More Aggressive U.S.-Backed Strategy Expected to Be More Challenging, Brutal

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

EL PAUJIL, Colombia -- The Colombian army, under pressure to produce lasting results against a resilient Marxist insurgency, has begun pushing into guerrilla strongholds in a military campaign expected to be more challenging and brutal than previous battles.

Since President Alvaro Uribe took office 17 months ago, Colombia's military has pushed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a roughly 18,000-member guerrilla army known as the FARC, from many towns and highways it had occupied in the previous decade. The guerrillas were never able to win civilian support in those regions and rarely stood ground to fight. The newly confident Colombian army has been welcomed in many of those towns as heroes.

That part was relatively easy, according to Colombian military sources and Western officials. Now the military, which has received nearly $2 billion in U.S. aid since 2000, has begun the far more difficult task of defeating the guerrillas in zones where they have held sway for generations. The question is whether the army has the resources to carry through this harder phase of combat.

An offensive unfolding along an expanse of rolling plains six miles southeast of this town offers a view of the new activity, driven by a general officer corps under constant pressure from the president. But it also reveals the challenges as government forces advance into villages traditionally sympathetic to the guerrillas and disrupt local economies built on the illegal drug trade.

Military success in this second phase of fighting, taking place in regions that the guerrillas count on for recruits, supplies and intelligence, would significantly increase pressure on the insurgency to seek a negotiated peace after 40 years of waging war against the state. But the army already has faced weeks of often intense fighting and an uneasy welcome from civilians.

"This is about recovering the credibility of the state," said Sgt. Luis Fernando Cano, who helped lead an armored unit into the village of La Union Peneya under heavy fire earlier this month. "The state abandoned these people years ago."

'Never a Moment's Peace'

The campaign, Operation New Year, began in the evening hours of Jan. 4 with an assault on the village of San Isidro using four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. At the same time, Cano's squad of 11 Brazilian-made armored personnel carriers, equipped with 90mm cannons or .50-caliber machine guns, began approaching from the west down a long dirt track running through the string of villages at the heart of the 15th Front of the FARC.

The two forces converged days later in the village of La Union Peneya, the center of the guerrilla unit's thriving coca trade. The operation, which involves several thousand men, is the region's largest since 2002, when soldiers reentered a 16,000-square-mile stretch of southern Colombia beginning 35 miles northeast of here that had been turned over previously to the guerrillas as an incentive to begin peace talks.

Brig. Gen. Guillermo Quiñones, commander of the 12th Brigade carrying out the new operation, said his plan is based on U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. Tall and rangy, Quiñones has a background that includes artillery training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and a stint at the U.S. Southern Command.

In the two years since peace talks collapsed, the army has followed a methodical strategy, Quiñones said. At first, the army occupied large urban centers and connecting roads, mostly abandoned without a fight by the guerrillas. Now his troops are pushing into main villages, such as La Union Peneya, then securing the unpaved tracks that join them to towns.

"We think we can accomplish it with the number of troops we have," he said. "But the plan is to do this in two years, and we can't guarantee that we can achieve it on that schedule unless we get more troops."

The troops have been startled by what they have found in the villages. Army officials said guerrillas gave orders to residents to abandon the villages or be killed, hoping to avoid mass arrests that would break up their civilian support networks. Only four of 1,000 La Union Peneya residents -- many of whom grow coca, the key ingredient in cocaine, which helps finance the guerrillas -- were there when the army arrived.

Many of the soldiers were on their first combat mission. They encountered crude guerrilla defenses upon entering villages that sometimes had only a few shacks. Most of the roads were mined, lined in places with explosives triggered by nylon tripwires, army officials said. After hours of meticulous mine-clearing by army engineers, the guerrillas returned each night to bury new ones.

A bomb found in a box by the bridge spanning the Peneya River also contained human excrement, army officers said, to ensure that wounds would become infected. Cars and a house were rigged to explode. As troops ate lunch each day, snipers fired at them from houses and tree lines.

"There was never a moment's peace," said one private, a member of the armored unit.

Quiñones said he believes that 80 percent of the population of Caqueta province, where the operation is taking place, supports the government effort. The remaining 20 percent, he said, are FARC members, longtime guerrilla sympathizers or civilians forced at gunpoint to help.

"It is a very different kind of operation," Cano said. "We need more logistical help, more communications equipment to develop it properly."

More than anything, commanders on the ground said, the army requires more air support, the key to success over rugged terrain against a seasoned guerrilla enemy. The U.S. aid package was initially restricted for use against Colombia's drug trade, which accounts for as much as 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States. President Bush eased those rules to allow U.S.-trained troops and more than 70 transport helicopters to be used directly against the insurgency, not just the drug crops it profits from.

At the time, the change was hailed as a boon for the Colombian army, now numbering 180,000 soldiers after Uribe's addition of between 40,000 and 60,000 troops. But commanders on the ground said the U.S.-provided resources are rarely employed in complicated anti-insurgency operations such as the one taking place here, and the army's mobility has suffered as a result.

"We have had to find other ways of doing things, usually by land," said Quiñones, who was supervising operations from the Larandia army post, 10 miles southwest of here. "Only under exceptional circumstances do we get to use a helicopter."

On a recent morning, 10 UH-1N Iroquois and three UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, all donated by the United States, sat idle on the post's new tarmac. Quiñones' troops, meanwhile, were engaged in combat less than 10 miles away without any air support.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman in the capital city of Bogota said the helicopters at Larandia were assigned to the army's U.S.-trained counter-narcotics brigade, engaged chiefly in operations against drug-production laboratories and crops. At any given time, he said, a third of the fleet is grounded for maintenance, which was probably why the helicopters were not in use.

"In the past we have been asked, and acquiesced, for the use of the helicopters in non-drug operations," the spokesman said. "It is not unprecedented."

Nonetheless, the army has reported gains in this new phase. In the operation here, it reported 17 guerrillas and one Colombian soldier killed. But the army recovered the bodies of only three guerrillas, basing casualty estimates on eyewitness accounts by soldiers and overheard radio chatter.

The lack of resources has slowed operations here and allowed the guerrillas, who have slipped out of the large villages, to maintain a potent presence just outside them. Without air support, which ended after the first night, the army has managed to impose only light control over the villages and virtually no presence along the roads or in the hills that surround them.

'We Don't Feel Free at All'

The military has not reported any civilian casualties so far in the operation, although no independent humanitarian delegations have been able to reach the combat area to verify those reports. Human rights officials and Western diplomats say arrest sweeps being carried out in villages the army has entered in recent weeks, here and in neighboring regions, have posed significant hardship among the population, sowing mistrust. The government has arrested 38 people for allegedly collaborating with the guerrillas, including the husband of Aurora Rodriguez, a mother of five.

"The government says that because we live there we are all a part of the guerrillas," said Rodriguez, 27, who tends a plot of coca. "We didn't even have a shotgun to shoot birds with. We don't feel free at all."

Villagers, skeptical that the army intends to stay, continue to heed guerrilla rules and warnings. No taxis or buses -- not even the truck that picks up milk each morning from the farms -- enter the narrow dirt track to La Union Peneya. The guerrillas have threatened to burn any vehicle that does.

Only a trickle of people have escaped the combat area because much of the population has been forbidden to leave -- a tactic employed by the guerrillas and their paramilitary rivals across Colombia to maintain their hold on regions they control. Refugee advocates say the tactic helps explain why the number of people forced from their homes dropped 49 percent to 175,000 over the first nine months of last year, even though the intensity of the fighting increased.

"We heard the helicopters, and we just started running," said one refugee, Eloisa Vargas, 37, who walked for more than 10 hours and left behind a husband and three children. "They can't get out, and I have no idea where they are. Is there any way to talk to them?"

Here in El Paujil, a town 225 miles south of Bogota, 42 people from those villages have arrived since the fighting started. Reports from the area suggest that hundreds of villagers are gathered on remote farms, unable to leave. One town official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals, said, "If they were allowed to, there would be 1,500 displaced or more."

The national government's relief agency has informed local officials it has no money to help the refugees, a dozen of whom gathered one recent afternoon in an open-air classroom next to the church.

"This is what is happening in Colombia," the Rev. Faiber Granja, the parish priest, told the mothers, fathers and scattered small children. "This time it has touched us."

© 2004