Love those Semana columnists

7.09.06

www.ciponline.org

In yesterday’s edition of the Colombian newsmagazine Semana, Daniel Coronell notes that the coca crop has been largely unaffected by fumigation in areas under paramilitary control. He refers to a map that appeared in last month’s New York Times article documenting Plan Colombia’s failure to reduced drugs.

The map, based on the U.S. government’s satellite measures, indicates three types of zones. The first are the areas in which illicit cultivations have been abandoned. The second are the places where coca-planting has stayed stable, and the third are the regions where existing crops have increased and new cultivations have appeared. When one compares this map with the map of FARC, ELN and AUC zones of action, one immediately notices that coca has stayed stable or incerased in regions controlled by paramilitary groups. ... According to the Department of State and the [White House] Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), southern Colombia [where guerrillas predominate] is now not the largest zone of illicit crops. Today, the largest coca-growing area extends across the [paramilitary-heavy] departments of Bolívar, Sucre, Córdoba, and northern Antioquia. ... The map seems to contradict those who believe that the fumigations haven’t done anything. The areas of Putumayo and Caquetá, which have been under FARC control, show the largest amount of abandoned cultivations. Eradication has also been successful in Norte de Santander, where the ELN has had influence.

Meanwhile, Antonio Caballero, whom El Tiempo called “an icon of criticizing power” upon his recent return from 20 years in exile, minces no words in a column about the longstanding but unacknowledged relationship between Colombia’s elite and the paramilitaries.

If today the narcoparamilitaries are not being punished for their crimes – political or economic – or for their massacres or for their illicit businesses, this is not just for the obvious reason that they have not been defeated by the State. But because they are, and continue to be as they have been from the start, allies of the state security forces (military and police), and friends of the State’s masters. ... The Colombian political and economic establishment has never had disgust for the paras, to the contrary. Not for their armed actions, whose spirit and goals it has always supported, though at times it may have been disgusted by the excessive roughness of their actions – those chainsaws. Nor for their legal or illegal businesses, in many of which the establishment has participated or wanted to participate, from cattle-ranching to narcotrafficking and including numbers rackets and siphoning off public funds.

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