“We used to use American M-16s,” a soldier told me, “but they’re too unreliable and take too much cleaning if you’re using them in the bush. We can’t afford the time. So we carry these Israeli Galils; they’re much sturdier. They’re all encased in metal, though—they weigh two and a half times what an M-16 weighs.” Likewise the Urban Counter-Terrorist branch of the Special Forces that guarded us in Bogotá: they carried Israeli TAR-21 snub-nosed semiautomatics.
While Colombia’s armed factions are busy slaughtering each other, sometimes with foreign and domestic state sponsors, every single one of these groups has also been involved in criminal activity: drug trafficking, kidnapping, torture, extortions, and assassinations, to name but a few of their favorite things. None of this protracted and brutal violence would be possible without First World demand for narcotics. This point was made poignantly to me by a farmer the Colombian government was retraining to grow coffee rather than coca. The government was giving him subsidies for equipment, training in small business management and efficient agricultural processes, and facilitated access to local, regional, and international markets under the Juan Valdéz brand.
“We are poor. I have to feed my family,” he said to me. “Coca grows fast; I can harvest it two to three times a year. I can sell coca for more money than coffee. So I make five or six times more money growing coca to feed my family. I’m just growing something people want. These groups fighting—killing—are fighting for money coming out of the United States. The guns, the land mines, they come out of the United States. This is a gringo problem,” he said, using the slang (and slightly derogatory) term for Americans, “not a Colombian one.”
This assertion seemed rather glib a day later when I spoke with a ten-year-old farm girl lucky to have prosthetic legs who was serving us fruit juices as we talked to more child soldiers demobilized from the paramilitaries. She hobbled over, careful not to spill the cups on her wooden tray, with a big smile on her face.
“¿Qué te pasó?” (“What happened to you?”)
“Minas. En mi finca. Tengo suerte.” (“Mines. On my farm. I’m lucky.”)
“Gracias,” I said as I took the cup off the tray and gave her a big smile.
Despite her youth and disability, she was remarkably dignified, so I didn’t want to embarrass her by making too big a fuss. She didn’t expand on whether she was lucky to be alive or lucky to have prosthetic legs. Probably both. Because of the narcotics cultivation and the long-running conflict, Colombia is second in the world in land mine victims, after Afghanistan, with the government reporting 11, 408 deaths and injuries since 1990.3 Try talking, too, about how none of this is a Colombian problem to the civilians and former fighters (both left-wing terrorists and right-wing paramilitaries) who have seen loved ones chopped to pieces by machete or chain saw to conserve ammunition.
Two generations have been lost to this conflict, all funded by narcotics. That little gram bought in New York or London to be snorted in clubs or at private parties results in these kids being raped by fighters, kidnapped for ransom (and then likely raped), or blown up: two generations devastated by a foreigner’s appetite for “a little fun.” The US has tried to implement aid and crop replacement programs in other drug-producing countries in the world, mainly Afghanistan, encouraging peasants to plant crops other than those that generate narcotics. Neither the program in Colombia nor Afghanistan has been deemed successful: the numbers simply don’t add up.
PIPELINES OF ILLICIT GOODS
The FARC, however, is not a fully integrated drug cartel as we generally understand the term: an organization effective at cross-border transactions. Nor is it involved in the most profitable downstream segment of the drug trade: the retail sale. It is when the user in the US or Europe buys from the dealer that the biggest profit is made. The FARC’s drug funding comes mostly from its involvement in the upstream, domestic supply chain: it controls the coca fields in twenty-three of the country’s thirty-two departments (states), which helps its members “recruit fresh troops and impose their own laws and taxes.”4
The FARC started collecting a “war tax” on drug crops in 1982, when cocaine use became prevalent and its trafficking profitable. FARC charged 10 percent of the per-kilogram price5 of coca base, the raw form of cocaine (which is actually greenish, after being processed—the mashed-up coca leaves are mixed with kerosene—in water-accessible riverside huts in the jungle). FARC also collected fees for every drug flight leaving from areas it controlled and taxed marijuana and opium (for heroin) farmers. It still does, though getting out of the drug business is one of the conditions of the peace deal FARC is now negotiating with President Santos.
Like the jihadis with whom I would later become familiar, the FARC, which was supposed to be a revolutionary group fighting for greater justice, also crafted a convenient narrative for its criminality and involvement in illicit trade: that with little government presence or support, the peasants lacked alternatives to making a living. True, growing coca is far more profitable than growing other crops, but it was also not in the FARC’s or the paramilitaries’ interest to give the peasants much choice: much of the fighting between the two sides was for control of the fields and the trafficking routes.
To increase their profits from the drug trade, the armed groups have attempted to move more into the midstream supply chain: smuggling. To do so, they have forged alliances with several of the criminal gangs (bacrim), mainly composed of demobilized fighters returning to their old tricks. The Urabeños is the most famous and powerful of the bacrim. In September 2017, however, their leader, Dairo Antonio Usuaga (alias “Otoniel”) offered to surrender and demobilize, in a manner similar to the FARC. That is no coincidence: the groups are linked. The bacrim pay the FARC’s famous taxes to move product through territory the FARC controls. Otherwise, the bacrim can pay the FARC directly in weapons, ammunition, and other supplies. The alliances also entail intelligence sharing; for which the FARC will provide shelter and training6 in military tactics to the neophyte bacrim members. That is a concrete example of a convergent threat when criminal and terrorist groups work together.
These alliances, based on money and self-interest, are fleeting, also due to money and self-interest. The FARC has sought to cut out the bacrim middlemen and further vertically integrate its drug business by selling cocaine directly to the Mexican drug cartels. FARC’s profit per kilogram triples if it can get the cocaine cross-border to pickup points on the Colombian coast or into neighboring Venezuela, Panama, or Ecuador, rather than selling the green paste product from laboratories inside Colombia.7 Depending on the estimate, each fighter costs the FARC between $6,000 and $12,0008 a year to maintain. If the FARC can cover costs by selling drugs, it stays fighting. So cutting out the drug profits will stop the violence, the terrorism, and the insurgency: cutting the consumption of the illicit product, taking the money out of the illicit trade, is an effective counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactic.
In his speech before the UN General Assembly in September 2013, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos asserted that drug trafficking “has been the main funding source for violence and terrorism in my country … Without the grim influence of drug trafficking—which fuels the fire of our war—I’m sure it would have already ended.”9
Perhaps, but that is not the whole story; narcotics are not the only source of revenue here: both the terrorist insurgencies and the cartels have a long involvement in smuggling consumer products. Before Pablo Escobar entered the cocaine trade, he smuggled cigarettes and electronics. The FARC are now also involved in smuggling cigarettes that come in from the Tri-Border Area at the intersection of Brazil-Argentina-Paraguay via free trade zones in the Caribbean and Panama. According to current estimates, drugs account for only 25 to 50 percent of the FARC’s income. So without its involvement in narcotics, the FARC would be weakened, but still well funded.10
Extortion has also long been FARC policy and a huge additional source of revenue. In 2000, the FARC issu
ed “Law 002,” which stated that every Colombian with a net worth over $1 million was obligated to pay a “war tax” to it. Dutch-born FARC fighter Tanja Nijmeier has detailed11 how, as a member of the FARC’s fierce RUAN (Red Urbana Antonio Nariño, or the Antonio Nariño Urban Network), she would get the details of whom to extort (names, addresses, relatives, pattern of life, and details of their finances and private lives), would call them at home, and, if they refused to pay, she would ensure they “entered into action” by bombing them. The FARC would call and ask again for their “war tax,” a practice that only ended in July 2016, when FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez (alias “Timochenko”) called off the practice by ordering his underlings to “stop the collection of taxes on all legal economic activity.”12 Those “taxed” ran the gamut from small farmers and shopkeepers to multinational corporations.
Illegal mining and the attendant extortion of mining companies are also a major source of income for the FARC and other groups. They impose taxes on illegal gold mines in the Antioquia, Córdoba, and Chocó departments13 in northwest Colombia. They are also involved in the mining of tungsten, tantalum, and coltan, which are used in consumer electronics such as cell phones. These are known as “conflict minerals,” and their regulation was suggested by the OECD Guidance on Conflict Minerals that targets the chokepoints in the supply chain: the smelters from which the major corporations (including Apple) buy their raw materials.
In the US, the Dodd-Frank Act has adopted the OECD guidance, so these corporations have to file reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission attesting that they are sourcing their materials from approved suppliers where the minerals came from. The practice, first started with the “blood diamonds” that funded the civil war in Sierra Leone, is drawn from banks’ well-established anti-money-laundering protocols.
When Colombia experiences a boom in oil and mining exploration, that increases the probability and profitability of extorting mining and energy companies. Terrorists, too, run with the bulls of capital markets. Illegal mining and extortion offer significant advantages for the FARC compared with drugs: they attract less attention from law enforcement, and the penalties are much lighter—those caught don’t face extradition to the US the way drug traffickers do, for a start.
Oil companies have been favorites. Pipelines are easy to poke holes in to steal oil to smuggle or, more simply, blow up and set aflame when the company refuses the up-front tax. In 2013, the FARC had carried out more than 163 attacks on pipelines by the end of November, causing the loss of thirty thousand barrels of oil a day—about 3 percent of Colombia’s production that year.14 Oil pipelines are an ideal target because they are difficult to protect and attacking them inflicts significant economic damage on the state and on “imperialist” foreign investment.
Sometimes the FARC and others would extort the oil companies and their personnel more directly. Kidnapping oil company executives and their families was a very good revenue earner: “K&R” (kidnap and ransom) insurance premiums have traditionally been very high for national senior executives of foreign companies operating in Colombia. Key infrastructure in general, though, is a pretty sweet target: electrical plants have been attacked, cutting off electricity to three hundred thousand people in October 2013.15 At the time, the Colombian government’s peace talks with the FARC were stalled, so the disruptions of oil and electricity supplies were an easy, cheap, and effective way of reminding the government of the FARC’s power and keeping it negotiating.
Official figures of kidnappings vary due to a variety of factors: people who were thought kidnapped were not, people were freed and did not notify the authorities, or the authorities might be sure someone had been kidnapped but the organization holding the victim might not be the group that originally took him—everywhere in the world, criminal organizations kidnap people and then sell them to terrorist groups, and more recently, foreigners kidnapped in the Middle East have been sold to ISIS. The average of the best estimates indicates that in the early 2000s, the FARC held between 2,500 and 3,900 civilian hostages, not counting military, police, or contractors. The FARC even built special camps in the heart of the jungle to hold them all.
Fortunately, kidnappings have declined significantly since the FARC officially gave up the practice in 2012 as a precondition to the opening of peace talks with the government. When I was there in 2009 and 2010, kidnappings were still such a phenomenon that there was a special radio program for hostages on the national radio broadcaster, Caracol (whose offices were once bombed). Obtaining a little radio was a major prize in Colombia’s internment camps for hostages, deep in the jungle. The kidnapped gathered around the crackling radio in the predawn hours every Sunday to listen to Radio Caracol’s Voices of Kidnap to hear if one of their relatives came on delivering a message of love to them. A typical broadcast would go something like this:
On cue starts the jingle with a driving beat not heard since the 1980s with a high little singsong: “The Voices of Kidnap on Caracol / are messages of life and liberty.” The voice on the radio speaks in a clear Colombian accent. “This is your host, Herbin Hoyos, speaking to all the kidnapped, wherever they may be in the jungles of Colombia. We are speaking to each and every one of you. We are here with you as we are every Sunday night, from midnight to six in the morning, telling you to keep hoping: you will be freed. We will continue broadcasting until the last captive is freed from the jungles of Colombia.
“Kidnapping has been a weapon of war either to extort money or achieve political ends since at least fifteen hundred years before Christ. We know it was used in ancient Egypt and Greece; we read about it in the Iliad and the Bible; we know the young Julius Caesar was kidnapped. Now this sad tradition continues in our own country, in our own war. I have with me here tonight someone that was just recently freed after thirteen years in captivity.
“Camila Arango was taken by the paramilitary autodefensas [Colombian Self-Defense Forces, AUC] from her own farm in Caquetá. After thirteen years, Camila, you are now on the other end of the radio. What is the message of hope you wish to share with your friends, your fellow captives who are listening out there in the jungle?”
A soft crinkling of paper is heard over the radio. “I just wrote down what I want to say.” Her voice is soft and tentative. “As you hear my voice now, you must have hope. So often I doubted my ability to go on, but my being here today is proof that you must, that miracles do happen, that your friends and family still love you, still pray for you, still work for your safe return. I want to express my gratitude to my fellow kidnapped who were with me in the jungle and took care of me and helped me go on. I am still with you, tonight, over the radio, but also every day, as I carry you in my heart and in my prayers and will work for your release, too.”
She pauses, then resumes her staccato delivery.
“I am grateful also to my family who daily waited for me, and to Almighty God. Continue praying to Him, my kidnapped friends; He will protect you. Especially to little Ofelia Ramírez, fourteen years old, taken on her way to school in Bogotá. She joined us the last six months of my captivity. Ofelia, do not be afraid, my child, do not be afraid. God is with you, in you, you must find joy in Him and you will be free.”
THE BUSINESS OF HUNTING TERRORISTS
I know from my own work that nothing releases the purse strings and unleashes the hounds of state like terrorism. Hunting terrorists is a business of its own. Those agencies that kill the most terrorists get the most funding. In Colombia, this dynamic put pressure on the Colombian military to produce results to justify all the funding and assistance it received, both from its own government and the US. This resulted in a scandal known as the “False Positives.”
Poor civilian boys who were reported missing by their mothers in Soacha, just south of Bogotá, were found three days later in a different part of the country dressed in fatigues and shot dead by the military, who identified them as left-wing guerrillas (like the FARC and ELN) killed in combat. The mothers and other famil
y members insisted this was impossible, that they were not members of armed groups. The government prosecuted nearly five hundred soldiers involved in the kidnaps and murders. But some Colombians remained dissatisfied, claiming the prosecutions were too slow and that the prison terms too often became time served while awaiting trial, leaving the kidnappings and murders to go legally unpunished.
“But the legal process is working in this [the Soacha] case [of False Positives]. It is the government itself that made the events at Soacha public, so we are not hiding anything,” insisted Carlos Franco as we chatted at the Colombian Embassy in London a few days after my 2010 trip. Franco was the very embodiment of redemption through reintegration: this blue-eyed, middle-aged man with wild wavy hair sitting in a pinstriped blue suit was once a commander of the leftist EPL (Popular Liberation Army, in Spanish) guerrillas, one of the many left-wing insurgencies that are similar to, but competed with, the FARC; when I interviewed him in 2010, he was the director of the Presidential Program for Human Rights, coordinating the tasks of the various government departments and shaping Colombian policy on human rights. He felt they had advanced greatly during the Uribe administration, mainly through strengthened state institutions.
“So the most important thing today,” said Franco back in 2010, “is that the state now feels responsible for guaranteeing the rights of the people. I think that’s very important—all rights, be they of labor union members or a businessman who should not be kidnapped or political opposition to the government. The second thing is that all the policies are considered in the light of human rights. Our security policy is designed to guarantee rights and it’s enacted respecting people’s rights.”
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