CSN Central NY Chapter

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Looking across the Guaviare River at Meta department.
Guaviare's recent history

The department of Guaviare is one of several that make up a vast California-sized region east and south of Colombia's Andes mountains. Flat and hot, this zone of dusty savannahs and dense jungles, ribboned by muddy rivers that empty into the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, is home to only about 4 percent of Colombia's population.

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This is Colombia's coca-growing heartland, an area so far from government presence that some smaller riverside towns lack access to the central government's currency, relying instead on grams of crude coca paste as a unit of exchange. It has also been the historical rearguard of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's oldest and largest (9,000-15,000 members) guerrilla group.

Like much of Colombia's southern plains, Guaviare was settled in the past few decades by cattlemen and coca growers, many of them displaced by violence elsewhere. As recently as the 1960s, this was wilderness, settled only by a few rugged frontiersmen and outlaws - as well as nomadic tribes of indigenous hunter-gatherers who had been there for perhaps thousands of years.

Within the past two generations, outsiders began to arrive in greater numbers, either pushed out by violence or drawn by the possibility of land for the taking - the property of any who wished to knock down jungle and carve out a life on the "agricultural frontier."

Colombia's government, however, failed to follow the colonizers to places like Guaviare. In a state of abandonment, with no security, no basic services, not even a road network, people soon learned to coexist with the armed insurgent groups that took refuge there, acting as a crude surrogate government.

Like many rainforest areas, Guaviare has poor soils. It is difficult to grow crops there sustainably, especially hard-to-transport products that yield low farm-gate prices. The coca plant, however, can be cultivated profitably; its leaves can easily be turned into a paste that is easily transported in the roadless region and sold to narcotraffickers willing to pay prices sufficient to guarantee a profit.

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A painting of a coca-paste laboratory hangs on a restaurant wall in San José del Guaviare.

A coca-grower with 2 1/2 acres, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated a few years ago, nets about US$199 per month, or just over US$6 per day. This is not enough to lift a family over the poverty line (over 80 percent of Guaviare's rural population lives in poverty), but it yields more than any other crop that can be harvested within a year of planting.

Guaviare's coca boom began in the 1980s and has never truly ended. Together with cattle-ranching, coca is the reason why Guaviare has the highest deforestation rate of all of Colombia's thirty-two departments.

Today, about 150,000 people live in Guaviare. This is still rather sparse for an area the size of Vermont and New Hampshire put together, but population growth continues to be rapid and uncontrolled.

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The locals eat river fish like bagre for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The department has four municipalities (counties), each of them enormous in size but small in population. The departmental capital, San José del Guaviare, is about the size of Connecticut, but with only about 60,000 people. Of these, 40,000 are concentrated in the rapidly expanding county seat. More than one-third of the town center's population, 14,000 people, are internally displaced people - refugees forced from the surrounding countryside and elsewhere by violence during the last ten to fifteen years.

A new mayor

The mayor San José del Guaviare is Pedro Arenas, a politician who comes from a social-movement background. In the 1990s, Arenas co-founded the Guaviare Youth Movement, whose community radio station has been one of the municipality's main information sources for the past ten years.

Arenas went on to serve for four years in Colombia's Congress. Then last October, at the age of 36, he was elected to the mayor's office with 60 percent of the vote, winning in rural areas and poor urban neighborhoods, as well as in the merchant neighborhoods of San José del Guaviare's town center.

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Mayor Pedro Arenas (at right with beige hat).

I have known Pedro Arenas since 1997, when the Colombia Human Rights Network brought him to Washington and several other cities to discuss the rapidly worsening situation in Guaviare. At the time, Arenas's Guaviare Youth Movement had run afoul of the right-wing paramilitaries who were pouring into Guaviare for the first time, openly aided by the security forces.

A key battleground

In July 1997, just a few months before Pedro's visit, the military and police had stood aside as two planeloads of thugs from the paramilitary strongholds of northwestern Colombia arrived in San José del Guaviare's airport. In what would be the paramilitaries' first foray into southern Colombia, the gunmen went about 40 miles downriver to the port town of Mapiripán, across the river in Meta department. There, hit lists in hand, they spent an entire week torturing and killing more than fifty of the town's residents, dumping their bodies in the Guaviare river.

Of the paramilitary leaders who ordered the crime, the hitmen who carried it out, and the military leaders who - in the name of hitting a guerrilla stronghold - allowed it to happen, very few have ever been tried or convicted. Most still walk freely among their fellow Colombians.

Mapiripán would be the first of a gruesome chain of massacres over the next five or six years throughout Colombia's southern plains. As the paramilitaries sought to attack the guerrillas by "draining the sea to kill the fish" - killing and intimidating social leaders in guerrilla-controlled areas - thousands would die at their hands, their bodies either dumped in rivers or turning up today in Cambodia-style mass graves.

The military stood idly by, if not collaborated openly. Local leaders told of the daily roadblock that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) maintained nearly every day during the late 1990s and early 2000s, about a half-mile down the only paved road from the local military battalion's headquarters. Those detained at this roadblock, they said, would not appear again.

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Meanwhile - and in part as a result - the guerrillas, who as the only entity resembling a government in Guaviare had enjoyed popular support as late as the mid-1990s, grew ever more paranoid, brutal and greedy. Fear of paramilitary (and later military) informants led the FARC to start treating the population with far greater suspicion, murdering anyone suspected to have given information or other aid to the other side.

At the same time, the FARC came to depend ever more on the drug trade as a source of funding. Flush with new funds from coca and cocaine production, the FARC were recruiting and buying guns at an accelerating rate. While this made the guerrillas a very formidable fighting force, it also led them to treat their social base - the population of neglected zones like Guaviare - like an ATM. The imperative of controlling the coca boomtowns and strategic trafficking routes of areas like Guaviare led the guerrillas increasingly to mistreat and alienate the people with whom they had long coexisted.

Coca and fumigation

Whether spurred by the guerrillas or lured by the prospect of easy money, Guaviare's landholders - nearly all of them owners of small tracts - turned increasingly to the coca trade. By the mid-1990s, when Colombia became South America's largest coca-producing country for the first time, Guaviare was the department with the largest amount of coca cultivation.

As a result, the United States pressured the government of President César Gaviria to allow an aerial herbicide fumigation to begin in 1994. The program expanded quickly over the next few years.

For its first several years, all of Colombia's fumigation flights took off from the Counter-Narcotics Police base adjacent to the airport in San José del Guaviare. About 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of Guaviare have been sprayed with the "Round-Up Ultra" glyphosate-based spray mixture since the program's initiation, making it either the first or second most-sprayed department in the country.

The results have been mixed at best. Fourteen years of spraying in Guaviare have made clear that sustained, heavy herbicide spraying can indeed reduce coca cultivation in a specific area, for a specific period of time. Spraying during the second half of the 1990s reduced the amount of coca that the United States and the United Nations measured in Guaviare. That reduction, however, was canceled out by a sharp growth in coca-growing further to the south, out of the spray planes' range, in Putumayo department near the border with Ecuador.

A big component of the U.S. "Plan Colombia" aid package in 2000 sought to expand the Guaviare-based spray program into Putumayo. After 2000, once the spray fleet reduced its activity in Guaviare in order to fumigate in Putumayo and elsewhere, coca cultivation in Guaviare again shot upward.



It has taken three years of intense spraying, from 2003 to 2006, to reduce coca-growing in Guaviare by two-thirds, to just under 10,000 hectares. (2007 data won't be available until June.)

When I was in San José del Guaviare last week, the spray program was continuing to function at a very rapid tempo. The fumigation planes and police escort helicopters based in San José had just finished another round of intense spraying. They were not present during my visit, however: they had just moved to the city of Barrancabermeja in the north-central Magdalena Medio region, from where they would be spraying the coca fields of southern Bolívar department.

For at least a couple of months, Guaviare will not be sprayed. All whom I asked, police included, agreed that the department's coca growers would be very likely to replant during this "down" period in the spray program, causing coca cultivation to move upward again. The department has only seen a minimal amount of the aerial eradication that the government of Álvaro Uribe has been encouraging throughout the country.

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Why, after being so heavily and repeatedly sprayed for fourteen years, would Guaviare's coca growers still insist on growing so much coca? Probably because so little has been done to bring the state into the department's rural areas, much less to encourage alternative income sources. Alternative-development investment - whether by the United States or any other foreign donors - is zero in Guaviare. The same, reports the UN, is the case in the massive neighboring departments of Meta, Caquetá, and Vichada, which together with Guaviare account for 40 percent of Colombia's coca cultivation.

Not a dollar has been invested in alternative development or governance projects in Guaviare. Here, the strategy has been the very definition of all stick and no carrot. It is no wonder, then, that the coca trade persists in Guaviare, fourteen years after the first spray mission flew over the department.

Coming next: the security situation