March 21, 2000

Drug War Myths in the U.S. Media

by Mario A. Murillo

In January 1999, hundreds of journalists, international dignitaries, peace activists and scholars converged in San Vicente del Caguan, a small jungle town in southern Colombia, for the ceremonial inauguration of long-awaited peace talks between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's oldest and largest guerrilla organization. In what was expected to be a carnival-like setting befitting a championship soccer match, the two sides agreed to meet for the first time in over seven years in an effort to put an end to Colombia's 35-year civil war.

However, the much anticipated meeting between Colombian President Andres Pastrana and the commander-in-chief of the FARC, Manuel Marulanda Velez, never materialized because the latter chose to remain underground for security reasons. Instead, Marulanda sent the FARC's veteran secretariat as its official representatives at the opening of talks. The next day, the front pages of Colombian and U.S. newspapers featured large color photographs of the president sitting next to an empty chair, looking like he had been stood-up for the prom.

While this early no-show by the FARC's controversial leader was significant in strictly public relations terms, its actual impact on the infant peace process paled in comparison to the wave of paramilitary attacks that began that same day throughout the country in response to the talks. In all, over 150 Colombian peasants were massacred by right-wing death squads allied with the Colombian military. They were apparently sending a message to Colombians that efforts to achieve peace were going nowhere if the paramilitary leadership was not invited to the talks. While this bloodbath was covered by the New York Times after the FARC broke off talks because of the government's failure to reign in the paramilitaries, it was not given anywhere near the prominence of that first photograph of a lonely Pastrana being stood up in San Vicente del Caguan.

The U.S. media's coverage of the last tumultuous year in Colombia has more or less continued the same pattern established last January, pointing the finger at the guerrillas as being primarily responsible for the failure of any progress in the peace process. One year later, it is no wonder that some in Washington are already clamoring for an end to peace talks with the argument that negotiations are going nowhere due to guerrilla intransigence. As a result, U.S. news consumers continue to get a flawed picture of both the Colombian conflict and the ongoing peace process.

It's true that U.S. media coverage of Colombia has improved when compared to the abysmally distorted picture that was constantly being painted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Prior to 1997, coverage of Colombia was almost exclusively focused on the drug trade and, more directly, on how U.S. "interests" were being threatened by Colombia's violent and powerful drug traffickers. The internal war and years of political violence always took a backseat in the minds of U.S. editors.

Today, although most Colombia coverage remains couched in U.S.-drug war and national security terms, reporting increasingly incorporates the human rights crisis, the Army-paramilitary alliance, internal displacement and the country's economic crisis. Perhaps this could not be avoided, given the recent escalation of the war and the growing attention given to it by official circles in Washington. However, some credit should also be given to the grassroots human rights movement that has forced editors and reporters to think a bit more comprehensively when covering Colombia.

Nevertheless, because of the media's insistence on echoing both the Colombian and U.S. "official" perspectives on the conflict, the lack of depth and historical context in the reporting continues unchanged, resulting in a chaotic picture designed to justify U.S. drug war policy in the country. As a result, President Clinton's recently announced $1.3-billion aid package to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the drug threat, has a good chance of being approved with little public debate.

Perhaps the most flagrant example of this superficial reporting came last summer when Dan Rather, considered the dean of U.S. broadcast journalism, went on "special assignment" to cover the war in Colombia. His trip was timely, since it coincided with the heated, albeit narrow, debates in Washington over how to deal with the "Colombia problem."

In his special series of reports for CBS, Rather used the word "history" in his account of recent developments in the western city of Cali, home of one of Colombia's most powerful but now defunct drug cartels. According to his version of Colombian history, the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country's second largest guerrilla organization, was "taking control" of Cali, a city "drug billions built," by taking advantage of a power vacuum created in the wake of the arrest of the Cali cartel's main bosses.

In his report, Rather implies that the ELN is a new phenomenon that has emerged in the vacuum created by the dismantling of the Cali cartel. by pointing to their alleged involvement in the drug trade, Rather conveniently ignores the ELN's 30-year history of waging war against the Colombian state, not only in Cali and its outskirts, but in many parts of the country. Consequently, Rather lends credence to the deliberately misused phrase commonly found in the contemporary U.S. media lexicon about Colombia--"narcoguerrilla"--that has been used again and again by Washington hawks calling for a more direct role in the Colombian conflict under the guise of the drug war.

While both the ELN and the FARC have been accused of generating funds by protecting drug plantations and illicit air strips, even former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette has discounted the idea of a guerrilla cartel that is profiting from the marketing and distribution of coca on a massive scale. Colombian sociologist Alfredo Molano, currently living in exile in Spain, has written extensively on the role of the guerrillas in the drug trade, and likens their coca income to the war taxes collected from other so-called traditional economic sectors, such as cattle ranching and coffee growing.

Throughout the special series, Rather described a country under siege by "narcoguerrillas" and "right-wing vigilantes." As a result he echoed the theory perpetuated by Colombian officials and their supporters in Washington that the Colombian Armed Forces are under attack, almost defenseless, and in desperate need of help from the Pentagon. The report also seems to suggest that the Colombian State Security apparatus has no links whatsoever with either drug trafficking or right-wing death squads (a more appropriate term to describe these heavily armed thugs that Dan Rather romantically dubs "vigilantes"). Both these claims have been proven false again and again.

The strong links between the army and the parmilitaries has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and numerous Colombian NGOs. As for the military's connections with the drug trade, one need only look at the infamous "blue cartel," the name given to the Colombian Air Force officers accused of smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States. By ignoring the facts, Rather has given ammunition to those sectors calling for an increase in military aid to Colombia, which for the next two years could total over $1.6 billion.

Like most corporate media reports from Colombia, the CBS series failed to present a broad range of sources, thus giving credence to the argument that the guerrillas are the cause of all evil. Featured most prominently were U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey, Indiana's conservative Republican Representative Dan Burton, and the Colombian National Police Chief Jose Rosso Serrano--the latter has been a media darling for Washington's counter-drug aid lobby.

This emphasis on official sources is seen in almost every U.S. news report, even when the topic is the dismal human rights record of the Colombian Armed Forces. For example, on October 3, 1999, a number of major dailies, including the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post, reported on the press conference held by General Fernando Tapias, Colombia's Armed Forces Commander, defending the Army's human rights track record on the eve of his trip to Washington. The Los Angeles Times did not challenge the numbers given by Tapias that claimed the guerrillas were responsible for "594 civilian deaths so far [in 1999], compared with 505 for the right-wing groups." While reporter Ruth Morris alludes briefly to "previous findings...in 1997" that blamed "right-wing groups...for more than two-thirds of civilian slayings," she leaves unchallenged Tapias' assertion that "this is almost a competition between the guerrillas and the self-defense forces to see who can kill more Colombians." No independent Colombian human rights activists were quoted in the report.

This one-sided reporting of a story that has many sides can be seen again and again in the Washington Post and the New York Times, where guerrilla-bashing goes on unabated. On November 27, 1999, a Washington Post article headlined "Colombian Ridicules Rebels' Claims to Help Poor" described a speech President Pastrana gave at a military ceremony in which he asserted that the guerrillas "don't understand or don't want to understand that their actions only help to perpetuate and increase poverty and unemployment." It goes on to describe acts that "sow only misery and unemployment." Nowhere does the article mention that more than 1.5 million Colombians are internally displaced as a result of violent sweeps across the country by right-wing death squads.

The New York Times' Larry Rohter is perhaps the reporter most guilty of providing space for pro-military sources, at times going even to the right of the Colombian government itself. In an October 25, 1999, report that focused on the resumption of peace talks in the region of southern Colombia that President Pastrana demilitarized last year in order to get the FARC to the negotiating table, Rohter quotes former Colombian Armed Forces Commander Harold Bedoya as saying the area no longer belonged "to the Colombian state, but to the narco-terrorists of the FARC."

Bedoya was removed as Armed Forces Chief by former President Ernesto Samper, and ran an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1998 on a platform of total war against "subversive scoundrels." Somehow the Times found his to be the only views fit to print, aside from a brief quote from Pastrana. In another article, describing Pastrana's dilemma of waging war on many fronts, he describes the paramilitaries as "insurgents," neglecting the fact that they are a creation of the Colombian Army to aid in its counter-insurgency war.

In another article, Rohter describes the paramilitaries as "insurgents" in reporting how desperate Pastrana and the military was in combating two armed groups, the guerrillas and paramilitaries. By saying the government is facing "insurgents from the left and the right," Rother negates the fact that the paramilitaries were in fact a creation of the Army in its counter-insurgency war, only to be criminalized after years of domestic and international denunciation of the government‚s role in paramilitary terror.

Mainstream news coverage of Colombia has seen some bright spots in recent months, including a very thorough October 31, 1999, report in the Houston Chronicle that documented the life of U.S. activist Terrence Freitas, killed by FARC guerrillas while visiting the U'Wa Indians in early 1999. Quotes in the U.S. media by human rights NGOs and other U.S. progressive institutions are becoming more common, albeit in a very peripheral manner. It is still very rare, however, to hear dissident voices from Colombia that are critical of U.S. policy, the Colombian government or the many armed actors in the war--unless they are denouncing any dialogue with the guerrillas or calling for direct U.S. intervention.

The Colombia story is a complex one, but not too difficult to comprehend if a little time is taken to understand the players and to recognize how global forces have escalated the war. Unfortunately, it's convenient for the U.S. corporate media machine to tow the official line by painting a picture of a country in chaos as a result of "leftist narco-terrorism."

Mario A. Murillo is an assistant professor in the Audio/Video/Film Department of the School of Communication at Hofstra University. He is also the host of Pacifica Radio's Our Americas: The Weekly Report on Latin America and the Caribbean.

This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).

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