Plan Colombia and Beyond

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August 15, 2005

Plan Patriota, as seen from the south

It’s been about 20 months now since the Colombian Army, with lots of U.S. support, launched “Plan Patriota,” a major military offensive in a longtime FARC guerrilla stronghold in southern Colombia. Supported by U.S. logistics, planning and intelligence personnel, Colombian troops continue to fight in a broad swath of heavily jungled territory in the departments of Caquetá, Guaviare, Meta, and Vaupés (and perhaps others).

In part due to the remoteness of the zones where it has been happening, it has been difficult to judge whether Plan Patriota is succeeding or failing, and what impact it has had on the area’s civilian population. Colombia’s main newspaper, El Tiempo, has visited the zone periodically, offering valuable glimpses of what is going on – particularly a series that appeared in early May.

A new, and pessimistic, vision comes from a column published in Sunday’s El Tiempo. Its author is Alirio Calderón, a former mayor of Puerto Rico, Caquetá, a town in the midst of the “Plan Patriota” zone (and near the former FARC demilitarized zone). In late May, FARC members burst into a Puerto Rico restaurant and massacred several town council members.

Calderón argues that the Colombian troops in the Plan Patriota zone have had a rough time in unfamiliar terrain, and that they made a big mistake by treating the local population as potential enemies and coca-growing criminals. The column is worth a close read. Here is a translation.

El Tiempo – August 14, 2005

Plan Patriota, as seen from the south

Alirio Calderón

Among the most important components of “Democratic Security,” the current government’s banner policy, is Plan Patriota. The Plan has sent 17,000 men to the jungles of the country’s south. This is an area where the FARC Secretariat has long resided with few difficulties, and where it has maintained its armed structures unscathed, along with hundreds of kidnap victims whose return the nation demands with a tone of desperation.

But the intelligent and well-intentioned Plan Patriota strategy began in error, since the Amazonian ecosystem has peculiarities that make it unique from other regions: its topography, its humidity, its heavy rainfall, its tropical diseases, its coca-based economy and the total absence of the state. All of this makes Colombia’s Amazon basin a complex and dangerous place.

The first mistake was to bring combatants from different regions (the Caribbean coast, Antioquia, the central Andes) to fight against guerrillas who were acclimated to, or born in, this tropical region. This led to 30 percent of the troops being forced to leave the zone with illnesses (malaria, leishmaniasis, etc.), in addition to those killed or wounded in combat, as well as the natural demoralization of human beings subjected to such difficult and unfamiliar conditions. This, without a doubt, meant that from the beginning the Army lost at least 40 percent of its operational capacity.

In the second place, there was a failure to take advantage of the most important potential support the troops had: the civilian population, who were tired of the unjust and despotic treatment they had received from the guerrillas’ mid-level commanders. The guerrilla chiefs, infected by a mafioso attitude, would kill any citizen on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing, without regard to his support for the revolutionary cause.

The Army absurdly squandered this asset by operating under the false premise that whoever lives in a region under guerrilla influence must be a guerrilla ally. Abuses became a constant characteristic of the military operation. Just one ombudsman’s office, that of Cartagena del Chairá municipality, has registered more than 145 violations committed by members of the security forces. That doesn’t even count the famous mass arrest of 130 of its residents, of whom not one today remains in jail.

Finally, a serious mistake was committed by trying to fight guerrillas and cocaleros at the same time, because they are not the same thing. A cocalero is generally a campesino who has a family, and who has completely different dreams and aspirations than a guerrilla does. Of course his role in the coca business is also absolutely different from that of a guerrilla. But the chosen tactic [of across-the-board confrontation] ended up building a bridge between the two.

The right thing would have been to lead an attractive program of manual substitution of illicit crops. This would have avoided, in the first place, the massive exodus of the zone’s residents, something that will simply move the problem to some other zone.

In the second place, it would have permitted a friendly winning of the population’s hearts. It is absolutely certain that fewer bullets would have been fired, the costs would have been much lower, the list of dead and wounded men would have been much smaller, and important military blows would have been struck.

What the country must clearly understand is that Plan Patriota is a military operation just like so many others that have been carried out against the guerrillas in Colombia (Marquetalia, Casa Verde, etc.). While it is part of the Democratic Security policy, its success or failure will not determine the success or failure of the whole policy.

For the good of the Colombian state’s legitimacy and institutionalization, Democratic Security must contemplate many more elements that can make it into a permanent state policy with a satisfactory development and operation, with fewer glaring errors.

Posted by isacson at August 15, 2005 10:58 PM

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