| Nick Miroff |
NECOCLI, Colombia – As the Colombian government nears a deal to end to its 50-year conflict with FARC guerrillas, it is intensifying another war in the jungles here along the Caribbean coast, the stronghold of a shadowy drug organisation known as Clan Usuga.
For more than a year, US-trained Colombian commandos in Black Hawk helicopters have been hunting the group’s leader, Dario Antonio Usuga, aka Otoniel, in an urgent campaign to capture or kill him before a truce with the FARC is signed.
Both the government and the traffickers know that a big share of Colombia’s billion-dollar cocaine trade will be up for grabs if the FARC – whose rebellion runs on drug profits – goes out of business.
Some of its 7,000 battle-hardened fighters may be looking for new jobs. Clan Usuga will be hiring.
“We can’t be naive and think that drug trafficking will end with FARC,” said Gen Jorge Rodriguez Peralta, the commander of a police special forces division targeting the group. “There’s too much money to be made,” he said.
The campaign against Clan Usuga, called Operation Agamemnon, is a sign of Colombian and US fears that criminal mafias will take advantage of the peace deal to reestablish Pablo Escobar-style cartels that undermine the rule of law as much as an insurgency.
Members of the Colombia special forces during the operation. Commanders say they are in daily contact with the Drug Enforcement Administration and other US law enforcement and intelligence agencies
Securing additional US support for the fight will be on the agenda of President Juan Manuel Santos, who is scheduled to visit the White House on Thursday for an official visit to commemorate the 15-year anniversary of Plan Colombia.
That $10 billion programmes, funded by Congress, is considered by many Republicans and Democrats to be one of the most successful US foreign policy achievements of the past generation, forcing the FARC to the negotiating table after a half-century of violence that has left more than 220,000 dead.
US lawmakers have approved $296 million for aid to Colombia in 2016, a slight decrease from last year.
The Santos government is so determined to debilitate Clan Usuga that it is throwing Colombia’s considerable military might at the traffickers.
The military carried out airstrikes on two jungle camps near the border with Panama late last year, killing 17 suspects with satellite-guided bombs.
At the time, Colombian officials justified the unusual use of force by saying they believed guerrillas were present at the camps.
But authorities confirm that they are seeking new legal authority to expand the use of lethal air power against Úsuga and other underworld bosses.
“We’re reviewing our use-of-force doctrines to make sure civilian populations will be protected and that the tactic can be used only when we have precise information,” said Luis Carlos Villegas, Colombia’s defense minister, in an interview.
The Usuga organisation is by far the country’s most powerful criminal syndicate, with 1,500 to 2,000 members, a presence in more than half of Colombian territory and an arsenal that includes mortars, rockets and land mines.
If it can survive long enough to see the FARC stand down, the potential rewards are lucrative.
Authorities say that the FARC is on a coca-growing binge to stockpile cash before it quits the business under the terms of the peace accord.
The coca boom sets up a bloody contest for FARC’s market share – at least 60 per cent of Colombia’s cocaine trade, according to government estimates.
President Santos is trying to force the country’s second, smaller leftist rebel group, the ELN, to enter peace talks as well and keep it from making the same play.
Cocaine, said Rodriguez, the general, is “the gasoline” that fuels all of the country’s illegal armed groups.
Some FARC units or “fronts” subsist by taxing coca growers and smugglers, but other guerrilla commanders are deeply involved in the drug trade, officials say.
These are the units Colombian authorities worry about most, because they already have the personal contacts with Clan Usuga leaders and other traffickers who will be looking to recruit them.
“Whoever takes over the drug trade will be a lot more effective than FARC,” said Jeremy McDermott, a security consultant based in Medellin and a founder of the InsightCrime project on organised crime in the Americas.
The Marxist rebels are fearsome on the battlefield, but not especially skilled as businessmen, he said.
In contrast, Clan Usuga is a highly sophisticated network whose middle managers derive profits from extortion, illegal mining and contraband smuggling, using encrypted communications and front companies to launder millions in drug money.
“The FARC are amateurs compared to these guys,” McDermott said. “Now the professionals are going to take over.”
An analyst goes through data to try to pinpoint the locations of members of Clan Usuga
Colombia special forces move in on the target area during an operation in Necocli
With Colombia’s fast-growing economy slowed by the crash in oil prices, US Ambassador Kevin Whitaker said, the United States should step in to help the Santos government ensure that a peace deal wins support for state-building in FARC-controlled areas where the government has long been absent.
US assistance can shore up programmes such as land restitution for victims of the conflict and substitution of legal crops for coca, while ensuring continued security cooperation between Colombian forces and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA and other US agencies.
With the government and FARC due to sign a peace deal in late March, “I hope Congress will be committed from day one,” said Whitaker, a veteran of numerous Latin America postings.
“With Colombia, we have the closest security relationship I have ever witnessed in my career.”
Clan Usuga is the government’s name for the trafficking group, but on the streets of Colombia it’s known as the Urabenos, named for the lush coastal region of Uraba, near the border with Panama, which has been a smuggling corridor for decades.
Last year, authorities seized 15 tons of cocaine from the group in Uraba alone, worth $150 million, according to police statistics, equal to about 10 per cent of all the cocaine confiscated annually in Colombia.
The helicopter base here operates as a “fusion center” where Colombian narcotics agents, commandos and prosecutors filter intelligence and plan raids against Clan Usuga targets.
Commanders say they are in daily contact with the DEA and other US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
On one recent muggy afternoon, dozens of police commandos with automatic rifles and grenade launchers took off in three helicopter teams for a raid on a suspected Clan Usuga courier known by the nickname “Batman”.
Landing their Black Hawk helicopters in the middle of a banana plantation, the troops circled Batman’s shack, finding him barefoot and stretched out in a hammock with two small children.
A ‘Happy Birthday’ banner with the Peppa Pig cartoon character stretched above the doorway.
Batman handed the troops his ID card and invited them inside.
The agents found no drugs or weapons but said they were suspicious of the dozen or so purebred fighting cocks in Batman’s care.
It looked like an expensive bird collection for a humble banana worker. One officer noted that Usuga, the leader of the organisation, liked fighting cocks.
“These are probably his,” the officer said.
Usuga himself is the product of failed previous attempts at government-negotiated disarmament. As a young man he joined the People’s Liberation Army (EPL), a small leftist guerrilla group that agreed to lay down its weapons in 1991.
When units from the much larger FARC moved into Uraba and hunted the group’s former members, Usuga joined a paramilitary “self-defense” movement to drive out the guerrillas.
The paramilitaries also thrived on cocaine profits.
When they made a deal with the government to disarm in 2006, Usuga was one of the mid-level commanders who went back into the drug business.
He lived in relative comfort until last year, authorities say, shuttling between safe houses in the mountains of Uraba and providing cocaine to Mexican trafficking groups such as the Sinaloa cartel.
Now he’s on the run, authorities say.
“We’ll get him this year,” said one Colombian narcotics agent who spoke on condition of anonymity because he works undercover. “We’re close.” – Text & photos by The Washington Post
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