To crush the poor
First it was Reds, then drugs, then terror. So who have
the US really been fighting in Colombia?
George Monbiot
Tuesday February
4, 2003
The Guardian
Last week, on the day George Bush delivered his
state of the union address, the Pentagon received a visitor. A few hours before
the president told the American people that "we will not permit the triumph of
violence in the affairs of men", General Carlos Ospina, head of the Colombian
army, was shaking hands with his American counterpart. He had come to discuss
the latest instalment of US military aid.
General Ospina has done well.
Just four years ago he was a lieutenant-colonel in command of the army's fourth
brigade. He was promoted first to divisional commander, then, in August last
year, to chief of the army. But let us dwell for a moment on his career as a
brigadier, and his impressive contribution to the war against
terror.
According to Human Rights Watch, the fourth brigade, under
Ospina's command, worked alongside the death squads controlled by the
paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño. In a report published three years ago, it
summarises the results of an investigation carried out by the attorney general's
office in Colombia. On October 25 1997, a force composed of Ospina's regulars
and Castaño's paramilitaries surrounded a village called El Aro, in a region
considered sympathetic to the country's leftwing guerrillas. The soldiers
cordoned off the village while Castaño's men moved in. They captured a
shopkeeper, tied him to a tree, gouged out his eyes, cut off his tongue and
castrated him. The other residents tried to flee, but were turned back by
Ospina's troops. The paramilitaries then mutilated and beheaded 11 of the
villagers, including three children, burned the church, the pharmacy and most of
the houses and smashed the water pipes. When they left, they took 30 people with
them, who are now listed among Colombia's disappeared.
This operation was
unusual only in that it has been so well-documented: among other sources, the
investigators interviewed one Francisco Enrique Villalba, who was a member of
the death squad that carried out the massacre, and who had witnessed the prior
co-ordination of the raid between the army and Castaño's lieutenants. The attack
on El Aro was one of dozens of atrocities which Human Rights Watch alleges were
assisted by the fourth brigade. Villalba testified that the brigade would
"legalise" the killings his squad carried out: the paramilitaries would hand the
corpses of the civilians they had murdered to the soldiers, and in return the
soldiers would give them grenades and munitions. The brigade would then dress
the corpses in army uniforms and claim them as the bodies of rebels it had
shot.
A separate investigation by the Colombian internal affairs agency
documented hundreds of mobile phone and pager communications between the death
squads and the officers of the fourth brigade, among them Lieutenant-Colonel
Ospina. On Tuesday, Ospina fiercely denied the allegations, claiming that they
were politically motivated and that "honest people around the world know that we
are serving our people well".
In same press conference, however, he also
revealed that this month the Colombian government will start to deploy a new
kind of "self-defence force", composed of armed civilians backed by the army.
Human rights groups allege that the government has simply legalised the death
squads.
Official paramilitary forces of this kind were first mobilised by
the current president, Alvaro Uribe, when he was governor of the state of
Antioquia in the mid-1990s. The civilian forces he established there, like all
the paramilitaries working with the army, carried out massacres, the
assassination of peasant and trade union leaders and what Colombians call
"social cleansing": the killing of homeless people, drug addicts and petty
criminals. They joined forces with the unofficial death squads and began to
profit from drugs trafficking. They were banned after Uribe ceased to be
governor. One of his first acts when he became president in August last year was
to promote General Ospina, and instruct him to develop similar networks
throughout the contested regions of Colombia.
Uribe, a landowner with
major business interests, was the US government's favoured candidate. After he
was elected, but before he assumed the presidency, it granted Colombia a special
package of military aid worth $80m. Its military funding, through the programmes
it calls Plan Colombia and the Andean Regional Initiative, now amounts to $2bn
over the past four years. At the beginning of last month, US special forces
arrived in Colombia to help train General Ospina's troops. One of the two
brigades they are assisting - the 5th - has also been named by Human Rights
Watch for alleged involvement in paramilitary killings. It has been equipped
with helicopters by the US army.
The United States has been at war in
Colombia for over 50 years. It has, however, hesitated to explain precisely who
it is fighting. Officially, it is now involved there in a "war on terror".
Before September 2001, it was a "war on drugs"; before that, a "war on
communism". In essence, however, US intervention in Colombia is unchanged: this
remains, as it has always been, a war on the poor.
There is little doubt
that the Farc, the main leftwing rebel group, has been diverted from its
original revolutionary purpose by power politics and the struggle for the
control of drugs money. It finances itself partly through extortion and kidnap.
Whether it could fairly be described as a terrorist network, though, is open to
question. What is unequivocal is that the great majority of the country's
political killings are committed not by Farc or the other rebels but by the
rightwing paramilitaries working with the army. Their task is to terrorise the
population into acquiesence with the government's programmes.
The purpose
of this unending war is to secure those parts of the country that are rich in
natural resources for Colombian landowners and foreign multinationals. Colombia
has one of the most unequal economies in the world - the top 10% of the
population earns 60 times as much as the bottom 10% - and there is no room in
that country for both the aspirations of the poor and the aspirations of the
super-rich. One faction has to be suppressed. The Colombian army is making the
country safe for business. This is why, over the past 10 years, the
paramilitaries it works with have killed some 15,000 trades unionists, peasant
and indigenous leaders, human rights workers, land reform activists, leftwing
politicians and their sympathisers. This is why it is the world's third largest
recipient (after Israel and Egypt) of US military aid.
The people funding
this programme are Britain's allies in the war against terror. They are the
people who have awarded themselves the power to arbitrate between good and evil.
They are the people who will, within the next few weeks, attack Iraq on behalf
of civilisation. "Throughout the 20th century," Bush told the US last week,
"small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals,
and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their
ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit." America's continuing adventure in
Colombia suggests that little has changed.
www.monbiot.com
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine