Abstract
This chapter will argue that, although the global drivers of defense reform and civil-military relations upon which this book is based are undeniable, there nevertheless is a case to be made for Colombian exceptionalism—the persistence of internal dynamics in Colombia’s case—for at least three reasons: first, unlike many of its neighbors, democracy is not an alien concept belatedly grafted onto an authoritarian political culture. On the contrary, Colombian democracy, while restricted and imperfect, formed part of that nation’s birthright. Indeed, Colombia has one of the most impressive records of democratic continuity in Latin America. This has included a century of civilian control of the military and ongoing attempts to foster a spirit of professionalism among soldiers, which implies a respect for boundaries between political and military roles. Professionalism, however, has hardly translated into apolitical behavior among Colombian soldiers. Rather, the history of civil-military relations in Colombia illustrates in full measure what British historian Hew Strachan calls “the political consequences of professionalism.”1
To find an intelligent soldier in Colombia is like a miracle, and miracles don’t happen.
—Colombian expression, provided by General Alvaro Valencia Tovar
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Notes
Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 112.
Daniel Pécaut, Guerra Contra la Sociedad (Bogotá: Espasa Hoy, 2002), 33.
While the extreme left has never commanded an extensive following in Colombia, many argue that the current insurgencies are a break with the past because the profusion of resources linked to globalized markets, especially oil and drugs, has allowed the main insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC) in particular to mount a serious challenge to the state. Others, however, see more continuity than change, among them the economist Francisco Thoumi, who argues that drugs are not the root cause of Colombia’s problems, but rather that Colombia produces cocaine because it is a fractured society with dysfunctional institutions. Francisco Thoumi, “The Numbers’ Game: Let’s All Guess the Size of the Illegal Drug Industry,” TNI Crime & Globalisation Paper, Amsterdam, NL, December 2003: 13, available at http://www.tni.org/crime; accessed 21 October 2005.
“We call it Security Assistance,” a senior officer in the MILGP-COL explained. “But we arc doing counter-insurgency like in the 1960s.” LTC Carlos Berrios, interview 2 February 2006.
Counterinsurgency missions invite a high level of politicization for several reasons: first, notions of jus ad bellum that prevails in interstate conflicts with its emphasis on war waged by a legitimate authority, as a last resort, for a just cause, using proportionate force usually slither over into a no-holds-barred conflict, what Michael Howard calls a bellum Romanum or guerre mortelle reserved for rebels, “savages,” and infidels. Michael Howard, “Constraints on Warfare,” in Michael Howard, George J. Andrepoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, eds., The Laws of War. Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 2–5. Second, the notion of hors de combat as defined by Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention are often ignored in counterinsurgency operations where the enemy mingles with the population, so that inflicting collateral damage may lie at the core of a counterinsurgency strategy. This may be especially true if the counter-insurgent forces are too few and/or are under pressure to deliver quick, dramatic results that may tempt them to rely on the indiscriminate application of force—firepower, “sweeps,” or “resettlement”—rather than a patient political strategy. Finally, soldiers engaged in counterinsurgency operations assume tasks that break down the boundaries of professional restraint, to include acting as policemen, warders, intelligent collectors, and executioners. As armed representatives of the state acting against an “illegitimate” and “cowardly” enemy, soldiers may feel that they are permitted any tactic required to restore “legitimate” authority unconstrained by jus ad bellum or international law.
“The principal purpose of effective civil-military relations is national security; its output is strategy. Democracies tend to forget that. They have come to address civil-military relations not as a means to an end, not as a way of making the state more efficient in its use of military power, but as an end in itself. Instead, the principal objective, to which others become secondary, has been the subordination of the armed forces to civilian control.” Strachan, “Making Strategy: Civil-Military Relations After Iraq,” Survival 48, 3 (Summer 2006): 66.
Indeed, the official reference to Colombia’s unpleasantness as a “conflicto” perpetrated by “narcoterrorist” grown rich on illicit gringo dollars, rather than a war carried out by an organized insurgency to challenge the legitimacy of the state, is shaped in part by a reluctance to grant to the insurgency de facto belligerent status, and hence concede to them certain prerogatives in international law and diplomacy.
The political system remains dominated by the same parties that lack ideological cohesion and are run by local elites. The judicial system remains clogged and ineffective; the problems with guerrillas and paramilitaries persist. Harvey F. Kline, State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 175–181.
“MoD Restructure,” CCMR Project Colombia, Bogotá, 1–4 April 2003, 10.
Andrés Dávila Ladrón de Guevara. All quotes come from an interview with the author on 30 June 2005, Bogotá.
Stephen Dudley, Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerilla Politics in Colombia, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 228.
Ladrón de Guevara, “Dime con quien andas,” 10.
“Colombia: NDI Analysis Finds Parties Lack Credibility, Stability.” FBIS LAP20051120004003, 22 November 2005 quoting Article by Juan David Laverde Palma, “Political Parties in Intensive Care,” El Espectador, 20 November 2005.
Ronald Archer and Matthew Shugart, “The Unrealized Potential of Presidential Dominance in Colombia,” in Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart, eds., Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 110–159.
“The Congress has power,” Andrés Dávila Ladrón de Guevara points out. “They can censure the minister of defense, and they vote on all bills promoted by the minister.” The Senate must also approve any “state of exception” declared by the president if it runs over ninety days, a measure meant to curtail the president’s pre-1991 prerogative to rule on the basis of open-ended “state of siege” decrees. Kline, State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 167.
J.M. Eastman, Vice Minister in charge of Budgets, Strategic Planning, U.S.—Colombian relations (Plan Colombia). All quotes are from an interview with the author on 28 June 2005, Bogotá.
Samper was continually at loggerheads with his generals over his attempt to trade a demilitarized zone in La Uribe to the FARC in return for the release of captive Colombian soldiers, a project to bring the code of military justice in line with human rights regulations, and the promotions process. Indeed, so unpopular was Samper with the military that rumors of military coups circulated on at least two occasions, while an unprecedented protest of over 200 officers occurred outside the Ministry of Defense when the president dismissed a popular general opposed to negotiations with the FARC. William Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 169–175.
Ladrón de Guevara, “Dime con quien andas,” 15–16.
Darren D. Sprunk, “Transformation in the Developing World: An Analysis of Colombia’s Security Transformation,” MA Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, September 2004, 39–40.
“Forward Operation Locations in Latin America: Transcending Drug Control,” 8–9. Transnational TNIB Briefing Series no.2003/6, http://www.tni.org/reports/drugs/debate8.pdf.
General Richard Goetze. All quotes are from an interview with the author on 21 July 2005, in Monterey, CA.
Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, 54.
National Security Council mission statement, available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/; accessed 21 October 2005.
Jaramillo, interview 22 August 2006
“Gerentes de la guerra,” La Semana, 3 June 2006.
Lt. Col. Juan-Carlos Gómez Ramirez, Director Derechos Humanos y Derecho Internacional Humanitario. [Director of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law], Ministry of Defense. All quotes come from an interview with the author on 25 June 2005, Bogotá.
“MoD Restructure,” 10.
Mahlstedt, interview 27 June 2006.
Ibid. Attempts by Marta Lucia Ramírez to wrest promotion away from the military were scuppered by General Mora. Interview with Admirals Edgar Cely, Vincente Eschandia, and Guillermo Barrera, 30 June 2006.
Ibid., 4. When a second vice minister was created, the idea was to divide their tasks between budgetary and technical issues, and international, policy-related issues. “However,” says Jaramillo, “What happened was that the new vice-minister simply took over new programs like human rights, kidnapping, demobilization of the AUC (Autodefensas Unitas de Colombia—the umbrella organization for the paramilitaries), etc., programs that came out of the new security strategy.”
Jaramillo, interview 28 June 2005.
“MoD Restructure,” 5.
“Colombia January 2004,” Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Overview, available at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/01/21/colomb6978.htm; accessed 23 October 2005.
“The first goal is legitimacy of the Colombian state. Human rights are part of that,” President Uribe’s Human Rights director and former guerrilla Carlos Franco asserts. All quotes are from an interview with the author on 23 June 2005 Bogotá.
“Human rights are part of the war against impunity,” Mauricio Wiesner Acero, International Consultant. All quotes are from an interview with the author on 23 June 2005, Bogotá.
Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, 1.
“Colombia January 2004.”
The “Sixth Division”: Military-Paramilitary Ties and U.S. Policy in Colombia (New York, London, Brussels, Washington: Human Rights Watch, 2001), 87–92; Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, 39, 140–143, 193.
Nieto, interview 24 June 2005.
Kline, State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 173; Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, 151–157.
Ladrón de Guevara, “Dime con quien andas,” 9.
Valencia Tovar, interview 30 June 2005; Luis Camilo Osorio, attorney general at the time of this interview, was replaced by Deputy Justice Minister Mario Iguarán on 20 July 2005. Osorio was criticized for failing to prosecute military officers accused of collaborating with the autodefensas. “World Briefing: Americas,” New York Times, 21 July 2005, A9.
In 2006, a judge allowed a colonel and fourteen soldiers of the Batallón de Alta Montaña alleged to have massacred ten policemen who were investigating military involvement in drug dealing to be court martialed rather than tried in a criminal court. La Semana, 20 July 2006. www.semana.com. This was later reversed after widespread protests. Joshua Goldman, “Colombian Army Accused of Massacre of Drug Police,” Washington Post, 18 June 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/17/AR2006061700840.htm1?nav=rss_print/asection; accesed 18 December 2006.
“Colombia January 2004.”
Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, 214.
Alfredo Rangel, Director of Security and Democracy. All quotes from an interview with the author on 28 June 2005, Bogotá.
Andrian English, “The Colombian Armed Forces—An Update,” Jane’s Data Research, Jane’s Intelligence Review (1 September 1999): 424; Thomas Marks, “Colombian Army Adaptation to FARC Insurgency,” Strategic Studies Institute Monograph, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2002, 10.
The military budget was still only 2 percent GDP and lagged behind that of Chile, Peru, Honduras, and El Salvador. Avilés, Globalization, Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, 147–149.
Accusations of drug connections in the Samper administration and accusations of human rights abuses caused Colombia to be decertified in March 1996; it was recertified in 1998. U.S. aid began to flow the following year, but was earmarked for counterdrug operations only. President Clinton’s Presidential Defense Directive 73 forbade the use of U.S. intelligence and military assets against insurgents. Henry L. Hinton, “Drug Control: Counternarcotics Efforts in Colombia Face Continuing Challenges,” United States General Accounting Office (Testimony Before the Committee on International Relations House of Representatives, 26 February 1998, GAO/T-NSIAD-98–103), 5–6.
Draft, MILGP-COL REORGANIZATION PAPER.
LTC Carlos Berrios, MILGP Executive Officer, 2 February 2006.
For instance, in the 1990s, NAS, which answers to the U.S. State Department, dealt directly with the National Police on antinarcotics programs during the period when the government of President Samper was decertified (placed on Washington’s list of countries considered insufficiently cooperative in the “war on drugs”). “Under Clinton, Washington gave money directly to the police,” Vice Minister Peñate complained. “Sending money straight to the police weakened MOD oversight.”
Interview with Admirals Cely, Eschandia, and Barrera, 30 June 2006.
Nieto, interview 24 June 2005.
Quoted in FBIS, 27 September 2005.
“Las FARC—Repliegue por ‘estrategia,’ o por necesidad,” Centro de Analisis Socilpolitico: 3 June 2005, available at http://www.cas.org.co/articulos/articulos/VerArticulo.php?Id=77; and “Situación de los terroristas,” 23 August 2005, available at http://www.cas.org.co/articulos/articulos/VerArticulo.php?Id=84; both accessed 23 October 2005.
I thank my former student Captain Paul Saskewitz for this observation.
Cely, Barrera, Eschandia interview 31 June 06.
One result has been an increasing number of soldier and civilian casualties caused by mines. “Objectivo: mutilar” La Semana, www.semana.terrra.com.co; accessed 30 November 2005.
These mid-tier leaders are regarded as the FARC’s critical link, because of their administrative responsibilities, their role in arms smuggling, and other criminal activities, and the power they hold over the largely peasant rank and file. “Colombian Army Increasingly Effective against Middle-Tier FARC Leaders,” FBIS LAP20051115347002, 22 November 2005. However, this may prove wishful thinking as the FARC structure allows for rapid promotion to fill vacancies.
LTC Berrios, interview 2 February 2006.
“Colombia: Presidential Politics and Peace Prospects,” International Crisis Group, 16 June 2005, 12. Available at http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3515&l=1; accessed 23 October 2005.
Liliana Gabriel, Political Section of U.S. Embassy, Bogotá. Interview conducted, 29 June 2006.
Negotiations would allegedly be based on the offer of a new Constituent Assembly, recognition of the FARC as a political entity, a truce, the cessation of a demilitarized zone, and a demobilization law modeled on the paz y justicia but tailored for the guerrillas. Alfredo Rangel, “The Thaw,” Cambio, 3–9 July 2006. FBIS, July 14 2006; Gabriel argues that the FARC dilemma is that they need to deal with a strong president with the popular backing to make a peace agreement stick, but they are reluctant to hand a victory to their arch enemy Uribe, who they do not trust. Liliana Gabriel, Political Section of U.S. Embassy, Bogotá. Interview conducted, 29 June 2006.
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© 2008 Thomas Bruneau and Harold Trinkunas
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Porch, D. (2008). Preserving Autonomy In Conflict: Civil-Military Relations In Colombia. In: Bruneau, T., Trinkunas, H. (eds) Global Politics of Defense Reform. Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611054_6
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