Behind the
THE MURDER of Liberal senator Luis
Carlos Galan on August 18 impelled the Colombian president Virgilio Barco
Vargas to unleash "total war" against the drug traffickers, the narcos. This took the form of an impressive military and police mobilization, the arrest of nearly 11,000 people and the seizure of the property of the famous Medellín Cartel in various regions of the country. Whole stocks of
October 2, 1989 • #170 International Viewpoint the drug traffic has
85 not been touched
On August 16 and 17, a
Supreme Court judge, the commander of the police in Antiquía arms and ammunition were found, several tons of drugs, as well as cars, planes and helicopters. The value of the equipment seized is estimated at $200 million.
However, at least so far, this operation has not had the success expected. A series of bombings of banks, newspapers and political offices in Bogota and Medellin shows that the cartels still have a considerable capacity for maneuver. The explanation of the government's impotence has to be sought in the way the mafia is interwoven into the
Colombian social fabric and the extent of its infiltration of the state apparatus. And there is also the factor of the United
States, which is also implicated in the drugs traffic, despite
President Bush's sanctimonious declarations.
RODRIGO O'FARREL
HE "SINISTER WINDOW" was established in 1974 in the Banco de la Republica.
Without any check, you could deposit dollars of dubious origin and get quite clean pesos back. In that year, the money that passed through that window was on the order of $500 million. In 1987, the flood of "narcodollars" flowing through it reached $1,200, the equivalent of 4% of the country's gross domestic product. In
1988, the Medellín Cartel's total profit was probably between 5 and 10 billion dollars, of which nearly 2 billion were injected into the Colombian economy.
The rest remained in foreign banks and clandestine caches of currency.
Another mechanism for laundering dollars from the drug traffic are the presidential amnesties. On taking office, every new Colombian president decrees an amnesty. In this way, the big mafioso stocks of capital are given a clean bill of health by the fiscal authorities. Such money can also be channelled into buying "foreign debt bonds," which were authorized by the Congress when the
World Bank refused to grant Colombia new credits.
Thus, the Colombian ruling class has always devised means for taking advantage of the drug capital. It has tried itself to administer this money, fearing that the emerging new class could quickly come to control the country's economy. However, as the mafia's economic operations took on greater scope, their political activity became independent and violent.
Spectacular maneuvers by the authorities
In 1985, the mafia eliminated a minister of justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who opposed their designs. The following year, it was Guillermo Cano, director of one of the country's major dailies, El Espectador. Murders of political personalities and uncorrupted judges and police have continued without letup over recent years. The authorities also responded with spectacular maneuvers. They have put the cities under martial law, restricted freedoms, caught some drug pushers, confiscated weapons and destroyed some laboratories. However, the backbone of and three left activists were murdered. But it was the ensuing murder of the Liberal senator Luis Carlos Galán that forced the government to react more energetically. According to all the polls, this 46year-old politician was the most serious candidate for the presidency. This time, the mafia's hired killers went too far. Galán belonged to the moderate center of his party, having begun his political career at the age of 25, as minister of education.
Violent protests at Galán's murder
Although he was responsible for a split that cost the Liberal Party the presidential elections in 1981, Galán was reinstated in the party after a few months. He had won the support of the bosses that he criticized before. His intransigence against the drug traffic, which he fought since the early 1980s, and his positions in favor of reforming the political system gained him enormous popularity in the big urban centers.
This reputation enabled him to emerge as the charismatic leader of the only current in the Liberal Party able to negotiate peace with the guerrillas and offer a democratic opening. Galán's murder aroused violent protest among, the population, which has long demanded the dismantling of the paramilitary groups. Virgilio Barco yielded to this pressure, unleashing his "total war" against the drug traffic.
However, the results of this operation did not match up to the fanfare of the government's campaign. Some 7,297 of the 10,797 arrests carried out after August 19 were of people suspected of being connected with the drugs' trade in one way or another. But by the start of September only about 3,500 of them were still being held, the rest having been released for "lack of evidence." portise ore, only people or secondare 3 importance in the two cartels were
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drugs war
COLOMBIA arrested. Apart from Eduardo Martinez Romero reputed to be the treasurer of the Medellín cartel and Fredy, the son of Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the third in command of the cartel, none of the "big fish" were picked up. Furthermore there was no attempt to storm any of the wellfortified bunkers of the Magdalena Medio, which are the nerve centres from which the bosses of the Medellín cartel, Pablo Escobar and Jorge Luis Ochoa, direct their vast networks when life in the town gets difficult. Justice ministers stooges of the mafia
Everyone in Colombia knows the reasons for the failure of the operation. Corruption and assassination threats against government officials were enough to "wilt" several of the state's top leaders. Two of Virgilio Barco's justice ministers, Edmundo López Gómez and José Manuel Arias Carrizosa, are remembered as stooges of the mafia. refused to extradite the two chiefs of the Calf cartel, and the second revoked five other extradition orders issued by the government of Belisario Betancur.!
The two super-rich cartels of Medellín and Calí have also succeeded in buying off whole sections of the armed forces, police and judiciary. The cartel bosses are kept regularly informed of planned raids by top police officials. It is by no means rare for leading figures to be arrested for contact with the mafia possession of drugs. In September 1986, an army chief was captured with 80 kilos of cocaine; last May a police colonel was summoned for possession of 400 kilos of cocaine; and more recently a former army captain who belonged to a training network of Pablo Escobar was captured in possession of important secret documents from the government and the armed forces, which he was about to deliver to the mafiosi. Up until now, more than 1,700 military personnel have been thrown out of the armed forces for weeks ago, Miguel Maza Márquez, director of DAS [state security services] had a miraculous escape from an attempt on his life. Subsequently he came up with some important revelations on the infiltration of the army by drug traffickers, drawing down the wrath of the Defence Minister, Paz. The latter demanded the sacking of the uncorrupted director of DAS, who has also denounced the role of the army in numerous massacres of peasants carried out by extreme right groups in 1988 Barco was forced to intercede. He decided to stick with Maza and ask for Guerrero's resignation.
The alliance between the drug trafickers and the military is not only a matter of the corruption of a handful of officers. It also flows from the common interests of these two social groups. In its struggle against "Communism," the military has never had such a determined ally as the mafia. When they tried to extend their power over the vast areas of agricultural
The Medellín Cartel -ACCORDING to the Miami Herald, 80% of the cocaine consumed in the United States is provided by the Medellin cartel. Some estimates claim that up to 300,000 people out of Colombia's total population of 32 million are directly or indirectly employed in the drug "sector", and that 1.2 million people are economically reliant on it.
The publicly known heads of the Medellín cartel - Pablo Escobar Gaviria, known as el padrino [the godfather] Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, known as el mexicano (the Mexican] and Jorge Luis Ochoa - are from the Antioquía region and are among the richest people on the planet. They are also at the top of the planet's wanted list. A fourth member of the cartel, Carlos Ledher, was captured in Colombia in February 1987 and immediately extradited to the USA, where he is now serving a life sentence.
The properties and investments of the Medellin cartel are spread across the whole territory of Colombia. The main laboratories for processing cocaine are in the eastern plains, in the forests of Guaviar and in the fertile region of Magdalena Medio, where the bosses own vast grazing lands guarded by private armies. It was there that this year Israeli, South African and British mercenaries trained an elite commando unit in terrorism for the cartel. Several secret cemeteries were also built there, in which some of the cartel's victims ended up.
In Medellin, capital of the prosperous department of Antioquía, the cartel controls a significant proportion of the town's buildings as well as numerous businesses. In the mid-1970s Medellín had a significant unemployment problem due to the crisis of the textile industry, but it is now an ultra-modern city where money flows readily. Building construction enterprises, credit and savings institutions as well as intermediate financial operations have developed spectacularly in the past few years thanks to the drugs money.
The mafia also invests in many other sectors such as foodstuffs, transport, stock rearing and tourism and owns banks, hotels, chemical laboratories, chains of drugstores, football teams and so on. From unassuming premises in Bogota, Rodriguez Gacha controlled by himself 34 different enterprises throughout the country with a monthly revenue of some 80 million pesos. 1,000 families throughout the country make their living through such business.
The other side of this economic prosperity is insecurity and drugs. Colombia has one of the highest numbers of violent deaths in the world In the last ten years, the number of murders have tripled, reaching 15,450 in 1987 and 21,129 in 1988 ("only" 1,637 of which were political murders). A big proportion of young people in Medellin, especially in the poorer quarters are affected by drugs, in particular by the spread of "crack". This is the element from which the "motorcycle killers", who will kill anybody for a modest fee, are drawn. * International Viewpoint #170 • October 2, 1989 land that they had bought to launder their money, conflict with the guerilla organizations.
At first, the mafia paid the "revolutionary tax" collected by the guerillas. It was at this time that the US ambassador, Lewis Tambs coined the phrase "narcoguerilla." But once they had dug in, they stopped doing this and made an alliance with the landowners, the cattle ranchers and the military. They set up "selfdefense" groups (civilian gangs authorized by law and supported by the army in the "struggle against subversion" and plunged into a crusade to exterminate the guerrillas, the agricultural workers' unions and all popular resistance.
Over 1,200 left activists assassinated
The army tolerated the activity of the self-defense groups, and in some cases backed it up. In 1987-88 more than 1,200 activists of the left organizations- the Patriotic Union, the People's Front and A Luchar — were murdered by the paramilitaries, to say nothing of dozens of teachers, priests, journalists and judges. In those regions where the guerrillas have responsible for massacres of peasants.
It is quite possible that the CIA itself played a role in stabilizing the mafia cartels in Colombia. In July 1988, the Washington Post revealed that at the end of 1986, the bosses of the Medellín cartel 1. The first law on extradition procedures was issued by President Rafael Nuñez in 1888. In 1980, Colombia made an agreement with the US on the extradition of drug-traffickers. In 1984, some 20 drug traffickers were extradited. The agreement was annuled by Colombia's Supreme Court in 1987, but after a wave of assassinations of magistrates and judges, Virgilio Barco threatened to revive the treaty, a threat he has carried out, using martial law powers.
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October 2, 1989 • #170 International Viewpoint had sought to get in contact with the American administration. In exchange for a tacit amnesty, they proposed through a Miami lawyer to provide information on the Colombian guerrillas, the activities of the Cuban advisers, the delivery of arms by Qadhafi and the presence of Palestinian, Angolan, Argentinian and Ecuadorian fighters among the guerrillas.
Campaign to liquidate the
Colombian left
According to the Washington Post, the US administration did not take this proposal seriously. It is hard to know what Washington really decided. But what is certain is that the date of this proposal coincided with the beginning of a campaign to liquidate the Colombian left in which an alliance between the army and the drug traffickers was an important fac-
What is more, there is a relationship between the Colombian drug traffickers and the CIA that goes back a long way. When the Irangate scandal was at its height, a CBS broadcast established that Colonel North was in contact with CIA agents who facilitated the entry into Florida of airplanes loaded with Colombian cocaine, after they had delivered arms and explosives to the Nicaraguan contras.
According to CBS, which based itself on testimonies from pilots jailed in the US, the CIA managed, thanks to cocaine money, "to buy more, better and still more sophisticated weapons for the contras." US senator John Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, noted in a letter to the Justice Department (published in the October 30, 1986, issue of the Miami News) that he had been approached by an informer who had assured him that he had taken part in drug operations together with the Colombian mafioso Jorge Luis Ochoa and CIA personnel. The same source confirmed that the CIA had sent arms to Colombia, and that on their return trips the planes used for this carried cocaine sent by Ochoa, with the complicity of the local CIA agents.
Later, a Colombian magazine published a peculiar testimony. The ex-wife of a • drug trafficker said that Eugene Hansefus landed several times at the Barranquilla airport in Colombia to take on cocaine from the Medellín cartel before (or after) his trip to Costa Rica, where he delivered shipments of arms destined for the Nicaraguan contras.
Barco's "total war" against the drug traffic has also offered Washington a pretext for increasing its military interference in Colombia through $65 million in "aid" and a proposal to send troops. Up until March 1989, the US had only allotted $10 million for Colombia to fight the drug traffic. As for the campaigns in the US itself to reduce drug consumption, they can only promote the growth of the
- 1 illegal traffic and its disastrous consequences in Colombia. But everyone knows that what really worries the US — more than the drug traffic — is the existence of the guerrillas in Colombia. Any US military involvement, therefore, will serve to reinforce the army in its fight against the guerrillas.
Intensification of terrorist
A few weeks before the assassination of Galán, far-right groups backed by the drug traffickers founded their own political movement - the Movement for National Restoration (Morena) - with the aim of establishing themselves in the electoral arena. It is well known that the drug traffickers are behind Santofimio Botero's campaign for the Liberal nomination and many candidates for Congress
They have already established important footholds in private enterprise, the court armed forces, civil service and the
The election campaign, which has already been disrupted by the murder of Luis Carlos Galán, is likely to be full of turmoil. Several candidates have already cancelled their public appearances and announced that they will limit their campaigns to TV appearances. The furthest right wing of the Liberal Party could emerge victorious from the present war
The "war against the drug traffic" may also go into a new stage with the entry onto the scene of US military advisers" and the intensification of terrorist attacks against public establishments. The idea of "negotiating" with the drug cartels is beginning to be defended by the Conser-
COLOMBIA I'M NEW HERE- IS THIS
A DRUG WAK IN THE COUNTRY OF
COLOMBIA OR THE DISTRIO
OF COLUMBIA? vative mayor of Medellín. In the present state of affairs, no one knows what concretely would be negotiated with the drug traffickers. However, the people who have come up with this plan insist that it is the only solution to the present violence, since repression will solve nothing and will reinforce right-wing terrorism.
At the same time, the idea of reintroducing the death penalty is being voiced in conservative circles, along with a call for bringing in the US Green Berets. On August 22, an editorial in the daily El Espectador summed up the situation thus: "It is certain that the phenomenon of drug-trafficking is gaining in importance. From the assassination of leftist militants and the expulsion of the guerillas from the areas they control, the drug traffickers have gone on to a new stage and they are now joining battle for power, alongside the extreme right."
A military coup is not excluded
Other observers do not rule out the possibility of a military coup if the measures announced by Virgilio Barco fail to produce a clear victory over the drug barons. There are plenty of objective factors pushing in this direction. Barco has not even been able to line up the traditional bipartisanship behind him. He seems to be fighting alone and with arms borrowed from others. But it is clear that he is trying to win the war. He knows that, if he fails, along with his ministers, he will be among the next targets of the mafia's killers. 2. Eugene Hasenfus is the American mercenary whose plane was to dot in Nicaragua when he was carry. 5 ing arms to the Contras.