Standing up to the “paras’”

Colombia’s raid in Ecuador and its aftermath

By DIANA de LALSAKUY

On March 1, Colombia jeopardized its relations with Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua by bombing a FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) encampment in Ecuadoran territory, killing a leading guerrilla along with Ecuadoran and Mexican citizens. In doing so, President Uribe—with U.S. backing—knowingly sabotaged a prisoner exchange process that had already yielded impressive results.

The highest moment of tension between Colombia and its neighbors occurred on March 1, with the killing of Raúl Reyes (FARC leader and the head of the prisoner exchange) in Ecuadoran territory by the Colombian military. Ecuador and Venezuela immediately retaliated and sent troops to the Colombian border and—along with Nicaragua—cut diplomatic and economic relationships with Colombia. With twelve American countries backing them and only the U.S. and Mexico supporting Uribe, Venezuela and Ecuador refused to back down until the Organization of American States (OAS) agreed to investigate the incident.

On March 17, the 34-member OAS unanimously rejected the military incursion of Colombia into Ecuador, essentially backing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s version of the story. Contrary to business as usual, the debate was not dominated by the United States. A week prior to the vote, the U.S. sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pressure Brazil and Chile to support Uribe, but the climate in Latin America is not as Yankee-friendly as it used to be.

In the aftermath of the OAS decision, Ecuador and Venezuela withdrew troops from the Colombian border. However, Ecuador has yet to reestablish diplomatic ties with Colombia, and the situation worsened when one of those killed in the raid was identified as an Ecuadoran citizen. Colombia, meanwhile, has used its monopolized media to spread blatant lies about Ecuador’s collaboration with the guerrillas. The widely read daily El Tiempo even published a photo that it claimed was of an Ecuadoran politician meeting with the FARC. The civilian in the photo, however, quickly identified himself as an Argentine communist who had met with the guerrillas years ago. Ecuador is also suing Colombia in the International Court of Justice “in an effort to stop or restrict aerial anti-coca spraying that has allegedly sickened people on the Ecuadoran side of the border,” as the Environmental News Service has reported.

Although left-wingers Correa (president of Ecuador) and Chávez scored some rhetorical points against Uribe and Bush, Uribe’s government ultimately achieved its objectives. The Reyes killing ended the prisoner exchange mediated by Chávez, which had been providing a visible alternative to Uribe’s militarist “Democratic Security Policy.” Part of that initiative stationed more soldiers and police along highways and offered higher rewards to civilians for turning in guerrillas. The strike also allowed the Colombian president to paint himself as a successful participant in the so-called global war on terror and demonstrate the effectiveness of Bush’s “preemptive” war doctrine within Colombia. Uribe will surely use this success to justify future military actions and armed control of the country. According to Colombian senator Jesús Bernal of the opposition party Polo Democratico (DP), the president even indicated in a closed meeting with politicians, that he would not hesitate to repeat a similar raid and that “the declaration of the Río Group Summit ‘was nothing more than a pantomime.’”

Paramilitary violence heats up in Colombia

The weeks following Uribe’s March 1 assault in Ecuador witnessed a wave of right-wing paramilitary violence inside Colombia. The attacks have come in the wake of a March 6 protest against paramilitary violence. Marchers demanded an end to disappearances, mass graves, forced displacements, kidnapping, and massacres—violence that is perpetrated overwhelmingly by the right-wing paramilitaries and their backers in the government. The protesters also called for an agreement between the government and Colombia’s main guerrilla group, the FARC, to secure the release of hostages held by the FARC, in exchange for guerrilla prisoners held by the government.

Organizers estimated that 300,000 people participated in the two-day march in Bogotá. An earlier protest, held on February 4, against the FARC and in support of Uribe, yielded no backlash from the FARC. The spike in paramilitary violence against leftists and trade unionists, on the other hand, began immediately after the March 6 protest.

Since the march, six organizers have been assassinated, unidentified shooters have targeted activists’ houses, and e-mail death threats have been sent to Indymedia, the DP, and more than twenty-seven other movement leaders. The Black Eagles, a newly formed group of rearmed paramilitaries, have acted so openly that even the United Nations has called for protection of human rights activists and for an investigation of the situation.

The recent victims include Carmen Cecilia Carvajal, a teacher, Leonidas Gómez Rozo, a member of the bank workers’ union, Gildardo Gómez Alzate, a teacher and activist, and Carlos Burbano, the vice president of the hospital workers’ union.

This happened despite the fact U.S. State Department, in its 2008 annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” praised Colombia for demobilizing paramilitary groups.

Free trade agreement

Both Bush and Uribe have also used Colombia’s leading regional role in fighting the so-called war on terror to justify the signing of a free trade agreement (FTA). Bush is pressing hard for Congress to pass the FTA before he leaves office next January in the face of pressure by U.S. unions and the Democratic majority to block the deal.

On the one hand, Bush and Rice simply argue that Congress should sign the pact because Colombia is an ally—regardless of any human rights violations its government may have committed. Others have used a more nuanced logic, such as Dan Fisk, director of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council, who argues that “The free trade agreement, in our view, is critical to helping Colombia address the continuing threats it faces.... In fact, if there’s one argument, I think, that is paramount in this is that we know that the main recruitment ground for terrorists, for guerrillas, or drug traffickers is poverty. The best way to get out of poverty is to create more and more opportunities for Colombians.... That’s what the Colombia free trade agreement will do.”

The irony of the U.S. government promising to end poverty aside, free trade agreements have a well-documented history of doing just the opposite. In Mexico, for instance, the North American Free Trade Agreement allowed international agribusinesses to dump cheap products on the Mexican market, thereby devastating local agriculture and displacing thousands of peasants into urban centers that could not support them. It caused massive inflation and a 65 percent increase in immigration to the United States. These problems will likely be increased for a country linking its economy more closely to the U.S. just as this country’s economy falls into a recession.

Meanwhile, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was right to point out that the so-called decrease in violence does not take into account violence against trade unionists: “Of the more than 2,500 murders of trade unionists since 1986, only around 3 percent have resulted in convictions.” In fact, judges who have attempted to try such cases, such as Justice Nirio Sánchez last year, have been either removed or threatened. It is worth noting here that of all of those civilians killed by the government and paramilitaries, only 3.5 percent are killed in combat (the rest are unarmed).

Gerardo Cajamarca, an exiled Colombian trade unionist, made an even stronger point:

In Colombia, the paramilitaries have been used by multinational corporations to suppress unions. At least four multinationals, Drummond, Nestle, Chiquita Brands International and Coca-Cola, have been named in lawsuits claiming they paid paramilitaries to kill or intimidate union workers in Colombia. And one, Chiquita, admitted last year that it paid $1.7 million over six years to Colombia’s brutal right-wing militias, the AUC. And I would ask them if the reason fewer are killed is that the multinationals and their paid assassins, the paramilitaries, have been so successful? The fact is that unions are smaller in Colombia now because of the years of terror tactics by the paramilitaries. So though there are fewer individuals murdered, each death is more meaningful as it represents a larger percentage of those left.