| Interview Transcript: Amb. Robert White | ||
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WHITE: i made two recent trips to Colombia. The level of violence is truly terrifying. There are four armies-four major armies, roaming the territory of Colombia. And the strongest is probably not the National Army of Colombia. The guerrillas-there’s two major bands of guerrillas. One is known as the Armed Forces of the Colombian Revolution or the FARC, and the other is the National Liberation Army, or the Army of National Liberation. The FARC probably controls almost 50% of Colombian territory.
Fortunately, Colombia elected a courageous young president, who has decided that fighting is not the proper route, that war is simply a way to divide Colombia further. And he was elected, elected in a very strong majority by the Colombian people, to bring peace through negotiation. He’s begun that process. And he had a right to expect support from the United States. Unfortunately all he’s gotten are mixed messages-lip service to the peace, but a lot of threats about how we’re going to militarize, or remilitarize, Colombia.
This of course appeals to the Colombian military, which have basically ignored the civilian government. That’s been their history. They do what they want to do, and the civilian government sort of picks up the pieces. The high point of my most recent trip was a… We flew into this guerrilla territory, drove into guerrilla territory, and held long and important, I think, conversations, with two of the leaders of the FARC. And we had been led to believe that these were sort of unlettered campesinos, who were parochial in their concerns and who were basically people with whom you couldn’t treat, couldn’t negotiate.
This was not our experience. Our experience was that they were highly intelligent, that they, they considered themselves players, in the Colombian game, and that they intended to negotiate and help bring about a new deal for Colombia, and God knows Colombia needs a new deal.
So we had these conversations where they signified again their intention to negotiate. Where they rejected the idea of two Colombias or a divided Colombia. Where they would get very upset at the very idea that they were ‘narco-guerrillas’ as General McCaffrey, the drug czar, describes them, and said that they were quite willing to cooperate with the United States and with the Colombian government in a program of coca eradication. And I thought that the trip was useful and important, and I think what we’re trying to do is impress on legislators here and that there is an alternative way to bring peace to Colombia, and that is through negotiations.
LOTTMAN: Ok. How did it compare to, say, either previous trips to Colombia or other trips through the region. Are problems there getting worse, what’s the trend in Colombia on our present course?
WHITE: We hear a great deal about the guerrillas and the armed confrontations. And those are real and those are deplorable. And the guerrillas have committed excesses. What you don’t hear much about is that, Colombia, the, the export of drugs accounts for about a third of Colombia’s total exports. Now there is no way that a business of that order of magnitude can exist and prosper without key people inside business, banking, commerce, and government, including the military. So enemies they confront are dangerous, but enemies that are inside and subvert are even more dangerous. And what this means is that a huge number of key Colombians have a vested interest in the status quo, have a vested interest in seeing that negotiations do not succeed. And they are precisely the ones that are encouraging us to go in militarily. And I have to tell you that if we do, it took us ten years to fight the guerrillas in El Salvador, to withdraw. If you go into Colombia, you’ll be there for a generation.
LOTTMAN: And it’s not amateurs that you’re confronting down there.
WHITE: No. Sure isn’t.
LOTTMAN: You said Colombia needs a new deal. What does that pertain to exactly?
WHITE: President Pastrana was elected on a platform of negotiation. To build a new Colombia. To renew Colombia. He is the first president to approach this thing as a political, social, and economic problem. In the initial negotiations with the revolutionaries, they arrived at an agreement called the Common Agenda. What this basically, this Common Agenda is basically a plan, an outline for future negotiations, which would, which should include not only the guerrillas, but the entire society-industry, commerce, etc. And among the important points in there are the emphasis on land redistribution, on private enterprise, but private enterprise that takes into account the poorest of the poor-and Colombia has a tremendous, huge population of displaced people-people who have been driven out of the countryside by the violence, and they are potentially a tinderbox.
LOTTMAN: Did you have any encounters with the internally displaced people?
WHITE: I went out and visited one sector, and it reminds you of a lot of the slums of the big cities of Latin America. It’s worse, because Colombia has always been a country that at least in the cities, there were certain minimal social services. 40% of the children are not in school. As far as I can see, the state has largely abandoned its responsibilities to these people, and in all fairness, it’s difficult to cope with this. Because there exists in Colombia a right wing terrorist group called the paramilitaries. And these paramilitaries are funded by large landowners who are also involved in the drug trade. And in their view, every villager is a potential recruit to the revolutionaries. So they just drive them out by terror. And this, so it’s beyond the capacity of the government to control this, or cope with this refugee problem. Course if we succeed in bringing military assistance to Colombia, that flow of refugees, internal refugees, will grow worse.
LOTTMAN: What role is our military aid playing there in the situation as you saw it?
WHITE: In my view, president Pastrana had a right to expect all out support from the Clinton Administration, to bring peace to Colombia through negotiations. The situation in Colombia is not totally similar to the situation in Northern Ireland. And the Clinton Administration, through Sen. Mitchell, played a truly positive role. It is within the capacity of the United States to play an equivalent role in Colombia. No one ever suggested that you could solve the problem in Ireland by sending more arms to either the Royal Constabulary or to the IRA. The idea of sending arms to Colombia to advance peace negotiations is simply ludicrous to anyone who understands the situation. It’s hard for me to imagine what this $550 million-that’s what they are talking about-can do other than to engage the prestige of the United States in somebody else’s civil war under the guise of fighting narcotics, which I don’t know anyone who knows how to do that effectively.
LOTTMAN: What dangers to the United States are presented by the Conflict in Colombia? What’s at stake for the American people? You already mentioned engaging our prestige….
WHITE: To most people in America, Colombia means either coffee or cocaine. But Colombia is a great deal more than that. Colombia is a country three times as large as California, with 40 million people, and it lies in astrategic position, it’s a very important place. Right beside Panama and bestride the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. So it’s in our interest that Colombia not destabilize that region.
Now, what general McCaffrey the drug czar and others are doing is reducing this complex country of Colombia to a single issue-narcotics. And this makes no sense whatsoever because you have a situation in Colombia where the revolutionaries control 50% of the country, they are willing to cooperate with the United States in stamping out the cocaine traffic, at least that’s what they say. I don’t know, no-one knows if they are sincere or not, but at least we should test that sincerity before we send in military might to try to solve a problem that’s not susceptible to guns and planes.
LOTTMAN: What would you like to see the United States do to play a more constructive role?
WHITE: To play a more constructive role, the United States first has to send a high-level, unmixed message that it stands four square behind president Pastrana’s peace plan. It should stop talking about military assistance because this is not basically a military problem. There are different sides. There is a guerrilla war. But the government and the guerrillas are in negotiations.
What I would like to ask the United States government is, “What is it that you want to accomplish by sending in military assistance that you don’t have already?” You have a President who is committed to negotiations, and who has specifically stated that he does not want a military solution. You’ve got guerrillas who have specifically pledged to negotiate a successful outcome. So what I wanna know is, what is it that you want to achieve through fighting?
The only possible answer that I can think of is to advance negotiations, to give superior firepower to the Colombian military. But this is a truly primitive view, because at this point, the country is de facto divided. And no-one with the faintest knowledge of Colombian terrain believes that the Colombian military have the capacity, or will ever have the capacity, to carry the war into the eastern half of the country, which is basically trees and swamps and rivers, and it’s basically unpopulated. Only 2% of the people live there, and they are, those that are there, are very unhappy with the government.
LOTTMAN: You mentioned the absurdity of pouring more weapons into an armed conflict. What about the assertion that we’re fighting drugs, and not guerrillas? That seems to be the official administration line, whereas the military people will tell you something different.
WHITE: For a long time now, Washington has been advancing the truly ridiculous notion that they are fighting drugs by arming the police and the military. But if 50% of the country is not under their control, and all of the coca, or 95% of the coca, is grown in that area, it doesn’t do much good to negotiate with those people because they’re not the people in control. So first you have to unite Colombia by negotiations, bring into one country where the rule of law and the writ of the government extends over the entire country. Once you do that, you can start to talk about how to interdict narcotics.
I’ll tell you one anecdote. I was the charge d’affairs in Colombia a little over 20 years ago. And I nearly got 4 DEA agents killed on one of the operations, then three months after that, the head of the DEA was killed. And then we found out that there was no point to what we were doing because the chief of the National Police, and the chief of the Special Narcotics Unit, were both in the pay of the narcotics traffickers. In Colombia, they have a saying: “Plata o Plomo.” Silver or lead. Take the bribe, or we’ll shoot you. And I have to tell you that in a violent, war-torn society that doesn’t know from one year to the next whether it’s going to be in existence, there are very few people, high or low, that can resist that choice.
LOTTMAN: Do you see history repeating itself now that we’re talking about creating this multi-national force and maybe some of the people that we are dealing with in the Colombian government….
WHITE: The Colombian military are probably more involved in drug running that are the guerrillas. Eight months ago, a, the, an air force plane, Colombian Air Force plane, the head of the Air Transport Command’s plane landed in Miami. DEA agents tore it apart and found over a half-ton of cocaine. That plane had spent its entire life on military bases. So the idea that there are black hats and white hats in this country is simply an illusion.
LOTTMAN: The Conventional Wisdom is that the decade since the Cold War has seen a certain amount of progress in Latin America, in terms of militaries being at least more marginally under civilian control, demobilizing guerrilla armies, etc. So just generally do you agree with that conventional wisdom?
WHITE: I think there have been improvements. Unquestionably. We’re no longer fighting wars in Central America. Well, we never should have fought wars in the beginning. But we in Colombia, in Venezuela, in Ecuador-all of these countries are to one extent or another, the victim of this voracious appetite that the United States has for drugs. Because all of them, the corruption that goes with the drug traffic is terrible. Now, civilian government in the Andes, generally speaking, is weakening. And the military are, is strengthening. I don’t think there’s any real danger of a coup, but what there is danger of is that the military will simply negotiate directly with the United States, as is happening now in Colombia. And strike in effect their own deals. By doing that, by shoving off military hardware on to these countries, what you do is strengthen the opponents or the enemies of democracy. The fact is that in Latin America, the only way, sure way, to democracy, is through demilitarization. Now by that I don’t mean total disarmament. What I do mean is making the military truly subject to civilian authority, and no separate negotiations between the United States government and the military-for all negotiations to go through the civilian arm.
LOTTMAN: The desire to export Latin America clearly exists in the United States, and they just lifted the arms embargo a few years ago. Now are there any developments you can foresee which would cause that to be reciprocated in Latin America. Because it’s not as though these countries can afford American weapons. How is it that demand could go back up again.
WHITE: There’s no real need for arms in Latin America. As a practical matter, there are no border disputes. As a practical matter there are no external threats, one country to another in Latin America. So the only use, basically, for arms in Latin America is for internal use against the population of that country. And we should simply get out of that business. Every country has the right and the obligation to settle its own problems. There’s a price to be paid for bad policies. Colombia is paying a price now for having driven two to three million campesinos off of their land and giving them over to rich absentee landlords. That was an outrageously wrong and inhumane policy. And if you radicalize people by driving them off their land, and sending them into city slums, or sending them out to the frontier, then of course you’re going to have to settle that debt in one way or another. And that is what President Pastrana is trying to do.
The idea that every problem is somehow susceptible to solution by force of arms is an illusion that this country has fallen into. Tell me where you put your money, and I'll tell you what your foreign policy is. If you put over 90 cents of your foreign policy dollar into the Pentagon and the CIA, then your policy is going to emphasize a military approach, a secretive, under the, you know, approach, to the problems. For example, the budget for the White House Drug Office, this office of Narcotics Control, is greater than the State Department and the Commerce Department put together. Now what possible sense can that make? You are starving diplomacy, you are exalting a military approach to problems. And frankly, all the experience we've had is that these anit- or counter-narcotics programs do not work. During the lifetime of the program in Colombia, the last three years, this intensive counter-narcotics program, exports to the United States have more than doubled.
LOTTMAN: Oscar Arias says that exporting weapons to Latin America is one of the best ways to keep Latin America poor. Does that make sense to you?
WHITE: I would never allow the sale of one rifle to any country where the budget for the military is not transparent, where it's not voted on by the Congress, and where everybody in the country knows what it's for. The fact is that the military budget in most of these countries is a military secret. It's passed without debate, and it's just sort of.... And I think, of course, Oscar Arias is absolutely correct, former president of Costa Rica, Nobel Prize winner, when he says that you keep Latin America poor by exporting arms, because the fact is that for every gun that they buy, that's one less kid that gets to go to school.
LOTTMAN: In a globalizing economy, how does that affect our interests? In terms of dollars and cents, and America's interest in the global economy, how do weapons exports to Latin America affect that?
WHITE: If they buy weapons, they can't buy other things. If they buy weapons, they're not going to buy computers. Our last experience of supplying huge numbers of weapons was to Central America. And what we have done is, there's a lost generation. The wars in Central America that we financed and we encouraged, they wouldn't have taken place without us. I mean, the revolutions would have taken place, but they would have worked it out in a year or so because they didn't have the wherewithal to keep them up. Thanks to our support, the revolutions in Central America lasted more than a decade.
How did the revolutionaries arm themselves? They armed themselves by capturing military installations and stealing the guns, the weapons that we supplied them. So these weapons come back at us. It's a... Of all the industries that should be downsized, I would put military productionat number one. War is really, or should be, a thing of the past. There is no rich nation today that's contemplating war with anyone. War is basically a poor person's, a poor country's game. And we should be ashamed of ourselves for encouraging them.
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