Direct Tv Colombia

Castro was arrested in Colombia as a young Communist during the Bogotaza riots of 1948-54 and has worked to export revolution throughout the Americas. He is still at it.

Ask any Americans who follow world affairs to name the hot spots of the world, and they're likely to say Kosovo, Iraq, North Korea, maybe China and Taiwan. Not many people, however, would say Colombia, but Colombia may take its place among those listed above.

This reporter has been covering Latin American revolutions since the Bogotaza of 1948, the Communist-led riots in Colombia's capital during the meeting called to write the charter of the Organization of American States, or OAS. The Bogotaza confined until 1954, during which period an unknown revolutionary named Fidel Castro was among the radicals who came there to cause trouble. In January 1959 as a United Press International reporter, I watched a bearded Castro enter Havana on a requisitioned tank; in 1963 I was in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, when President Johnson sent in the Marines to quell a Castro-inspired revolution. But no president, even LBJ, had the guts to do anything about Castro himself, and he remains the inspiration for left-wing revolutionaries throughout Latin America.

There are some, such as President Clinton, who seem to think that Castro is a dead issue. But Castro's example among Latin America's left remains strong, including in Colombia where rebels control about 60 percent of the country's territory and the government is in danger of disintegrating (see "Colombia Implodes," Sept. 13).

The strength of the narco-linked leftist rebels in Colombia has a direct impact on the United States. As U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering reported on Aug. 16 upon returning from South America, "Colombia produces the bulk of the cocaine that comes to the United States and a large and growing percentage of heroin entering this country." And the bulk of the coca plants and opium poppies grown there is protected by the guerrilla forces of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and its smaller rival, the Popular Army of Liberation, or ELN.

Until recently, the Clinton administration placed its faith in Colombian President Andreas Pastrana's "peace process," hoping that a settlement could be reached with FARC. In doing so, the administration was following in the footsteps of virtually all of its predecessors since the takeover of Cuba by Castro's guerrilla operation. Like other administrations, it refused to acknowledge that the guerrilla problem in Latin America is ideological as much as social. The result is that Castro's longevity has helped the guerrilla gospel to spread with results that still confound the United States.

Nowhere is that more clear than in Colombia. Pastrana, it turns out, did have a promised "peace plan." In January, he traveled to Cuba with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to meet with Castro and to seek his mediation in the peace process with FARC. Talk about ironies! Castro is the very man who inspired FARC in the first place and in the early days trained and taught them the art of revolution. Since then, we are assured by Juan Gabriel Uribe, the Colombian president's main political adviser, Pastrana confers regularly by phone about the guerrillas with both Clinton and Castro.

It is quite possible that the Colombian guerrillas would not be a problem if Castro's communist regime had disappeared years ago. Only one person during the last 40 years ultimately is responsible for the 30,000 dead in El Salvador; for the 10-year destruction by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua of the best economy in Central America; and for the interruption of Chilean democracy in September 1973 when Marxist President Salvador Allende, who had brought in Cuban shock troops for a coup against the Chilean Congress, was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. That person is Castro.

Hours after taking over Cuba, Castro began his move to communize the island nation and make it a base from which to subvert Latin America or encourage subversion. The threat of Castro's revolution was well understood by President Kennedy -- at least during the time when he was still running for president.

On Oct. 7, 1960, Kennedy told a campaign audience in Cincinnati "about a disaster that threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere -- about a Communist menace that has been permitted to arise under our very noses, only 90 miles from our shores." Stating that Cuba was "in the iron grip of a Communist-oriented police state," Kennedy went on to say, "Castro is not just another Latin American dictator, a petty tyrant bent merely on personal power and gain. His ambitions extend far beyond his own shores. He has transformed the island of Cuba into a hostile and military Communist satellite -- a base from which to carry Communist infiltration and subversion throughout the Americas." Indeed, according to candidate Kennedy, Castro "has transformed the island into a supply depot for Communist arms and operations throughout South America, recruiting small bands of communist-directed revolutionaries to serve as the nucleus of future Latin revolutions." Attacking the Republicans, Kennedy went on to say, "It is the party in power which must accept full responsibility for this disaster."

He spoke accurately. A State Department press release of March 27, 1962 -- which is still in my files -- says, "For about a year-and-a-half the Sino-Soviet bloc has supplied Cuba with large-scale military assistance. Bloc military deliveries, primarily from the USSR and Czechoslovakia, have included a wide assortment of land armaments ranging from small arms through heavy tanks. Bloc aircraft supplied to Cuba include MiG jet fighters, helicopters, transports and trainers. Extensive military training has been provided both in the bloc and in Cuba. Communist military aid has turned the Cuban military establishment into one of the most formidable in Latin America, and it has introduced a military capability hitherto not present in any of the Latin American countries of the Caribbean area." State estimated that deliveries during that first year-and-a-half amounted to $100 million, in the days when $100 million was a lot of money. But by the time Kennedy spoke, Castro already had expropriated 300 U.S. properties in Cuba worth $1 billion.

According to a State Department document of August 1960, Castro's guerrillas had infiltrated four OAS countries -- Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama. Of the 90 expeditionaries caught in Panama in August 1959, 10 were officers of the Rebel Army of Cuba. They were deported to Cuba.

It is true the Eisenhower administration maintained a benign attitude toward Castro at first. President Eisenhower had at his disposal four means of action against Castro: the Monroe Doctrine, the 1947 Rio Treaty, the 1954 Act of Caracas and the Articles of the Organization of American States. The OAS articles had been drawn up at the meeting in Bogota in 1948 and they provided for "armed action." Eisenhower thus had the authority to call for common action under the OAS statutes -- as Johnson did later in April 1965, calling together an inter-American army under the Rio Treaty and keeping the Dominican Republic from falling into pro-Castro hands.

But Eisenhower did do one thing -- a halfway measure intended to avoid direct responsibility. On March 17, 1960, he instructed the CIA to train Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro without U.S. participation. Later, as president, Kennedy was to inherit the preparations for the invasion but, at the last minute, did not allow Cuban airmen to fly the crucial air cover that was essential to the mission's success, sending 1,400 Cuban freedom fighters to their deaths (see "Ducking Blame at the Bay of Pigs," April 26). Nineteen months later, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 ended in a stalemate, but it left subsequent administrations wary of tackling Castro head-on -- and left Castro free to pursue his adventures in Latin America.

In Colombia, Castro found a fertile field. As early as 1932, Jack Kornfelder, then a member of the Communist Party of the United States, was sent to Colombia to organize and train the fledgling Communist Party there. Kornfelder also had been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for three years and was a member of the Comintern, the apparatus through which the Soviet Union used communists in other countries for espionage activities. On Aug. 13, 1959, he testified before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee that he had attended the prestigious Lenin University in Moscow for three years. He said the goal of the training was to overthrow the United States, but to do so by beginning in Latin America. Kornfelder, who broke with the Communists in 1934, testified that at that time there were around 1,200 members of the party in Colombia, mostly students and workers.

On Feb. 6, 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said during a press conference, "I have no evidence that Cuba is being used as a training base for subversion in other Latin American countries." But 13 days later, CIA Director John McCone told a congressional hearing, "The Cuban effort at present is far more serious than the hastily organized and ill-conceived raids that the bearded veterans of the Sierra Maestra led into such Central American countries as Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the first eight or nine months Castro was in power. Today the Cuban effort is far more sophisticated, more covert and more deadly. In its professional tradecraft, it shows evidence and training by experienced communist advisers from the Soviet bloc, including Spanish communists."

Defectors have described the tactics taught in Cuba. "Sabotage; how to wreck trains, at this point closing down factories, facilitating discontent to raise the mob spirit in order to encourage the men on the go; derailing cargo trains; utilities, water, light, gas, telephone service, telegraph must be blown up ...." Other lessons included street fighting, how to develop a general strike out of a local strike, how to arm citizens for revolutionary action and how to gain control of radio and TV stations and newspapers.

A 1965 radio broadcast from Havana, intercepted by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, described how the guerrillas worked to gain and hold territory by infiltrating the villages. Although the broadcast described the tactics in Venezuela of the Armed Forces of National Liberation, the same methods were found everywhere: "In this region, the peasants first showed their solidarity with the guerrillas by refusing to inform on them and by spontaneously offering to supply them with food.... The purpose is to instruct the peasants in the use of arms and explosives, as well as to give them political instruction.... In a village where there is a bully who is an enemy of both the peasants and the guerrillas, he is tried and executed. There have been many cases in which the results of this kind of infiltration have been extraordinary, and the peasant mass is surely won to the guerrilla side."

The nucleus implanted by Kornfelder grew. In 1971, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, in State's abbreviation system, document "World Strength of the Communist Party Organizations" stated that the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Colombia, or PCC, had 8,000 members, while the pro-Chinese Communist Party of Colombia/Marxist-Leninist, or PCC/ML, had another 1,000. However, the PCC in 1971 controlled the 150,000-member Confederation of Colombian Workers' Unions.

Moreover, the 1971 INR document goes on to say: "The Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) continues to function as the guerrilla arm of the PCC. The Communist Party of Colombia has never publicly disavowed guerrilla activity, as have most other Soviet-oriented Communist parties." It also states, "The pro-Chinese PCC/ML has been relatively inactive, but its ties to the pro-Chinese guerrilla organization, the Popular Army of Liberation (ELN), are believed to be as strong as ever."

What goes around comes around. In 1999, FARC and ELN have the elected government of Colombia at a standoff. Although its closest ally now is the Cali drug cartel and it doesn't look to Cuba for arms supplies -- it buys weapons on the black market from the profits it makes on narcotics and from kidnapping ransoms -- Castro tutored its early leaders well in the ways of armed disruption. Those lessons are being used by their heirs, and Americans soon may have to adjust again to looking at trouble spots closer to home.

COPYRIGHT 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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