Narcos, Coca Leaf Farmers, Paramilitaries, and Guerrillas in Colombia
Revisiting the 2016 Peace Accords
In NARCOS opening season, episode 1 DEA Agent, Steve Murphy, says: If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the Narco world, it’s that life is more complicated than you think.
NARCOS delves into this complex political landscape revealing that there are many local, regional, national, and international actors involved in Colombia’s historical struggles.
NARCOS highlights the criminal world of kidnappings, torture, forced displacement, and sicarios carrying out political assassinations. Narco-traffickers, government military, the DEA, paramilitaries, the FARC, ELN, and how other Bandas criminales participated in driving Colombia’s fifty-year war and will continue to play a vital role in Colombia’s post-accord future.
Yet, the poor, the indigenous, and the Afro-Colombian communities have been purposefully denied a voice in Colombia’s future. And this is where Pablo Escobar comes in.
Pablo Escobar was birthed during La Violencia one of the bloodiest moments in Colombian history in which 200,000 Colombians were killed and 20% of the population was injured or forced to flee their homes.
Born in 1949, Escobar grew up during the worst years when, according to Norman Bailey, “The government fought paramilitaries and guerrillas, industrialists fought unionists, conservative Catholics fought heretical liberals, and Bandidos took advantage of the free-for-all to plunder.”
La Violencia created a conflicted generation of Colombians who were acquainted with violence and murder and suspicious of a corrupt and immoral government that operated with impunity.
With little social and economic protection from the government, thousands of vulnerable indigenous, peasants, and Afro-Colombians were forced to migrate to “asentamientos” squatter settlements to survive.
While Liberal and Conservative leaders established a National Front of seeming political stability consenting to divide power by rotating each term for sixteen years, the disparity between rich and poor expanded.
In 1961, President Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress to encourage economic liberalization and capitalism and discourage any communist ideologies, made the rich richer at a rate of 6 percent annually and did little for the poorest sectors which in 1970, earned less than 16% of total urban income, while the richest 10% earned over 43%. Two-thirds of all Colombians living in rural areas lived in abject poverty.
Escobar understood the sentiments of the poor, understood what it was like to live through years of the horror and carnage of La Violencia. In a statement to his lawyer, he declares that terrorism “was the atomic bomb of the poor people. It is the only way for the poor to strike back.”
The forsaken, the dispossessed, the powerless who were ignored by decades of Ladrino Administrations who did little to help them, found a champion in Escobar and welcomed his paternalism and generosity.
In La Parábola de Pablo, Alonso Salazar narrates how Escobar’s mother, Hermilda’s school was almost burned down by conservatives because they feared that she was indoctrinating their children with Liberal ideologies.
Salazar writes: “Upon stepping outside they saw something that they would never forget: liberal peasants hung by their feet from the school’s crossbeams and decapitated with a machete. The blood, dark and thick, covered the hallway and stuck to their feet.” After, Hermilda moved to Envigado, a suburb of Medellín and Escobar built a chapel devoted to el Niño de Atocha.
During the height of Escobar’s narco-trafficking, he made Forbes international billionaire’s list in 1987 and continued to hold that title for seven years with an individual cash flow of $3 billion and net worth of over 2 billion.
Whereas the government continued to ignore the plight of the poor and marginalized Escobar proceeded to win the hearts of Medellin’s neglected communities through development projects including his most famous project the construction of Barrio Pablo Escobar, which received the blessing of the Catholic Church and today, houses 12,700 people in 2,800 homes.
An entrance sign presents Escobar’s face and reads: “Welcome to Barrio Pablo Escobar. Here there is peace.” Residents of Barrio Pablo are his most ardent supporters. In the documentary, Pablo Escobar: ángel o demonio, one woman who lives in the barrio claims that besides her mother, Escobar is the only person who ever provided for her. In addition to planting trees in and around Medellin, he established a health care facility for low-income families and one hundred soccer fields for Medellin’s youth.
It’s complicated: Unemployment in Medellín was more extreme than in Bogotá and Cali and when General Augusto Pinochet of Chile ended the cocaine trade, there, the city was ripe to take over. Many of Medellín’s employed youth, who felt abandoned by the oligarchy and discounted in Colombia’s economic growth, found lucrative employment as drug smugglers or sicarios for the growing drug cartels in a country that seemed silently tolerant of drug trading.
Colombian history is notorious for the wealthy gaining power through often brutal means of slave trading, land seizers, tobacco, emerald and gold smuggling, and forced displacement of indigenous populations. Drug traffickers like Escobar were part of the ostracized and dispossessed who had to fight to be included in Colombia’s prosperity. As a result, cocaine production was simply a new export that enabled the poor to have access to economic wealth and stability.
Unlike, Colombia’s oligarchy, drug traffickers like Escobar brought in billions of dollars into the economy and donated some of their money back to their communities by investing in infrastructure projects. During the early 70s, the United States also seemed more concerned with the containment of communism during the Cold War than in the rising cocaine trade and considered Colombia a political ally against the spread of communism in the region. When the U.S. observed that the disparity between rich and poor put Colombia at risk of “going communist,” it intervened with both military and non-military assistance.
By the 1980s, international drug trafficking organizations reorganized and began operating on an unprecedented scale and the US began stepping up the amount of DEA special agents from 1,941 in 1980 with an annual budget of 206.6 million to 2,234 special agents in 1985 with an increase in budget to $362.4 million.
“The war on Drugs offered US prospects to increase military hegemony and thus maintain and establish commercial interests where the US can dominate governments and obtain cheap labor and natural resources (particularly mining and oil). It also sews death, fear and chaos that stifle populist revolts against the oligarchical and military rule” (WTF).
US Ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tamb increased the pressure of the US government to intervene in drug trafficking by associating drug traffickers with the leftist guerilla movement whom he argued were not only working together but operated as a direct threat to US commercial interests in Colombia.
Pena points to the conflation of issues in Season Two Episode Six: “They were operating against the guerillas and now operating against the Narcos.” Tambs coined the term “narco-guerillas” to establish the connection between communism and drug trafficking “coca leaf farmers and guerrillas” legitimizing the argument for “military intervention in subversive zones.” Evidence demonstrates complicity “between military intelligence, the DEA and a docile sector of narco-trafficking.”
According to National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book №243, “The U.S.-Colombia Medellin Task Force, known in Spanish as the Bloque de Búsqueda or ‘Search Block,’ was sharing intelligence information with Fidel Castaño, paramilitary leader of Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar or ‘People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar’), a clandestine terrorist organization that waged a bloody campaign against people and property associated with the reputed narcotics kingpin.”
Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project observed that: “The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today’s ‘para-political’ scandal.
The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords, and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and the U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history.”
It is important to note that paramilitaries grew in the 1980s with the growth of the narco trade and the drug traffickers who hired private armies to protect their interests. “Working as an adjunct to US and Colombian military intelligence units, and with funding from the drugs trade, paramilitary groups were involved in counter-insurgency operations and implicated in serious human rights violations.
They employed tactics such as selective assassinations and forced disappearances, massacres, forced displacement of entire populations. Since their emergence, paramilitary groups have maintained political, military, and economic links with powerful landowners and businessmen as well as with individuals involved in local, regional, and national politics.
Through these ties paramilitaries, and their associates, amounted to wealth and political influence, fuelling human rights violations and undermining the rule of law.”The majority of human rights violations over the last two decades have been committed by paramilitary groups.
In Season II, Episode 6, Pena asks a poignant question capturing the complicated Narco-World of good and evil: “Who are the good, Steve? he asks. “That’s Us?” Even Pablo Escobar acknowledges the complicity of actors needed to bring about his eventual demise indicting the “The Pepes, the Cali Cartel, Judy Moncada, the Castanos, the government, (and yes)the Gringos.”
It is true that the Gringos and the collusion of other actors dismantled the Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, interdicted coca coming into Colombian processing facilities, used drug certification requirements to pressure the Colombian government to attack drug cartels, and allowed aerial fumigation of coca crops.
These successes, however, merely pushed coca cultivation increasingly to FARC-dominated areas intensifying civil strife. Many analysts have argued that the war on drugs has been a strategic failure. The latest Colombia Coca Survey, released in July of 2016 jointly produced by The United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime UNODC and the Colombian Government revealed an increase of almost 40 percent in the coca crop area — from 69,000 hectares (ha) in 2014 to 96,000 ha in 2015.
Additional data show that five of the 23 Colombian departments affected by coca crops — Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo, Caquetá, and Norte de Santander — comprise 81 percent of the coca crop area. In 2015 Cocaine production increased 46 percent compared to 2014. In indigenous reserves, coca crops increased by 52 percent, rising from around 7,800 ha in 2014 to more than 11,800 in 2015. In the regions belonging to Afro-Colombian communities, the increase was up 51 %% compared to the previous year, increasing from some 10,600 ha to more than 16,000.
In theory, the Peace Accords, and the awarding of the Noble Peace Prize to Colombian President Manuel Santos ought to end Colombia’s long-running civil war and drug war even though it was narrowly voted down during the Oct. 2 referendum. While speaking to many forcefully displaced Afro-Colombians the week leading up to the referendum, one thing was made clear — the United States government and many US companies have played a substantial role in the conflict.
Escobar is correct: “Las mentiras son necessarias cuando la verdad es muy dificil de creer.” What is difficult and complicated to understand is that US Military and foreign policies have colluded to safeguard profits for those that stand to profit from sustained conflict and instability in Colombia.
Here’s how: U.S. military aid has significantly increased the military might, size, and technological capacity of the Colombian army; an army, as mentioned above, that has been implicated in numerous human rights violations and has contributed to the displacement of over five million Colombians, which represents over 10% of the population.
The subsequent rural-to-urban migration resulting from that displacement frees up two key market resources: the natural resources found on the land left behind, and an easily-exploited labor supply living in a condition of vulnerability that subjects them to accept low labor standards. Both of these spell profit, of which U.S. companies have claimed a share.
For over fifty years, the School of the Americas (currently known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC) has provided training programs for Latin American public security forces.
In November of 1996, the Department of Defense of the United States admitted to having trained members of the Latin American military in techniques of torture, kidnapping, murder, and forced disappearance, among other grave insults to the conscience of humankind, and between 1954 and 1998, 167 graduates of the School of the Americas have been implicated in serious human rights violations or acts of corruption.
General Gustavo Pardo Ariza an SOA graduate was head of the Fourth Brigade in Medellin and responsible for guarding the prison from which Escobar literally walked away.
While these human rights violations were occurring, the U.S. government was simultaneously pursuing market liberalization policies to open up the Colombian economy to foreign capital, leading to the steady growth of the Colombian economy at an average rate of 5% a year. However, that economic growth was made possible by direct violence against the Colombian people at the hands of their public forces, and economic violence against vulnerable groups. It also came at the expense of worker rights, in a country already known for its horrible track record in that arena.
Here are the faces of dispossession who were not in favor of the Referendum as they unanimously asserted that past attempts to demobilize leftist-guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary units in Colombia have not been successful. “Alternatively, they form splinter groups or new criminal bands, or join up with other armed groups that are still fighting,” Bouvier writes, citing the presence of “17 different ‘narcoparamilitary’ groups that operate in hundreds of municipalities throughout Colombia — many as the result of the paramilitary demobilizations in the mid-2000s.”
“We do not have a voice and have been left out of the peace processes. Already we are witnessing FARC elements working with right-wing paramilitaries in Cauca — indicating that the transformation from leftist insurgency to a business-first cartel in the Mexican style might already be underway.
As for cocaine production: “The government tells us not to raise coca, and not to sell it to the guerrillas — but we have to feed our families. We don’t have a choice.”
