-Caveat Lector-
12-28-99
from: Consortium News http://www.consortiumnews.com/122299a.html
Inside U.S. Counterinsurgency:
A Soldier Speaks
Editor's Note: Stan Goff served in the U.S. military for two
decades, much of the time with Special Forces training Third
World armies. His first-person account of these
counterinsurgency projects comes as policy makers in
Washington press for major increases in military aid to
Colombia’s government in its war with leftist guerrillas.
By Stan Goff
Tolemaida is hot. The whole Sumapaz River Valley
is hotter than hell.
Steep, semi-arid, plenty of thorns and mosquitoes, it's the
perfect place for the Lancero School, where the Colombian
military runs its toughest course of training and assessment.
About 70 miles south of Bogota, Tolemaida is also home of
Colombian Special Forces, kind of like the Fort Bragg of
Colombia.
I'd been married for the second time for only 10 days on Oct.
22, 1992, when 7th Special Forces sent me there.
Bill Clinton was campaigning for the presidency against
George Bush, and I remember the Delta guys who were
billeted alongside us shrieking and carrying on when the
election results came through. "That faggot lovin' draft
dodger! Shit!"
Delta was there training a select group of Colombian soldiers
for "close-quarter battle," which means fighting inside
buildings during hostage situations and the like. We were
training two battalions of Colombian Special Forces in night
helicopter operations and counterinsurgency tactics.
Of course, we were there helping the Colombian army to
defend democracy against leftist guerrillas who were the foes
of democracy. It mattered not that only a tiny fraction of the
population had the means to recruit and promote candidates
or that terror stalked the population.
I'm not being cynical. I'm just awake now. It took a couple of
decades.
Growing up, I lived in a neighborhood where everyone
worked in the same plant, McDonnell-Douglas, where F-4
Phantoms were built to provide close air support for the
troops in Vietnam.
My dad and mom both riveted, working on the center
fuselage assembly. I just understood that it was my duty to
fight the godless collectivist menace of communism.
So, I joined the Army seven months after I squeaked through
high school. In 1970, I volunteered for the airborne infantry
and for Vietnam.
In the years that followed, I found out that I didn't know
communism from cobblestones. All I saw in Vietnam was a
race war being conducted by an invading army, and very
poor people were taking the brunt of it.
I left the Army after my first hitch, but poverty coaxed me
back in in 1977. Soon, I had stepped onto the slippery slope
of a military career. But I didn't like garrison soldiering and I
did like to travel.
So, it was inevitable that I ended up in Special Operations,
first with the Rangers, later with Special Forces.
In 1980, I went to Panama. The fences there separated us
from the “Zonies” -- the slum dwellers who lived in the Canal
Zone. After that, I went to El Salvador, Guatemala and a host
of other dirt-poor countries.
Over and over, the fact that we as a nation seemed to take
sides with the rich against the poor started to penetrate --
first my preconceptions, then my rationalizations, and finally,
my consciousness.
Now I am the Viet Cong.
1983:
The former Special Forces guy posing as a political officer
didn't even try to hide his real job at the U.S. Embassy in
Guatemala.
"You with the political section?" I asked. I knew what he did. I
was trying to be discreet.
"I'm a fuckin' CIA agent," he responded.
The CIA man had adopted me out of friendship for a mutual
acquaintance, one of my work associates with whom he had
served in Vietnam. The CIA man told me where to get the
best steak, the best ceviche, the best music, the best
martinis. He liked martinis.
We stopped off one afternoon at the El Jaguar Bar in the
lobby of the El Camino Hotel, a mile up Avenida de la
Reforma from the U.S. Embassy. He drank eight martinis in
the first hour.
The CIA man began spontaneously relating how he had
participated in the execution of a successful ambush "up
north," two weeks earlier.
"North" was in the Indian areas: Quiche and Peten, where
government troops were waging a scorched-earth campaign
against Mayans considered sympathetic to leftist guerrillas.
He was elated. "Best fuckin' thing I got to do since Nam."
"You're talkin' kinda loud," I reminded him, thinking this must
be pretty sensitive stuff.
"Fuck them!" he shot a circumferential glare. "We own this
motherfucker!" The other patrons looked down at their table
tops. The CIA man was big and manifestly drunk.
I should have known better, but I mentioned a Mayan
schoolteacher who had just been assassinated by the
esquadrones de muertos. It had been in the newspapers.
The teacher had worked for the Agency for International
Development.
My point was that it made the United States look bad, when
these loose cannons pulled stunts like that. The impression
was left that the U.S. government tacitly approved of
assassinations by continuing to support Guatemala's
government.
"He was a communist," stated the CIA man, without even
pausing to toss down his dozenth martini. His eyes were
getting that weird, stony, not-quite-synchronized look.
So that's how it was. I never thought to thank him for peeling
that next layer of innocence off my eyes.
I had to take the CIA man’s car keys from him that night. He
wanted to drive to some whorehouse in Zone 1.
When we left the bar, he couldn't find his car in the parking
lot, so he pulled his pistol on the attendant and threatened to
shoot him on the spot. He accused the attendant of being
part of a car theft gang.
"I know these motherfuckers," he glared. The attendant was
almost in tears, when I wrested the pistol from my colleague’s
hand.
We proceeded to find his car in the lot one block away.
That's when he started talking about driving to his favorite
bordello.
"Gimme the keys!" he bellowed, as I danced away from him.
"I can't."
"I'll kick your ass," he said.
I reached into my pocket and grabbed three coins. When he
lunged at me again, I tossed the coins into a street drain with
a conspicuous jingle.
"There's the keys," I said.
He peered myopically into the drain for a moment, then tried
to train his eyes on me. I dodged his staggering assault like
he was a child. He almost fell, and I found myself wondering
how I could possibly carry him.
He turned abruptly, like he'd just forgotten something, and
tottered quietly away. I dropped his keys off at the political
section the next day, with a note explaining where his car
was.
Fred Chapin was the U.S. ambassador in Guatemala. He
was famous for his ability to drink a bottle of Scotch and still
give a lucid interview in fluent Spanish, before his
bodyguards carried him up to his room at la residencia and
poured him into bed.
Chapin was credited with a well-known quote in Foreign
Service circles: "I only regret that I have but one liver to give
for my country."
Embassies are collections of these idiosyncratic characters.
Mauricio, another one of these exotic individuals, was the
chief Guatemalan investigator assigned to work with the
Security Section at the embassy.
Dissipated to a fault, even the thugs on the bodyguard
details gave him a wide berth. His reputation as a sadistic
former death squad member was well known.
His history was on him, like an aura of impersonal decay. He
made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. "If you need
to find something out, just send Mauricio" was the provincial
wisdom at Security.
Langhorn Motley, Reagan's special ambassador to Central
America, came to Guatemala to see what was being done
with U.S. money, other than aboriginal genocide and the
elimination of Bolshevik school teachers, of course.
I was assigned as a member of his security for a trip to
Nebaj, a tiny Indian hamlet near the Mexican border. We
were going to inspect a hospital.
There were no roads into Nebaj, so a helicopter was
coordinated. When we finally arrived in Nebaj, the pilot and
crew chief were in an animated conversation, both referring
again and again to the fuel gauge.
Out of the helicopter, we were escorted through the dirt
streets to an open-bed 2 1/2-ton truck by a corpulent,
European-looking Guatemalan lieutenant colonel. The
villagers stood in silence as we passed.
Two small children, maybe three years old, burst into
hysterical tears when I walked too near them with my CAR-15
assault rifle. I tried not to speculate about their reaction or its
antecedents.
The truck took us to a dusty stone foundation. Nothing more.
No rooms, no walls, no nothing. This was the hospital. Motley
turned to me and said, "This is a fuckin' white elephant."
Later, the lieutenant colonel sat us in a room at his
headquarters and trotted in two "former guerrillas." One was
a skinny old man.
The other was a pregnant woman, around 25 years old.
They told us dutifully that they had been reformed by their
new-found understanding of the duplicity of the communists
and by the humanitarian treatment they had received at the
hands of the soldiers.
It was a flat-eyed, canned recital, but it seemed to please the
lieutenant colonel who sat there with a benevolent half-smile,
glancing from them to us and back, judging their
performance, assessing our reaction.
The skin of the two demonstration Indians almost moved from
underneath with an arid, copper-tongued terror. The whole
place smelled like murder to me.
Like murder.
1985:
Reporters in El Salvador tended to hang out at the pool in
the Camino Real Hotel, with transistor radios pressed to their
ears.
I was chatting up a member of the press corps one day,
having lunch at the Camino. Around 30, she worked for the
Chicago Tribune.
She was just terribly excited because she had been allowed
aboard a helicopter the week before, that flew into Morazan,
a stronghold of leftist guerrillas. She got to see some
bang-bang and was eternally grateful to the Embassy for
arranging it for her.
Would I mind, she asked, taking her out for coffee or a drink
somewhere in the barrios sometime? She would never think
of doing it alone.
I was disillusioned. With her anemic weariness, she
annihilated my concept of reporters as eccentric fearless old
salts, obsessed with getting at the real story.
Bruce Hazelwood was a member of the Milgroup at the U.S.
Embassy, like me a former member of the counter-terrorist
unit at Fort Bragg. Hazelwood oversaw training management
in the Estado Mayor, army headquarters.
Over the past five years, he had earned an enviable
reputation as a productive liaison with the Salvadoran
military. He told me off the cuff once that his biggest problem
was getting the officers to quit stealing.
Good-looking, strawberry blonde, freckled, charming,
Hazelwood also was a favorite of the young women with the
press corps.
I went with him and an Embassy entourage to visit an
orphanage at Sonsonate. The women from the press pool
absolutely doted on him. He rewarded them with tons of
mischievous magnetism.
Billy Zumwalt, also with the Milgroup, a fellow with Elvis-like
looks, did the same thing at a party. The women from the
press would skin up alongside him, asking how he thought
progress was coming with the human rights situation. He
would ask them how it seemed to them.
Well, they’d say, there were only a few battlefield executions
of prisoners still taking place, according to rumors, but they'd
heard nothing else. We can't expect them to come around
overnight, now, can we?
Would you like to go dancing at an all night club later? You
know where one is? I know where they all are, he’d tell them.
Zumwalt told me at a bar once that he was training the finest
right-wing death squads in the world.
The reporters at the Camino Real hired Salvadoran rich
kids as informants and factotums. It was very important that
they be educated, English-speaking kids, 20 to 25 years old,
who could keep the reporters abreast of rumors and
happenings in the capital.
But the rich kids were as far from the lives of average
Salvadorans as were most of the reporters.
In the street, I saw an old woman dragging herself down the
sidewalk with a gangrenous leg, a crazy man shrivelled in a
corner, bone-skinny kids who played music for coins with a
pipe and a stick.
On the bus one day in downtown San Salvador, a blind man
came begging, and people who could ill afford it gave him a
coin.
These people were callused, very modestly dressed, with
Indian still in their cheeks.
To the slick, manicured, round-eyed, well-to-do, the poor and
the beggars were invisible, as invisible as the blackened
carboneros, the worm-glutted market babies, the brooding
teens with raggedy clothes, prominent ribs and red eyes
glaring out of the spotty shade on street corners.
They have to be invisible so they can be ignored. They have
to be sub-human so they can be killed.
I was reminded of the goats at the Special Forces Medical
Lab. When I was training to be a medic, we used goats as
"patient models."
The goats would be wounded for trauma training, shot for
surgical training, and euthanized over time by the hundreds
for each 14-week class.
Nearly every student upon arrival would begin expressing his
antipathy for the caprine breed. "A goat is a dumb creature,
hard-headed, homely," we’d say.
A few acknowledged what the program was actually doing
without seeking these comfortable rationalizations. A few
even became attached to the animals and grew more
depressed with each day.
But most required the anti-caprine ideology to sustain their
activity.
1991:
As a member of 7th Special Forces, I went to Peru in 1991.
The reasons we went there were manifold and layered, as
are many of our rationales for military activity.
We were committed, as a matter of policy, to encouraging
something called IDAD for Peru. That means Internal
Development and Defense.
We were involved in a nominal partnership with Peru in the
"war on drugs." Peru was in our "area of operational
responsibility," and we (our "A" Detachment) were performing
a DFT, meaning a Deployment for Training.
So, we went to Peru to assist in their internal development
and defense, to improve their "counter-drug" capabilities,
and to train ourselves to better train others in our "target
language," Spanish.
Those were the official reasons. No briefing mentioned
another part of the mission: unofficial wars on indigenous
populations.
The course of training we developed for the Peruvians was
basic counterinsurgency. Drugs were never discussed with
the Peruvian officers. It was a sensitive issue -- if you get my
drift.
We were quartered in an ammunition factory outside the
town of Huaichipa, for the first few weeks. Later, we moved
into DIFE, the Peruvian Special Forces complex at the edge
of Barranco district in Lima.
During the middle of the mission, we camped at the edge of
an Indian village called Santiago de Tuna in the sierra four
hours out of the capital.
Tuna is the Spanish word for prickly pear cactus fruit.
Blessed with Cactus Fruit would be the direct translation.
Local Indians did bring us two sacks full of cactus fruit, which
was delicious and which kept everyone regular.
We became very chummy with the Peruvian officers, some of
whom were easy-going fellows, and some of whom were
aggressively macho. They stuffed us full of anticuchos
(spicy, charbroiled beef heart) and beer every night.
Sometimes the combat veterans would get very drunk and
spit all over us as they relived combat. One major couldn't
shut up about how many people he had killed, and how the
sierra was a land for real men.
A lot of drinking went on. Beer with the officers and soldiers.
Cocktails in the bars; pisco with the Indians, who the soldiers
tried to run off because they were considered a security risk.
One Indian man, in particular, toothless and dissipated, his
blood-red eyes swimming with intoxication, astonished me
with his knowledge of North American Indian history. He even
knew the years of several key battles in our war of
annihilation.
Geronimo was a great man, he said. A great medicine man.
Great warrior. A lover of the land.
A Peruvian captain said a strange thing to me, as we walked
past an Indian cemetery during the gut-check forced march
out of Santiago de Tuna.
"Aqui hay los indios amigos." Here are the friendly Indians.
He opened his hand toward the little acre of graves.
1992:
When I was training Colombian Special Forces in Tolemaida
in 1992, my team was there ostensibly to aid the
counter-narcotics effort.
We were giving military forces training in infantry
counterinsurgency doctrine. We knew perfectly well, as did
the host-nation commanders, that narcotics was a flimsy
cover story for beefing up the capacity of armed forces who
had lost the confidence of the population through years of
abuse. The army also had suffered humiliating setbacks in
the field against the guerrillas.
But I was growing accustomed to the lies. They were the
currency of our foreign policy. Drugs my ass!
Today:
Drug czar Barry McCaffrey and Defense Secretary William
Cohen are arguing for massive expansion of military aid to
Colombia.
Already, Colombia is the third largest recipient of U. S.
military aid in the world, jumping from $85.7 million in 1997 to
$289 million last fiscal year. Press accounts say about 300
American military personnel and agents are in Colombia at
any one time.
Now, the Clinton administration is seeking $1 billion over the
next two years. The Republican-controlled Congress wants
even more, $1.5 billion, including 41 Blackhawk helicopters
and a new intelligence center.
The State Department claims the widened assistance is
needed to fight "an explosion of coca plantations." The
solution, according to the State Department, is a 950-man
"counter-narcotics" battalion.
But the request is strangely coincident with the recent military
advances of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionario Colombiano
(FARC), the leftist guerrillas who already control 40 percent
of the countryside. [For details on FARC’s history and goals,
see iF Magazine, July-August 1999.]
In the United States, there is a different kind of preparation
afoot: to prepare the American people for another round of
intervention.
McCaffrey -- not coincidentally the former commander of
Southcom, the Theater Command for the U.S. armed forces
in Latin America -- is "admitting" that the lines between
counter-narcotics and counterinsurgency are "beginning to
blur" in Colombia.
The reason? The guerrillas are involved in drug trafficking, a
ubiquitous claim that it is repeated uncritically in the press.
There is no differentiation between the FARC and a handful
of less significant groups, nor is there any apparent
preoccupation with citing precise evidence.
When this construct first began to gain wide currency, former
U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Miles Frechette pointed out
that there was no clear evidence to support the claims. His
statement was soon forgotten.
We were to be prepared.
In Colombia, it is well known that those who profit the most
from the drug trade are members of the armed forces, the
police, government officials, and the "big businessmen" of
the urban centers.
The FARC taxes coca, a far cry from trafficking. The FARC
also taxes gas, peanuts and furniture.
Coca also is the only crop left that keeps the campesinos'
heads above water. The peasant who grows standard crops
will have an average annual income of around $250 a year.
With coca, they can feed a family on $2,000 a year. These
are not robber barons.
They are not getting rich.
Once the coca is processed, a kilo fetches about $2,000 in
Colombia. Precautions, payoffs and the first profits bring the
price to $5,500 a kilo by the time it reaches the first gringo
handler.
The gringo sells that kilo, now ready for U.S. retail, for
around $20,000. On the street in the United States, that will
break out to $60,000. There are some high rollers at the end
of the Colombian chain, but the real operators are the
Americans.
Still, drugs can fill in for the World Communist Conspiracy
only so far. Drugs alone won't justify this vast military
build-up. For that, we also must believe we are defending
democracy and protecting economic reform.
[For more background on Colombia, see Human Right
Watch’s Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary
Partnership and the United States, November 1996.]
The rationales have become more sophisticated since I was
in Guatemala in 1983, way more sophisticated than the blunt
instrument of open war in Vietnam.
Democracy wasn't the goal then. We were stopping
communists. Drugs are a great rationale, too. But with the
FARC, we can have our drug war and our war against
communists.
Yet, behind the democratic facade in Colombia are the most
egregious and systematic human rights violations in this
hemisphere. Except in the 40 percent of the country where
the FARC holds sway, right-wing paramilitaries, supported
and coordinated by the official security forces, are involved
in a process that would have made Roberto D'Abuisson or
Lucas Garcia or Rios Montt proud: torture, public
decapitations, massacres, rape-murder, destruction of land
and livestock, forced dislocations. Favored targets have
been community and union leaders, political opponents, and
their families.
This July, Commander of the Colombian Army, Jorge Enrique
Mora Rangel intervened in the Colombian judicial process to
protect the most powerful paramilitary chief in Colombia,
Carlos Castano, from prosecution for a series of massacres.
Castano's organization is networked for intelligence and
operations directly with the security forces.
That network was organized and trained in 1991, under the
tutelage of the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA. This
was accomplished under a Colombian military intelligence
integration plan called Order 200-05/91.
The cozy relationship between the Colombian army and
Castano raises another little problem for the drug-war
rationale. Castano is a known drug lord. Not someone who
taxes coca growers, but a drug lord.
There is also the U.S. government’s troubling history of
fighting with -- not against -- drug traffickers. Indeed, the CIA
seems to have an irresistible affinity for drug lords.
The Tibetan contras trained by the CIA in the 50's became
the masters of the Golden Triangle heroin empires. In
Vietnam and Cambodia, the CIA worked hand in glove with
opium traffickers.
The contra war in Nicaragua was financed, in part, with drug
profits. The CIA’s Afghan-Pakistani axis employed in the war
against the Soviets was permeated with drug traffickers. Most
recently, there were the heroin traffickers of the Kosovo
Liberation Army.
It might make more sense for McCaffrey to find $1 billion
dollars to declare war on the CIA.
I was in Guatemala in 1983 for the last coup. In 1985, I was
in El Salvador; 1991, Peru; 1992, Colombia.
People don't generally hear from retired Special Forces
soldiers. But people need to hear the facts from someone
who can’t be called an effete liberal who never "served" his
country.
A liberal will tell you the system isn't working properly. I will
tell you that the system is working exactly the way it's
supposed to.
As an insider on active duty in the armed forces, I saw the
deep dissonance between the official explanations for our
policies and our actual practices: the murder of
schoolteachers and nuns by our surrogates; decimations;
systematic rape; the cultivation of terror.
I have concluded that the billions in profit and interest to be
made in Colombia and neighboring nations has much more
to do with the itch for stability than any concern about
democracy or cocaine. After reflection on my two decades
plus of service, I am convinced that I only served the richest
one percent of my country.
In every country where I worked, poor people's poverty built
and maintained the wealth of the rich. Sometimes directly, as
labor; sometimes indirectly, when people made fortunes in
the armed security business, which is needed wherever there
is so much misery.
Often the companies that need protecting are American.
Chiquita is a spiffed up version of United Fruit, the company
that pressed the United States for the coup against Arbenz in
Guatemala in 1954. Pepsi was there for Pinochet in Chile in
1973.
But the top interest now is financial. The United States is the
dominant force in the dominant lending institutions of the
world: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
What the United States exports, more than anything else, is
credit. So the money is made from squeezing the interest out
of those loans.
What that means in the Third World is that the economic
elites borrow the money, with the government as their front,
then bleed the population to pay the interest. That’s done
through higher more regressive taxes, by cutting social
services, by selling off public assets, by co-opting or
crushing labor unions, and so forth.
If the governments don’t do enough, Washington pressures
them to do more. At home, the American people are told that
these countries need "structural adjustment" and "economic
reform," when the reality is that U.S. foreign policy often is
being conducted on behalf of loan sharks.
The big investors and the big lenders also are the big
contributors to political campaigns in this country, for both
Republicans and Democrats. The press, which is run by a
handful of giant corporations, somberly repeats this rationale
again and again, “economic reform and democracy.”
Pretty soon, just to sound like we're not totally out of touch
with current events, we catch ourselves saying, yeah ...
Colombia, or Venezuela, or Russia, or Haiti, or South Africa,
or whomever ... they need
"economic-reform-and-democracy."
Though phrased differently, this argument is not new. In
1935, two-time Medal of Honor winner, retired Gen. Smedley
Butler accused major New York investment banks of using
the U.S. Marines as “racketeers” and “gangsters” to exploit
financially the peasants of Nicaragua.
Later, Butler stated: “The trouble is that when American
dollars earn only six percent over here, they get restless and
go overseas to get 100 percent. The flag follows the dollar
and the soldiers follow the flag.
“I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to defend some
lousy investment of the bankers. We should fight only for the
defense of our home and the Bill of Rights. War for any other
reason is simply a racket.
“There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military
gang is blind to. It had its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies,
its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan
war preparations and a ‘Big Boss’-supernationalistic
capitalism,” Butler continued.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service in
the Marines. I helped make Tampico, Mexico, safe for the
American oil interests in 1914; Cuba and Haiti safe for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenue; helped purify
Nicaragua for the International banking house of Baron
Broches in 1909-1912; helped save the sugar interests in
the Dominican Republic; and in China helped to see that
Standard Oil went its way unmolested. War is a racket.”
Like Gen. Butler, I came to my conclusions through years of
personal experience and through the gradual absorption of
hard evidence that I saw all around me, not just in one
country, but in country after country.
I am finally really serving my country, right now, telling you
this. You do not want some things done in your name.
Stan Goff retired from the U.S. Army in February 1996,
after serving in Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Grenada, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela,
Honduras, Somalia and Haiti. He lives in Raleigh, N.C.
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