Curtis W. Kamman, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, statement, November 1, 1999

Curtis W. Kamman, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, statement, November 1, 1999

COLOMBIA: WHAT ARE WE GETTING INTO?

Ambassador Curtis Warren Kamman
U. S. Ambassador to Colombia
Secretary of State's Open Forum
November 1, 1999

Colombia has many images and these days, the images tend to be negative. But let me remind you that there are many things about Colombia, apart from being there and working with the Colombian people, that are positive and always have been positive. Unfortunately, in recent times the images become more negative: cocaine, heroin, guerillas, kidnapping. These are the things that you read about regularly in the US press and which, I think, make Colombia a country of some considerable importance to the United States.

The country is also of importance to us because it is a major trading partner, number 25 in the world of all countries who are trading partners of the United States. It is a country of 40 million people, that makes it the third most populous in Latin America after Mexico and Brazil. It is a country that is itself trying to overcome the four problems that I would like to cover this morning: drugs, guerrillas and other forms of violence, peace process, and the economy. These problems are interrelated and if there is to be a solution to them, that solution must be also interrelated.

DRUGS

Colombia is by far the greatest provider of cocaine to the United States and to the world. At one time the raw material for the cocaine, although it was grown in Colombia, was grown principally in Bolivia and in Peru. No longer. Now, Colombia is the largest producer of the raw material, the coca leaf, as well as the final product, cocaine. Colombia in the last ten years has become the major supplier of heroin to the east coast of the United States. Whereas if you go back fifteen years or so, opium poppy was simply not grown in Colombia, now Colombia has developed a very significant market for heroin in the United States.

The problem of narcotics has led to corruption which comes from easy money, illegal easy money; a principal result of the drug trade in Colombia. The drug trade is affecting Colombia itself. Consumption is no longer limited to the developed countries. You're seeing it all over the Hemisphere, in major cities of South America, including Colombia. The drug trade has fueled the violence in Colombia by providing a reliable source of income for the armed groups that in some cases have been active for forty years in Colombia. These groups might have died off when the external supporters for such guerrilla movements either got out of the business or changed their ideology. I'm thinking here of Moscow and Havana. Countries that once upon a time could support guerrilla movements now cannot afford to do so. But the guerrillas nevertheless are well funded. Their money comes from kidnapping traditionally and, especially in the last ten years, from drugs. It is not that the guerrillas produce the drugs or traffic in the drugs. They may do a little bit of that. It is primarily that they provide protection to the narcotraffickers, the criminals who are producing the drugs and smuggling them into the United States.

For the United States, traditionally and even at this very moment, a joint effort with the government of Colombia against narcotraffickers is our number one priority. It is the activity into which we are putting the greatest amount of our resources. It soaks up the greatest amount of my time and of many other people in our Embassy. For the United States, this is a priority. But it is also a major priority for the government of Colombia. The effort that we are making is a joint effort shared with the Colombian authorities. We are hoping that we will be able to turn the situation around. That hope has been present for ten years and we are continuing to plug away at it.

GUERRILLAS AND PARAMILITARIES

The conflict in Colombia involves principally two guerrilla groups and a third major group which is called variously the paramilitaries or the selfdefense, "autodefensas," or sometimes they are simply called "vigilantes." These three violent groups have grown in ferocity, in armament, and in numbers over the last several years. The FARC now numbers roughly speaking 15,000; the ELN perhaps 5,000; and the paramilitaries, around 5,000. Those are guesses. Nobody has ever made a census of these groups but they give you an idea of the ballpark magnitude.

These groups are conducting violent activities against the civilian population, against the armed forces and the police of the government of Colombia, and against each other, in the case of the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. They have been responsible for extortion, especially extortion of companies involved in petroleum production, for mass kidnappings. Last year, Colombia had 2,500 kidnappings, again a rough number for not all the kidnappings are reported. That's the greatest number by far for any country in the world. It's even the greatest number per capita anywhere in the world. Of this number, about 100 are foreign citizens; the others were Colombians. Colombians are suffering from the depredations of these violent groups.

And the paramilitaries, rather than do kidnapping, although they occasionally kidnap people (usually for political effect), rely on massacres. They go into a small village sometimes with a list of people whom they believe have been sympathetic to the guerrillas, sometimes with no special list simply wanting to demonstrate to the villagers that they had been doing something that the paramilitaries consider to be supportive of the guerrillas. And in these massacres, ten, twenty, forty, fifty people may be killed, all of them noncombatants, innocent civilians. A very ugly situation.

Although the government has made major efforts against these groups, those efforts have been, in some cases, inadequate because of lack of government presence in outlying parts of the country. They have also been unable to meet the firepower and force available to these guerrilla groups. The guerrilla groups in turn are financing their activities through protection money they receive from the narcotraffickers.

The guerrilla groups and, by extension, the paramilitaries have a political agenda. The guerilla groups in effect are arguing that Colombia has had an unjust society, has had insufficient economic development especially in rural areas. The paramilitaries are a reaction against the guerrillas; they grew up to protect property against guerrilla attacks. All these groups say that their objectives are noble and that they are for the people and that they are politically justified.

If you look at guerrilla movements elsewhere in the world, they often make those arguments but they usually have a certain degree of public support. There is a political base, generally speaking, for most guerrilla movements around the world. In Colombia, well done, scientifically conducted opinion polls show that the maximum amount of positive support for the guerrillas might be on the order of 4% of the population. There is no public political base for the guerrilla movements in Colombia. But, because they have money, because they have military discipline, and because they have many years of experience fighting against government authority, they have survived and thrived.

PEACE PROCESS

If guerrillas have a political agenda, and they say they do, and if paramilitaries are reaction against the tactics of guerrillas, then obviously what the Government would like to do is to bring this violence to an end either by defeating guerrillas militarily or through a negotiated agreement. President Pastrana, before he was elected, said that he would negotiate with the guerrillas, principally with the largest guerrilla group, the FARC.

The story of his efforts to get the negotiations going is the story of the first fifteen months of the Pastrana government. It has been difficult and one must question whether the guerrillas have an interest in reaching an agreement. Are they negotiating seriously? But if their objectives really are political, if they really are looking for social justice, then at least you have to put them to the test. You have to see if they are willing to negotiate.

The price of that negotiation, demanded by the guerrillas, was something that's called the despeje or more recently has come to be known as the zona de distensión. These two terms are just like that term that we used in the Cold War, détente. They are very difficult to translate. But, in effect, this area of despeje or distensión is an area from which the Government has withdrawn all military forces and all national police, leaving a sort of civic police and the other elements of government authority, but not government ability to enforce that authority.

It has been a controversial decision to establish the despeje area. You will always read in the press that the despeje area is the size of Switzerland. That is true, it is the size of Switzerland. Or it is twice the size of El Salvador; that is true also. But that is 4% of the territory of Colombia and the population of the area is 100,000 people on a base of 40 million. This means that one quarter of one percent of Colombia's population is in this area of despeje. The Government has sought to monitor what guerrillas are doing and guerrillas have sought to avoid government monitoring. That standoff for the last several months prevented any movement in negotiations with the guerrillas.

The government now has agreed simply that the Constitution of Colombia, the laws of Colombia, still will be enforced in the area. They have agreed simply to talk to the guerrillas during the negotiations to determine how the implementation of that principle will be monitored. The guerrillas themselves have resisted any international presence, any third country or even a neutral party Colombian presence in this area of the despeje. This has been clearly the hardest thing for the Government; to reach agreement to get real negotiations going.

But if the negotiations prospered, and they just started a week ago, then you could expect (if indeed there is a political agenda for the guerrillas) an end to violence, a prisoner exchange, and the guerrillas getting out of the business of protecting narcotraffickers. All these are things that are eminently desirable, which could provide a more stable and peaceful society in Colombia.

The United States has seen the peace process as an essential element of the Colombian Government's strategy. More than that, if one takes at face value the political agenda of the guerrillas, there must be an economic component to the ultimate arrangement of a peace agreement. There must be development for the campesinos who are currently involved in growing coca or opium poppy. All of these things are still at a very early stage. The peace process will go on; unless somebody brings it to an end, it will go on, probably for years.

THE ECONOMY

Colombia had an average annual growth rate of over 4% for the past 70 years, a remarkable record. The Latin American debt crisis never affected Colombia the way it affected the rest of the Hemisphere. Colombia has been able to weather many of the other ups and downs either through good management, export strategy, new exports such as flowers, or expansion of the petroleum industry. Colombia is also a world class producer of coal, another major export commodity.

But in the last year and this year, Colombia has seen the economy falter. For the first time, the problems of civil conflict and of narcotics came together with a bad economic situation. When you read of the difficulties faced by the Government of Colombia and the low opinion poll rankings for President Pastrana and his Government, it's the economy that's really affecting most people today. But the economy of course is not helped by the insecurity in the countryside. It is not helped by the expenditures that the country must devote to security which it could otherwise be devoting to development.

From the U.S. perspective, we have to take into account that Colombia, largely for reasons not of the making of this Government and for some reasons not even of Colombia's making, is faced now with negative growth in 1999 that will perhaps be 4% to 5% GDP growth. The country must do some belt tightening, must make a major effort to cut government spending; all of these while trying to solve the other three problems. A daunting picture. I cannot always believe that President Pastrana and his ministers get up in the morning and tackle their problem, and they generally have a smile on their face. They are not discouraged. But we read of some of the very difficult situations that have occurred and we wonder, can this country make it? My answer is, yes. Colombia will make it. Colombia has dealt with most of these problems, although they have not come together in the way that they have recently. Colombians have dealt with them since independence, or at least since World War II.

Where is the key? Where do you attack these problems to try to make a difference? I think that narcotics is the key. And I am happy to say that the Colombian Government, the Colombian armed forces and police agree that without the money that comes from narcotics trade, there would be less corruption, there would be less violence, less arms smuggled into the country going to the guerrillas. Therefore, rather than simply attack the guerrillas who are well dug in the isolated areas, you go after their sources of income. So, the Colombian Government has now come to the realization that the root of all evil is drugs. It is not only because the gringos are consuming the drug, it is because of what the drugs and the illicit income from drugs are doing to Colombia.

How do we attack the drug problem?

First of all, eradicate the raw material. It is cost-effective to go after the coca or the opium poppy when it is growing in the ground rather than try to track it through container shipments and then the distribution network all over the United States, or being peddled on the streets. It was a Colombian idea to use aerial spraying, crop dusting type spraying to kill coca. It was done twenty years ago with marijuana. By the way, there's no point in smuggling marijuana anymore. We grow enough in the U.S. There's ample supply here and the Colombians don't bother smuggling marijuana these days.

But the Colombian National Police found that spraying large commercial industrial size plantations of marijuana was effective. They began doing that in the early 90s against coca. We saw that they were having technical difficulties and we decided to offer assistance. We, the United States, are working with Colombian National Police to spray coca and opium poppy to cut the raw material. Unfortunately, the narcos, once their crops are sprayed, simply go to another area and plant again. There has to be a greater presence of the Government in the isolated parts of the country for the eradication to work.

Another thing that we do is interdiction. Three weeks ago, 30 Colombians involved in a very significant network of smuggling cocaine and heroin into the United States were arrested at our request. This is another way to cut the flow of cocaine into our country and also to eliminate the source of illicit income in Colombia. The group that was arrested constituted the largest network of narcotraffickers since the infamous Cali Cartel and the Medellin Cartel of the early 90s.

These 30 people that were arrested at our request are being held for extradition to the United States. That's the third tool that we have at our disposal: eradicate, interdict, and extradite.

Colombia, for a period of time following the adoption of a new constitution in 1991, prohibited the extradition of any Colombian national from the country. That part of the Constitution was amended at the end of 1997 and any crime committed by a Colombian against U.S. law after December 1997, now makes that Colombian subject to an extradition request. Request is one thing, extradition is something else again. In Colombia, all extradition requests go to the Supreme Court; that is, if the Executive Branch of the government believes that there is enough basis to arrest an individual, that person is arrested and then the Supreme Court must decide whether or not to extradite. So far, no Colombian has been extradited to the United States since the new constitutional amendment. We have approximately 40 requests pending, including these most recent thirty.

Note: This speech was given on November 1, 1999. The first Colombian citizen since 1991 was extradited to the U.S. on November 21, 1999.
But it is the one thing that we know from a lot of conversations with the drug traffickers and with others in the society, that drug traffickers do fear extradition because they know that sentences are tough. They will not be able to live in the U.S. jail in the way that the really wealthy ones have been able to live in a Colombian jail.

What else can we do? We strongly support the peace process. President Clinton said that a year ago when he met President Pastrana here in Washington during a state visit. He has repeated it. The Secretary of State has written about this in an op-ed piece in August in The New York Times. We support the peace process in part because we don't see a military victory being likely to occur anytime in the foreseeable future.

But we also see that to get a negotiation that produces a peace agreement, you have to put some pressure on the parties, especially the guerrillas. And therefore, we are working, as we always have, with the Colombian National Police, to strengthen their ability to go after the narcos, thereby denying income to the guerrillas. And we are doing the same thing now with the Armed Forces which we had done on a much more limited scale in the past. Now we see the need to provide enough firepower, enough manpower in the Armed Forces to accompany the police in their efforts to go after the narcotraffickers.

We are not supporting a counterinsurgency campaign in Colombia. We cannot ignore the fact that the narcotraffickers depend on the guerrillas and, if we are to succeed against the narcotraffickers, we have to take into account the guerrillas. But our assistance (both training and material) that goes to the Colombian armed forces goes to the Police, to the military for counternarcotics purposes. And the lion's share of this is not appropriated to the Pentagon; the lion's share share is appropriated to INL, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs here in the Department of State, for counternarcotics purposes. It is spent on helicopters, on chemicals to spray coca, on arms training to make the Police and the armed forces more effective against the narcos.

We also are concentrating in the nonviolent side of the equation; on strengthening democracy through work with the judicial system, trying to improve the efficacy of that system, through alternative development, which means offering real options to the campesino so that he does not have to grow coca or opium poppy. We are focusing very strongly on the importance of human rights, insisting that Colombia train its police and military to respect human rights, and they are doing that. And that those who have abused human rights in the past should be punished. It is a little more difficult to see progress on that one, but we're continuing to insist on that.

Let me conclude by saying what are we not doing in Colombia. Here's where we get to the answer to the question, "What are we getting into?" We are not sending DEA nor U.S. military nor any other U.S. citizens on any operations. They do work with their counterparts. They try to strengthen the capabilities of Colombia's police and armed forces but they don't go on operations.

We are not building up our military presence in Colombia. In the last several years, we have had on the average 150 to 200 military personnel in Colombia largely working with police and Colombian armed forces. That number has not changed. There is no growth curve in military presence. Many of the people who are there come only for a few weeks. They are doing specialized training; when the training is finished, they go home.

We are also making quite sure that we deal with the Government of Colombia on all issues affecting the guerrillas and the peace process. We are not trying to take over the negotiation. We are not even invited to participate in the negotiation. The FARC does not want that. We are, in effect, standing ready to be helpful if we can.

This is not a case of the United States sliding down a "slippery slope" into a counter-insurgency situation. We know what the problem is: it's drugs. There are other problems, but that is the one we choose to make our major input. We know with whom we are working. We have extremely valuable relations with the police and the military. We have a government now that is committed to counternarcotics, the Government of President Pastrana. We also know our limits, and those limits are imposed by the White House, by the Congress in the appropriations process, and certainly there are limits which you will find in U.S. public opinion.

So, what are we getting into? We are getting into what we've been into for a very long time: a protracted counternarcotics struggle in a country which has severe problems that are interrelated and which we hope are now the subject of a comprehensive strategy that will tackle all the problems simultaneously.

Thank you.

As of March 13, 2000, this document is also available at http://www.usia.gov/regional/ar/colombia/kamman.htm