ROVER
07-12-2009, 05:43 PM
SOUTHERN FRONT
Rebels Flail in Colombia
After Death of Leader
BOGOTÁ, Colombia -- Last November, a guerrilla commander in the jungles of Colombia wrote a despairing note to his superior, the legendary guerrilla leader known as Manuel Marulanda.
"The [army] operation doesn't let up. The number of troops is enormous," wrote Iván Márquez. "Sometimes we eat once a day."
Mr. Márquez's flagging morale, and that of the broader Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group, known as the FARC, has probably deteriorated much further in the past few months. This past weekend, it emerged that Mr. Marulanda, whose given name is Pedro Antonio Marín, died of an apparent heart attack in late March. He was the FARC's leader for four decades.
Mr. Marulanda's death is only the latest blow to the FARC, Latin America's oldest and biggest insurgency. Having been at the gates of Bogotá just five years ago, the group finds itself on the run from an invigorated Colombian military that runs nightly bombing missions. By most estimates, the rebels' ranks have fallen from an estimated 18,000 fighters to about half that level -- ravaged by desertions. The group's command and control structure has been disrupted to the point where rebels hardly ever use mobile phones for fear of being overheard, relying instead on a system they used in 1964: couriers on foot.
The turnaround is a triumph for Colombia's military and President Alvaro Uribe. A driven man whose father was killed by the FARC in a botched kidnap attempt in 1983, Mr. Uribe was elected Colombia's president in 2002 and vowed to bring the Communist group and other insurgents to heel. His success on that score is a big reason why his approval ratings top 85%.
It is also a largely unsung victory for the U.S., which has lavished nearly $4 billion in mostly military aid on Colombia during the past five years and helped retool the country's army from a demoralized and static force into a powerful fighting machine. At a time when the U.S. has struggled to defeat insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the progress in its own backyard against a powerful drug-fueled Communist insurgency is a noteworthy achievement.
"The U.S. took us by the hand and showed us how to do things," says a high-ranking Colombian military officer. "None of these successes could have been possible without the United States."
March may have been a tipping point for the rebels. During that month, the FARC lost three members of its seven-man ruling Secretariat -- a stunning development considering the rebel group had not lost a single member of its Secretariat to battle in 44 years of warfare. Aside from losing its founder, the FARC's second in command, Luis Eduardo Devia, known as Raúl Reyes, was killed in a controversial cross-border bombing raid in Ecuador by Colombia's army. A week later, Iván Rios, a rising star in the FARC, was murdered by his trusted bodyguard, who then cut off his hand to ensure he would get a $2.5 million bounty offered by the Colombian government.
Another blow was the recovery of thousands of incriminating files found in the computers of Mr. Reyes which show a relationship between the guerrillas and several regional leaders, especially Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez. The files suggest that Mr. Chávez has a strategic plan to put his oil-financed political muscle and millions of dollars in economic aid behind the FARC. The Venezuelan government has denounced the files as fake. But Interpol has analyzed the computers and declared that the Colombian government hasn't tampered with them. In any case, the uproar over the files would likely discourage major gestures of aid from Venezuela in the future.
To be sure, no one expects the FARC to disappear. The guerrillas have a decentralized structure -- the FARC is a sort of franchise with 64 "fronts" and 26 "mobile columns" spread through Colombia -- which gives commanders leeway to act on their own. About half the fronts are heavily involved in the cocaine trade, providing their members with millions of dollars and little incentive to give up what has become a way of life. While some FARC fronts may dissolve and some FARC commanders may surrender, many others could evolve into rural warlords or bandit chiefs with no ideological incentive.
Another, smaller guerrilla outfit, the National Liberation Army, has also been much diminished by the Colombian military in recent years. It is believed to number 3,500 fighters now, down from a peak of about 5,000 in the late 1990s.
Analysts believe that FARC commander Alfonso Cano, who has been named to take over from the late Mr. Marulanda, will have a difficult time trying to impose control on the organization. Mr. Cano, whose real name is Guillermo León, studied anthropology and law, and is seen as more prone to political engagement. But many analysts believe he faces a tough challenge from Jorge Briceño Suárez, known as Mono Jojoy, the FARC's brutal military commander who is believed to control much of the organization's drug-trafficking business. Making matters worse, Mr. Cano is also isolated, in an area of the country where the military is carrying out an ambitious operation to capture or kill him, according to Colombian military officials.
Most experts agree the group now faces perhaps its deepest crisis since Mr. Marulanda, the son of a farmer and grandson of a rural guerrilla, led a ragtag team of 40 peasants with 20 rifles between them in 1964 to form what would eventually become a nationwide insurgency. Information from Mr. Reyes's computers and a flood of recent defectors paints a picture of a rebel group that is hard-pressed by the military and facing an identity crisis, torn between a faded ideology and the money to be made in the drug trade.
Rural Roots
During the two decades that followed its formation, the FARC slowly grew across the Colombian countryside, attracting disaffected peasants and Communist intellectuals. But unlike most insurgencies in Latin America, the FARC's biggest achievements came after the end of the Cold War, when the group started earning hundreds of millions of dollars by taxing coca growers, selling cocaine, extorting businessmen and kidnapping for ransom. The money was used to buy weapons, entice young men into the ranks, and very nearly bring the Colombian government to its knees.
By 1998, the FARC had the government on the run. That year, it ambushed an elite antiguerrilla battalion, capturing or killing most of its 154 men. Months later, it overran an army base in Miraflores, in the southern jungle province of Guaviare. Those and other FARC victories pushed the newly elected president Andrés Pastrana, who had campaigned on a platform of reaching a peace treaty, to the negotiating table.
"The bandits [FARC] were using improvised tanks to attack isolated bases," says the high-ranking Colombian military officer who was then a captain. "We had no way to counterattack. We were helpless."
President Pastrana agreed to hand over an area the size of Switzerland in the midst of the FARC's southeast jungle stronghold to the guerrillas while the two sides discussed peace. But negotiations went nowhere. From 1999 to 2001, the FARC used its sanctuary to consolidate its forces, carry out kidnappings, attack nearby towns, and even hijack an airplane, forcing a humiliated Mr. Pastrana to cancel the talks and order the military to formally retake the area.
In 2000, Mr. Pastrana inked a deal with the U.S. government called Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar agreement to strengthen Colombia's antidrug effort. Over the years, Plan Colombia would eventually involve the U.S. in every aspect of counterinsurgency operations -- and spell bad news for the FARC.
Mr. Pastrana's failed attempt to negotiate with the guerrillas left Colombians angry, paving the way for the election of Mr. Uribe in 2002 on a get-tough platform. During his first week in office, he declared a 90-day state of emergency and pushed through a one-time $800 million tax on the nation's wealthy to help pay for the war. For the first time, military analysts say the army here felt Colombia had the political will to win the war.
A hands-on commander in chief, Mr. Uribe travels every Monday to a different part of Colombia to review the local security situation. He peppers generals with telephone calls about the progress of military operations -- a practice known in the presidential palace as "Happy Hour" -- and works off tension by practicing yoga every day.
Under Mr. Uribe, and thanks partly to American help, Colombia's military has been transformed. Before the reforms, Colombia counted on about 15,000 professional soldiers. Now, Colombia has about 80,000 highly trained soldiers in an overall force of 270,000 men. These include 22 mobile "antiguerrilla" brigades of 2,000 men each, a helicopter aviation brigade, and an elite 1,200-strong Special Forces unit, modeled on the U.S. military.
Once unable to come to the aid of remote army bases under fire from the FARC, Colombia now has U.S. military hardware like C-130 transport planes plus Blackhawk and other helicopters that allow the military to respond quickly. Given the importance of the complex web of rivers that cuts through its jungles and mountainous landscape, Colombia has also developed a force of 34,000 marines, the second-largest such force in the hemisphere after the U.S. It's now also developing a coast guard.
For the FARC, the expanded military has been a nightmare, leading to almost daily contact with Colombian forces. Ten days ago, Nelly Avila Moreno, 45 years old, aka Karina, the FARC's most famous female commander, called it quits after a 24-year career with the guerrillas. She surrendered with her lover to the authorities. Tellingly, she said she hadn't been in communication with her commanders for two years out of fear the army would eavesdrop on their conversations.
"Everywhere we went, the army was there," Karina told a member of the Colombian Ministry of Defense team that handles defectors, according to a tape made available to The Wall Street Journal. "We couldn't sleep in one place for more than one night," said the bullet-scarred guerrilla, who lost one eye to combat.
Having once treated deserting guerrillas such as Karina as criminals, the government now rolls out the red carpet. The former guerrillas, called desmobilizados, or "demobilized ones," are taken into a special program where they are debriefed and given assistance. Some go to work for the military as guides, showing soldiers paths through the minefields that have become the guerrillas' most effective weapon. desmobilizados are also put on army radio broadcasts that cover the whole country, urging their friends in the FARC ranks to leave. Karina herself followed suit, telling a televised news conference: "To my comrades: Change this life you are leading with the guerrillas."
The effect on the FARC has been devastating. In the missive from Iván Márquez, whose real name is Luciano Marín Arango, to Mr. Marulanda last year, the guerrilla commander wrote of the bombardment on the airwaves from former guerrillas urging would-be defectors to quit. "They are constantly on the air," reported Mr. Márquez in an email later found in Raúl Reyes's computers. "Ten have deserted, four have gone directly over to the enemy," he said, adding up the toll on his unit.
Throughout the late 1990s and early parts of this decade, the FARC faced another enemy in addition to Colombia's military: rural landowners and drug barons. Both financed private armies to protect their businesses from the guerrillas. These paramilitaries, which were accused of sometimes working with the Colombian military, helped drive out the FARC guerrillas from parts of the country, resorting to massacres and other gruesome tactics. They were disbanded in 2005 after reaching a peace deal with Mr. Uribe allowing them to turn in their weapons in exchange for light prison sentences.
Crucial Component
A crucial component of Colombia's ongoing military success has been a professional and systematic use of intelligence. Mr. Uribe instituted a nationwide system of civilian spies who are paid for intelligence they provide on guerrilla movements. Colombia also counts on "aerial intelligence platforms" -- small planes bristling with listening devices. These devices interact with land bases that cover the whole of the country's rugged jungle and mountain-covered territory. Now police and military routinely share intelligence.
Improved intelligence has helped the Colombians develop a strategy of going after "high-value targets" in the FARC. Led by special-forces teams, the army has killed or captured a string of high-ranking FARC commanders. Last September, intelligence located Tomás Medina, known as El Negro Acacia, the commander of the FARC's 16th Front, who ran much of the FARC's cocaine and arms business through Brazil, according to Colombian Ministry of Defense officials. The air force then bombed the camp in southern Colombia, killing Mr. Medina and 16 other guerrillas, according to the Ministry of Defense.
Aside from sustained army pressure, analysts say the FARC sowed the seeds of its own destruction by entering the drug trade and thereby giving up any legitimate claim it might have had as a guerrilla movement.
"When I was a captain, I would hear Jacobo Arenas [a founder of the FARC] and Marulanda himself talking on the radio about the revolution, social issues, Mao Zedong," says the high-ranking Colombian army officer. "During the last 15 years, 99% of what you intercept has to do with drugs and money. They've lost their ideological North Star."
Nicolas, a 35-year-old demobilized guerrilla who was in the FARC for 12 years, agrees. "I can't conceive of a revolutionary organization which has to turn to drug trafficking to win a war," he says in an interview, asking that his full name not be used for security reasons. "He who has the truth wins the war. Truth convinces the people to go on the side of those who wield it."
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Rebels Flail in Colombia
After Death of Leader
BOGOTÁ, Colombia -- Last November, a guerrilla commander in the jungles of Colombia wrote a despairing note to his superior, the legendary guerrilla leader known as Manuel Marulanda.
"The [army] operation doesn't let up. The number of troops is enormous," wrote Iván Márquez. "Sometimes we eat once a day."
Mr. Márquez's flagging morale, and that of the broader Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group, known as the FARC, has probably deteriorated much further in the past few months. This past weekend, it emerged that Mr. Marulanda, whose given name is Pedro Antonio Marín, died of an apparent heart attack in late March. He was the FARC's leader for four decades.
Mr. Marulanda's death is only the latest blow to the FARC, Latin America's oldest and biggest insurgency. Having been at the gates of Bogotá just five years ago, the group finds itself on the run from an invigorated Colombian military that runs nightly bombing missions. By most estimates, the rebels' ranks have fallen from an estimated 18,000 fighters to about half that level -- ravaged by desertions. The group's command and control structure has been disrupted to the point where rebels hardly ever use mobile phones for fear of being overheard, relying instead on a system they used in 1964: couriers on foot.
The turnaround is a triumph for Colombia's military and President Alvaro Uribe. A driven man whose father was killed by the FARC in a botched kidnap attempt in 1983, Mr. Uribe was elected Colombia's president in 2002 and vowed to bring the Communist group and other insurgents to heel. His success on that score is a big reason why his approval ratings top 85%.
It is also a largely unsung victory for the U.S., which has lavished nearly $4 billion in mostly military aid on Colombia during the past five years and helped retool the country's army from a demoralized and static force into a powerful fighting machine. At a time when the U.S. has struggled to defeat insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the progress in its own backyard against a powerful drug-fueled Communist insurgency is a noteworthy achievement.
"The U.S. took us by the hand and showed us how to do things," says a high-ranking Colombian military officer. "None of these successes could have been possible without the United States."
March may have been a tipping point for the rebels. During that month, the FARC lost three members of its seven-man ruling Secretariat -- a stunning development considering the rebel group had not lost a single member of its Secretariat to battle in 44 years of warfare. Aside from losing its founder, the FARC's second in command, Luis Eduardo Devia, known as Raúl Reyes, was killed in a controversial cross-border bombing raid in Ecuador by Colombia's army. A week later, Iván Rios, a rising star in the FARC, was murdered by his trusted bodyguard, who then cut off his hand to ensure he would get a $2.5 million bounty offered by the Colombian government.
Another blow was the recovery of thousands of incriminating files found in the computers of Mr. Reyes which show a relationship between the guerrillas and several regional leaders, especially Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez. The files suggest that Mr. Chávez has a strategic plan to put his oil-financed political muscle and millions of dollars in economic aid behind the FARC. The Venezuelan government has denounced the files as fake. But Interpol has analyzed the computers and declared that the Colombian government hasn't tampered with them. In any case, the uproar over the files would likely discourage major gestures of aid from Venezuela in the future.
To be sure, no one expects the FARC to disappear. The guerrillas have a decentralized structure -- the FARC is a sort of franchise with 64 "fronts" and 26 "mobile columns" spread through Colombia -- which gives commanders leeway to act on their own. About half the fronts are heavily involved in the cocaine trade, providing their members with millions of dollars and little incentive to give up what has become a way of life. While some FARC fronts may dissolve and some FARC commanders may surrender, many others could evolve into rural warlords or bandit chiefs with no ideological incentive.
Another, smaller guerrilla outfit, the National Liberation Army, has also been much diminished by the Colombian military in recent years. It is believed to number 3,500 fighters now, down from a peak of about 5,000 in the late 1990s.
Analysts believe that FARC commander Alfonso Cano, who has been named to take over from the late Mr. Marulanda, will have a difficult time trying to impose control on the organization. Mr. Cano, whose real name is Guillermo León, studied anthropology and law, and is seen as more prone to political engagement. But many analysts believe he faces a tough challenge from Jorge Briceño Suárez, known as Mono Jojoy, the FARC's brutal military commander who is believed to control much of the organization's drug-trafficking business. Making matters worse, Mr. Cano is also isolated, in an area of the country where the military is carrying out an ambitious operation to capture or kill him, according to Colombian military officials.
Most experts agree the group now faces perhaps its deepest crisis since Mr. Marulanda, the son of a farmer and grandson of a rural guerrilla, led a ragtag team of 40 peasants with 20 rifles between them in 1964 to form what would eventually become a nationwide insurgency. Information from Mr. Reyes's computers and a flood of recent defectors paints a picture of a rebel group that is hard-pressed by the military and facing an identity crisis, torn between a faded ideology and the money to be made in the drug trade.
Rural Roots
During the two decades that followed its formation, the FARC slowly grew across the Colombian countryside, attracting disaffected peasants and Communist intellectuals. But unlike most insurgencies in Latin America, the FARC's biggest achievements came after the end of the Cold War, when the group started earning hundreds of millions of dollars by taxing coca growers, selling cocaine, extorting businessmen and kidnapping for ransom. The money was used to buy weapons, entice young men into the ranks, and very nearly bring the Colombian government to its knees.
By 1998, the FARC had the government on the run. That year, it ambushed an elite antiguerrilla battalion, capturing or killing most of its 154 men. Months later, it overran an army base in Miraflores, in the southern jungle province of Guaviare. Those and other FARC victories pushed the newly elected president Andrés Pastrana, who had campaigned on a platform of reaching a peace treaty, to the negotiating table.
"The bandits [FARC] were using improvised tanks to attack isolated bases," says the high-ranking Colombian military officer who was then a captain. "We had no way to counterattack. We were helpless."
President Pastrana agreed to hand over an area the size of Switzerland in the midst of the FARC's southeast jungle stronghold to the guerrillas while the two sides discussed peace. But negotiations went nowhere. From 1999 to 2001, the FARC used its sanctuary to consolidate its forces, carry out kidnappings, attack nearby towns, and even hijack an airplane, forcing a humiliated Mr. Pastrana to cancel the talks and order the military to formally retake the area.
In 2000, Mr. Pastrana inked a deal with the U.S. government called Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar agreement to strengthen Colombia's antidrug effort. Over the years, Plan Colombia would eventually involve the U.S. in every aspect of counterinsurgency operations -- and spell bad news for the FARC.
Mr. Pastrana's failed attempt to negotiate with the guerrillas left Colombians angry, paving the way for the election of Mr. Uribe in 2002 on a get-tough platform. During his first week in office, he declared a 90-day state of emergency and pushed through a one-time $800 million tax on the nation's wealthy to help pay for the war. For the first time, military analysts say the army here felt Colombia had the political will to win the war.
A hands-on commander in chief, Mr. Uribe travels every Monday to a different part of Colombia to review the local security situation. He peppers generals with telephone calls about the progress of military operations -- a practice known in the presidential palace as "Happy Hour" -- and works off tension by practicing yoga every day.
Under Mr. Uribe, and thanks partly to American help, Colombia's military has been transformed. Before the reforms, Colombia counted on about 15,000 professional soldiers. Now, Colombia has about 80,000 highly trained soldiers in an overall force of 270,000 men. These include 22 mobile "antiguerrilla" brigades of 2,000 men each, a helicopter aviation brigade, and an elite 1,200-strong Special Forces unit, modeled on the U.S. military.
Once unable to come to the aid of remote army bases under fire from the FARC, Colombia now has U.S. military hardware like C-130 transport planes plus Blackhawk and other helicopters that allow the military to respond quickly. Given the importance of the complex web of rivers that cuts through its jungles and mountainous landscape, Colombia has also developed a force of 34,000 marines, the second-largest such force in the hemisphere after the U.S. It's now also developing a coast guard.
For the FARC, the expanded military has been a nightmare, leading to almost daily contact with Colombian forces. Ten days ago, Nelly Avila Moreno, 45 years old, aka Karina, the FARC's most famous female commander, called it quits after a 24-year career with the guerrillas. She surrendered with her lover to the authorities. Tellingly, she said she hadn't been in communication with her commanders for two years out of fear the army would eavesdrop on their conversations.
"Everywhere we went, the army was there," Karina told a member of the Colombian Ministry of Defense team that handles defectors, according to a tape made available to The Wall Street Journal. "We couldn't sleep in one place for more than one night," said the bullet-scarred guerrilla, who lost one eye to combat.
Having once treated deserting guerrillas such as Karina as criminals, the government now rolls out the red carpet. The former guerrillas, called desmobilizados, or "demobilized ones," are taken into a special program where they are debriefed and given assistance. Some go to work for the military as guides, showing soldiers paths through the minefields that have become the guerrillas' most effective weapon. desmobilizados are also put on army radio broadcasts that cover the whole country, urging their friends in the FARC ranks to leave. Karina herself followed suit, telling a televised news conference: "To my comrades: Change this life you are leading with the guerrillas."
The effect on the FARC has been devastating. In the missive from Iván Márquez, whose real name is Luciano Marín Arango, to Mr. Marulanda last year, the guerrilla commander wrote of the bombardment on the airwaves from former guerrillas urging would-be defectors to quit. "They are constantly on the air," reported Mr. Márquez in an email later found in Raúl Reyes's computers. "Ten have deserted, four have gone directly over to the enemy," he said, adding up the toll on his unit.
Throughout the late 1990s and early parts of this decade, the FARC faced another enemy in addition to Colombia's military: rural landowners and drug barons. Both financed private armies to protect their businesses from the guerrillas. These paramilitaries, which were accused of sometimes working with the Colombian military, helped drive out the FARC guerrillas from parts of the country, resorting to massacres and other gruesome tactics. They were disbanded in 2005 after reaching a peace deal with Mr. Uribe allowing them to turn in their weapons in exchange for light prison sentences.
Crucial Component
A crucial component of Colombia's ongoing military success has been a professional and systematic use of intelligence. Mr. Uribe instituted a nationwide system of civilian spies who are paid for intelligence they provide on guerrilla movements. Colombia also counts on "aerial intelligence platforms" -- small planes bristling with listening devices. These devices interact with land bases that cover the whole of the country's rugged jungle and mountain-covered territory. Now police and military routinely share intelligence.
Improved intelligence has helped the Colombians develop a strategy of going after "high-value targets" in the FARC. Led by special-forces teams, the army has killed or captured a string of high-ranking FARC commanders. Last September, intelligence located Tomás Medina, known as El Negro Acacia, the commander of the FARC's 16th Front, who ran much of the FARC's cocaine and arms business through Brazil, according to Colombian Ministry of Defense officials. The air force then bombed the camp in southern Colombia, killing Mr. Medina and 16 other guerrillas, according to the Ministry of Defense.
Aside from sustained army pressure, analysts say the FARC sowed the seeds of its own destruction by entering the drug trade and thereby giving up any legitimate claim it might have had as a guerrilla movement.
"When I was a captain, I would hear Jacobo Arenas [a founder of the FARC] and Marulanda himself talking on the radio about the revolution, social issues, Mao Zedong," says the high-ranking Colombian army officer. "During the last 15 years, 99% of what you intercept has to do with drugs and money. They've lost their ideological North Star."
Nicolas, a 35-year-old demobilized guerrilla who was in the FARC for 12 years, agrees. "I can't conceive of a revolutionary organization which has to turn to drug trafficking to win a war," he says in an interview, asking that his full name not be used for security reasons. "He who has the truth wins the war. Truth convinces the people to go on the side of those who wield it."
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