08. WAS U.S. INVOLVED IN KILLING FARC-EP LEADERS?

(The following article is from the April 1-15, 2008 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3).

PV Vancouver Bureau

A March 12 article posted at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com by Acadia University assistant professor and solidarity activist James J. Brittain suggests that there may have been U.S. involvement in recent deadly attacks which killed high-ranking leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army.

     Titled "Was the United States Involved in Recent Attacks Targeting the FARC-EP?", Brittain's article notes that the United States has remained surprisingly silent on these attacks, even though successive U.S. administrations have backed the Colombian state's war against the insurgents.

     On March 1, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez and other officials sanctioned an air and ground assault which resulted in the deaths of Comandante Raul Reyes (a FARC-EP Secretariat member) and other leading members of the rebel army.

     Hours later Defence Minister Santos said that Colombian forces began the operation with an air assault followed by ground combat. Santos claimed that intelligence information related to a satellite phone used by Comandante Reyes had enabled the Colombian military to pin-point the location of the FARC encampment.

     While the U.S. backed the military raid, which was condemned as illegal by most members of the Organization of American States, Washington had little more to say about this military achievement by its principal Latin American ally.

     As Brittain reports, a high ranking official within the Colombian Defence Ministry has leaked that the United States was involved in the March 1 operation. Through satellite intelligence gathering over southern Colombia and northern Ecuador, the U.S. had retrieved signals from the FARC-EP's 48th Front, and handed over this information to the Colombian police. Colombian officials were able to process the data and find the exact location of Comandante Reyes. "The leaked information demonstrated that the US was, at the very least, indirectly involved in the actions of March 1st, 2008," notes Brittain.

     A week later, Ecuador's Defence Minister Wellington Sandoval announced that further investigation of the area targeted during the March 1 attack revealed that the site had been bombarded with incredible precision. Five "smart bombs" were detonated within a 50 metre diameter, a virtually impossible achievement given the military capabilities of the Colombian Air and Armed Forces. The arms used during the incursion, Sandoval said, can only be deployed by aircraft with the capacity to fly at a considerable height and velocity, weaponry that is not found within the Colombian Air Force or any other Latin American nation. In fact, only the U.S. air force has such capabilities.

     Brittain concludes that "it is quite likely that the United States played more than an informal role in the aggression."

     Less well publicized in North America was the murder of FARC-EP Comandante Iván Rios.

     On March 7, Defence Minister Santos again took to the airwaves in Colombia, announcing that Rios, another member of the Secretariat, had been killed on March 4 by a FARC-EP member named Rojas and two other FARC-EP combatants. Santos claimed that the killers had severed Rios' right hand to prove his identity, and then taken his laptop and identification to the Colombian Army and intelligence services. The murder apparently occurred during a Colombian military operation designed to capture Comandante Rios after receiving intelligence that he was located in a high-elevation region in the Department of Caldas.

     Confusion immediately began to circulate around the Santos account, since another state official within the Prosecutor's Office had reported a different version. This anonymous official had prematurely contacted the press to report that Comandante Rios had been killed on March 7th during an attack carried out by an elite wing of the Colombian Army. Adding to the questions, the Colombian state has given no details about the identity of "Rojas."

     Brittain notes the difficulty of believing the Santos account, since "each Comandante associated with the Secretariat has a cadre of more than a dozen immediate personnel which are not only responsible for the Comandante's protection but oversee the ongoings of the guerrilla camp..." All meetings with any Comandante are coordinated each day and formally scheduled, and take place under heavily guarded conditions. Brittain asks, "How is it then that not only one but three armed FARC-EP combatants were able to violently enter into Comandante's Rios' barracks directly in front of an entire FARC-EP Front, which includes two FARC-EP Companies and two FARC-EP Guerrilla Squads which contain, on average, at least twelve combatants per squad?"

     He calls the Santos story "incredibly simplistic," noting further that the tactic of cutting off limbs "has been systemically employed by paramilitaries, privately funded `security forces' and right-wing civilian vigilante groups dating back to the 1940s and increasingly carried out over the past decade."

     Brittain's conclusion is that the details of the Rios murder are "symptomatic of those carried out by Colombia's many far-right paramilitary groups", but that "the Colombian state cannot afford to have a paramilitary group claim responsibility for the murder of Comandante Rios for this would, once again, demonstrate that the state has either failed in their political capacity to demobilize the paramilitary forces and power, or more accurately, that the state has been complicit in covering up the actions of Colombian paramilitarism..."

     Countless researchers and journalists, he notes, "have exposed how reactionary forces dress up in fatigues making themselves appear to be FARC-EP combatants. Paramilitaries have regularly presented themselves as members of the FARC-EP so as to commit atrocities against civilians in the hopes of creating false condemnations aimed at the insurgency."

     Brittain also suggests a plausible motive for these latest developments, and for the possibility of direct U.S. involvement in the killings. The Bush administration has had great difficulty in getting Congress to pass the new Free-Trade Agreement with Colombia, since many Democratic Party politicians are concerned about unpunished atrocities committed by the paramilitaries, and the failure of the Colombian/US military strategies. "If the Bush administration was able to claim even the slightest victory over the FARC-EP then they could argue that their counter-insurgency funding has been successful and that a new FTA should be supported in Congress," writes Brittain.

     US Special Forces and Marines have been illegally engaging in counter-insurgency campaigns in Colombia for years, he adds. Even though the legal number of US troops in the country cannot exceed 800, thousands have been operating in campaigns against the FARC-EP.