CASE STUDY: COLOMBIA
Separatism in Urabá:
a UN pilot project
As the world applauds the takedown of Colombia's Medellín and Cali cocaine cartels, by coordinated actions of Colombian law enforcement agencies with the Clinton administration, little attention is being paid to the existence of a danger as great or greater: the so-called Third Cartel, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC. Like the Medellín and Cali cartels, the FARC runs drugs, but also has a nearly 50-year history of operating as an armed guerrilla movement across Colombia. Along with its allies in the National Liberation Army (ELN), it controls large portions of national territory, drug production, and guerrilla activity.
As Maps 7 and 8 (PDF) show, there is a total overlap between Colombia's drug regions, and those areas controlled by the FARC and ELN terrorists. The maps also show the dramatic growth of both drugs and terrorism from 1982 to the present.
This Third Cartel is today being used by the British and the United Nations to run a terrorist separatist operation against the Colombian nation-state. Supranational oversight of "conflict resolution" is being actively promoted by the United Nations and its NGOs, and the U.S. State Department, under the policy advice of Kissingerian permanent bureaucrats such as Luigi Einaudi, is fully behind this insane approach, which was pioneered in El Salvador with disastrous results.
In Colombia, there is no "ethnic" or "racial" pretext, as was fabricated in Chiapas and Bosnia, to justify a U.N.-sponsored partitioning of the nation. But Colombia has the FARC and ELN narco-terrorists, which are deploying to create the conditions of civil war that would "justify" direct U.N. intervention—politically and, perhaps, even militarily—into Colombian territory.
The plot
The FARC and ELN, which together constitute the Simón Bolívar National Guerrilla Coordinator (CGSB), propose that the United Nations recognize the departments of Santander, Norte de Santander, César, Arauca, Casanare, Meta, and Guaviare, as well as the region surrounding the Gulf of Urabá (see map), as territories officially controlled by these "insurgent" forces, a move which would lead to a kind of Korea-style partition. The terrorists' plan is to later deploy out of these controlled territories to lay siege to the capital city of Bogotá. A large percentage of the water, food, and energy supplies which go to Bogotá's 8 million inhabitants, come from precisely those territories that the narco-terrorists are moving to control. The siege would be combined with attacks against military and police installations.
The escalating spiral of violence in Urabá has set the stage for this scenario. Urabá extends along the Caribbean coast, from the Colombian border with Panama, through Chocó and Antioquia departments, to the border with Córdoba department. The FARC's efforts to control this important region have concentrated on murdering anyone who gets in its way. Among those "in the way" are members of the Hope, Peace, and Freedom Party (EPL), a former guerrilla group which was legalized after signing a peace agreement with the government, and which went on to join the electoral alliance of the M-19, another legalized terrorist group. The FARC views the EPL as having committed "treason" by signing a peace pact, and has begun assassinating EPL members. The EPL has now in turn armed itself, and even allied with other "paramilitary groups," in order to respond with "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" to any attack from the FARC. The result is that 700 people have been murdered in Urabá this year alone.
On cue, the U.N. Human Rights Commission proposes to name a special rapporteur to head a commission of "international observers" that will look into the Urabá massacres. Included in this commission will be delegates of Pax Christi, a U.N.-affiliated NGO known for its constant persecution of the Colombian military, along with other European NGOs. Pax Christi already has more than 100 observers in Urabá, and France, Italy, and Spain have sent delegates to Urabá to determine the cost of such an international oversight commission, which would be financed by the U.N. and the European Economic Commission.
The advocates of this oversight commission view it as the first step toward bringing U.N. blue helmets into the area to "pacify" the region, supposedly because the Colombian State is incapable of doing so. Once the region is "pacified" under U.N. authority, Urabá would be returned to the Colombian authorities again. However, if another massacre were to occur, Urabá's independence would be declared, so that the population of the region could control its own destiny "under U.N. protection."
Supranational authority
While the idea of the United Nations moving in and running a region of a country may appear to be lunacy, the fact is that things have already gone a long way toward establishing the U.N. and the human rights NGOs as the real authorities in the country:
- In 1992, a cluster of human rights NGOs, prominently including the Belgium-based Pax Christi International, issued a book entitled State Terrorism in Colombia, which contains detailed profiles, including photos, of over 350 of the country's most effective anti-subversive fighters in the military and national police. The book, which condemns these men as "human rights violators," constitutes a hit-list both for the terrorists and for their allies inside the Attorney General's office and related institutions which are determined to purge the country's defense forces.
- The ELN's third-in-command is Francisco Galán, who today is in a cell at Itaquí maximum-security prison on charges of multiple murders and kidnappings. Galán and his colleague Francisco Caraballo, of the People's Liberation Army (EPL), receive daily visits from U.N. representatives, and representatives of Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs, who are coordinating efforts to win the terrorists' release. In July 1995, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, an NGO, demanded that the Colombian government release Galán, who they claim was illegally arrested. On Oct. 26, a delegation headed by Augusto Ramírez Ocampo, the former Colombian foreign minister who is the United Nations' chief agent in Colombia, met for five hours with the terrorists.
- Gen. Alvaro Velandia Hurtado was forced out of office in September 1995, after the human rights prosecutor of the Attorney General's office accused him of responsibility for the 1987 kidnapping and subsequent torture-murder of an M-19 terrorist by a military intelligence unit under his command. Evidence proving that the terrorist was a military informant against the M-19 was not permitted to be used in General Velandia's defense, and the main witnesses against the general were other M-19 terrorists. General Velandia's name appears in State Terrorism in Colombia.
- Head of Army intelligence Gen. Luis Bernardo Urbina was abruptly discharged from the military in late October 1995, by President Ernesto Samper, when he was named as responsible for having leaked to the press a taped phone conversation by Congressman Heyne Mogollón, head of the "accusations committee" which is investigating Samper's narco-corruption, in which Mogollón is caught committing fraud. Said General Urbina, "Loyalty to my country came first. The only thing important to me is that whoever investigates the President be clean." General Urbina's name also appears in State Terrorism in Colombia.
History of the project
With Urabá, the history of Panama may be repeated. In 1903, Panama "won" its independence from Colombia thanks to the intervention of U.S. Marines, deployed by the British-run President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt. Immediately afterwards, Panama signed a treaty with the United States in which Panama granted a chunk of its territory for the United States to build an interoceanic canal.
The Gulf of Urabá is one of the only routes possible for a new, sea-level interoceanic canal. Only 100 kilometers separate Urabá on the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific. It also borders on the Darién National Park of Panama, a narco-terrorist refuge. Urabá has some of the most fertile land in Colombia, and is also a natural sea outlet for Medellín, Colombia's most industrialized city. However, there is currently no decent highway between Medellín and Urabá, much less a railroad.
In the late 1960s, Urabá was converted into banana plantations under United Fruit Co. EIR's book Dope, Inc. identifies United Fruit, later United Brands, as a front for the international drug trade. United Fruit invented the technique of transporting cocaine to the United States packed in banana skins.
During the 1970s, United Fruit decided to sell its Urabá land, to dedicate itself exclusively to banana transport. That period precisely coincides with the creation of the so-called Medellín Cartel, which got its start stuffing cocaine into bananas for export. Since that time, violence has grown in the area, until it now serves as the pretext the United Nations needs to dismember Urabá from Colombia.
Creating an 'ethnic' flank
Apart from committing massacres in Urabá, the FARC has poured finances and manpower into trying to create an "ethnic guerrilla" force in Chocó, the neighboring department to Antioquia which shares the Urabá region. Ninety percent of Chocó's inhabitants are black. Chocó is also a region which is physically separated from the rest of the country by a lack of roads, and its poverty is dramatic. While the FARC is trying to create a guerrilla front made up exclusively of blacks, the better to promote separatism (à la Chiapas), a theology of liberation faction inside the Catholic Church has tried to promote a "black theology of liberation," with the absurd concept that each race requires a different "gospel."
The FARC has been helped along in this endeavor by the New York Times, which last year devoted a prominent story to the supposedly spontaneous emergence of a black ethnic movement in Chocó, which the Times portrayed as a possible "next Chiapas."
