COLOMBIA:
Conflict to Heat Up Ahead of Elections, Say Analysts
Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA,  (IPS) - Analysts expect the four-decade armed conflict between the Colombian state security forces and insurgent groups to intensify over the next five months in the run-up to the May 28 elections, in which rightwing President Álvaro Uribe stands a good chance of winning a second four-year term.

During the election campaign, "We can expect military actions with many casualties, an increase in acts of economic sabotage, and attacks on state institutions, on politicians in the regions, and perhaps on the U.S. Embassy," said military analyst Alfredo Rangel, who is running for the Senate on a pro-Uribe list of candidates.

Rangel said the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) expressed their own opinion of Uribe's possible reelection by inflicting "the worst military embarrassment on the government" on Dec. 27: an attack by 300 guerrillas on a 90-man counterinsurgency unit in Vista Hermosa in the department (province) of Meta, south of Bogotá.

The attack, which left 29 soldiers dead and between six and 24 injured (according to official sources or the press), was staged in one of the areas where Plan Patriot is being carried out.

Plan Patriot is a major military offensive that has been shrouded in secrecy. Launched in June 2003, it involves between 17,000 and 20,000 soldiers, as well as U.S. troops, military contractors and advisers.

According to a May 2004 memorandum sent to the U.S. Congress by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), "The Patriot Plan signals the entrance of the U.S. into a new, more intense phase of military involvement in Colombia's internal armed conflict."

In mid-2004, the then chief of the U.S. army Southern Command, General James T. Hill, explained that the U.S. military was providing the Colombian armed forces with fuel, logistical support, and planning. He also warned that the operation would be "long and difficult", but said that in the end, victory would be won, and the guerrillas would be forced to demobilise or to sit down at the negotiating table by 2006.

But 2005 came to a close with strong criticism of the Uribe administration's military strategy, which was further fueled by the setback in Vista Hermosa that occurred just as the election campaign was getting underway.

The day after the rebel attack, FARC spokesman Raúl Reyes told the Swedish-based New Colombia News Agency (ANNCOL) that the guerrillas had "sufficient resources and the necessary mobility to deal a blow to the military forces at any time, anywhere in the national territory."

According to a study by Canadian sociologist James Brittain, published in the September issue of the independent U.S. magazine Monthly Review, FARC had 46,000 combatants in 2004 and was present in every municipality, although with different levels of influence depending on the region.

Uribe, who is involved in an all-out war against the insurgent group with Washington's support, engaged in talks in Havana last month with the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), a 4,500-strong rebel group that like the FARC emerged in 1964.

In the preliminary negotiations, the two sides agreed to continue working towards holding full-fledged peace talks.

In some regions, the ELN operates alongside FARC. However, the smaller insurgent group sees the election campaign as an opportunity to work together with civil society organisations to draw up a humanitarian agenda that would design proposals for necessary transformations in the country.

Meanwhile, the extreme right-wing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which backs up the security forces, held closely-guarded negotiations with the Uribe administration that led to the controversial and partial demobilisation of some 10,000 armed men - half of the total combatants, according to the paramilitary umbrella group.

Rangel expects the five months to the elections to be marked by military clashes with FARC. The guerrillas are going to "kill politicians and members of the security forces, using gunmen. Absolutely selective killings," he told IPS.

The paramilitaries, on the other hand, "will be far more careful, and will maintain a much lower profile. Their armed threat will be much more subtle, less visible, but equally effective," said Rangel.

The United Nations and leading human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hold the paramilitaries responsible for at least 80 percent of the atrocities and war crimes committed in Colombia's civil war.

Last week, the Communist Party reported that two of its regional leaders had been killed by the paramilitaries in the past 15 days, and accused the government of encouraging the actions of its "paramilitary allies" that are aimed at sowing "terror" and are surrounded by "impunity."

AUC chiefs themselves have acknowledged that they control 35 percent of the seats in Congress, and many fear that in the Mar. 12 legislative and local elections, their influence in the legislature and control over municipal governments will increase significantly.

Another region where Plan Patriot is being carried out, the southern department of Putumayo, along the Ecuadorian border, is caught in the grip of an "armed strike" declared by FARC on Dec. 31 - the second in six months.

Due to sabotage by the guerrillas, electricity was not restored to eight of the 13 municipalities in Putumayo until last Friday. The Guamuez and Putumayo Rivers were also polluted in that region when the insurgents blew up eight oil wells.

With the support of modern U.S. technology, especially wiretapping methods and target detection from the air, Plan Patriot is aimed at hemming in the insurgents in a 260,000 square km region in southern Colombia.

By means of swift actions designed to minimise military casualties, which combine army, navy and air force operations under a single command, the strategy is aimed at tracking down the rebel leaders and surrounding them with rings of elite counterinsurgency troops.

Rangel criticised Plan Patriot because the concentration of troops has left other regions underprotected. In fact, in 2005, "the number of army offensive actions outside of Plan Patriot was reduced by eight percent, with respect to the previous year," he told IPS.

He added that "The number of attacks by the guerrillas also went down by nine percent." However, several were large-scale, such as the ones on military bases in Nariño in February and more recently in Putumayo - both along the border with Ecuador - and the attack on a police post in the western department of Chocó.

For several weeks, the insurgents also brought to a halt activity in the oil-producing department of Arauca and the region of Catatumbo in the department of Norte de Santander, both of which are on the border with Venezuela.

"The number of troops committed to combat was larger on both sides than in previous years," which indicates "the intention by both sides to deal harsher blows to the adversary," said Rangel.

Rebel attacks on Colombia's economic infrastructure were up 101 percent with respect to 2004. "One of the biggest increases (106 percent) was against energy infrastructure, while attacks on oil infrastructure increased 21 percent, especially the Transandean pipeline in Putumayo," said the analyst.

The struggle for land lies at the very roots of Colombia's armed conflict. In the 1980s, as drug trafficking became a major element fuelling the fighting, the AUC increasingly began to take part in the conflict, forcibly displacing peasant communities from coveted land.

In Rangel's view, the attack in Vista Hermosa "had no impact in strategic military terms," since it did not mark "any shift in the correlation of forces or in the dynamics of the confrontation." But it did have "a political, media and psychological impact," due to the approach of the elections, he added.

However, an expert on military affairs who preferred not to be identified said it was "obvious that Vista Hermosa had strategic repercussions favourable to the insurgents' objectives." The idea behind the attack, he said, was "to show that it is not possible for the army to maintain real control over the territory."

Since Uribe took office in 2002, the State has consolidated its control over urban areas. But FARC controls at least 30 percent of the national territory, mainly in rural, sparsely populated areas.

"Over the past decades, the army has shown that outside of urban areas and certain military bases, it is unable to keep the insurgents in check, and for that reason every time it moves beyond the garrisons, things go poorly," said the expert.

"Even though the army says it has the support of the civilian population, that support is not sufficient for it to feel safe outside of its forts," he added.

Vista Hermosa "is a sanctuary for FARC," a "strategic rearguard zone" where the guerrillas are protected by their own security rings, said a spokesman for the Bolivarian Movement, an organisation set up by the guerrillas to represent their civilian supporters.

FARC "is able to shift, in less than three hours, from a large number of men to commandos of five, and vice versa, and they are not detected," he told IPS.

In its New Year's message, the rebel group pointed to the expansion of the "fratricidal war," the "multiplication of combat actions" and the growing number of victims. It also denounced "the secret burials of soldiers and police" killed by the guerrillas, and warned that Uribe's reelection would bring on "a total war strategy."

Summing up 2005 in terms of military repercussions, Rangel said the skirmishes and clashes became more lethal: "More and more combatants on both sides are dying, and less civilians. That means that the war has become more humanised, as human rights defenders have demanded."

But the anonymous expert on military questions interviewed by IPS said that "Plan Patriot, as an expression of Plan Colombia (an anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy that is also financed by the United States), has not been a failure."

"That is because Plan Colombia has also inflicted severe damages on, and intimidated, the civilian population, which was one of its main objectives: the idea of 'removing the water from the fish'," he said, referring to the counterinsurgency concept of weakening the guerrillas' civilian support.

"Based on the idea of 'removing the water', massive sweeps have been carried out, and civilians have been killed," he added.