There is plenty of evidence linking the HMB, an elite force of the Colombian Army, with human rights violations. International groups such as Amnesty have denounced the killing of trade unionists at their hands, while Colombian human rights defenders have documented the gross and systematic violations carried out by the HMB, including the torture, murder and disappearance of numerous civilians. For his part, General Montoya is reported to have collaborated with right-wing paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers, groups which are inextricably linked with the army in the repressive policy of the Colombian regime.

The UK has been a staunch supporter of Uribe, in power since 2002, and currently provides his hard-line regime with secret military aid. While the UK government refuses to disclose the extent of British aid to Colombia, citing ‘national security’, a Guardian investigation has revealed that it includes SAS training, setting up and equipping an intelligence centre and providing military advice to the HMB. The UK government has also admitted giving the Colombian army training and advice on urban warfare techniques, counter-guerrilla strategy and ‘psychiatry’.

As chair of the TUC-backed human rights organisation, Justice for Colombia (JFC), I have attended meetings with the British government at which I and other trade-union leaders have passed on detailed information about the gross human rights violations committed by the British-backed HMB and other units of the Colombian army. We have outlined why British military aid to the Uribe regime, and to these abusive units in particular, is unacceptable. While the UK government doesn’t deny that it assists the HMB or that they are involved in torture, murder and gross human rights violations, it justifies this aid by claiming that the Uribe regime is making ‘significant progress’.

Extra-judicial executions

The reality on the ground is very different. In March this year a report by Colombian human rights groups documented 955 executions of civilians carried out by the Colombian army between July 2002 and June 2007 – a 65 per cent increase on the previous five year period. This overall trend in extra-judicial executions has been confirmed by the UN high commissioner for human rights.

In another worrying development, in April the CUT trade union federation (the Colombian TUC) reported a 77 per cent increase in killings of trade unionists during the first part of this year. These murders formed part of an upsurge in attacks and killings of human rights defenders, trade unionists, and other civil society actors. It came shortly after Uribe’s presidential advisor, Jose Obdulio Gaviria, suggested that civil society groups that had organised a protest on 6 March against state and paramilitary human rights abuses were linked to the left-wing FARC guerrilla group. A letter sent by prominent international human rights defenders denouncing this and accusing the Colombian regime of endangering the lives of activists went largely unreported in the English language press.

In this climate, it is unsurprising that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. In fact, more trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia during Uribe’s presidency than in the rest of the world over the same period. But it is not just murder. Death threats, forced disappearances and imprisonment without trial are just some of the other attacks suffered by Colombian workers – all, like the murders, carried out in a climate of impunity.

A third major factor that should worry the British government is the reports detailing the close links between outlawed right-wing paramilitary death squads and Uribe, his close friends and supporters and the Colombian state.

Damming connections

A damning article, ‘Colombia political scandal imperilling US ties’ by Indira A R Lakshmanan of the Boston Globe, published widely earlier this year, outlined a number of worrying connections. They include the facts that, first, last year, Uribe’s foreign minister was forced to resign after her brother, a senator, was jailed for colluding with the paramilitaries in a series of murders and kidnappings; second that, in the same month, the head of Colombia’s secret police, who also served as Uribe’s campaign manager, was arrested for ‘giving a hit list of trade unionists and activists to paramilitaries, who then killed them’; and third that 14 of Uribe’s closest congressional allies sit behind bars for colluding with paramilitary death squads. At the time of writing, 62 of Uribe’s political allies are being investigated for allegedly collaborating with these death squads.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, journalists who have questioned Uribe on his past or present links with paramilitaries have subsequently received death threats and, in many cases, have been forced to leave the country. In October last year, for example, Gonzalo Guillen, a reporter for the Miami Herald’s Spanish language newspaper El Nuevo Herald fled Colombia because of death threats he received after Uribe publicly criticsed him three days earlier. Guillen explained that he was leaving Colombia after receiving 24 death threats in 48 hours. In the light of this, it is not surprising that journalists are reluctant to investigate Uribe’s regime.

Even so, despite the danger to journalists, news of the Uribe regime and its role in Colombia’s human rights crisis does filter out. Last year in the US, Democrat Senators cited General Montoya’s alleged links to the death squads when freezing $50 million of US military aid to Colombia. And Al Gore, the former US vice president, recently refused to share a platform with President Uribe, reportedly because of concerns over allegations linking the Colombian leader to the paramilitaries.

It appears, then, that the political tide in the US is turning against wholehearted support for Uribe’s regime and that if the Democrats win the presidency, the US policy towards Colombia might come under review.

Changing policy

In Britain powerful voices within the Labour party have already called on our own government to change its policy towards Colombia. The campaign to end British military assistance now has the support of more than half of Labour MPs, as well as the entire British trade union movement, every Labour MEP and the majority of Labour’s ruling NEC. Last year, the international human rights organisation Human Rights Watch congratulated Justice for Colombia for publishing a statement during the 2007 Labour conference, calling for a suspension of UK military aid to Colombia on human rights grounds.

It is worrying then that the British government is refusing to listen. A letter of January 2008 from JFC to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, requesting that the government investigate over 30 assassinations carried out in recent months by Colombian soldiers who may have received British military training, remains unanswered.

And in an outrageous twist to the UK’s relationship with Colombia, in March this year Kim Howells accused JFC of supporting the FARC guerrilla group. While Howells was forced to retract his comments after being roundly condemned, with a number of unions calling on Gordon Brown to sack him if he didn’t, such ill-informed remarks could put at risk the lives of those trade unionists, journalists and human rights defenders involved in projects supported by JFC.

Instead of smearing groups working towards peace and social justice in Colombia, the UK government should listen to calls for change and rethink its policy. It should by no means disengage. Rather, instead of funding the perpetrators of the continuing slaughter in Colombia, Britain should start playing a positive role by switching funding from military aid to humanitarian projects. We could begin by joining our EU partners who are already involved in the search for a peaceful solution to Colombia’s conflict. After 60 years of civil war it is clear that only a politically mediated rather than a military solution will bring about peace.

Jeremy Dear is the chair of Justice for Colombia (JFC) www.justiceforcolombia.org

For one of the best analyses of the political complexities of Colombia, see ‘Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth’ by Jenny Pearce (Latin America Bureau, 1990)

There is war in the high Andes. There are no rockets, no suicide bombs, no bodies rotting on the streets. Up in the rarified mountain air of the Colombian and Ecuadorian capitals the weapons are different, but the aim is pretty much the same: control. This war between the two Andean nations is being fought out on the airwaves and in the pages of the press, with the United States present in every move.

The source of the conflict is Ecuador’s traditionally neutral stance vis-a-vis its neighbour’s seemingly never ending civil wars, its consistent refusal to categorise the leading Colombian insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as terrorists, and its determination to get rid of a US military base on its Pacific coast that has played a covert part in the Colombian armed conflict. To make things worse this particular Ecuadorian government has declared itself to be ‘socialist’ and has shown itself to be friendly towards Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

The troubles in Colombia have been a perennial thorn in the side of Ecuadorian politicians; the country has spent years debating its neighbour’s problems and trying to stave off the impacts they have brought in their wake, particularly since the initiation of Plan Colombia in 2000. But after the attack on its territory by Colombian forces on 1 March it seems that the Ecuadorian government and its policy of neutrality will be tested to the limit in the battle to force Ecuador to take sides: the side of the government of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Vélez.

Legitimate targets

Alvaro Uribe is likely to be one of the very few people in this world who will be sad to see the back of George W Bush. The collective sigh of relief that can be heard as the world watches the US presidential primaries, and imagines a world without one of the most warlike and intellectually challenged presidents in the history of the United States, is not audible in the corridors of the presidential palace in Bogotá. The Colombian head of state is desperate to finish off his adversaries and the next US leader may be less committed to military solutions.

But it’s not over yet. Bush was never going to be a traditional lame duck president – quite the opposite. So there will doubtless be a sting in the tail of this particularly nasty American administration. The seven months remaining still allow enough time for scores to be settled, and while the political and economic climate in the US may not be conducive to major operations such as an attack on Iran or Venezuela, the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador are clearly more appetising targets, vulnerable to means less dramatic than major military intervention.

The 1 March incursion into the northern Ecuadorian province of Sucumbios was the opening gambit. The Colombian minister of defence, Juán Manuel Santos, openly stated that he regretted nothing, claimed the raid was legitimate and a clear victory for his country despite its condemnation as a violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty by the Organisation of American States. Twenty-six people died. Among them was Raul Reyes, second in command of the FARC, four students from the Autonomous University of Mexico (DF) and one Ecuadorian citizen. But apart from the dead the attack has left behind a number of questions, above all regarding the participation of the United States.

AWAC electronic monitoring planes from the American base at Manta on the Ecuadorian coast are constantly in the air but failed to report the attack to the Ecuadorian authorities until it was over, despite having more than sufficient time to do so: the raid lasted six hours. Colombia also claims the encampment and the position of Reyes was revealed to them by human agents. But the heavy tree cover that made the camp invisible from the air, the fact that the raid was carried out at night, and the precision of the bombing, all suggest the use of sophisticated monitoring equipment used by AWAC type aircraft. The type of bombs used has also been analysed by the Ecuadorian military. Their conclusions are that the GBU 12 type of guided bomb was used in the raid, which according to NATO no planes used by the Colombian airforce are equipped to carry. The question of what planes were used, where they were based and who flew them, are presently being investigated by the Ecuadorian government.

An Ecuadorian military source, who asked not to be named, was quoted by the Inter Press Agency as saying that the pilots of the planes that attacked Ecuadorian territory were Americans, possibly employees of Dyncorp, a company which provides military equipment and mercenaries and has contracts related to Plan Colombia. The planes, said the source, flew from the US base at Tres Esquinas in the southern Colombian department of Caqueta.

Colombian authorities claim that Franklin Aisalla, the Ecuadorian who died in the attack, was a FARC sympathiser and therefore also a ‘legitimate target’ according to the Uribe government, despite being a non combatant and being on his home soil. The issue of ‘legitimate targets’ has been taken up by the New York faith-based Fellowship of Reconciliation. The group has been investigating the role of US aid to Colombian army units that kill their own civilians and claim them (at times going so far as dress them) as guerillas. Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have exposed the widespread nature of the practice.

According to the Post, a coalition of Human Rights Groups has claimed that a total of 955 civilians (campesinos) were executed in this way between mid 2002 and mid 2007. The killings appear to correspond to the need to boost numbers in the face of American pressure to be ‘winning’ the war against the guerilla forces and justify the huge expense involved in supporting Colombian military expansion. Together with Amnesty International, the Fellowship of Reconciliation is preparing a report, which will claim that the US has approved aid to certain Colombian military units ‘despite creditable allegations regarding killings disappearances and collaboration with outlawed paramilitary forces’.

Computer games

Since the 1 March raid the attempt to force a change in the political stance of Rafael Correa’s government has changed form. The confrontation is now being carried on in the leading newspapers and television station of the two countries and in the foreign press, mainly hostile to Ecuador and anything vaguely connected to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. The major play has revolved around the computer supposedly belonging to Raul Reyes that Colombian-US authorities maintain survived the bombardment. The Colombian-US position is that the device contained documents showing that the FARC had contributed to Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa’s electoral campaign and had received money from Hugo Chávez. A nice twist was provided by documents which allegedly showed Fernando Bustamente, the Ecuadorian minister of state, to be a CIA agent and his sub-secretary, Juán Sebastián Roldán, to be an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Agency, DEA.

In the unlikely event that a computer did survive, OAS president José Miguel Insulza has cast doubt on the ability of anyone (including Interpol, to whom the final proof of authenticity has been charged) to prove the files are real, or even if they were, to show that they represented the truth. The Colombian government has provided photocopies to the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian authorities. Both have rejected them as useless. But despite the lack of evidence that the documents are real the New York Times has joined the fray, carrying front-page allegations against the two governments.

A second incident involved the Bogotá daily El Tiempo. The newspaper, owned by the family of the vice president and minister of defence , printed a photograph said to have been found in Reyes’ computer which showed him in the company of a man the paper claimed was Gustavo Larrea, the Ecuadorian minister of internal and external security. The person in question was later shown to be an Argentinean unrelated to Larrea. But as with the raid and the supposed computer documents, the first strike is what counts. The supposed facts prepare the ground for a chain of events whose course later apologies or refutations cannot change.

In another example of erroneous reporting the Spanish daily El País (which has a long-running campaign against Hugo Chávez) ) claimed that according to an un-named OAS spokesperson the FARC had numerous camps on the Ecuadorian side, coming and going as they pleased. The OAS categorically denied that any of its personnel had made such statements, while the Ecuadorian military demonstrated that of the sites mentioned by El Pais two were actually in Colombia, while none at all could be located on Ecuadorian soil.

That the FARC come and go as they please on the Colombian side is undisputed: they simply control that part of the country. The Colombian army has only two posts on the entire length of the 364 kilometers of the common border, compared to eight of the FARC and ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional). The Colombian government accuses Ecuador of not controlling its side of the frontier, but apart from the difficulty of patrolling the entire border, particularly in the densely forested areas, the task is made so much more difficult by the fact that on the other side of the river it’s the FARC, not the Colombian government, that forms the political presence.

Regional newspapers now seem to be full of reports about the FARC: the death, capture or surrender of leading operatives and subordinates, some, such as Ivan Rios, allegedly killed by their own for the million dollar reward (the possibility exists that the killing was done by paramilitaries, which supposedly no longer operate); the uranium that belongs, or not depending on the source, to the FARC; the arrest of FARC members in Peru; the links between the FARC and the Brazilian mafia; the links between the FARC and Costa Rica etc etc etc.

Spent force

Over the years, and particularly in the period of the dictatorships in South America in the 1970s and 1980s, the FARC was seen by many Latin Americans as one of the few forces capable of withstanding the bloody right wing military agenda of the likes of General Pinochet in Chile and General Videla and the military junta in Argentina. As a guerilla force whose aims were to make Colombia more responsive to the needs of the poor, it counted on the moral and in many cases direct support of large numbers of people throughout the region, not to mention Colombia itself.

The FARC clearly use the drug trade to finance their activities. But they are not alone. Colombia is a complicated place and while it would probably be going too far to call it a narco- state, the history of Pablo Escobar (a friend and admirer of Alvaro Uribe), the Cali and Medellin cartels and the smaller siblings that now operate the trade, the drug linked paramilitary forces (which have not been demobilised but rather been reorganised in smaller, more private security type units ), as well as Alvaro Uribe himself (named by the US Department of Defense as No 82 on a list of important people linked to the cocaine trade ), show clearly that the drug trade is deeply embedded in Colombian society . Asking Ecuador to take sides based on involvement in the drug trade is not very practical.

According to some the FARC is demoralised, on the run, their troop levels fallen from 18,000 to between 6,000 and 12,000 and the war will soon be won. It’s hard to evaluate the claims as no definite information is available, but much of it seems to err on the side of wishful thinking, to be worked up to satisfy Colombian voters or American task masters, or is simply another aspect of the propaganda war. And while it does seem clear that the FARC are not the force they were ten years ago, they (and the ELN, the National Liberation Army) still control huge areas of land (an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the national territory) as well as more than 25 per cent of all municipalities. Barring a sudden collapse, for which there is no evidence, it seems unlikely that the conflict will end any time soon.

Give peace a chance

Ecuador has the sympathy and support of almost all Latin American countries for its sovereign position in the face of the Colombian attack on its territory. But in the end the country has been forced to re-examine its position vis-à-vis the conflict, and in one sense the Colombian/US strategy has worked. After the raid it no longer appears possible to believe that the consequences of the conflict can be wished away or limited to the other side of the rivers that mark the frontier between the two countries.

The impacts are dramatic. The hundreds of thousands of Colombian refugees that have poured into the country in the last five or six years , with little or no international help in dealing with their needs; the environmental and health impacts of spraying the herbicide glyphosate over large areas of the frontier region , carried out by the Colombian government to eradicate coca leaf but also to clear the frontier area and deny human support to the guerrillas; and finally the high cost ($100 million a year according to Ecuadorian military sources) of stationing troops to police a border the Colombians themselves are unable to control.

For a long time now the violence in Colombia has been out of control. The ninth of April of this year marked the 60th anniversary of the shooting of the Colombian Liberal leader Jorge Eliezer Gaitán in the centre of Bogotá. His death triggered a round of violence that has still not come to an end. What began as the Bogotazo, later became La Violencia, and was transformed into the insurrection of the Marxist guerillas, has now been incorporated into the War on Terror in another attempt by one side to defeat the other. But whatever the name, no matter the definition, the bloodshed is a constant .

In the end what is important is that no country, no population, no civil society ought to be subjected to 60 years of war, and that no neighbouring country should be subject to the impacts of that violence. Colombians and Ecuadorians have many things in common, but above all they both need an end to the constant death, destruction and forced migration. Both nations need to be able to spend their resources in meeting social goals, in improving the lives of their populations, large numbers of whom exist in dire poverty. In the end the only answer is peace. The difficulty is how to find the road. In this sense the end of the bitter long-running conflict in Northern Ireland and the peaceful (although admittedly fragile) conclusion to the Balkan conflict, offers some hope that it can be done. In the Colombian case Ecuador will need to stay neutral but work hard for peace; it is the only ethical response to the media war being waged against it and to the real needs of both nations.

Ecuador needs to mobilise international pressure from other South American states, in particular Brazil, in order to develop a true peace process (as opposed to the slaughter that resulted from the last real attempt ) in which all are guaranteed security.

There are a number of obstacles. Conflict always benefits someone, and on the Colombian side the civil war has been a boon to the neoliberals and the economic elites. On the Ecuadorian side, despite being the injured party Rafael Correa has surely noticed that his popularity has risen since the beginning of what the local press has called ‘microphone diplomacy’. Also of concern is the fate of Evo Morales in Bolivia, if he falls or even fails, it will likely convince many that the electoral road has been closed off, and that arms are once again the only solution.

Finally, but by no means least important, are the various interests of the United States. Besides being a boon for the US arms industry, the Colombian conflict, as with the Korean War, has provided the motive for the militarisation and the consequent, and very large, strategic US presence. Peace would remove that rationale, and for the US this may simply not be part of the plan.

Footnotes

· The Crisis Group, an NGO linked to the World Bank, has recently estimated that after falling for a number of years, the production of Coca leaf and Cocaine actually increased by 8% with a greater area under production now than in 1995. (‘Colombia No Logra Cotrolar el Narcotráfico’. El Comercio, Quito, 7 April 2008)

· The Ecuadorian Government and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimate that there are some 250,000 refugees in Ecuador plus another 40,000 that have been granted status. According to the Jesuit Refugee Service in Quito the figure is much higher, of some 750,000 Colombians in the country only 80,000 have status while the rest are refugees or people displaced by the Colombian conflict. (‘ONG: más de 600,000 desplazados en Ecuador’. El Comercio, Quito, 13 March 2008)

· Spraying takes place in Colombia but the proximity to the border and the height of the spraying has mean that severe health impacts have been felt within a ten kilometer range of Colombia. Chromosomal damage and other major health impacts have been identified in frontier populations together with contamination of water, animals and crops. El Sistema de Aspersiones Aéreas del Plan Colombia y su Impactos Sobre el Ecosistema y la Salud en La Frontera Ecuatoriana. Comisión Científica Ecuatoriana, Dr. Jaime Brielh et al. Quito 2007. The Ecuadorian government has recently launched a suite against Colombia at the World Court in the Hague over the impacts of the spraying. The case is expected to last up to six years.

· It is difficult to calculate the number of deaths related to the violence since 1948. Figures of 200,000 and even 300,000 have been quoted for the number of people killed from 1948 to 1956 but that figure is undoubtedly imprecise. Figures from 1964 onwards also vary. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that from 163 to 2000, 47,000 people died as a direct consequence of the violence, while Amnesty International estimates that 60,000 people died in the much shorter period from 1985 to 2002.

· In 1984 a ‘Bilateral Cease Fire’ was signed between Manuel Marulanda of the FARC and Colombian President Belisario Betancourt. A legally recognized political party the Union Patriotica, UP, was formed in exchange for a progressive reduction in military activity by the FARC. But after the UP won a third of the votes in municipal elections a campaign of violence against its leaders was begun. Thousands of its supporters were killed, including three presidential candidates.

· Colombia now has the highest troop levels of any country in South America (210,000 not including air-force, navy or police dedicated to anti guerrilla activities), and spends 6.5% of its GDP on the military, the US 4% even with the war in Iraq. (See ‘Crisis en la región: La guerra preventiva de Bush llegó a Sudamérica’, Raúl Zibechi, IPS, 7 March 2008)

In the late morning, Guto (our bassist) and I visit the rundown offices of Colombian food workers’ union Sinaltrainal. A downbeat meeting of Coca Cola workers is taking place downstairs. We are taken to an upstairs office to wait.

A knock on the door and Limberto Carranza, a union rep in his fifties, is ushered in. His quiet testimony moves us like no other. He has worked for Coca Cola for over 25 years, and as conditions worsened he joined the Sinaltrainal trade union. From that day onwards he and his family were targeted by paramilitaries employed by the bottling plant manager. His 15-year-old son was beaten close to death and thrown in a river. He was forced to send his psychologically scarred children to live with relatives far away from home and now barely sees them. At this point Limberto bursts into tears, much to his own embarrassment. He couldn’t apologise enough afterwards in this most macho of countries.

Last year the Super Furry Animals turned down a seven-figure offer by an advertising agency for the use of our song ‘Hello Sunshine’ in a Coca Cola commercial. We thought long and hard. We have never been a big selling band, but when it came to the crunch, we felt we couldn’t justify endorsing a product that may have had a part in violently suppressing some of its workers. For a moment, sitting in the Sinaltrainal office, I thought that we could have done the advert and donated the money for their campaign for justice. Yet the thought of having to hear our song used to sell anything that exploits anyone for the worse turns my stomach.

Day 3: Cali

We’re backstage at Concierto Por La Vida (‘Concert For Life’), a music festival in a barren looking park, waiting for a sound check. Hanging from a nearby tree is a banner in memory of Jonhy Silva, a crippled 21-year-old student shot and killed by ESMAD, the Colombian riot police, in September 2005. This festival is dedicated to his memory.

After the heavy, high-altitude atmosphere of Bogota, Cali, lying lower down at a thousand metres, is surprisingly relaxed. Its reputation as a cocaine capital seems the least of its worries. When we flew in on Wednesday night, the Vaca Loca (Mad Cow) Carnival was in full flow – every 50 yards a different sound system was blaring out loud salsa music and people were dancing in the street.

In the throng of the crowd we meet Sintraemcali representative Berenice. She is dancing watchfully in a doorway. She needs to be careful: she is on the leaked hit list of Operation Dragon, an assassination campaign run by active and retired Colombian army personnel. Last year she was sent an invitation to her own funeral. Defiantly, she dances to the music.

Day 4: Buena Ventura

Twenty-seven hours later I’m sitting in a deserted thatch-roofed bar. The air is heavy with tropical dark clouds and the hum and racket of giant US-built military helicopters. Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart implausibly spins on the video jukebox. A few ill-looking palm trees punctuate the mist occasionally to remind you of the potentially exotic location.

The Colombian Army’s ‘Plan Colombia’, sponsored by the US, aims to clear all the coca plantations in this region. This has fed into Colombia’s decades-long and brutal civil war as the state tries to claw back territory from the left-wing guerrilla fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The ton upon ton of poison dropped on to Colombian soil to kill the coca weed has failed to reduce the volume of narco-trafficking, and has led to severe pollution of the water table.

Villages in these areas are targeted by both sides of the war. They are targeted by the FARC, who fear informers, and their food is often rationed by government forces who are worried that they are feeding the guerrillas or hiding them. This has led to a series of massacres and clearances in the region. And it has left around three million people displaced throughout Colombia.

These are the observations of a light entertainer, displaced for a week in a country that is, in all except name, engulfed in a brutal civil war. I’m not an expert on Colombia, but it is clear from this visit that international corporations, and military schemes funded by the US (and UK) government, are contributing to this mess – supported in part by my taxes and supermarket spending power, in my name.

(Adopting a Lee Hazelwood-style singing voice) – Call me Shame!

Grace Livingstone: There were two versions of Plan Colombia. The first version was written in Spanish by Colombians in May 1999. It was not particularly radical, but it was a peace and development plan which aimed to dissuade peasants from growing coca crops or joining armed groups by investing in alternative rural development and education. It did not mention drugs trafficking, military action or spraying crops with pesticides.

US officials re-wrote the draft entirely in October 1999. Their involvement was so extensive that the final version of Plan Colombia was published in English – not Spanish. Strengthening the authority of the state (by re-equipping and expanding the armed forces) became the main objective. An intensive militarised crop spraying campaign was also introduced. The US basically transformed Plan Colombia to meet their own perceived security needs – that is, the need to combat the Colombian guerrillas. It was used as a vehicle to step up counter-insurgency aid and US military involvement in Colombia at a time when combating drugs was the only acceptable pretext for intervention.

Some have argued that Colombia’s recently elected president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, with the backing of the US, is imposing “state terrorism”. What are your thoughts on this?

Colombia’s human rights record was so appalling in the 1990s that the US Congress banned all military aid to Colombia, except counter-narcotics aid. Of course, the counter-drugs aid found its way to counter-insurgency units and to the paramilitaries, but at least US politicians showed some awareness of the human rights problem. The ban also stemmed from a desire not to repeat the horrors of US foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, an illegal and cruel war was launched in Nicaragua, thousands were “disappeared” in El Salvador and 200,000 people were murdered in Guatemala.

The scary thing is we appear to have returned to those days; the language of the “war on terror” is eerily similar to Reagan’s anti-communist rhetoric. After 11 September, Congress agreed to lift the ban on aid to Colombia and approve aid to combat “terrorist activities and other threats to national security” – basically giving the Colombian army a carte blanche to wage war on its opponents.

As most Red Pepper readers will know, the Colombian military collaborates with illegal paramilitaries, who carry out massacres, selective assassinations, torture and kidnapping. They target any critics of the government: trade unionists, left-wingers, human rights workers, peasant activists. Two of Uribe’s policies are likely to exacerbate paramilitarism: the creation of a network of paid informants to the military and the recruitment of part-time “peasant soldiers” who guard the streets by day and go home at night. Uribe also declared an effective state of emergency as soon as he came to office and has put large parts of the country under direct military control.

But it’s important to note that Uribe is popular in Colombia. Many people are simply exhausted with violence and want someone to put an end to it once and for all, whatever the methods. The guerrillas must accept some of the responsibility for this since their tactic of kidnapping civilians for money has contributed to the war weariness and desire for a firm hand.

Given the increasing number of progressive governments coming to power in Latin America, how important is Colombia’s role in the region and how do you see events unfolding?

At the moment I am in Venezuela, which has a left-wing president, Hugo Chavez. A government official here told me that he thinks the US are trying to create an Israel in Latin America, a state that is propped up with US military aid and loyal to US interests. And in 1999, the US lost its military base in Panama, from which it had directed all its interventions in the Americas since WWII. Since then it has been looking for other bases in Latin America from which to operate.

In your book you document the relationship between multinationals and contracted armed security accused of threatening and assassinating workers, farmers and trade unionists. Colombia Solidarity Campaign UK, along with many organisations internationally, have launched an international boycott of Coca-Cola, as a result of the company’s direct link to repression of workers in Colombia. Could you tell more about the link between multinationals and human rights violations in Colombia?

If you look at a map of Colombia, the areas of oil and coal extraction, heavy industry and business centres coincide with the areas of most intense paramilitary activity. This is mainly because Colombian businesses and Colombian landowners have resorted to funding paramilitaries to defend their interests. The paramilitaries are waging war on “subversives”, which in their definition includes peasant activists, environmental campaigners and trade unionists.

There is virtually no space for democratic dissent in Colombia. So we find that trade unionists working for a multinational – say Drummond, a US mining company – have been shot dead. But to prove that a multinational company had a direct link to the killings is another matter. Each case has to be looked at individually. Of course, whether companies should operate in a country where trade unionists are killed with impunity is open to question.

In the case of British Petroleum (BP), in the early 1990s a number of peasant activists who had campaigned against oil spills complained of harassment by the army and paramilitaries (such as death notices being pinned on the walls, and photographs being taken when coming out of meetings). Two activists were killed by death squads. The Colombian state prosecutor investigated the accusations and said although it was clear that the military had collaborated with paramilitaries around the Casanare oil fields, it could find no evidence that BP was responsible. But the prosecutor’s investigation was not, shall we say, particularly probing. [The omissions in his report are outlined in Inside Colombia].

The prosecutor also looked into claims that the private security company hired by BP, Defence Systems Colombia, had trained paramilitaries in “lethal counter-insurgency” tactics. With the evidence available, it could not prove or disprove the allegations and left the case in abeyance.

The Coca-Cola case is very important because the Colombian food workers’ trade union (Sinaltrainal) is trying to establish in court a direct link between a multinational company and the paramilitaries. Nine trade unionists working in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia have been killed by paramilitaries. In a court action lodged in Miami, Florida, the union claims the paramilitaries were acting on behalf of the company. In March, the court ruled that the case could proceed. Now, Panamco Colombia (Coca-Cola’s bottlers in Colombia) is suing the union for slander. More details are available on the union’s website (www.sinaltrainal.org).

Finally, with an ever-increasing amount of Colombians having to abandon the country because of the civil war in Colombia, what can people in Britain and elsewhere do to show solidarity with the people in Colombia?

The most important things to do are to let threatened people in Colombia know that they have not been forgotten, to cut through the media silence and report what is really going on, and to lobby the British government and companies which have involvement in Colombia.

Other useful websites

The UK-based Colombia Solidarity Campaign (www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk) campaigns for a socially just and sustainable peace in Colombia and opposes foreign military intervention. See its website for the latest reports from Colombia.

War on Want is calling on activists to lobby Britain’s minister for Latin America, Bill Rammell, to freeze military assistance to Colombia until the killing of trade unionists stops and the links between the Colombian security forces and the paramilitary death squads are severed. You can send an electronic postcard or take further action via the organisation’s website, www.waronwant.org/colombia.Grace Livingstone’s Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War is published by the Latin America Bureau (£12.99). To order, ring 0845 458 9910 or visit www.lab.org.uk. Red Pepper will review Inside Colombia in its January 2004 issue.