienergetica claiming that the company had “aided and abetted” the paramilitary perpetrators of the murders. While Drummond denied the allegations, a sworn statement by former Colombian intelligence officer Rafael García supported the union’s claims. In his affidavit, García said he witnessed Augusto Jiménez, president of Drummond’s Colombia operations, hand over a “suitcase full of cash” to a paramilitary commander named Julian as payment for killing Locarno and Orcasita. Former paramilitary fighter Alberto Visbal verified García’s statement, claiming that he was also present when Jiménez handed his commander $200,000 in cash. However, the judge refused to allow the statements to be submitted as evidence, declaring that the case was beyond the discovery stage. Consequently, the jury had little choice but to find Drummond not guilty.

Drummond is not the only multinational company that has been accused of maintaining ties to paramilitaries. The union representing Coca-Cola’s workers in Colombia has claimed the soft drink manufacturer recruited paramilitaries to murder a labor leader at one of its Colombian bottling plants in 1996 in an attempt to bust the union. Further links between multinational corporations and the paramilitaries were made evident in 2007 when Cincinnati-based Chiquita pleaded guilty in a US court to funding paramilitaries in the banana-growing region in northern Colombia. Between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita paid $1.7 million to the paramilitaries even though the company knew that they were on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The Uribe administration claims that the paramilitaries have been demobilized, but according to many analysts the disbandment of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) represents little more than a restructuring of the militia group. The Colombian NGO Indepaz, for instance, reports 43 new paramilitary groups totaling almost 4,000 fighters have formed in 23 of the country’s 32 departments. Meanwhile, the OAS estimates there are 20 new paramilitary groups with 3,000 fighters operating in Colombia.

While the Uribe administration dismisses these new militias as criminal organizations and not actors in the armed conflict, one of Colombia’s leading human rights lawyers, Alirio Uribe of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective disagrees: “There are 43 new paramilitary groups but, according to the Ministry of Defense, these new paramilitary groups have nothing to do with the old ones. But the truth is, they are the same. Before they were the AUC, now they are called the New Generation AUC. They have the same collusion with the army and the police. It’s a farce.”

While the Uribe administration’s demobilization process has failed to completely disband the right-wing death squads, it has led to a decrease in human rights abuses perpetrated by the paramilitaries. However, a significant portion of that decrease — particularly in Colombia’s rural conflict zones — has been offset by the military’s increased role in human rights violations. These violations include extra-judicial executions, forced displacements, disappearances and arbitrary arrests, with many of the abuses occurring in regions where multinational oil and mining companies operate.

As previously stated, when President Uribe assumed office in 2002, the state was responsible for 17 percent of all human rights violations. Four year’s later, at the end of Uribe’s first term, the state was responsible for 56 percent of human rights abuses — more than double the total number of violations perpetrated by the military and other government agents in 2002.

Perhaps most troubling is the escalation in the number of extra-judicial executions perpetrated by state agents. According to a coalition of eleven Colombian human rights groups, extra-judicial executions carried out by state agents during President Uribe’s initial five years in office (2002-2007) increased by an alarming 66 percent when compared to the previous five years. Of the 955 documented instances that occurred between July 2002 and July 2007, convictions have been obtained in only two cases — an impunity rate of over 99 percent.

Colombia’s much lauded economic growth has paralleled a troubling increase in human rights violations perpetrated by the Colombian military and other state actors. These two phenomena are directly related as security policies intended to establish a favorable environment for foreign investors in the extractive sector have led to widespread abuses. US-backed counter-insurgency strategies routinely target the civilian population as part of a dirty war in which it is assumed that peasants, unionists and community leaders in resource-rich regions are either guerrillas or, at the very least, rebel sympathizers.

Foreign companies exploiting Colombia’s natural resources often provide logistical support to a military that is becoming increasingly engaged in human rights violations. Consequently, they have become complicit in human rights abuses perpetrated by military units responsible for protecting their operations. Meanwhile, despite Colombia’s robust economic growth, more than 80 percent of the rural population continues to live in poverty while also being forced to endure the ongoing violence. As one peasant in the oil-rich region of Putumayo noted, “Everyone knows the conflict in the Middle East is because of oil, and Colombia’s problems are no different. Maybe the coca is going, but there’s still oil. And if there’s oil, then the armed groups won’t leave because they are interested in places where there is money and power.”

Sixty-one elected officials, the majority of whom are political allies of President Uribe, are currently under investigation for ties to right-wing paramilitaries belonging to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Thirty of the officials are already in prison, including the president’s cousin and former senator Mario Uribe. Much of the evidence linking the politicians with the AUC has come from testimonies provided by paramilitary leaders as part of the demobilization process.

For President Uribe, the demobilization of the AUC — the country’s principal violators of human rights — was supposed to represent a peace feather in his cap. The original goal of the demobilization was to have the paramilitary leaders serve prison terms as short as 22 months — once the negotiating process was considered as time served and good behavior was taken into account. In return, the paramilitary leaders would demobilize all their fighters, confess their crimes and completely dismantle their criminal organizations, including their drug trafficking networks — or at least appear to do so.

However, due to international pressure and virulent protests from sectors within Colombian civil society, Uribe was forced to revise the plan to provide the AUC leaders with a virtual amnesty, instead insisting that they serve eight years in prison. The paramilitary leaders responded by threatening to withdraw from the process. Uribe then ordered them transferred from the ranch in northern Colombia where the negotiations had taken place to maximum-security prisons.

The original plan hatched between Uribe and the AUC leaders began to unravel as animosity between the government and the paramilitaries intensified. Demobilized paramilitary leaders soon began revealing ties between the militia and elected officials allied with the country’s president. The para-politics scandal has not only undermined the legitimacy of the Colombian government, it has also hurt Uribe’s efforts to sign free trade agreements with the United States and Canada.

With the paramilitary leaders safely ensconced in maximum-security prisons, there was no need to secretly whisk them out of the country in the middle of the night. Even if they were still managing their illegal activities from within their prisons cells — and they likely were — the Uribe administration could have allowed the AUC leaders to complete their testimonies before announcing its intention to extradite them. However, to do so would have ensured that Uribe and his political allies would have become further enmeshed in the para-politics investigation.

The most effective way of silencing the paramilitary leaders was to extradite them to the United States where they will stand trial on drug trafficking charges. Meanwhile, their human rights abuses and links to Colombian officials will be considered irrelevant to the cases against them and so will remain secret. In all likelihood, as has occurred with FARC guerrilla leader Simón Trinidad since he was extradited to the United States, the paramilitary leaders will be kept in seclusion making it impossible for them to make public any new evidence that could prove uncomfortable for Uribe and his political allies. Furthermore, the Bush administration is more than happy to oblige Uribe efforts to thwart justice given that the Colombian leader is Washington’s closest ally in Latin America.

President Uribe likely knew that any prior announcement of his intention to extradite the paramilitary leaders would have resulted in a significant backlash from the political opposition, criminal investigators and human rights organizations, all of who would demand that he allow the testimonies to continue. With some of the most prominent paramilitary leaders, including AUC chief Salvatore Mancuso, now in US prisons, it will prove much more difficult for prosecutors to effectively investigate the links between politicians and the right-wing death squads. Claudia Lopez, an independent investigator, acknowledged this new reality when she declared, “They’ve taken away all the witnesses.”

The disconnect between what people believe and the human rights reality in Colombia has again been made evident by the recent issuance of arrest warrants for Colombian soldiers responsible for the February 2005 massacre of eight peasants in the peace community of San José de Apartadó. Immediately following the massacre, community members had claimed that the Colombian army was operating in the area at the time. The Colombian Defense Ministry immediately denied these claims, stating that the army was not involved in the killings and that “no army troops were closer than two days’ distance” from where the massacre occurred.

Vice-President Francisco Santos then quickly sought to shift blame for the massacre to the guerrillas by stating, “The Government has evidence that leads to the FARC as authors of this horrible crime.” According to this alleged evidence, the victims were FARC collaborators who were killed for trying to leave the guerrilla group. And then, several weeks after the massacre, President Alvaro Uribe accused leaders of the peace community of San José de Apartadó of “helping the FARC” and “wanting to use the community to protect this terrorist organization.” By publicly aligning the victims with the guerrillas — a common strategy of the Colombian government — the president sought to redirect attention away from the possible perpetrators and onto the victims by holding them responsible for their own deaths.

While the mainstream media dutifully reported all of the government’s accusations, the fact that the massacre occurred in San José de Apartadó posed a problem for the Uribe administration. The peace community has achieved a relatively high profile with international solidarity and human rights organizations over the past decade, which led to the mainstream media in this particular case also reporting claims by community members that the Colombian army was involved in the massacre.

Finally, last week — more than three years after the massacre — Colombia’s attorney general’s office issued arrest warrants for 15 soldiers accused of perpetrating the killings. The warrants were issued following testimony given by a demobilized paramilitary fighter named Jorge Luis Salgado. According to Salgado, he and other paramilitaries acted as guides for the Colombian army patrol that committed the massacre in the hamlet of Mulatos in San José de Apartadó.

In his testimony, Salgado described the massacre: “The children were under the bed. The girl, about five or six years old, was very nice and the boy was smart as well. We suggested to the officers that they be left in a nearby house, but they said they were a threat, that they would become guerrillas in the future.” Salgado then claimed that an army officer, who went by the nickname Cobra, “grabbed the [five or six-year-old] girl by the hair and cut her throat with a machete.”

Salgado’s account of the massacre not only corroborates the long-standing claims of community members, it also illustrates how collusion between the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries was ongoing almost three years after President Uribe assumed office. Unfortunately, the majority of Colombians killed by the military and paramilitaries meet their fate in remote communities that lack the international exposure of San José de Apartadó. Consequently, the government’s propaganda strategy of blaming the FARC often proves far more successful in those instances.

In one such case, five indigenous Awa were massacred in the early morning hours of August 9, 2006 in the village of Ataquer in the southern department of Nariño. The gunmen, partially-uniformed and hooded, arrived at four o’clock in the morning on World Indigenous Day and dragged the indigenous leaders out of bed and shot them to death.

I flew to the city of Pasto the day after the killings and in my hotel room that evening watched a Colombian army general declare on the nightly news that the FARC had committed the massacre. All of Colombia’s mainstream media outlets dutifully reported the Colombian army’s accusations. A couple of days later, army Colonel Juan Pablo Amaya Kerguelen publicly declared, “We are open to all investigations, but we know it was the guerrillas in retaliation to the indigenous for not being informers.”

When I interviewed a spokesperson for the Grupo Cabal Mechanized Battalion—the army unit operating in the region where the massacre occurred — he reiterated the claim that the guerrillas were responsible for the killings. And, as had occurred following the San José de Apartadó massacre, the government issued a statement suggesting that some of the indigenous victims might have been guerrillas, thereby implying that it was “terrorists” that had been killed.

The second day after the massacre, I traveled from Pasto to Ataquer and soon discovered that no foreign correspondents had visited to investigate the story. As usual, foreign journalists were reporting on the massacre from the country’s capital, Bogotá, and again illustrating their over-reliance on official sources, which claimed that the FARC was responsible.

Given that, according to locals, the heavy military presence in the village that I witnessed was in place at the time of the killings, it was clear to me that the guerrillas could not have committed the massacre. I also learned that the indigenous Awa and many locals had drawn the same conclusion as myself: that the army was responsible for the killings. It was also the army that had forcibly displaced 1,700 Awa only a month earlier. I wrote up my findings in an article that was published by World Indigenous News. Meanwhile, local and national indigenous organizations pressured the attorney general’s office into investigating the army’s role in the massacre.

One year later, the attorney general’s investigation identified eleven suspects in the killing of the five Awa leaders. Six of the suspects were army officers and five civilians. Not surprisingly, given that the Awa lack the international profile of San José de Apartadó, the media did not report the new findings and the general population was left believing that FARC guerrillas had committed the massacre.

These two massacres illustrate the propaganda strategy that the Colombian government uses on a daily basis. Whenever killings occur, officials immediately blame the FARC and the mainstream media dutifully report the accusations without investigating the crimes for themselves. And when evidence finally emerges that it was actually the Colombian military or the paramilitaries that committed the killings, the mainstream media rarely reports the new findings, thereby leaving the impression that the FARC was the guilty party.

This propaganda strategy utilized by the Colombian government—with the acquiescence of the mainstream media — has led to people’s perception of the conflict becoming disconnected from the human rights reality on the ground. People are overwhelmed with news stories about killings allegedly perpetrated by the guerrillas while there are significantly fewer accounts of ongoing abuses by the Colombian military and its paramilitary allies — some details of past crimes revealed in testimony by demobilized paramilitaries are being published.

Meanwhile, Colombian and international human rights organizations that routinely document human rights violations have repeatedly shown over the years that the guerrillas are responsible for only a minority of the killings of civilians. For example, the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ) reported last year that during President Uribe’s first term in office (2002-2006), the guerrillas were responsible for 25 percent of the killings of civilians. Meanwhile, the paramilitaries accounted for 61 percent of the deaths and the Colombian military for the remaining 14 percent.

Because most people do not read annual human rights reports, the news stories ultimately influence the opinions of a far greater number of people. Consequently, President Uribe’s accusations that human rights groups are spokespersons for the guerrillas seems plausible to many because the human rights statistics they present contradict most people’s perception that the FARC is the principal abuser.

The same propaganda strategy is evident in other areas of human rights in Colombia. For instance, according to the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), 305,966 people were forcibly displaced in 2007 — a startling 38 percent increase over the previous year. However, because the Colombian military and paramilitaries are responsible for a majority of the forced displacements, and because the victims are poor Colombian peasants, there is little government focus on this human rights issue — and by extension little media emphasis of the humanitarian crisis.

In stark contrast, there is an enormous focus both in Colombia and internationally on kidnapping. In contrast to displaced persons, most kidnap victims are members of the middle and upper classes and it is the guerrillas that have violated their rights. The disproportionate media coverage of the plight of several hundred kidnap victims helps the government focus attention on human rights abuses perpetrated by the FARC. Meanwhile, more than a quarter of a million poor Colombians are displaced annually — the majority by state security forces — and their dilemma is mostly ignored.

The propaganda strategies of the Colombian government have proven very effective with regard to distorting the country’s human rights reality. Government officials blaming the FARC on an almost daily basis for killings committed throughout the country and a disproportionate focus on kidnapping has convinced most people that the guerrillas are the principal perpetrators of violence and human rights abuses. The fact that such perceptions stand in such stark contrast to the reality on the ground illustrates just how successfully the Colombian government has propagandized human rights.

Finally, the mainstream media in both Colombia and the United States are complicit in this psychological warfare by continuing to dutifully report the allegations of government officials even though reporters are fully aware of the fact that the claims are often false. It does not seem to matter to reporters and media outlets that the same officials have repeatedly manipulated them in the past—and are likely doing so again. Representatives of the mainstream media claim that they are simply reporting what a particular government official has said—and that the allegations by officials are, in and of themselves, news. However, by dutifully and unquestioningly reporting any statement issued by government officials, the mainstream media reduces itself to little more than a propaganda tool for the state.

Ever since he assumed the presidency, Uribe has been reluctant to engage in any negotiations with the FARC, even prisoner exchange talks, for fear of lending political legitimacy to the guerrilla group. However, Chávez’s successes in obtaining the unilateral release of six FARC captives in little more than a month had left many Colombians — particularly the loved ones of those being held by the rebels — feeling cautiously optimistic that a prisoner exchange could in fact be negotiated. Following the latest handover of captives, according to a senior Colombian military officer, “Chávez was thrilled by the release of the hostages and called Reyes to tell him that everything went well.” That phone call provided the Colombian president with the opportunity he needed to sabotage any possibility of a prisoner exchange once and for all.

In July 2007, Uribe had reluctantly bowed to increasing public pressure demanding that his government negotiate the release of those held captive by the FARC. He asked Colombian Senator Piedad Córdoba and Chávez to act as mediators between his Colombian government and the FARC. The Colombian right quickly began criticizing Uribe for providing Chávez with a platform to increase his visibility and legitimacy among Colombians.

Uribe responded to the pressure being placed on him by his own supporters and began making unilateral declarations that clearly illustrated his unwillingness to allow any serious talks to even get off the ground. Uribe made it clear that he was going to do everything possible to ensure that Chávez and FARC negotiators could not meet face to face. The Colombian president refused to guarantee safe passage to FARC leaders so they could meet with Chávez in Venezuela.

When it was initially rumored that the FARC’s second-in-command Reyes, would travel to Caracas to meet with Chávez, Uribe make it clear that the guerrilla leader would have to find his own way to Venezuela and that he would be arrested by Colombia’s security forces if they were to encounter him. When Chávez then said that he would be willing to travel to the jungles of Colombia to meet with the FARC’s supreme commander Manuel Marulanda, Uribe immediately ruled out any such meeting on Colombian soil.

The Venezuelan president then suggested that Marulanda come to Caracas to discuss a prisoner exchange, and perhaps even lay the foundation for future peace talks. Uribe again blocked a meeting between the two people best positioned to reach an agreement by announcing, “Manuel Marulanda sends messages that he can’t attend meetings because if he comes out of hiding he’ll be killed. Well, he guesses correctly.” The Colombian president then declared that the only people Marulanda “has to meet with are the judges and police, to respond for 40 years of killing and other crimes.”

Nevertheless, despite Uribe’s clumsy attempts to prevent Chávez and the FARC from meeting face-to-face, Ivan Marquez of the rebel group’s central command made it to Caracas and met with both the Venezuelan president and Córdoba. Not long afterwards, Uribe announced that he was terminating Chávez’s role as mediator and ended talks that had shown more promise of success in three months than Colombia’s peace commissioner had achieved in the previous five years.

Despite being “fired” by Uribe, Chávez continued his efforts to convince the FARC to unilaterally release some of its captives. In January 2008, the FARC released two Colombian lawmakers to representatives of the Venezuelan government. On February 27, the guerrillas handed over four more captives to Venezuela and that afternoon Chávez made the fatal call to Reyes that was intercepted by Colombian intelligence.

Not only did the Uribe government succeed in killing the FARC’s principal negotiator, it also ensured that the efforts of the Ecuadorian government to secure the release of FARC captives would also be terminated. Following the Colombian military’s cross-border strike against Reyes’s camp, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa announced that his government had been in talks with the FARC to obtain the release of some of the captives. However, the killing of the FARC commander had ruined any chance of freeing those captives. “I’m sorry to inform you that the talks were rather advanced to liberate 12 hostages, among them Ingrid Betancourt, in Ecuador,” said Correa.

By cynically taking military advantage of a satellite phone call directly related to a process that had liberated six Colombians held captive by the FARC for years, Uribe has likely ensured that the guerrilla group will not re-engage in talks anytime soon. After all, the FARC has little reason to trust the Colombian president given that he has made clear his willingness to exploit humanitarian efforts in order to assassinate FARC leaders. Sadly, Uribe’s decision to kill a FARC commander who has already been replaced has ensured that the relatives of those Colombians still being held captive by the guerrillas will not see their loved ones for a very, very long time — if ever.

The Bush administration signed a free trade pact with Colombia in November 2006, but congressional Democrats have stalled its ratification on human rights grounds. For its part, the Harper government is currently negotiating its own bilateral deal with the Uribe administration, but it is also facing increasing opposition at home as critics point to the severity of continuing abuses against Colombian workers.

Both governments have responded to critics by pointing out that there has been a significant decrease in the number of unionists killed since Uribe came to power. In October, US State Department spokesperson, R. Nicholas Burns, declared, “Homicides of trade unionists have shown a steep decline. … Rather than condemning as insufficient the considerable progress already made by the Colombian people, we should help them consolidate that progress through expanded trade.” Echoing the Bush administration’s argument in defense of a free trade agreement, Canada’s Trade Minister David Emerson recently stated, “We recognize there have been some terrible violations, but you would have to admit the level of those incidents have been declining.”

In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. And of the 144 unionists killed worldwide last year, 78 were Colombian — eight more than the previous year. According to the International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICFTU), there were 1,165 documented murders of Colombian trade union members between 1994 and 2006. However, the state has convicted the perpetrators in only 14 of these cases — an impunity rate of over 95 percent.

This dirty war against workers, in conjunction with the implementation of neoliberal economic reforms, has devastated union organizations and their membership. More than 195 trade union organizations were dissolved between 1991 and 2001, with union membership declining by more than 100,000 workers during that period. In fact, with only four percent of the workforce unionized — compared to 15 percent 20 years ago — Colombia now has the lowest unionization rate in Latin America.

While the US and Canadian governments focus on the significant decline in the number of Colombian unionists killed in recent years, they ignore both the principal reason for this decline and the escalation in other forms of human rights abuses against workers. The decrease in the number of unionists killed is more a product of a war of attrition against organized labor than of any policies implemented by the Uribe administration. In other words, more than 20 years of a dirty war waged against Colombia’s unions has meant that there are fewer labor leaders left to kill. Consequently, while the total number of unionists killed has declined in recent years, the intensity of the slaughter has not diminished.

A review of the numbers shows that the ratio of labor leaders killed relative to the number of unionized workers in Colombia is higher under the Uribe government than it was during the 1990s. Last year, one out of every 6,800 union members was assassinated. This rate of extermination is significantly higher than during the mid-1990s when an average of one out of every 8,100 unionists was killed. Because the level of unionization in Colombia has declined to only four percent of the workforce, the percentage of unionists being killed today is markedly higher than a decade ago.

Furthermore, other forms of human rights abuses against unionists have increased under the Uribe administration when compared to previous governments. There was a 62 percent increase in the number of threats against unionists in 2005 when compared to four years earlier — the final year of the Pastrana administration. There was also a 57 percent increase in arbitrary arrests and a 38 percent increase in harassment.

Not only have there been increases in the intensity of the killing of unionists and the number of threats, arbitrary arrests and serious incidents of harassment—along with the maintenance of a 95 percent impunity rate — there has also been a dramatic escalation of the state’s direct role in these abuses. According to the ICFTU, paramilitaries were responsible for 89 percent of the human rights abuses perpetrated against Colombian unionists in 2001, while the state and leftist guerrillas accounted for the remaining 11 percent. Four years later, state security forces were directly responsible for 41 percent of the violations — and paramilitaries for a further 50 percent.

In actuality, the Colombian government should be held responsible for human rights abuses perpetrated against unionists by both the state’s security forces and the paramilitaries since the two frequently collude in the country’s dirty war. Colombia’s ongoing para-politics scandal has confirmed links between the government and right-wing paramilitary death squads. In fact, more than 40 Colombian legislators are currently being investigated or have already been imprisoned as a result of the scandal — the overwhelming majority of them are political allies of President Uribe.

Earlier this year, long-standing accusations of collusion between the paramilitaries and multinational corporations — who stand to be the principal beneficiaries of a free trade agreement — were also confirmed. In March, Chiquita Brands International pleaded guilty in US federal court to funding Colombian paramilitaries on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations to the tune of $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004. Those paramilitaries killed thousands of civilians, including unionists, in the banana-growing region during the years they were on Chiquita’s payroll.

The United States and Canada should not “reward” the Colombian government with a free trade agreement while it continues to violate the human rights of unionists. After all, it is primarily the Colombian government and certain political and economic elites in the country, rather than the Colombian people, that want the free trade agreement. Polls show that more Colombians are opposed to a free trade agreement with the United States than support it. While no similar poll has been conducted on an agreement with Canada, there is little reason to believe that the attitude of the Colombian people is any different with regards to that free trade pact.

Furthermore, in a July 2007 poll, 73 percent of Canadians said that their federal government should not negotiate free trade agreements with countries that have dubious human rights records. That same month, Harper illustrated just how out of step he is with the Canadian people when he responded to criticism of his free trade negotiations with Colombia by declaring, “We’re not going to say fix all your social, political and human-rights problems, and only then will we engage in trade relations with you. That’s a ridiculous position.”

There is no moral justification for the United States and Canada negotiating free trade agreements with Colombia when the foundation of these pacts is the slaughter of Colombian unionists. The perpetrators of these crimes should not be rewarded with agreements that most Colombians do not want.

After an hour journeying deeper into the lush green rainforest we pulled over to the riverbank, climbed out of the canoe and walked down a narrow path through the jungle to a small clearing. We waited there while our two female guerrilla guides stashed the canoe and its outboard motor. When the two rebels returned to the clearing they were each carrying two planks of wood measuring six foot long, ten inches wide and two inches thick. They insisted on also carrying our backpacks for us. The sun was setting when we all set off along a trail through the jungle on a one-hour hike to the FARC camp.

We stumbled and slid along the muddy path, traversing streams on fallen logs with only the narrow beams of our small flashlights to illuminate the way. Miraculously, I managed to avoid falling into the quagmire that passed as a trail. Almost an hour into the hike I heard the female guerrilla up front mumble something to a shadowy figure in the darkness. A fully uniformed, AK-47-toting male guerrilla then greeted Terry and I as we passed him. I noticed a small white light through the trees up ahead and as we reached the perimeter of the camp saw a uniformed man with a gray beard working on a laptop computer. It was FARC commander Raúl Reyes; a member of the rebel group’s seven-person Central Command. According to many analysts, Reyes is the second-highest ranking member of the FARC.

Reyes greeted us both and after an introductory conversation invited us to join him and several other guerrillas for dinner. Afterwards, Terry and I were shown to our bivouac, which consisted of a bed with wooden planks for a mattress, a mosquito net and a plastic camouflaged canopy that hung above everything to provide protection from the frequent tropical rains. Our bivouac was identical to the ones used by the guerrillas in the camp. For the next three days, Terry and I lived as the guerrillas lived. We bathed with them in a nearby stream. We went to the bathroom in their rainforest latrines, which consisted of trenches dug in the ground. And we all ate ample servings of basic Colombian food.

Terry and I were at the remote FARC camp for different reasons. She was there to interview female guerrillas as part of her research on women engaged in social struggle in Colombia. I was there to interview Reyes. We were given free rein of the camp and access to all the guerrillas, about one third of whom were female. We were also allowed to take photos with the stipulation that we didn’t publish the faces of any of the rebels except Reyes. We also passed many hours engaged in informal conversations with Reyes and other guerrillas.

Living conditions for the guerrillas were austere to say the least. They consisted of the aforementioned bivouac, two uniforms, a pair of rubber boots, an AK-47 assault rifle, extra cartridges of ammunition, a machete and three meals a day. Despite the austerity, the camp’s infrastructure was impressive given its remote location. The bivouacs were interconnected with a network of wooden walkways constructed several inches above the wet, muddy ground. As few trees as possible had been felled to make space for the bivouacs and walkways in order to preserve the rainforest canopy, no doubt to limit the possibility of detection from the air.

In the center of the camp was a large wooden-framed, tent-like structure with sheets of black plastic that served as a roof. Inside were a dozen rows of benches constructed from wooden planks similar to the ones our guerrilla guides had carried to the camp. A television and chalkboard were situated at one end of the structure and each evening the guerrillas watched the news on Caracol and RCN—Colombia’s two major television networks—in order to keep informed about current issues. This activity was particularly interesting given that the country’s television networks generally presented a very negative portrayal of the FARC.

The wooden walkways extended beyond the center of the camp in several directions, becoming wooden steps whenever the path went up or down hills. One walkway disappeared into the rainforest only to terminate at the men’s latrine. The word latrine might be a bit elaborate given that it only consisted of two trenches dug into the ground. One was for urine and the other for feces. A different walkway led to the women’s latrine, which consisted of the same facilities. There were long sticks that were used to shovel the red, clay-like mud back into the trench to cover up the human waste.

A third walkway led to the camp’s kitchen, which was a large, open-sided structure that contained two fires and lots of large pots and pans. The cooks prepared three meals a day of basic Colombian fare such as beef, chicken, rice, potatoes, yucca, vegetables and lots of soup. One afternoon, while Terry was interviewing female guerrillas, I walked down to the kitchen and hung out with the two rebels, one male and the other female, who were on kitchen duty.

“You all seem to eat well here?” I said to them, half as a question and half as a statement.

“You’ve come at a good time,” explained the female guerrilla. “We have plenty of food right now. Sometimes we don’t have much to eat. How often we get supplies depends on the weather and the security situation.”

“Do you two cook everyday?” I asked them.

“No,” replied the male rebel. “Everybody takes a turn. We will cook dinner today and then breakfast and lunch tomorrow. After that someone else will take over and do the same.”

“So everybody cooks?” I inquire. “The men and the women?”

“Of course,” the female guerrilla answered. “Everybody does everything in the camp. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. You cook, you wash your own clothes, you stand guard, and you go out on patrol. It is the same for men and women.”

I had heard that this sort of equality was part of the FARC’s philosophy, but wasn’t sure to what degree it had actually been implemented. I still wasn’t sure to what degree it applied in other FARC units throughout the country. However, there was little doubt that the guerrillas in that particular camp had achieved an impressive degree of gender equality. It was not just evident in their activities and words but, more importantly, in their way of being.

Surprisingly, for me at least, it was more evident in the behavior of the men than the women. The softness of the energy exhibited by the male rebels towards their female colleagues, their absolute lack of machismo, their acceptance of them as equals, was actually quite astounding. And for the women, they also exhibited many feminine qualities for a group of females living a traditionally male lifestyle. In fact, maintaining their femininity was important to the female guerrillas. During off-duty hours we often observed female rebels getting together to apply make-up or to braid each other’s hair. Evidently, equality in that FARC camp was not about women acting like men.

Everyday in the late afternoon the guerrillas went in groups to bathe. Terry and I would go with a bunch of rebels shortly before dinner each day. The wooden walkway wound its way through the rainforest and down a hill to a small stream. The rebels had built a dam across the stream that allowed the fresh, clear water to flow over the top of the twelve-inch high wooden structure, through the ten foot long bathing area and then over another dam before continuing its course through the rainforest. Wooden floorboards were placed in the bottom of the pool of water created between the two dams to ensure solid, mud-free footing.

The male and female guerrillas stripped down to their underwear and bathed together in the shin-deep pool of water. They also hand washed their clothes on a wooden table constructed along one side of the pool. The guerrillas each had two sets of camouflage uniforms and they washed one each day, which then dried over the following twenty-four hours while they wore the other one. In one of our bathing sessions I attempted to hand wash the pair of trousers that had gotten muddy on the hike to the camp. A female guerrilla who was bathing with us couldn’t help but smile at my ineptitude in the laundering department. A male rebel took pity on me and taught me his washing technique, which was surprisingly effective.

Everyday began at 4:50 am. Some rebels went out on patrol and others stood guard around the camp’s perimeter. Many of those who remained in the camp engaged in education programs that taught basic reading, writing and math. All the guerrillas were peasants, some illiterate. The better-educated rebels would be paired with the less literate ones in order to provide them with a basic education and to teach them the fundamental concepts of Marxism. The pairs would spend a couple of hours each afternoon engaging in lessons. Some days the guerrillas engaged in military training. After dinner, the rebels would watch the news, engage in group discussions about political and cultural issues, watch a movie and be in bed by 9:00 pm.

We were told that the rebel unit frequently moved camp for security reasons. Such an operation involved packing up everything, except the wooden infrastructure, for the journey to another part of the jungle where they would take out their machetes and begin constructing a new camp. Because they were all peasants, the rebels were very adept with that ubiquitous tool of the countryside, the machete. However, other skills that the group required were not always so easy to come by, such as medical care.

I asked one female rebel what happened when a guerrilla became ill, or was injured or wounded.

“There are always several guerrillas who can apply basic medical care,” she explained. “And these guerrillas pass this knowledge on to others so each unit always has medics.”

“But what if the sickness or injury is serious and requires extensive medical care, like surgery?” I inquired.

“Then the person is transported to one of the FARC’s hospitals, which are staffed by doctors. For security reasons, it is preferred that they don’t go on such a journey unless it is absolutely necessary.”

“Where are these hospitals located, in villages or in jungle camps like this?” I asked her.
“In camps like this,” she replied.

Several of the guerrillas referred to their cultural time on Sundays as an important part of guerrilla life. During these sessions they would engage in music, theatre and poetry readings, with most of the art being inspired by their revolutionary ideals. On our final afternoon in the camp the guerrillas put on a cultural show. We all gathered in the large structure for the performance, which consisted of songs and skits that were full of humor and political and social commentary. One skit that several rebels performed was a parody of beauty pageants, which are extremely popular in Colombia. A male and a female guerrilla held imitation microphones and acted as the hosts of the pageant, which sought to crown the new Señorita Colombia.

They first introduced the reigning champion, who was an attractive female rebel dressed in a halter-top and miniskirt with a cardboard crown perched atop her head. She took her place at the front of the room while the hosts introduced the contestants seeking to become her heir. One by one, the four contestants entered the room from behind a curtain. They each paraded around the inside perimeter of the structure in their skimpy outfits as the audience cheered wildly. The interesting catch was that all four were male guerrillas dressed in drag and adorned with lipstick and makeup.

The hosts then asked the contestants questions about what they would do if they were to be crowned the new Señorita Colombia. When it was his turn to answer, a short stocky mestizo rebel who was Señorita Cauca replied, “I would bring about the New Colombia in which all Colombians would be equal.” His reference was to the socialist society that the FARC has envisioned and labeled the “New Colombia.” Clearly, in the FARC, culture and politics are integrated.

The funniest moment in the show occurred when Señorita Chocó, a tall thin black guerrilla with a moustache, paraded around the structure exhibiting exaggerated feminine mannerisms while wearing a wig, a red bikini top and a blue makeshift plastic mini-skirt. The skit ended when the hosts asked Terry and I to select the new Señorita Colombia. We agreed on Señorita Chocó. The hosts then coaxed several male rebels into dancing with the guerrillas in drag. The entire skit was a parody on the sexist nature of beauty pageants and the objectification of the female body.

There were a few older guerrillas in the camp who had been members of the FARC for decades. Among them were Reyes, who had been in the rebel group for 26 years, and the oldest woman in the FARC, who had been living in the jungle for 32 years. Most of the guerrillas, however, were in their twenties. Some of them were couples whose bivouacs had been constructed with double beds. Any two guerrillas who want to enter into a relationship with each other have to obtain the permission of their commander. This protocol is similar to that in the US military where soldiers posted overseas must obtain the permission of their commanding officer before getting married. FARC guerrillas also need to obtain permission to end a relationship, although that is rarely denied.

The fact that the guerrillas are rotated in and out of field units makes it difficult to maintain long-term relationships. One morning I sat down with a guerrilla couple in their bivouac to discuss engaging in relationships under such conditions.

“It is difficult because you never know when one of you is going to be sent somewhere else,” explained an Afro-Colombian female guerrilla named Carmen.

“The FARC tries to keep couples together whenever it is possible,” added her partner Osvaldo.
“If you are separated is it possible to stay in touch with each other?” I asked.

“No, not really. It is difficult, but that’s just the way it is,” said Osvaldo, acknowledging that commitment to the FARC and their revolutionary cause is every guerrilla’s first priority.

Terry and I also engaged in many informal conversations with Reyes and I conducted one formal two-hour interview with the FARC commander. During the informal conversations we discussed a wide variety of topics related to Colombia and the world in general. Some of the conversations occurred during the meals that we ate with Reyes. Other conversations were held around the table in his bivouac, which was situated at one end of the camp. The only difference between Reyes’ living quarters and those of the other guerrillas was that it contained a table with wooden benches on each side and a laptop computer.

One topic of discussion was the possibility of a prisoner exchange between the FARC and the US government. More precisely, I asked about the possibility of the rebel group exchanging the three US military contractors that it was holding captive for Simón Trinidad and Soñia, the two FARC members imprisoned in the United States.

“We cannot agree to such an exchange because we are engaged in an internal conflict and so any exchange would have to be between us and the Colombian government,” explained Reyes. “We are not at war with the United States and we don’t want to internationalize the conflict. And besides, any humanitarian exchange would have to include the release of all the guerrillas being held in Colombian prisons.”

We also discussed the country’s new center-left political party, the Democratic Pole. At one point I asked Reyes if he thought there was any possibility of the FARC negotiating peace with the Democratic Pole should the party win the presidency in the 2010 elections.
“It would depend on their policies,” he replied.

Back in my bivouac I thought about the accusations made by many analysts that the guerrilla group is nothing more than a criminal organization. These critics often claim that the FARC was ideological many years ago but now is only interested in profiting from its criminal activities, which are primarily related to the coca trade. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has repeatedly declared that there is not an armed conflict in Colombia and that the government is simply combating criminals who engage in terrorism. Clearly these are efforts to de-legitimize the FARC as a political entity.

The FARC’s involvement in the coca trade and its human rights abuses against civilians, including kidnapping and the use of landmines and notoriously inaccurate homemade mortars, have made it easy for critics to simply dismiss the rebels as criminals. However, the issue is not so black and white, as illustrated by life in the FARC camp. In fact, it is difficult to accept such a simplistic analysis of the FARC given the difficult life that the guerrillas live. After all, unlike Colombian soldiers and paramilitary fighters, the rebels do not get paid and they receive no material benefits other than three meals a day.

And if guerrilla leaders like Reyes are little more than the heads of a criminal organization, then they must be considered miserable failures. After all, other Colombian criminals live in luxury. The leader of the former Medellín cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar, lived lavishly in magnificent mansions, as have many other Colombian drug traffickers over the past thirty years. Paramilitary leaders have also lived well on their vast cattle ranches in northern Colombia, enjoying the riches wrought from their criminal activities. And now they are demobilizing so they can legally enjoy their ill-gotten wealth.

On the other hand, the FARC’s leaders live as Reyes lives. There appears to be no personal monetary gain despite the guerrilla group’s financial wealth. It is a hard life spent sleeping on wooden planks, bathing in rivers, fighting off tropical diseases, and constantly moving from camp to camp to avoid US intelligence gathering efforts and the Colombian army. Reyes has lived in the jungle in this manner for 26 years and the only comforts that he enjoys are a laptop computer and the camp’s television. It is hardly the lifestyle of a criminal whose principal objective is the attainment of wealth.

After spending three nights in the camp, and with our work completed, Terry and I awoke on our final morning, packed our things and bid farewell to the guerrillas. Along with our rebel guides, we made the return trek through the rainforest to the river and boarded a canoe. As we cruised along the jungle river I thought about Colombia’s future. After almost seven years of Plan Colombia, five years of President Uribe’s security policies and more than five billion dollars in US military aid, there is no evidence that the FARC has been significantly weakened militarily. Consequently, with the FARC being too strong to be defeated on the battlefield and not strong enough to take power by force, a negotiated settlement is the only possible route to achieving peace.

The FARC, however, is not about to simply negotiate its demobilization in return for reduced prison sentences as the paramilitaries have done. Nor is the FARC likely to demobilize in return for a full amnesty under a “peace” agreement that leaves the structures of neoliberalism intact, as did the M-19 in Colombia, the FMLN in El Salvador and the URNG in Guatemala. Any negotiated peace would require a restructuring of Colombia’s political, social and economic system to ensure a much more equitable distribution of the country’s wealth and land. But such a negotiated settlement would require the acquiescence of the country’s political and economic elites as well as of the US government. Consequently, at least for the near future, it appears that the conflict will continue to rage. And, tragically, it will be the civilian population that will continue to bear the brunt of the violence.

*To read the entire interview with FARC Commander Raúl Reyes, click here.

The Nixon administration had established a small group of operatives called “the Plumbers” whose mission was to plug-up leaks and ensure the secrecy of the government’s illegal activities. The group engaged in illegal operations on behalf of the Nixon White House that included placing listening devices in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee located in the Watergate office building in Washington, DC. The wire-tapping occurred during the 1972 presidential election campaign.

Obviously the Plumbers were a small unit engaged in espionage and political sabotage and not the widespread violence and human rights abuses perpetrated by Colombia’s largest paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Nevertheless, both the Plumbers and the AUC were used by their respective governments to help ensure electoral victory. In the case of the Plumbers, it was to ensure Nixon’s re-election. For the AUC, it was to guarantee victory for President Alvaro Uribe and his congressional allies in northern Colombia.

The greatest similarities between the para-politics scandal and Watergate exist in the drama that unfolded after the initial crimes were committed. In both cases, Senate hearings and other investigations revealed links between government officials and the covert activities being perpetrated by the illegal groups. Investigations in Colombia have revealed the existence of “hit lists” containing the names of unionists and other political opponents of President Uribe. High-ranking intelligence officers drew up the lists and then passed them to AUC leaders who threatened or killed the targets. Similarly, the Nixon administration drew up an “enemies list” of political opponents who were to be targets of illegal investigations by US federal law enforcement agencies.

In Colombia last week, President Uribe demanded the resignations of the chief of the country’s National Police, General Jorge Daniel Castro, and his head of intelligence, General Guillermo Chavez, after it was revealed that the National Police had illegally wiretapped members of the political opposition. Spokespersons for Uribe immediately proclaimed that the president knew nothing of the affair and that he will not tolerate any illegal activities by members of his government. Similarly, ten months after the Watergate scandal had broken, President Nixon fired two of his closest aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, when evidence emerged linking them to the illegal Watergate wiretappings. Nixon’s spokespeople immediately pointed out that the president was unaware of their illegal activities and would not tolerate such wrongdoings. As was the case with Watergate, public knowledge of official involvement in Colombia’s illegal wiretappings resulted from investigations conducted by journalists, not by the government.

The current para-politics scandal is less than a year old and has so far failed to directly link President Uribe to any illegal activities. At the same point in the Watergate scandal, Nixon had also not been directly linked to any wrongdoings. It wasn’t until two years after the Watergate scandal erupted that it finally became evident Nixon was personally aware of the illegal activities that had occurred. Furthermore, he had been involved in ordering them. However, these facts only became apparent after it was discovered that the paranoid Nixon had taped all conversations that took place in the White House’s Oval office. Those tapes turned out to be the “smoking gun” that finally brought down the president. Up until that point, Nixon had fired all those around him who had been implicated in the scandal while proclaiming his own innocence. Without the discovery of the White House tapes, Nixon might well have succeeded in remaining above the political fray in much the same way that President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-Contra scandal a decade later.

Like Nixon, Uribe is firing all those close to him who have been implicated in the para-politics scandal. And unless one of his political allies decides to turn on the president, or unless Uribe has a smoking gun of his own hidden away somewhere, he may well survive the scandal. However, not being directly implicated in the scandal does not mean that Uribe is “not a crook.” It might simply mean that he isn’t as stupid as Nixon and has loyal political allies willing to take the fall for him. After all, as we eventually learned with Watergate, when there is so much smoke swirling around there is usually a fire at its center.