The one thing that all these groups have in common is their need for more inexpensive weapons, mainly AKs, which now are the preferred firearm because of their low cost and durability in jungle conditions. Unlike the mujahideen in Afghanistan, South American fighters and their counterparts in Central America have favored the heavier 7.62mm bullet instead of the lightweight 5.56mm or 5.45mm rounds because it tends to penetrate jungle foliage better and has a longer range to fend off government helicopters. Culturally, these fighters have been “brought up” on the larger round and are used to it.
The illegal trade in AKs and ammunition in Latin America offers intriguing views of how difficult it is to stop small-arms smuggling because of the layers of middlemen and corrupt government officials. The deals are further obfuscated by the inclusion of legal elements of arms purchases that turn illegal at some point in the transaction. By then, however, it often is too late to stop the deal. While the vast majority of illegal arms deals go unnoticed by authorities, some well-documented cases have been made public, and they offer a glimpse into the shady world of gun-running.
One incident in October 1999 began simply and legally enough but evolved into the illegal transfer of three thousand AKs and two and a half million rounds of ammunition from official Nicaraguan government warehouses to the AUC guerrilla group in Colombia. Originally a deal was cut for the legitimate transfer between the Nicaraguan National Police and a private Guatemalan arms dealer, Grupo de Representaciones Internacionales S.A., known as GIR S.A. GIR S.A. offered to trade new Israeli pistols and Uzi submachine guns for five thousand surplus AKs and two and a half million rounds of ammunition. This was a good deal for the Nicaraguan police, because they wanted the pistols and Uzis, which were more useful for police work than the AKs.
GIR S.A. found Shimon Yelinek, an Israeli arms dealer based in Panama, to buy the AKs. Yelinek said he was representing the Panamanian National Police, but his papers later turned out to be forgeries. After inspecting the weapons, Yelinek decided that the weapons were not satisfactory and threatened to scuttle the deal. After some negotiation, Yelinek and Nicaraguan army officials decided to exchange the 5,000 weapons that Yelinek deemed unsatisfactory for 3,117 AKs. Yelinek arranged for a Panamanian cargo company to pick up the weapons in Nicaragua on their ship the Otterloo, whose manifest stated it was sailing to Panama.
Instead of sailing to Panama, the ship landed in Turbo, Colombia, in November 2001—customs officials conveniently disappeared for several days while it was unloaded—and the arms ended up in the hands of the AUC, which controlled the area. The ship’s captain disappeared, and the company was dissolved several months later. The ship was later sold to a Colombian citizen.
Not knowing about this diversion, GIR S.A. started another deal with Yelinek using the same purchase order, but when authorities discovered that the first shipment had gone astray they organized a sting operation to find those responsible. GIR S.A. officials learned about the first shipment and canceled the deal before any sting could take place.
Panamanian authorities arrested Yelinek and tried him for arms diversion. His case was thrown out, though, because the court determined that his actions did not harm Panama; they took place in Nicaragua, outside of their jurisdiction.
This is a classic example of what is known as the “gray market” in small-arms trading, which rests, as you might expect, between white- and black-market arms sales. White-market trading is the legal and transparent sale of small arms. Documentation is honest and official and includes state-to-state sales as well as private sales to individuals. Black-market trading is the extreme opposite. These are completely illegal sales with no accountability or documentation and often with individuals or groups who are prohibited from buying arms under local laws or government or UN sanctions. In gray-market trading, two legitimate parties may arrange what they think is a legitimate sale—in this case the Nicaraguan National Police and GIR S.A.—but the weapons were diverted through forged documents and a series of confusing but seemingly benign tangent deals.
What makes the above example even more intriguing is that the whole operation would have remained hidden except that Carlos Castano, head of the AUC, boasted in April 2002 to a reporter from the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo that he bought the guns carried by the Otterloo from Nicaragua. In fact, he said he bought even more weapons. “This is the greatest achievement by the AUC so far,” he bragged. “Through Central America, five shipments, 13,000 rifles.” The other shipments were never discovered.
This incident of arms smuggling signaled a new, more terrible era for South America that continues today. Previously, arms imported to Colombia had been arriving in small shipments, tens or hundreds of rifles at a time, often on board private fishing vessels, speedboats traveling through swamps and rivers, or by light planes landing on dirt fields or dropping containers filled with arms. This bulk shipment proved that the combatants were becoming more sophisticated in their gun procurement, intent on rearming current members and adding recruits.
Many of these new recruits were children. More than eleven thousand child soldiers have been fighting in Colombia’s conflicts, one of the highest totals in the world, according to Human Rights Watch. At least one of every four was under eighteen, and thousands were younger than fifteen, the minimum age permitted for armed forces recruitment under the Geneva Conventions (still below the minimum age for many countries). About 80 percent of child soldiers belong to FARC or ELN, with AUC using fewer children. Most children join voluntarily, although many were recruited by force, drugged into enlistment, or saw no other opportunities for safety, food, and shelter.
A major difference between African guerrilla forces that used children and those in Colombia was the high number of girl combatants, comprising as many as one-quarter to one-half of guerrilla units, especially in FARC. Some were as young as eight years old. The reasons they joined were similar to those of boys, with sexual abuse at home being an additional factor. (A guerrilla group with an even higher girl population is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka.) One reason why girls were acceptable in combat was that Marxist ideology (as practiced in South America) embraced equality of the sexes and female liberation, which extended to the armed revolutionary struggle.
These left-wing groups, children and all, became the seeds of large-scale narcoterrorists that today control large swaths of South America, especially in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil, and threaten the stability of the Western Hemisphere.
One impetus for the increased interest among these groups in larger arms shipments during this particular time frame may have been Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. initiative begun in the spring of 2000. The plan had been in the works for some time and everyone knew it would be instituted. Its intention was to help Colombian authorities eradicate drug cultivation and smuggling. Insurgents considered this as a threat to their trade and began seeking larger AK purchases and increasing recruitment.
Despite its size, this instance was relatively simple compared to another case that occurred around the same time and had further-reaching implications. This involved the CIA’s top asset in Peru—that country’s chief intelligence officer—who planned to funnel AKs to FARC rebels in Colombia with the help of one of the world’s largest arms dealers. This broker was the same man who supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran at the behest of the Reagan administration. The incident involved the sale of ten thousand AKs—a huge shipment for the time—and eventually led to the downfall of Peru’s government and the exile of its president to Japan.