Medellin Traveler says on Jul 2, 2008, 13:56:
LDW says, "Will FARC ever be completely finished?"
Here's an interesting article........ it's not all about communism.
Colombia's ex-rebels face hardships
by Chris Hawley - Jun. 30, 2008 12:00 AM
Republic Mexico City Bureau
BOGOT�?, Colombia - The wounds of war are still fresh here in the Quinta Ramos Peace House, a shelter for former guerrillas in the Colombian capital.
Men who spent their entire lives fighting or growing coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, now worry about finding work. Hardened rebels struggle to become mothers to children who were taken away from them at birth. At night, scenes of battle haunt their dreams.
Colombia's 44-year-old leftist insurgency appears to be on the ropes, thanks in part to $6.2 billion in mostly military aid that the United States has pumped into the Colombian government over the past eight years.
Kidnappings have dropped by 80 percent since 2000, the Defense Ministry reports. Bogotá's streets, once deserted at night, are now full of people walking their dogs and going to restaurants. Some top insurgent leaders, whose forces used cocaine and heroin profits to fund their war, have died or surrendered this year.
On Tuesday, John McCain will make an unusual campaign stop here to praise the aid effort, known as Plan Colombia, and to urge passage of a U.S. free-trade agreement with the South American country.
But total victory is still far off, Colombians warn. A new U.N. report shows a rise in coca cultivation despite millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent on spraying herbicide. The guerillas still hold hundreds of hostages, including three Americans. Colombian society is struggling to absorb more than 47,000 demobilized insurgents.
And as they worry about finding jobs and supporting their families, the rebel defectors at the Quinta Ramos Peace House say the poverty and discontent that fueled Colombia's civil war continue to boil.
"The military has gained a lot of territory, but I would not say it is winning the war," said one former platoon commander in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He spoke to The Arizona Republic on condition that his name not be used for fear of FARC squads that hunt down and kill defectors.
"The majority of the guerrillas are just poor peasants," he said. "Until the government brings a good life to those people, the fight will go on."
Out-of-town holiday
On Friday afternoon, a sight unimaginable a few years ago unfolded on the highway leading out of Bogotá toward Medellín.
Thousands of city dwellers jammed the road as they headed out of town to enjoy a long holiday weekend.
"A few years ago, we would never do this," motorist Lizette Velásquez said. "The guerrillas controlled the roads. They would stop 30 or 40 cars at a time and just go down the row, kidnapping people they thought had money. You never wanted to leave the city."
In the late 1990s, Colombia teetered on the brink of anarchy. Leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries controlled huge swaths of Colombia, operating drug routes and huge plantations of coca. People in Bogotá, the capital, rarely left the city limits for fear of being kidnapped.
"We were on the verge of being a failed state," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said. "A third of the territory was controlled by guerrillas, another third was controlled by paramilitaries."
In 2000 the United States launched Plan Colombia, which has since given the country about $6.2 billion, mostly military aid such as helicopters, airplanes, guns, ammunition and training.
The Colombian military says it has re-established a government presence in every town in the country, and in 2005, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the main right-wing paramilitary group, agreed to disband.
On March 1, Colombian troops killed a top FARC commander, Raúl Reyes, and found a treasure trove of intelligence on his laptop computer. Later that month, the symbolic head of the FARC, Pedro "Sureshot" Marín, died of a heart attack. A notorious FARC leader known as Karina surrendered in May, saying her guerrillas were starving.
Former FARC guerrillas interviewed by The Republic said army attacks were growing more frequent and shipments of food and other supplies more scarce.
The number of rebel deserters has soared, from 730 in 2002 to 16,055 so far this year, the government says.
Training police force
Part of the secret to the government's success can be seen in a sweltering valley in the jungle southwest of Bogotá.
On a base built with $10 million in U.S. funds, Army Rangers fresh from Iraq are teaching the Junglas, an elite paramilitary police force, how to organize patrols and plan attacks. The Army Corps of Engineers is building barracks and classrooms.
An ex-Green Beret runs classes in how to fortify outposts with razor wire, trenches, tunnels and pillboxes.
"Before, bases were getting overrun all the time by the guerrillas," Junglas Capt. Edgar Flores said. "Not anymore."
During a recent exercise, U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Vickers watched from atop a berm as Junglas burst into a house, blasting down doors and shooting paper targets to rescue a "hostage" held by guerrillas.
"I think we're doing great in Colombia," said Vickers, who oversees special operations for the Pentagon. "The FARC are really set back on their heels, half the strength they were some years ago, and so things are heading in the right direction."
But some experts aren't so sure.
"If you focus on the major urban areas, there is enormous progress," said John Walsh, a senior associate for the Andes and drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank. "But if you look at the rural areas, it's still in very bad shape."
Meanwhile, U.S.-backed coca eradication has reached "kind of a plateau phase" as farmers get better at dispersing and hiding their fields, said Thomas Shannon, assistant secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere.
"What we were able to do is break the kind of industrial or plantation production of coca leaf," Shannon said. "We're now facing a more sophisticated group of growers."
On June 18, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported the amount of coca being grown in Colombia rose 27 percent last year. The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center also reported an increase in 2008. Santos said such cultivation estimates are unreliable.
There have been recent declines in the amount of cocaine reaching the United States, but they are mainly due to a crackdown on Mexican smugglers, not Colombian producers, the National Drug Intelligence Center said.
The Colombians are also opting to send more of their cocaine to Europe, where they can make more money because of the stronger euro, Walsh said.
Some Colombians feel the government has failed to address abuses committed during four decades of conflict.
Wilson Borja limps across his living room to a chair. Above his right ankle, a mass of scars shows where doctors reattached his foot after gunmen sprayed his car with assault rifles during an assassination attempt in 2000.
The government blamed the attack on the right-wing paramilitaries, but Borja, a labor activist, says it was directed by the military, which tolerated the paramilitaries for many years.
Now a member of Congress from the opposition Alternative Democratic Pole, he says the government is trying to protect paramilitaries by extraditing them to the United States and giving them light jail terms under the 2005 Justice and Peace Law.
"All of these things that the government is doing are aimed at creating impunity for these killers," he said.
47,000 back in society
The government is now trying to re-introduce 47,000 former guerrillas and paramilitaries into Colombian society. The transition has been rough for many.
Many rebels have spent their entire lives in the jungle. Many have never used an elevator or a crosswalk, paid an electric bill, managed money or waited in line for anything, said Paula Pedraza, a psychologist at the Quinta Ramos Peace House.
Stripped of their rank and power, many former rebels slip into depression and drug abuse, she said.
Because the rebel groups force their members to have abortions or give up their babies to relatives, many have never lived together as families.
"They don't know how to handle children or show affection," Pedraza said. "Here, they learn to be parents."
As part of their therapy, families are asked to make collages imagining their future lives. The collages show pictures of houses, cars and food.
But the defectors worried how they were going to support their families on a government stipend of $235 a month. With only a third-grade education, one wondered how he would ever get a job.
And they all said they live in fear of being found and killed by their old comrades or by vengeful ex-paramilitaries.
One former National Liberation Army member was attending a group therapy session for demobilized fighters in November when her husband, also a guerrilla, got into an argument with some ex-paramilitaries.
During a 15-minute break, they shot and killed him in the street.
The woman has moved twice because of fear of being found.
"There are so many people here, you don't know who is who," she said, looking out over Bogotá from the roof of her rented house. "I'm working on building a new life, but it's not easy."
"Huevos Rancheros en Medellin, No Quiero Taco Bell." - www.medellintraveler.com
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