US Ambassador to Colombia Miles Frechette
Knocks Wind out of Narco-Guerrilla Theory

The Frechette Doctrine

From El Espectador, Bogota
May 1996 --- But as of October, Frechette was toeing the State Dept/Pentagon line that the guerrillas were narco-terrorists!!! Tens of millions of dollars in new military aid is going to the Colombian military -- plus several Black Hawk copters.....just what the people of Colombia need, more guns, more firepower in the hands of U.S. trained Cold Warriers who refuse to allow political opposition, labor organization, or anything that questions the status quo...

Within the framework of Colombian academics in which General Bonnett Locarno organized the War College (Escuela Superior de Guerra) -- which was a free and pluralistic forum, where Antonio Caballero said that he did not like military privilege because it permitted challenge -- the turn of Ambassador Frechette came. He is a person who, one must admit, is courageous and uninhibited. He repeated that the 'path' of the gringos passes through extradiction: that of the 50 druglords who are in prison, not one has been condemned, and that the eradication of illicit crops is a failure because the crops which have been fumigated reappear a short time later. This is sad but true.

But he went further. When an official of an upper graduating class asked him why the United States did not declare war against the narco-guerrillas, he replied simply:

"Because we do not have evidence that the guerrillas are manufacturing and exporting cocaine to the United States."

A striking statement. Without doubt, the majority of those in attendance who had made of doctrine of the narco-guerrilla (which was formulated by Ambassador Tambs, who later turned out to be tainted with cocaine in Guatemala) their compass and the justification of their struggle, the statement by Frechette ought to have left them green. For obvious reasons they could not classify it as subversive. With few exceptions -- honor must go to the "News Magazine of 7 PM" -- the news media were silent about this occurrence because it did not fit with the image which they have been creating of the conflict which we suffer from and because, in general, they speak very much of peace but they follow much more that of war.

The guerrillas kidnap, shoot, tax, rob. They extort from the merchants of cocaine, from the (traqueteos) and from those large growers, and from them they obtain fabulous earnings to sustain the war. More than one commander has made lucrative business in the shadow of the (gramaje) which the guerrillas charge the drug traffickers and which really is paid by the small producers. But for the guerrillas as an organization it is not advantageous to involve themselves in planting, processing, and exporting when they can tax the value added at the source of production itself. They have learned a great deal from Neoliberalism. To traffic in cocaine or in the poppy requires many people, a great deal of work and a great deal of effort which would tend to detour them from the activity which is basically military. Nor would it serve them from the political point of view, because the (traqueteo) is a source of indiscipline, corruption and demoralization. They do what they have to do to finance a war which day by day becomes more costly and broader, and they do not do what they know from experience is against their political and military projects.

Frechette opened a new chapter in the struggle against drug trafficking when he divorced the traffic in drugs itself from subversion.

For those of us who continue, inspite of it all, to insist on peace, the new doctrine is a light at the end of the tunnel in which we have been placed by the enemies of a political solution to the conflict. The position of Frechette of not letting himself be carried along on the easy road of Satanization, puts the United States in the position of a possible mediator of the conflict in the future, when the nationalist posturing is reduced and war demonstrates its uselessness and very high cost.

The Frechette Doctrine permits initial thoughts also that the problem of illicit crops -- as a problem for the peasants, which it is -- could be brought to the negotiation table as Agrarian Reform in place of so much spraying of crops, so much crop substitution planning and so much violence. To end the supply of cocaine, implies sacrificing the present structure of agrarian property, which is precisely that which they do not wish do do because the blood which is spilled in the war has not been the blood of the owners of the haciendas but rather of the peasants, whether they be soldiers or guerrillas.