Tour Reveals Force's Growing Isolation

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

LA HERRADURA, Colombia -- Shortly after sunrise the army opened the narrow bridge over the River Guejar, allowing a noisy convoy of civilian trucks to rattle over the loose planks. Soldiers waved them through after searching for guns, explosives, gasoline and rubber boots.

Less than half a mile away, past a grove of palms that had been a battleground the previous afternoon, three young guerrillas in rubber boots stopped the traffic at a checkpoint. A rebel in a floppy camouflage hat approached a truck and began interviewing the crew-cut driver.

"How many troops are there?" he asked. "Are more of them coming? How close are they to the bridge?" Then, turning to an American reporter sitting by an open window, he asked: "Are you a gringo?"

A fellow passenger explained that the reporter wanted to see the highways and bridges built by the guerrillas across this vast area that belongs to the Colombian government in name only. "Then go ahead," the guerrilla said with a smile, extending his hand to shake.

A trip last week to explore the elusive politics and governing priorities of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a guerrilla movement known as the FARC, began auspiciously enough. But over the next two days the visit would include some darker hallmarks of the FARC's dominion: a brief captivity, a tour of public works projects funded with drug profits and glimpses of the guerrillas' coercion of civilians living in the FARC's domain.

The southern stretch of Meta province, a lush jungle broken by arid plains, is a crossroads for the guns, drugs and social resentment that sustain Colombia's war. In 1998, the government, recognizing the guerrillas' presence, turned much of the province of 740,000 people over to the FARC as an enticement to begin peace talks, which collapsed last year, beginning a period of guerrilla retrenchment.

Now the Colombian military, remade since 2000 with nearly $2 billion in U.S. military training and equipment, is using mobile columns, night raids and aerial bombardment in an attempt to cut off FARC financing from Meta's coca fields. The offensive is deepening a sense of siege and persecution among mid-level FARC commanders that has become the dominant theme of the rebels' public administration.

The guerrillas' most tangible achievements here are public works -- hundreds of miles of red-clay roads and dozens of bridges that have been a boon to coca farmers and arms smugglers. The FARC has managed to impose both strict authority and an ethic of lawlessness on the area, which is 120 miles of hard travel south of Colombia's capital, Bogota.

After an American reporter was told to leave the zone by a FARC commander, a second commander offered to escort him out. Along the way, however, the commander informed the reporter that he would be "detained" until "we decide what to do with you." The next day, after 20 hours of confinement on a remote coca farm, the reporter was told that he would be granted a guerrilla-guided tour of the region and released.

The overall impression from the zone was of an insurgency that 40 years after its founding as a collection of rural self-defense groups has grown richer, larger, but also more isolated. With an estimated 18,000 members nationwide, the FARC clings to a Marxist message of land reform and equitable redistribution of wealth, but these principles are only vaguely present among the populations it controls.

"More and more, these armed groups are acting like occupying armies," said Jorge Rojas of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement, a leading Colombian human rights group. "The guerrillas' best weapon is not drug-trafficking or guns, but time."

Rebel Public Works
 

With bombs dropped by the Colombian Air Force thudding in the distance, Efrain Salazar guided his battered blue Toyota Land Cruiser over a network of roads that appear on no government map. Ledgers, radios and tape measures slid across his dashboard, the tools of the trade for an unusual guerrilla.

Salazar is a 40-year-old father of three with salt-and-pepper hair and a pistol on his hip. He is a lifelong resident of the region who joined the FARC four years ago because, he said, "It was clear that the only way to end this government's oppression was to fight it." He is now the FARC's public works director in Meta, managing a $1 million annual budget derived mostly from the coca fields to maintain guerrilla-built roads, bridges, five dump trucks, six bulldozers and a backhoe.

But Salazar's job is getting harder by the day. A bombed bulldozer and backhoe sit ruined by the side of the road in Caño Cafre, and he has had to hide much of the machinery from air force bombs. The army has also restricted gasoline from entering the zone because it powers guerrilla Land Cruisers and is a key ingredient in transforming coca leaves into a base for powder cocaine. The road work has slowed, although he said construction of several new bridges is planned for December.

Air force bombs have destroyed a number of FARC-built bridges in recent months, including a 70-foot long, 40-foot high span at Caño Yarumales. The bridge, the FARC's largest, built at a cost of $110,000, was the only north-south link inside the guerrilla zone. Two 500-pound bombs struck it in March, leaving it in pieces and demolishing an adjacent store.

"On the one hand, it makes me sad to see it like this," Salazar said, gazing at the ruins. "On the other, we're in a war. The military says this is to stop us from moving guns, but we have so many other ways of doing so. The only ones who really suffer are the peasants."

Salazar's budget includes money to pay workers on his road crews a monthly wage of $125, and a group of them passed in a dump truck carrying barrels of smuggled gasoline. Salazar waved them down, and filled his tank. A corporate logo had been rubbed off the dump truck's door, suggesting that it had been stolen.

Some interviews conducted without guerrillas present indicated that the FARC does not always honor its wage policies. Jose Alivio, a 59-year-old farmer from the village of Los Laureles, said that he and other villagers were forced to work on FARC road projects one day each week or so. Asked if he received pay, a woman listening in laughed and shook her head.

"Well, yes, some people don't like it at all," Alivio said. "But it's a way to keep the roads in order, and that's something that must be done. It's just a matter of following who's in charge."

While helping subsistence farmers, the roads serve primarily as highways to ship coca out of the region as quickly as possible. The FARC serves as the sole buyer of coca here, according to residents, paying farmers $820 per 2.2 pounds of base. That is about $150 less than the going rate in other regions. The guerrillas realize a 100 percent rate of return when they sell the base to drug traffickers as crystallized cocaine, residents and others who study the business say.

There is no appealing the FARC's prices or rules, even when they seem to contradict the guerrillas' political platform. On land reform, for example, some of the measures seem consistent with helping peasants, while others appear arbitrary and self-serving.

Jesus Martinez, a local official in Piñalito, said the FARC had broken up 10 large ranches over the past two years. The parcels have been distributed to subsistence farmers, who in turn plant enough food to survive and seed the rest with coca. But the peasants must receive FARC permission to clear jungle for new farms, and receive it only when their plans do not conflict with guerrilla interests. The guerrillas also reserve for themselves the use of dynamite to fish the rivers, a blunt if effective way to feed troops.

"They have a radical way of managing problems," said Martinez, who is generally supportive of the FARC's rule. "If you break the law, you are given a chance to leave or else you pay for it. Behave well and you have no problems."

As he drove, Salazar mixed talk of the war's roots with a discourse on the Bermuda Triangle, the Abominable Snow Man and all manner of science fiction. Coca fields dominated the landscape, dotted with thatched shacks sheltering the vats used to turn the leaves into base on its way toward becoming cocaine destined for markets in the United States and Europe.

"The state has never done anything here, and this is the only thing now the peasants here can grow that will pay them enough to live on," Salazar said.

Many farmers have migrated here in the past five years to grow the region's most profitable crop even if it means living under guerrilla rule. At the coca farm where the American reporter was put up for the night, the owners, who moved this year from the provincial capital, Villavicencio, had a generator, a DVD player and a library of accordion-laced vallenato music.

The migration has extended the guerrillas' economic and political influence into distant regions where much of the money made in these fields ends up.

"Almost everyone who works here has family someplace else counting on the money they send," said Elsie Cano, who manages a boarding house in Piñalito that caters to coca workers. She sends $350 a month to Villavicencio to pay tuition for her three children. "Right now, though, the army has stopped all movement."

The 'Dirty War'
 

The village of Puerto Alonso, a boat landing on the River Guejar 18 miles downstream from Piñalito, consists of a shop selling soap, soft drinks and odds and ends, a garage and car wash servicing the local fleet of Land Cruisers, and a pool hall. Several pairs of guerrilla fatigues hung from clotheslines on a recent afternoon. The men in town all wore the rubber boots that are a trademark of FARC foot soldiers, and treated as a contraband item by the Colombian army.

Since its founding in 1964, the FARC has portrayed itself as a fugitive group of farmers fleeing a hostile, U.S.-backed government. Marxist doctrine came later, but still takes a back seat in many regions to more general themes of social justice and self-defense. The message has deepened as U.S. military assistance has been permitted for use directly against the guerrillas, and President Alvaro Uribe ordered a military offensive after he took office last year.

The next stop on the visit was announced as a chance to see the state's "dirty war," as the guerrillas frequently call the fight against them.

A 25-year-old guerrilla in camouflage pants, a blue T-shirt and black ammunition vest screeched up on a motorcycle carrying a young boy from school. The guerrilla gestured toward a hollowed-out wooden canoe with an outboard engine. After a 10-minute ride down river, he beached the boat near a pile of palm branches. A body, bloated, hairless and riddled with knife wounds, was beneath the fronds.

"You see why guerrillas exist in this country?" the guerrilla said, claiming the man had been killed by Colombia's anti-insurgent paramilitary force in the wake of the army advance, something impossible to verify. "This has happened for years. And it's only going to stop when we govern this country."

Arriving in the village of La Cooperativa, Salazar's truck shook and stalled. He pulled into a garage that served as a FARC motor pool, full of Land Cruisers. Women washed clothes, including guerrilla uniforms, in the river. Teenage guerrillas rested in the shade of large trees.

The Colombian army, in a midnight raid nine days earlier, entered La Cooperativa for the first time in 13 years. But they did not remain until morning, and on this day the restaurants were filled with guerrillas eating plates of meat, rice and fried plantain, assault rifles across their laps. The local newspaper is Resistencia, a FARC pamphlet that urges people to resist "the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Colombia." Copies sat in piles around the restaurants.

"So what happened to you. Did your plane crash?" asked a 40-year-old guerrilla with a two-way radio dangling from his chest. He was alluding to three U.S. Defense Department contractors who have been held by the FARC since their plane crashed in southern Colombia in February.

The guerrilla with the radio started up a Land Cruiser and told stories on the way to El Tigre, the last FARC-held town west of the army advance. His mother had been killed seven years earlier by paramilitary forces in Vista Hermosa while she worked in the hospital, he said. He chain-smoked Mustang cigarettes and sweated in the heat.

At the suspension bridge into El Tigre, a sign painted in camouflage patterns warned: "500,000 Peso [about $180] Fine for Excessive Speed -- the FARC's 27th Front." Music poured from the canteens, empty in the afternoon, and the town appeared to be bracing for an army assault. An empty bar is a rare, portentous sight in rural Colombia.

A few hilltops away, across an invisible border between FARC territory and army control, was the town of Puerto Toledo. An ancient driver with a beaten Land Cruiser was willing to make the trip, although he would not go all the way to the army checkpoint.

The last mile was crossed on foot. An ebullient Colombian army major, Edgar Garcia, who had made a fighting entrance into the sullen, surly town a few days earlier, served as the welcoming committee.

"This is the Citibank for the FARC's Eastern Bloc," said Garcia, referring to the amount of money its coca fields generated for the guerrillas' most potent military unit. Most shops in town were shuttered and a maze of barrels served as a barricade to the army post at the Hotel Acapulcu, a garish two-story stucco building in a town of one-story plank houses.

The 55-gallon drums once held gasoline, and Garcia said 2,000 of them passed through Puerto Toledo each month. One drum is needed to produce one kilo of cocaine, meaning that by his estimate two metric tons of the drug flowed out of the area each month. He said the local guerrilla front's chief priority had never been combat -- that is, until now.

"We're fighting a war just like the U.S. did in Vietnam," Garcia said. "The civilian population has no idea of the dimensions of this."

Taking a reporter's notebook, Garcia sketched a map beginning in Puerto Toledo and listing towns and rivers to the south. Garcia said his destination was a FARC camp with 300 soldiers and senior commanders. At least eight towns stood between him and his goal.

"This is all American doctrine," he said of his strategy. "And if the U.S. doesn't pay attention to this, it will get out of hand because of the financial potential of the FARC."

As he spoke, the rumble of combat sounded across the river.

"You should leave," he said, then took off at a trot toward the noise.

© 2003