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From: Pakito Arriaran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2000 6:25 PM
Subject: MLL: Colombia: The Politics of Escalation
Colombia: The Politics of Escalation
by Mark Cook
The U.S. government is sabotaging the Colombian peace
process through the classic strategy of imperialist
intervention and massive escalation of that country's
civil war. It is the same strategy that was used in
Vietnam and Central America.
The escalation can only be understood in a regional
context. The aggressive land takeovers in Colombia by
transnational oil and mining corporations and their use of
paramilitary death squads to expel the peasants has
inevitably contributed to the rapid growth of the
insurgency. More and more of the poor join the Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the
Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN).
The events in Colombia, largely produced by
transnational and Colombian big business, come on top
of the overwhelming election of Hugo Chavez as
President of neighboring Venezuela and his commitment
to policies of national sovereignty. Domestic
developments in both countries are seen as endangering
U.S. imperial domination in the area.
In an incident that suggests serious concern in U.S.
business and government circles about threats to
corporate and military control of the strategic and
oil-rich Colombia-Venezuela sector, the U.S. media
blacked out coverage of a summit of 48 countries of the
European Union, Latin America, and the Caribbean, held
in Rio de Janeiro in late June. The meeting proclaimed a
"new era" in European-Latin American relations. The
meeting of so many heads of state and government,
with potentially profound consequences for U.S.
corporate dominance in Latin America, was completely
censored from the New York Times and the Washington
Post, as well as the major television networks, although
they could not possibly have been ignorant of it. The
Wall Street Journal gave the story three paragraphs on
page eight. (1)
U.S. officials are responding by pressuring Ecuador,
Argentina and unnamed Central American countries to
set up a string of new U.S. military bases. They speak
openly of attempting to "revise" (that is, abrogate) the
Panama Canal Treaty which requires the abandonment
of all U.S. bases in Panama. But opposition to bases is
intense throughout the region, and U.S. officials
acknowledge that they dare not name the Central
American states they are approaching for fear of
fomenting discontent in those countries. (2)
In Colombia, Clinton administration officials claim to be
supporting President Andres Pastrana's peace
negotiations with the country's leftwing insurgents, a
process initiated a year ago by Pastrana in fulfillment of
an election campaign promise. But Washington's
multibillion dollar arms shipments and troop deployments
strengthen the dreaded Colombian army, which has
made clear that it has no interest in peace.
Clinton policies bear a striking resemblance to the
Reagan administration tactic in the mid-1980s of
professing support for the Contadora Central American
peace process as an excuse to escalate the Central
American wars. Now, Clinton administration officials give
perfunctory praise to Pastrana's peace negotiations,
while joining the Colombian military in denouncing
Pastrana for "giving away the store" in the negotiations.
(3)
The decision by the Clinton administration to name
General Barry McCaffrey, former head of the U.S.
Southern Command, or SouthCom, as the White House
"drug czar" was interpreted at the time as a way of
escalating Colombia's almost unbelievably bloody civil
war by dressing it up as a war on drugs. His replacement
at SouthCom was Gen. Charles Wilhelm, who immediately
began to speak of direct counterinsurgency assistance
for the Colombian military. Wilhelm declared that
criticism of military abuses of human rights was "unfair"
and said that guerrillas abused human rights more often
than Colombian security forces or paramilitary death
squads. This was wildly false, even contradicting the
State Department's own annual report. (4)
No Mention of Death Squads
Few of the reports in a massive U.S. media campaign
supporting increased aid to Colombia even mention the
existence of "paramilitary" death squads trained by U.S.
Special Forces and closely tied to the Colombian
military.
Presented instead is the new line, as summed up by
Investors Business Daily: that Colombia's insurgencies
control "40 to 60 percent of the countryside"; that they
"lack popular support" but are awash in drug money,
some $600 to $800 million; that the U.S. has spent
years trying to "fight the drug war but not Colombia's
guerrilla insurgency," (5) but that "this month, U.S. drug
czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey finally admitted that's no
longer possible." (6)
Selling such a story is hard. Even official and
semi-official agencies of the Empire have conceded that
the bulk of the killing and the drug-dealing is being done
by their own allies. The U.S. State Department, as well
as establishment human rights groups, blame the
government-connected paramilitaries for the
overwhelming majority of all political killings in 1998.
(7)
And as the Economist of London has written, "the
right-wing paramilitary groups and the traffickers they
protect are far deeper into drugs-and the DEA [U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration] knows it." (8)
It is an open secret that the military units sponsored by
SouthCom are among the largest drug traffickers, as are
the rightwing paramilitary death squads formed by U.S.
trainers years ago. They also hold a northern fiefdom
from which they control "land, people, drug laboratories,
and shipping routes for drugs and arms to and from the
Caribbean and Central America." (9) The Colombian air
force is widely reputed to be a major drug cartel itself.
In November 1998, a half ton of cocaine was found on
board the airplane of the chief of the Colombian Military
Air Transport Command when it landed in Miami. (10)
U.S. officials publicly denounced the government of
Pastrana's predecessor, President Ernesto Samper, for
his alleged receipt of millions in campaign contributions
from drug dealers. Colombia was "decertified" for its
failure to collaborate with Washington in the "drug war,"
and cut off from a wide range of aid and trade deals.
But at the same time, the U.S. was sharply increasing
aid and arms sales to Colombia's military, while loudly
and repeatedly "decertifying" the government the
military was sworn to support. For the last two years of
Samper's government, when he was publicly declared
"persona non grata" by Washington, U.S. ties to
Colombia's military grew exponentially. Pastrana assumed
office in 1998.
Stopping Paramilitaries
President Pastrana has said he would comply with the
insurgents' key demand, to stop the paramilitaries, but
seems unwilling or unable to do so. Leaders of
paramilitary organizations operate with impunity, giving
press interviews and even walking in and out of
Colombian military bases.
In the same fashion, the real history of the paramilitaries
is studiously ignored by the U.S. media. The FARC
negotiated a settlement at the beginning of the decade,
formed the UP, an electoral political party, and won a
stunning series of victories in local and regional
elections. Almost all of the thousands elected have
since been systematically murdered.
When complaints were recently raised about the U.S.
government and media failing to mention the
paramilitaries, Gen. McCaffrey changed his tune slightly
and asserted that the U.S. military aid plan was to help
the Colombian military fight the "narco-guerrillas" and
the paramilitaries. (11) The Washington Post and the
Miami Herald followed suit with stories claiming that U.S.
military personnel were training the Colombian military to
respect human rights. (12)
Big business interests, both Colombian and
transnational, also have regularly joined forces with
paramilitaries to terrorize poor farmers off their land. If
the peasants do not leave, they are killed by the death
squads. Either way, the corporation can then seize the
land or buy it for practically nothing.
Beyond Washington's other concerns, demands put forth
by Colombian insurgents for curing the cocaine plague
with agricultural subsidies for alternative crops would
contradict and endanger New World Order economic
policies for Latin America.
President Pastrana is no progressive-minded pacifist,
and the Colombian government is suspected by many of
using negotiations with Colombia's rebels to buy time
while the U.S. increases the military buildup. The U.S.
escalation appears to have been what provoked the
FARC's offensive in July.
The previous March, U.S. intelligence dramatically
increased its collaboration with the Colombian military,
particularly through the use of spy planes to aid in
attacks on the rebels. The "sharing of intelligence" from
the spy planes was lauded by U.S. Southern Command
officials as having had devastating effect on the rebels
in military engagements. A spy plane crashed in the
midst of a rebel offensive in late July, reportedly setting
back U.S. efforts considerably. (13)
Multinational Force
Meanwhile, U.S. officials began pressuring Brazil,
Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela to cooperate
with U.S. intelligence and the Colombian military to fight
Colombia's insurgency. U.S. officials pushed those
countries and Argentina to form a multinational military
force to intervene in Colombia, according to reports from
semi-official media outlets in Peru and elsewhere.
The proposal for a multinational military force to
intervene in Colombia was rejected by the governments
involved, and Washington hastily denied that anything
of the sort had been mentioned.
But only a month before, Washington publicly proposed
exactly such a force to the General Assembly of the
Organization of American States (OAS). U.S. diplomats
called for a "group of friendly countries" (linked
economically or politically) to intervene in internal
conflicts that are judged to threaten "democracy" in any
country in Latin America.
That goes far beyond a 1991 OAS provision, also pushed
through at U.S. insistence, that would allow intervention
in the case of an extreme and immediate threat, such as
a coup d'état. Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Peter Romero called the new proposal "preventative
diplomacy." "This is a way to make sure a potentially
manageable brush fire does not burn down the forest,"
Romero said.
Jamaica called the measure "paternalistic" and the
Peruvian foreign minister declared that "all actions of the
OAS should be directed so each country...is responsible
for dealing with its own problems, maintaining always its
sovereignty."
Objections centered on who would determine if a crisis
was serious enough to warrant intervention, as well as
the form and degree of intervention necessary. (14)
Although the proposal was repudiated by Bolivia, Chile,
Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, it will
be returned to committee and U.S. authorities believe
they can push it through next year. "We never hoped
that the proposal would be approved at this session, we
just wanted to put the matter on the table for
discussion," U.S. representative to the OAS Victor
Marrero remarked. (15)
Flouting Leahy Amendment
Meanwhile, as Washington has been engaged in a
massive escalation of the war, it has been flouting both
the spirit and the letter of the Leahy Amendment
(introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy [Dem.-Vt.]), which
forbids aid administered by the State Department to
Colombian military units where personnel have engaged
in gross human rights abuses. That amounts to the
overwhelming majority of the units of the Colombian
army. (16)
Although the Leahy Amendment specifically includes aid
to counter-narcotics efforts, the Pentagon and the CIA
feel themselves under no obligation to comply, since
their programs are not counter-narcotic but
counter-guerrilla. (17)
The small group of Republicans who have led the
campaign on Colombia bitterly attacked the Leahy
Amendment and tried unsuccessfully to have it removed
from the 1998 foreign operations bill, saying that human
rights concerns hampered the "drug war."
The group is led by Republican Representatives Dan
Burton of Indiana and Benjamin Gilman of New York,
whose collaboration with the Colombian military is so
extreme that they have practically been made honorary
members. (Both have had helicopters named after them.
"Big Ben" is still flying; Burton's has crashed. (18)) They
are the source of the allegation that the guerrillas in
Colombia are earning $600 to $800 million a year in the
drug trade and using the money to buy weapons, figures
ridiculed even by U.S. intelligence reports. (19)
Gen. McCaffrey's televised House committee
appearances are carefully stage-managed affairs, aimed
at depicting the Colombian security forces as helpless
against unpopular but drug-rich and heavily armed
guerrillas. House members plead for more helicopters to
interdict the drugs. Following the script, McCaffrey
agrees that this is urgently necessary but points out
that the Colombians lack enough trained helicopter
pilots, implying that the Colombians should use U.S.
personnel, either current or "retired" military who would
be hired as soldiers of fortune. In fact, as Tod
Robberson of the Dallas Morning News has reported,
large numbers of such "ex-military" mercenaries already
have been recruited. (20)
At present, Colombia is the fourth largest recipient of
U.S. aid-after Israel, Egypt, and Jordan-with most of
the aid in the form of arms. U.S. officials have ceased
even to pretend seriously that the aid is to combat
cocaine trafficking. (21)
Washington's orchestrated attack on President Pastrana
seems ironic. The Harvard graduate from Colombia's
ruling élite was perceived by ordinary Colombians as
having been handpicked by U.S. officials. (22)
As part of the attack on Pastrana, the media blitz has
begun highlighting Colombia's desperate economic
straits, including the worst depression in decades, a
growing debt burden and a 20 percent unemployment
rate. That unemployment rate compares favorably with
a number of Latin American governments considered
"friendly" to Washington and much-praised in the U.S.
corporate media. The fact that the media are showing
such unusual concern for Colombia's unemployed adds to
the feeling in Bogotá that U.S. authorities are setting
Pastrana up for the chopping block. (23)
The same news reports credulously pass along
intelligence agency claims that Colombia has managed
to develop a new super-strain of coca leaf, making it
unnecessary for drug dealers to import the material from
Peru and Bolivia, as in the past, and asserting that
Colombian "narco-guerrillas" are earning fantastic
revenues as a result.
No effort is made to explain the obvious discrepancy
between Colombia's undoubted economic straits and the
fantastic new wealth supposedly pouring into the
country because of the "super-strain" of drugs. If the
claim that at least $5 billion in drug profits flow into
Colombia annually is accurate, that amounts to $125 per
year for every adult and child in Colombia. (A
subsequent AP report on a mass arrest of alleged
Colombian drug dealers claimed that the gang was
earning $5 billion a month. (24))
Undeterred, the media also continue to cite a CIA report
that coca crops increased 28% in Colombia last year.
That report was rejected by Colombian National Police
Chief Rosso José Serrano, who, the Colombia Bulletin
reports, showed his own aerial photographs and satellite
images obtained from the French space agency to
counter the CIA assertions.
"The worldwide chief of the U.N. Drug Control Program,
Pino Arlacchi, said CIA methods fall short because the
agency relies almost exclusively on satellites, rarely
checking on the ground to see if the coca plants are,
indeed, dead," the Bulletin reported. (25)
While there may not be an "explosion" of coca leaf
cultivation, it is probably true that it has increased as
transnational corporations (mostly oil and mining) and
landlords use paramilitary death squads. Many of the
displaced-who now number between a million and a
million and a half people-have gone to the edge of the
rain forest where they usually clear between three and
five hectares of land and grow coca leaf, the only crop
that will allow them to survive.
As Colombia's insurgent groups have pointed out, if the
U.S. Empire wants to end the cultivation of coca leaves,
the only way is to provide these marginalized peasants
with a crop and a market which will enable them to feed
their families. That requires either: (1) agricultural
subsidies of the kind that have existed in the United
States and Western Europe for decades but which are
forbidden to the poorer nations of the world under the
New World Order; or (2) the indexation of commodity
prices, a demand made by the Non-Aligned Movement
for years.
If the claims of economic collapse are greatly
exaggerated, at least by current Latin American
standards, and the claims of a dramatic increase in coca
leaf production are also greatly inflated, if not simply
false, that would answer the assertion that a country is
sinking into economic destitution at the same time that
a principal export crop is off the charts.
But it does not explain why the U.S. media have picked
up on this line now. Usually, these stories of economic
distress are the standard media fare for countries whose
governments the U.S. is seeking to overthrow, such as
Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, or Popular Unity Chile.
Is the U.S. preparing to overthrow Pastrana or make
him, Central American style, into a useless decoration on
a military-death squad regime? What is certain is that
the insistence by the U.S. government and imperial
media on calling the FARC and ELN "narco-guerrillas" and
"narco-terrorists" completely invalidates Pastrana's
peace initiative.
Pastrana has insisted that the guerrillas are nothing of
the sort. The common agenda for peace talks, which he
signed with the guerrillas last May, "implicitly recognizes
that the revolutionaries took up arms in a just cause
and commits both parties to negotiate profound
economic and social reforms through political
compromise," wrote former U.S. Ambassador to El
Salvador, Robert White recently. (26) They include land
reform, especially through confiscation and redistribution
of huge land holdings obtained through drug profits, an
end to the cultivation of illicit drugs, and a crackdown
by the Colombian army on the paramilitary death
squads.
But U.S. officials have been heavily involved with
forming the death squads since the beginning. Until
Pastrana is able to make good on these last
commitments, it is absurd to demand, as Washington
has, that the rebels abandon their commitment to the
peasants and labor organizers who depend on them, and
leave them at the mercy of the paramilitary death
squads.
Footnotes
1. Agence France-Presse report, El Diario/La Prensa,
June 30, 1999, p. 11.
2. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering and drug
czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Senate Foreign Relations
Committee testimony, Oct. 6, 1999. Honduran military
bases used in the Central American wars of the 1980s
are ruled out because they are surrounded by mountains
and lack sufficiently long runways for AWACs and other
heavy aircraft.
3. "Despite their early hopes for Mr. Pastrana, however,
United States officials generally describe his efforts to
negotiate with the guerrillas as a failure that has left
the insurgents stronger and more defiant," wrote the
New York Times in a front-page story Sept. 15. It added
that administration officials "say they have made it clear
to the Colombians" that increased American support will
come with pressure for "a new, probably tougher
Government approach to the peace talks with the
insurgents."
4. As noted in Human Rights Watch, "Human Rights
Developments: Colombia," 1998.
5. Investors Business Daily, Aug. 25, 1999, p. 1.
6. Ibid.
7. "Colombia on the Brink," Foreign Affairs, Summer
1999, p. 17. As Human Rights Watch has noted, op. cit.,
n. 4, although exact figures remained difficult to
confirm, the Data Bank run by the Center for Research
and Popular Education (Centro de Investigación y
Educación Popular, CINEP) and the Intercongregational
Commission of Justice and Peace (Justice and Peace),
human rights groups, reported that of those killed for
political reasons in 1998 where a perpetrator was
suspected, 73 percent of the killings were attributed to
paramilitaries, 17 percent were attributed to guerrillas,
and 10 percent to state agents.
8. Quoted in Nick Trebat, "U.S. Policy Towards Colombia
About To Massively Veer Off-Track: Drugs replace
communism as the point of entry for U.S. policy on Latin
America," Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Aug. 24, 1999.
9. "Guns, drugs and a slim chance for peace," Irish
Times, July 13, 1999.
10. Robert E. White, "The Wrong War: Our Guns and
Tanks Won't Bring An End to Colombia's Civil Strife,"
Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1999, p. B1.
11. PBS Newshour, Sept. 22, 1999.
12. This was reminiscent of similar media stories in the
1980s extolling the U.S. formation from scratch of the
Atlacatl Battalion in El Salvador, a military unit which it
was asserted would have special human rights training
that would gradually improve the behavior of the rest of
the Salvadoran army. Atlacatl turned out to be
responsible for the worst atrocities of the Salvador war.
Apparently no one was surprised by this, for no serious
U.S. media or congressional effort has ever been
undertaken to establish how this could have happened.
Years later, even after revelations of the Battalion's
involvement in some of the worst atrocities of the war,
from the El Mozote massacre at the beginning to the
Jesuit murders at the end, the New York Times called it
"the pride of the United States military team in San
Salvador.... [T]rained in antiguerrilla operations, the
battalion was intended to turn a losing war around."
Clifford Krauss, "How U.S. Actions Helped Hide Salvador
Human Rights Abuses," New York Times, Mar. 21, 1993,
p. A1.
13. Although the spy plane was supposedly aimed at
drug interdiction, it crashed an improbably long distance
from where it was supposed to be operating. Weekly
News Update on the Americas, July 25, 1999.
14. Stratfor Global Intelligence Update, June 10, 1999.
15. The effort to push through such a measure harkens
back to 1979 when the Carter administration requested
OAS backing for an invasion of Nicaragua, one month
before the Sandinista triumph over the Somoza
dictatorship. In an unprecedented show of
independence, the OAS rejected the Carter proposal and
accused the U.S. of interference. (Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance had presented the proposal as a
"peacekeeping force" aimed at preventing an imminent
"humanitarian and political disaster" in Nicaragua.)
16. Op. cit., n. 4. The report listed the names of
Colombian military units that form death squads and/or
actively promote, support and take part in paramilitary
activities. "These [units] make up over 75 percent of
the Colombian army," it concludes.
17. An aide to Sen. Leahy reportedly told Tod Robberson
of the Dallas Morning News that "previous Pentagon
attempts to avoid applying those restrictions prompted
Sen. Leahy earlier this month to draft legislation
requiring compliance. Although the Defense Department
has said it would agree to the proposed law, he said,
the CIA rejects such restrictions." ("U.S. launches
covert program to aid Colombia Military, mercenaries
hired, sources say," Dallas Morning News, Aug. 19, 1998.
18. So do many of Burton's enterprises. Burton
reportedly hands out copies of the memoirs of deposed
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to Central
American visitors to his office.
19. See New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p. A14. The
$600 to $800 million figure is flatly contradicted by
official U.S. findings, which claim that no more than $30
to $100 million reaches guerrilla hands, largely through a
war tax on peasants. Ibid. But even if the higher figures
were true, U.S. officials also claim that at least $5
billion
in drug profits flow into Colombia every year. Who is
receiving the rest?
20. Op. cit., n. 17.
21. "While fighting drugs will remain a central goal, the
United States is about to make a broader commitment
to support Colombia's embattled Government than it has
in years." New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p. A1.
22. "Nor do those [U.S.] officials hide their view that
Colombia's multiple crises may be beyond Mr. Pastrana's
ability to resolve." New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p.
A14.
23. Much of the U.S. administration's treatment of
President Pastrana is disquietingly reminiscent of official
U.S. reaction to President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in
1963. U.S. officials learned in the autumn of that year
that Diem was engaged in secret negotiations with
Hanoi and the National Liberation Front to make South
Vietnam neutral and to ask the Americans to leave.
They immediately ordered the overthrow of Diem, whom
they had installed as president of the U.S.-created
republic, and his replacement with military rulers. Diem
and his brother (who had been the go-between in the
negotiations) were both murdered. Three weeks later, in
a coincidence of timing that continues to interest
historians, U.S. President John Kennedy was himself
assassinated in Dallas. Diem was followed by a series of
revolving-door military governments, many of them
overthrown in turn when U.S. officials learned that they
were engaged in peace negotiations.
24. AP dispatch, Hoy (New York), Oct. 14, 1999.
25. "Congressional Cowboys Shoot for Big, Bad War,"
Colombia Bulletin, Summer 1999, p. 8.
26. Op. cit., n. 10.
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