>
> WW News Service Digest #92
>
> 1) From a former Green Beret: Is Colombia the next Vietnam?
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 2) FARC-EP and Colombia's unfolding revolution
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 3) Colonel admits money laundering
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 4) Free Elian demonstrations on May 11
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 5) Vermont vows
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 6) The right guys -- and women -- won
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the May 11, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>FROM A FORMER GREEN BERET: IS COLOMBIA THE NEXT VIETNAM?
>
>By Stan Goff
>
>On my 19th birthday, I departed McChord Air Force Base for
>Vietnam.
>
>I was told I was going to fight for democracy there. The
>people back home were being told the same thing.
>
>I found the truth was substantially different.
>
>On the ground, we waged war not for democracy, but against
>the entire Vietnamese people. It cost billions of dollars
>and 58,000 American lives--as well as over 3,000,000 lives
>among the people of Southeast Asia--before we discovered
>that we had been manipulated by a vast military-industrial
>complex, a compliant press, and cynical political
>demagogues.
>
>In 1996, I retired from 3rd Special Forces after having
>participated in my last massive deception of the people of
>the United States--again allegedly to protect democracy--in
>Haiti.
>
>They are doing it again. The people of the United States
>are being led down the garden path in Colombia.
>
>Under cover of the "fight against communism," we
>surrendered trillions of dollars from our national treasury
>to support criminals: Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Roberto
>D'Aubuisson in El Salvador, Augusto Pinochet in Chile,
>Suharto in Indonesia, Romeo Lucas Garcia in Guatemala, Ngo
>Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Fran�ois Duvalier in Haiti and so
>forth.
>
>Our treasury also supported drug traffickers. The Central
>Intelligence Agency trained, equipped and financed the
>opium empires of the Golden Triangle, the narcotics-
>financed Chinese Nationalists, the Corsican Mafia, the
>Sicilian Mafia, the U.S. Mafia, Afghani-Pakistani heroin
>traders, the drug kings of the bloodthirsty Guatemalan G-2,
>key members of Mexico's Guadalajara Cartel, the cocaine-
>financed Contras of Nicaragua, drug traffickers with the
>Peruvian National Intelligence Service (SIN), the so-called
>Kosovo Liberation Army--a Balkan criminal network
>responsible for over 20 percent of Europe's heroin imports-
>-and the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.
>
>These activities were undertaken in every case to protect
>capitalist profits. They still are.
>
>The profound irony--or the profound deception--is that the
>justification for U.S. military escalation in Colombia is a
>war on drugs.
>
>The House of Representatives has already approved a $1.7-
>billion "aid package" for Colombia. The lion's share of
>that "aid" is for the Colombian military.
>
>To sell this "aid" to the people here, we are being told
>that the U.S. Special Forces already training Colombia's
>armed forces are there to "assist in the counter-narcotics
>effort."
>
>I was on one of those teams in Colombia in 1992, with the
>same story. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now.
>
>WE SAID ONE THING, DID ANOTHER
>
>We were explicitly told that due to political
>sensitivities, any discussion of the mission to Colombia--
>like all missions going down from 7th Special Forces--was
>to be represented as part of the counter-narcotics effort.
>This was not a directive to clarify our mission, but to
>clarify how we were to represent the mission.
>
>What we conducted was counter-insurgency training.
>
>We were based at Tolemaida, the Peruvian Special Forces
>base. The troops we trained not only did not attempt to
>hide their mission--to prosecute the war against Marxist
>guerrillas--they were deployed to conduct operations on the
>weekend breaks.
>
>The Colombian Army was losing ground. Their officers were
>corrupt; many involved themselves in drug traffic. There
>was racism in the ranks directed at Indigenous and Afro-
>Colombian troops.
>
>Their long-standing record of abuses against civilians had
>earned fear and hatred from the people. Many of the
>officers--while physically tough and full of bravado--were
>incompetent planners and uninspiring leaders.
>
>Anyone who knows the history of Vietnam will remember that
>a similar situation existed in South Vietnam after the
>United States took the role of colonial overseer. Ngo Dinh
>Diem, hand-picked by the United States, exercised tenuous
>control over a hodge-podge of corrupt military factions,
>each representing different interests.
>
>President Andres Pastrana of Colombia finds himself in
>much the same situation today.
>
>Our job was to begin teaching the fundamentals of night
>patrolling and the integration of infantry operations with
>heliborne infiltration and extraction. A previous team of
>specially trained American chopper pilots had just finished
>teaching their Air Force rotor-wing pilots how to operate
>at night.
>
>The subject of every tactical discussion with Colombian
>planners was how to fight guerrillas, not drugs.
>
>The U. S. military is involving itself in a civil war.
>People who remember Vietnam should find this very familiar.
>
>It began with a decision by the president, the national
>security advisor, and the secretary of defense not to
>"cede" Vietnam. The interests that drove that decision were
>manifold. McCarthyism's impact gave the decision momentum
>of its own. The strategic decision was actually about
>filling post-World War II colonial vacuums with American
>influence, and with protecting current and future
>investments in Asia.
>
>In Colombia, the U.S. interest is regional as well.
>Colombia sits in an oil- and mineral-rich region that
>includes Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, where populist and
>anti-imperialist movements are gaining strength. The United
>States sees Colombia as the front line against this
>current, and as a necessary foothold in the region.
>
>John F. Kennedy won an uncomfortably close presidential
>election against Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon relentlessly
>baited Kennedy for being "soft on communism." Now the fear
>is to be labeled "soft on drugs."
>
>Washington propped up a doddering regime against a popular
>insurgency in Vietnam. Pastrana's administration is
>certainly being ripped apart by at least as many competing
>factions as Diem's.
>
>WILL PASTRANA GO THE WAY OF DIEM?
>
>Colombians perceive Pastrana as Washington's man. But he
>is under pressure to make a deal with the guerrillas to end
>the civil war. The guerrillas' demands for land reform,
>crop subsidies, social services and commodity price
>indexation are considered off-limits by the U.S.
>administration.
>
>Recent attacks against Pastrana by the U.S. capitalist
>press--usually a precursor to the U.S. foreign policy
>establishment dumping a client--should give the Colombian
>president pause. He should think of Diem, dead in the back
>of an armored personnel carrier after a coup directed by
>the U.S. government.
>
>The Clinton administration is now requesting that the
>ceiling for U.S. military advisors in Colombia be raised
>from 100 to 170. That's just the way it happened in
>Vietnam.
>
>In Pastrana's July counter-offensive last year, U.S.
>military pilots were flying active, direct-support tactical
>reconnaissance missions. One aircraft was lost, and the
>Department of Defense has been mute about the
>circumstances.
>
>The Colombian military is intimately linked to networks of
>right-wing paramilitaries--death squads--that receive a
>large portion of their funding, apart from U.S. aid
>funneled through the Colombian military, from narcotics
>trafficking.
>
>Right-wing chieftain Carlos Casta�o has long been
>associated with the vestiges of the Cali drug cartel. His
>death squads in the north have assisted aggressive land
>grabs for companies like Occidental, Shell, BP and Texaco,
>as well as guarding the narcotics export infrastructure.
>Conservative estimates put the number of death squad
>murders in the past decade above 25,000, and 1.2 million
>peasants have been displaced by right-wing violence.
>
>This displacement by violence is directly supported by oil
>and mining companies and by big landowners. The
>Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC-EP,
>are the only force in the region that protects now-landless
>peasants from further violence. Direct army complicity
>demonstrates to peasants that they are being attacked by
>their own government on behalf of foreign investors.
>
>They see the guerrilla struggle, then, in the same terms
>that the Vietnamese National Liberation Front did--a fight
>against colonial rule enforced by the Colombian military
>and paramilitary as colonial surrogates.
>
>Between the military and the paramilitary, whose
>operations and intelligence apparatuses were merged under
>CIA direction in 1991, Colombian forces are now committing
>the most massive human-rights violations in this
>hemisphere. Said Carlos Salinas, Amnesty International's
>advocacy director for Latin America and the Caribbean, who
>is generally no advocate for the revolutionaries: "If you
>liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia. It's the
>same death squads, the same military aid, and the same
>whitewash from Washington."
>
>Drug czar and former SOUTHCOM Army Commander Barry
>McCaffrey recently spilled the beans: "[Operations in
>Colombia are] to recover the southern part of the country."
>
>DRUG CHARGES HIDE POLITICS
>
>While the U.S. government provides direct and indirect
>support to elements in Colombia that profit most from the
>drug trade, it has launched a tidal wave of disinformation
>attempting to portray Colombian guerrillas as drug
>traffickers. Even President Pastrana himself, also no
>friend of the Colombian insurgents, and former U.S.
>Ambassador to Colombia Miles Frechette say there is no
>evidence to support such a charge.
>
>The demonization of this 35-year-old popular insurgency is
>manufactured by the CIA and uncritically regurgitated by
>the U.S. mainstream press.
>
>Guerrillas tax agricultural production, including coca.
>That's not drug trafficking. The increased production of
>coca by peasants has been decried by FARC leader Manuel
>Marulanda, who has long demanded that the government
>initiate a program for crop transition.
>
>Increased coca production by peasants is directly related
>to forced dislocations by the right-wing paramilitaries.
>U.S. intelligence estimates, which are probably high, say
>the FARC levies taxes on coca amounting to around $30
>million a year. Since the FARC is now administering a large
>area of the country, this is not a lot of money.
>
>The net profit from coca in Colombia is believed to be
>around $5 billion a year. This means the "narco-
>guerrillas," a term McCaffrey shakes like an evil fetish in
>front of Congress, are pulling in a whopping six-tenths of
>a percent of the gross--from growers only, who have little
>choice of crop.
>
>Former CIA officer Ralph McGehee says: "In Colombia today
>we attack `narco guerrillas' or `narco Communists' or
>`narco terrorists,' as we quickly slide into the Latin
>version of the Vietnam quagmire. Does ... intelligence
>recognize or reflect this--of course not."
>
>According to McGehee, a highly decorated CIA veteran,
>"Disinformation is a large part of [the CIA's] covert
>action responsibility, and the American people are the
>primary target audience of its lies."
>
>As a veteran of a number of U.S. adventures--Vietnam,
>Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Somalia, Peru, Colombia
>and Haiti--I have come to agree. Some will say that by
>taking this position, I am supporting the FARC. They would
>be right.
>
>Imperialism is the enemy of us all, and the FARC is on the
>front lines against imperialism. It's very simple to an old
>soldier. Remember Vietnam!
>
>[Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces master sergeant and
>author of "Hideous Dream: Racism and the U.S. Army in the
>Invasion of Haiti," a book to be released this fall by
>Softskull Press about the 1994 U.S. military intervention
>in Haiti, in which he participated. He lives in Raleigh,
>N.C.]
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
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>
>
>
>Message-ID: <00a401bfb957$185a7d20$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] FARC-EP and Colombia's unfolding revolution
>Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 21:37:10 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the May 11, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>FARC-EP AND COLOMBIA'S UNFOLDING REVOLUTION
>
>By Andy McInerney
>
>["FARC-EP: Historical Outline"
>
>International Commission
>of the FARC-EP, 2000. 146 pp.]
>
>
>
>The United States government is preparing a massive
>escalation of its military intervention in Colombia.
>
>Colombia is already the third-biggest recipient of U.S.
>military aid in the world. The Pentagon is pushing a $1.7
>billion military-aid package through Congress right now.
>This aid is clearly aimed at the country's two main
>insurgencies: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-
>Peoples Army (FARC-EP) and the National Liberation Army
>(ELN).
>
>At the same time, the FARC-EP has been conducting high-
>level talks with the government of Colombian President
>Andres Pastrana in a demilitarized zone of five
>municipalities. Pastrana recently announced plans to
>demilitarize three more municipalities in order to hold
>talks there with the ELN.
>
>This dynamic situation of revolution and U.S. military
>intervention makes the publication of "FARC-EP: Historical
>Outline" by the International Commission of the FARC-EP
>extremely timely. The book is an essential tool for
>activists wishing to understand the unfolding struggle in
>Colombia.
>
>The book, first published in Spanish in 1999 and now
>translated into English, contains an historical account of
>the development of the FARC-EP as well as political
>documents relevant to the struggle. It is an antidote to
>the campaign of lies and slander against the FARC-EP
>emanating from the Pentagon.
>
>Besides being a fascinating account of the Colombian
>struggle for a new social order, the book covers three main
>points.
>
>First, it explains how the FARC-EP developed from an
>organization of 48 fighters for peasant land rights to a
>national military-political organization with 60 fronts in
>seven main blocs.
>
>Second, it provides a clear view of the group's political
>orientation and view of the world--the result of applying
>communist theory to the characteristic features of the
>Colombian history and struggle.
>
>Third, the book devotes considerable attention to the FARC-
>EP's experience in carrying out talks with various Colombian
>governments in the past. This experience weighs on the FARC-
>EP's current round of talks with the Pastrana regime far more
>heavily than the recent experiences in other Latin American
>countries with "peace talks"--processes held up by both
>Pastrana's government and its Washington backers as models for
>"successful" negotiations.
>
>ORIGINS OF THE FARC-EP
>
>The book traces the origins of the FARC-EP to the violent
>struggles within the Colombian ruling class after the end of
>World War II. As part of those struggles, the Liberal Party
>embraced a program of land reform to generate popular support
>against the rival Conservative Party.
>
>Liberal supporters organized peasant militias to fight for
>the land reform. A state of near civil war gripped the
>countryside. Among the leaders of those militias was Pedro
>Antonio Marin, future leader of the FARC-EP.
>
>That sharp phase of ruling-class struggle came to an end
>in 1952. Liberal guerrillas demobilized, turning in their
>weapons. But peasants who were serious about pursuing the
>land struggle grouped around the communists, including
>Marin and Arenas, and continued the struggle.
>
>During this period, Marin changed his name to Manuel
>Marulanda Velez to commemorate a communist militant killed by
>police in Bogota while protesting sending Colombian troops to
>Korea.
>
>After the Liberals and Conservatives closed ranks, communist
>guerrillas helped the peasants set up organizations to defend
>their land. The ruling class demonized them as "independent
>communist republics."
>
>The Colombian government--by this time completely under the
>sway of U.S.-led anti-communist alliances--launched an attack
>against the peasants at Marquetalia in 1964.
>
>Marulanda led the resistance to "Operation Marquetalia." It
>was in the wake of this attack that Marulanda and his 47
>comrades formed what would become the FARC-EP.
>
>The "Historical Outline" describes the evolution of the
>FARC-EP's organization and political development. Particular
>attention is paid to the group's eight conferences--meetings
>where overall strategy and political perspective were
>evaluated and modified.
>
>At the 1966 Second Conference, the group formally adopted
>the name FARC. This was revised to the FARC-EP at the 1982
>Seventh Conference, based on a change in the conception of the
>guerrilla organization.
>
>The 1993 Eighth Conference adopted the "Platform for a
>Government of National Reconciliation and Reconstruction," the
>main programmatic document guiding the FARC-EP's current talks
>with the Pastrana government.
>
>"BUILDING A NEW COLOMBIA"
>
>What is the FARC-EP fighting for?
>
>The Pentagon and its paid pundits slander the group as
>"narco-guerrillas" without an ideology or vision of the
>future. The documents presented in "FARC-EP: Historical
>Outline" show that this is hardly the case.
>
>The group's political perspective is outlined in the form of
>six anniversary greetings, written from 1994 to 1999. All the
>documents were written by Marulanda, the FARC-EP's commander-
>in-chief.
>
>What emerges from these documents is a clear political
>vision of the "New Colombia" that the FARC-EP is fighting for.
>In particular, in the revolutionary struggle that it is
>carrying out, "massive and conscious popular participation is
>indispensable."
>
>"This is not a confrontation of military machines, but
>rather of classes contending over the political leadership of
>the country," Marulanda writes. "War has been the consequence
>of the implacable aggression by the oligarchy against the
>people rising up in struggle for its liberty." (May 1996)
>
>The FARC-EP openly expresses its goal as a socialist society
>"without exploiters or exploited."
>
>The immediate aims expressed in the 1993 "Platform" (and in
>the 1964 "Agrarian Program of the Guerrillas of the FARC-EP")
>
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