[News] Was the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/brittain03122008.html

March 12, 2008


Was the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders?

By JAMES J. BRITTAIN

While virtually every country in Central and 
South America, including the Caribbean, has waged 
in on the debate of the Colombian state 
conducting an illegal military campaign within 
Ecuadorian sovereign territory, resulting in the 
deaths of various high ranking officials in the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s 
Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de 
Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP), the 
United States have remained virtually silent. 
Such silence from the US is quite perplexing 
consdiering the administrations of Ronald Regan, 
George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. 
Bush have wielded a twenty-two year old assault on this insurgency movement.

The United States have deemed the FARC-EP to be, 
what it considers, a foreign terrorist 
organization (FTO). Therefore, would one not 
expect, during the so-called ‘war on terror,’ 
some attention from Washington - other than a few 
sentences by state officials - following the 
deaths of both Comandante Raúl Reyes and 
Comandante Iván Ríos within less than six days of 
each other; two of the seven highest-ranking 
members of the organization (lest we forget the 
hourly visual barrage of images related to the 
capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 or his 
execution in 2006). The following makes a case 
that the United States’ silence has far more to 
do with a plausible connection to the deaths of 
Comandante Reyes and Comandante Ríos rather than simple disinterest.
The Case of Comandante Raúl Reyes (Murdered March 1, 2008)
It has become general knowledge that shortly 
after midnight on March 1, 2008, the President of 
Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Vice-President 
Francisco Santos Calderón, and Defense Minister 
Juan Manuel Santos sanctioned an illegal air and 
ground assault against the 48th Front of the 
FARC-EP, which resulted in the death of 
Comandante Raúl Reyes, one of the members of the 
insurgency’s Secretariat of the Central High 
Command, Julian Conrado, a member of the Central 
High Command (and the insurgency’s most 
recognized cultural icon through his work as a 
revolutionary folk-musician), and twenty other members of the FARC-EP.

Hours after the assault had taken place Defense 
Minister Santos reiterated that Colombian forces 
began the operation with an air assault followed 
by a group of Colombian soldiers engaging in a 
ground combat against members of the FARC-EP 
Front. Santos expressed that recently obtained 
intelligence information related to a satellite 
phone used by Comandante Reyes enabled the 
Colombian military to pin-point the location of 
the encampment, subsequently enabling the campaign to take place.

During meetings of the OAS, state officials and 
representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, 
Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and 
Peru condemned the assault. Unsurprisingly, one 
of the only backers of the illegal military 
incursion was the US. Nevertheless, President 
George W. Bush and J. Robert Manzanares, the 
United States’ representative during the OAS 
meetings, had very little to say about the 
greatest achievement ever realized by the United 
States’ principal ally in Latin America’s 
forty-four year old civil war with the FARC-EP.

When asked if the Uribe and Santos administration 
had informed Washington preceding the 
transgression on Ecuadorian soil, Tom Casey, a 
spokesman for the US State Department, hesitantly 
stated “No, I’m not aware that we found out about 
this other than after the fact”. Less than 
assuring complete impartiality, Colombia’s Chief 
of Police, General Oscar Naranjo declared that “I 
can say for sure that the operation was 
autonomous”. As General Naranjo continued his 
press conference he did however reveal that the 
United States had, in fact, been involved in 
operations connected to the Colombian military 
assault in Ecuador, albeit indirectly,.

General Naranjo asserted that no external forces 
were involved in the FARC-EP-targeted attack but 
he did offer that “it is no secret that 
 a very 
strong alliance with federal agencies of the US” 
exists between the Colombian military. Shortly 
following this statement, a high ranking official 
within the Colombian Defense Ministry leaked that 
the United States had been involved in the March 
1, 2008 operation. In actuality, the US, through 
satellite intelligence gathering over southern 
Colombia and Northern Ecuador, had been able to 
retrieve signals from the FARC-EP’s 48th Front 
and handed over the identification of the 
satellite telephone being used by the insurgency 
to intelligence sectors of the Colombian police. 
The informant went on to add that it was only 
then that Colombian officials were able to 
process the data, thereby enabling the Colombian 
state to decipherer the exact location of 
Comandante Reyes. The informant’s account of the 
satellite phone effectively mirrors that made 
during Defense Minister Santos’ first press 
conference. The leaked information demonstrated 
that the US was, at the very least, indirectly 
involved in the actions of March 1, 2008. That was until March 7, 2008.

On Friday, Ecuador’s Defense Minister Wellington 
Sandoval announced that after further 
investigation of the area targeted during the 
March 1 attack it was revealed that the site had 
been bombarded with at least five bombs (‘Smart 
Bombs’). All five detonations were within a 
50-meter diameter during a nocturnal attack, a 
virtually impossible achievement when concerning 
the military capabilities and resources of the 
Colombian Air and Armed Forces. Sandoval claimed 
that the arms used during the incursion can only 
be deployed through the use of aircraft which 
have the capacity to fly at a considerable height 
and velocity, weaponry that is again not found 
within the Colombian Air Force. The only Air 
Force in the region with such an arsenal is the United States.

While the US and the Colombian governments claim 
that the United States were not involved in the 
attack that resulted in the death of Comandante 
Raúl Reyes, it is quite likely that the United 
States played more than an informal role in the aggression.

The Case of Comandante Iván Ríos (Murdered March 4, 2008 or March 7th, 2008)
On the afternoon of March 7, 2008, the country of 
Colombia was once again the witness of an 
interruption by Defense Minister Santos taking 
precedence on both television and radio. Similar 
to his announcement made six days earlier, Santos 
announced that a member of the FARC-EP’s 
Secretariat had been killed. To the great 
surprise of many, the Defense Minister claimed 
that Comandante Iván Ríos had been killed by 
another member of the FARC-EP named Rojas (in 
association with two other combatants associated 
with the insurgency) on March 4, 2008.

The Defense Minister proceeded to tell the press 
that after those deemed responsible had killed 
Comandante Ríos they severed his right hand in 
order to prove to Colombian officials that the 
youngest member of the Secretariat was dead. It 
was then stated that the three insurgents took 
the severed limb, along with Comandante Ríos’ 
laptop and identification and handed them over to 
members of the Colombian Army and the Colombian 
Attorney General Office’s Technical Investigation 
Body (Cuerpo Técnico de Investigación, CTI). 
During a brief press conference related to this 
incident, Defense Minister Santos said that the 
Colombian army had launched an operation designed 
to capture Comandante Ríos on February 17, 2008 
after (again) receiving intelligence that he was 
located in a mountainous region in the Department 
of Caldas. Unlike the March 1, 2008 press 
conference, however, Santos did not entertain any 
questions or reveal any additional information 
other than that listed above and that Comandante 
Iván Ríos had been officially pronounced dead.

Confusion immediately began to envelop the events 
presented by Defense Minister Santos. The reason 
for the uncertainty was that previous to the 
‘official’ pronouncement ofe Comandante’s Ríos 
death another state official within the 
Prosecutors Office of Colombia had given a 
different account concerning the death of the FARC-EP leader.

An anonymous official had prematurely contacted 
the press and reported that Comandante Ríos had 
been killed on March 7, 2008 during an attack 
carried out by a  unit of the Colombian Army in 
conjunction with members of the CTI in Aguadas, 
just outside the Samaná Municipality within the 
department of Caldas. This again mirrors events 
as revealed in the case of Comandante Reyes 
death; intelligence provided to state officials, 
upper level official presenting sanitized 
sanctioned accounts explaining the deaths of the 
FARC-EP’s high command, and lower-level officials 
disseminating alternative accounts of the actual 
on goings during said transgressions.

Another strange complexity related to Comandante 
Ríos’ death is simply, where is Rojas? One would 
think that the state would put forth details 
concerning who Comandante Ríos’ murderer was, 
what his social background or personal 
identification is, how the killing occurred, what 
has happened to Rojas, etc. Interestingly, 
however, nothing related to the above queries concerning Rojas were released.

If Comandante Ríos was, in fact, murdered by 
Rojas, such events surrounding the death are 
quite perplexing due to the actual structure and 
formation of the FARC-EP. It is difficult to 
understand how one FARC-EP combatant let alone 
three were capable of breaking rank and violently 
reacting against not only a highly-ranked officer 
but a leader within the FARC-EP’s Secretariat. 
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 on goings 
of the guerrilla camp in which the leader is 
situated. From first-hand experience, all 
meetings and interactions with the Comandante are 
coordinated each day and formally scheduled. 
Prior to each meeting, the party invited must 
wait and ask for approval to enter the 
Comandante’s barracks. Once approval has been 
arranged it is only then that a member is 
escorted into the Comandante’s quarters by at 
least one other armed guard. How is it then that 
not only one but three armed FARC-EP combatants 
were able to violently enter into Comandante’s 
Ríos’ 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?

For any researcher, academic, environmentalist, 
or journalist who has spent any significant deal 
of time within FARC-EP-controlled territory since 
2002, the Defense Minister’s ‘official’ account 
of ‘Rojas’ and two other so-called FARC-EP 
combatants being solely responsible for the 
murder of Comandante Ríos is highly problematic. 
The discussion of Comandante Ríos’ limb being 
removed by a FARC-EP member is greatly out of 
character to any informed analyst of the 
Colombian civil war. There has not been one 
confirmed case of any FARC-EP combatant in its 
forty-four years of existence of employing such 
tactics; however, such a tactic has been 
systemically employed by paramilitaries, 
privately funded ‘security forces’, and 
right-wing civilian vigilantly groups dating back 
to the 1940s and increasingly carried out over the past decade.

Plausible Paramilitary Role in the Deaths of both 
Comandante Reyes and Comandante Ríos

Over the past two years the Uribe and Santos 
administration have increasing promoted the story 
that Colombian paramilitarism has come to and end 
with the demobilization of the United 
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas 
Unidas de Colombia, AUC) throughout 2003-2006. 
Such proclamations are in direct contradiction to 
existing evidence, eye-witness reports, and 
escalating violence targeted at civilians 
critical of the Colombian state and 
political-economic structure. More accurately the 
AUC has decentralized its actions and activities 
through various small-scale organizations rather 
than that experienced between 1997 and 2006 where 
a single umbrella organization consolidated 
leading paramilitary organizations into one dominant structure.

The actions related to Comandante Ríos’ murder 
are symbolic of those carried out by Colombia’s 
many far-right paramilitary groups. However, if 
it was to get out to the general international 
public that paramilitarism has, in reality, 
continued within Colombia there could be awkward 
political and economic consequences.

The Colombian state cannot afford to have a 
paramilitary group claim responsibility for the 
murder of Comandante Ríos. This would, once 
again, demonstrate to the state has either failed 
in its political capacity to demobilize the 
paramilitary, or more accurately, that the state 
has been complicit in covering up the actions of 
Colombian paramilitarism which are rampant 
throughout the Colombian countryside.

Rather than supporting the claim that ‘FARC-EP 
combatants’ committed the assault and subsequent 
amputation of Comandante Ríos’ hand it is more 
likely that what transpired was a tactic which 
has been widely utilized by the paramilitaries 
over the past several years. Countless 
researchers and journalists 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.

Plausible US Role in the Deaths of both Comandante Reyes and Comandante Ríos

The Bush administration has had great difficulty 
in getting a new Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) with 
Colombia passed. Internal congressional protests 
by sectors of the Democratic Party have opposed 
the legislation, due to allegations and proven 
atrocities committed by the paramilitaries, 
crimes that the Colombian state has allowed to go 
unpunished. Many of these politicians argue that 
the Colombian state and the US government and 
military have failed to quell the illicit 
drug-trade or decrease the FARC-EP’s strength 
throughout the Colombian countryside even though 
billions of US dollars have been spent. 
Therefore, if the Bush administration was able to 
claim even the slightest victory over the FARC-EP 
than they could argue that their 
counter-insurgency funding has been successful 
and that a new FTA should be supported in Congress.

There is a distinct possibility that the United 
States may have been involved in the actions 
leading up to Comandante Ríos’ death. US Special 
Forces and Marines have been illegally engaged in 
counter-insurgency campaigns within the country 
of Colombia for years. Even though the legal 
number of US troops cannot exceed 800 state 
forces (and 600 private forces), thousands have 
been operating in campaigns against the FARC-EP. 
For example, Peter Gorman published that as far 
back as 2002 roughly 1,100 US counter-insurgent 
troops were on “orders to eliminate all high 
officers of the FARC”. This does not even 
highlight what possible actions private US-based 
contradicted counter-insurgent forces may be carrying out.

There is a two-fold psychological 
effect  inculcated by  propaganda related to the 
deaths of Comandante Reyes and Comandante Ríos, 
which is being disseminated through the 
centralized media, primarily El Tiempo.

1) Systemically exposing sectors of Colombia’s 
general public to photographs of the bullet 
ridden and mutilated corpse of Reyes on an hourly 
basis or the ‘cooler’ containing Ríos’ severed 
limbs is a tool utilized to intimidate and to 
deter sympathizers with the insurgency, political 
activists, and state opponents within Colombia 
from criticizing the state’s political dominance 
and promotion of far-right economic policies.

2) Telling the world that Comandante Ríos’ was 
murdered by his own comrades is a tactic employed 
to decrease external solidarity from sectors of 
the international community, who may now falsely 
believe the argument that the largest and most 
powerful Marxist-Leninist revolutionary social 
movement in Latin America is loosing ground, 
power, and influence in the Colombian 
countryside. At the same time, such accusations 
are internally disseminated in the hopes of 
destabilizing the FARC-EP itself. Claiming  the 
rank-and-file have abandoned the leadership and 
that the movement is collapsing is a strategy to 
destabilize the insurgency’s many Squads, Companies, Columns, and Fronts.

James J. Brittain is an Assistant Professor of 
Sociology at Acadia University, Nova Scotia, 
Canada and the co-founder of the Atlantic 
Canada-Colombia Research Group. He can be reached 
at <mailto:james.brittain at acadiau.ca>james.brittain at acadiau.ca.




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