« The paramilitary "extraditables" | Main | Fumigation and "defoliation" »
September 10, 2006
Car bombs and credibility
In a war, credibility before the public is an asset that is hard to measure, but victory is impossible without it. For the Colombian military, this has been a tough year credibility-wise, as several cases of abuse and corruption have shaken the public trust. And it suffered another severe blow with Friday's revelation that soldiers - not guerrillas - were behind a Bogotá car-bombing days before Uribe's re-election.
On July 31, a military convoy was passing through a west-central Bogotá neighborhood when a car bomb went off, killing a civilian bystander and wounding several soldiers. As it turns out, the Defense Ministry announced Friday, this was the work of four officers in an elite army intelligence unit, as were other bombs in the capital that the authorities deactivated in the weeks before President Álvaro Uribe's August 7 re-inauguration.
Until Friday, authorities had attributed these attacks to the FARC guerrillas. This seemed like a safe guess, given that the FARC accompanied Uribe's first inauguration in 2002 with a series of mortars launched at the presidential palace. The guerrillas never denied responsibility for that attack, even though they succeeded only in killing more than a dozen people in a poor neighborhood blocks away.
But the FARC has denied responsibility for other Bogotá bombings that have shocked and stunned Colombians in the past few years. These include:
- The February 7, 2003 car-bombing of the El Nogal social club in northern Bogotá, which killed thirty-six people. (Guerrilla denial here.)
- The October 10, 2005 car-bombing that narrowly missed killing pro-Uribe Senator Germán Vargas Lleras, but wounded nine people, only a few blocks from the El Nogal site. (Guerrilla denial here.)
- The April 6, 2006 bomb attack on two "Transmilenio" rapid-transit buses in a poor southern Bogotá neighborhood, which killed two boys. (Guerrilla denial here.)
The guerrillas' denials usually appear in communiqués issued weeks after an attack. Colombian authorities and analysts brush these off as fabrications, lies from FARC leaders seeking belatedly to defend themselves against the public backlash that their attacks inspire. This interpretation ends up being widely accepted, since the FARC has nearly zero credibility with the average Colombian.
The revelations about the July bombs, however, give the guerrillas' credibility a boost, however slight. At least they require us to view their past denials in a new light.
That doesn't mean that we have to believe the FARC every time they insist that they are innocent of a terror attack. Nor does it mean that elements in the Colombian military must be the "real" culprits. (For instance, Sen. Vargas Lleras, a leading proponent of extraditing drug criminals to the United States, no doubt has many powerful enemies in Colombia's narco underworld who could plausibly have set off the October 2005 bomb.) But it does cast strong doubt on the Colombian authorities' snap judgments that the guerrillas are to blame.
Worse, it undermines one of the Colombian government's main narratives: that only an iron-fisted security strategy can keep a vicious, nihilistic and powerful enemy from wreaking havoc in Colombia's big cities. The next time a car bomb slaughters innocents in an urban area, it is less likely that Colombians will immediately and unanimously blame the guerrillas - and the security forces may find themselves uncomfortably under the same cloud of suspicion.
While these revelations are very damaging, the Colombian Army's top leadership does deserve praise for allowing investigators to do their job and for announcing publicly that officers were to blame. A cover-up and stonewall would have done far more damage to the institution's credibility, which has suffered some grave blows this year. Damage control will be further eased if the armed forces allow Colombia's civilian judicial system to conduct a swift, transparent investigation and judgment of all those responsible.
Posted by isacson at September 10, 2006 2:10 AM
Comments
Back in 1988 some group bombed the Centro Colombo Americano in Medellín shortly before I arrived to teach English. It wasn't a car bomb.
The attackers actually entered the Colombo and herded staff and students out of the building before blowing it up.
As far as I know, no one ever claimed responsibility. There was considerable speculation that it could have been the FARC. Then again, Pablo Escobar was "active" at the time.
I've always tended to blame the FARC--simply because I despise the group and consider the FARC a primary reason for the misery of Colombia today. And yet, if someone were to press me on the issue, I have to admit that the government's lack of concern for marginalized Colombians makes the "oligarchy" (=the upper class) equally responsible for the country's troubles.
I suppose I show the natural tendency to descry overtly violent crime while glossing over acts and policies that breed violence.
Posted by: richtiger ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 10, 2006 10:20 AM
It should also be mentioned that the FARC are not entirely unrelated to the events: a former FARC member, "Jessica", who apparently still had contacts with active FARC members, was closely involved with the accused officers and with the attempted bombings (including the one bomb that did go off).
We could even be talking about a double-double-cross, so to speak: "Jessica" could have been aiding the officers in their deception just as she was aiding active FARC in real attacks. It's not an impossibility, since reality isn't always straightforward.
All that, of course, doesn't erase the clear and evident responsibility of the officers involved in these criminal acts, a responsibility that extends to the government, which urgently needs to take action against those involved in these acts, if some measure of credibility is to be regained.
I do welcome Mr. Isacson's call for keeping an open mind about past, present and future events, as long as we don't go as far as assuming that now the Army will be to blame for everything and the FARC are to remain innocent until proven guilty. Especially if one considers that, given today's climate, the FARC might possibly be inclined to step up attacks that they can easily deny, trusting that some people will be more willing to believe them now.
richtiger: Well, the FARC might not be the primary historical reason behind all of this, but they are definitely a primary contemporary symptom and one of the ongoing engines that drag the conflict forward, deeper into darkness. In a few words, if the FARC don't stop doing what they are doing (whether unilaterally, in a negotiation or plainly forced to do so), condemning the "oligarchy" is not going to bring any changes, but rather it will only eternally stagnate the conflict.
Of course, blaming the "oligarchy" for everything is generally pretty politically correct, in Colombia even, but then there's the real problem of defining what exactly the "oligarchy" is.
For the FARC, the "oligarchy" also includes a lot of people that are nowhere near the top of the political, military or economic elite: anybody that isn't obviously poor and that, somehow, someway, is "aiding the oligarchy" can be understood as an enemy of the FARC and a "friend" of the "oligarchy".
Just as how some people, those in the paramilitaries and criminal sectors of the military for instance, have an equally loose interpretation of what a "guerrilla" or a "friend of the guerrilla" is. Both perspectives are astonishingly similar, if one stops to think about it for a moment.
Posted by: jcg at September 10, 2006 12:54 PM
Ah, jcg. Interesting comments. The conflict in Colombia is like a disease. Symptoms (=FARC, ELN, AUC, etc.) should be treated while the root causes of the illness (unequal distribution of wealth) are also addressed.
Posted by: richtiger at September 10, 2006 2:18 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)