--- Begin Message ---
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
<FONT COLOR="#000099">Buy Stock for $4.
No Minimums.
FREE Money 2002.
</FONT><A HREF="http://us.click.yahoo.com/BgmYkB/VovDAA/ySSFAA/zgSolB/TM";><B>Click
Here!</B></A>
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Please send as far and wide as possible.
Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
WSWS : News & Analysis : South & Central America
US militarism targets South American oil
By Bill Vann
20 February 2002
Back to screen version | Send this link by email | Email the author
Washington's military intervention into Colombia's four-decades-old
civil war was initiated nearly two years ago by the Clinton
administration with a $1.3 billion emergency military aid package
dubbed Plan Colombia. The plan was justified in the name of waging
a "war on drugs."
In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration has decided
to dramatically expand US military involvement in the South American
country. As in Afghanistan, the escalation is being carried out under
the banner of the struggle against terrorism, while its real
objectives center on securing US corporate control over the region's
strategic oil reserves.
Even as it prepares to intervene in a more direct military fashion in
Colombia, Washington is intensifying its threats against the
government of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the third-largest
exporter of petroleum to the US market.
Earlier this month, the administration unveiled plans for the
creation of a special 2,000-4,000-member "Critical Infrastructure
Brigade" of the Colombian army that would be deployed to protect US-
owned oil installations. Specifically, it would be assigned to guard
a nearly 500-mile pipeline that carries oil belonging to Los Angeles-
based Occidental Petroleum Corporation from the Caño Limón oilfields
in northeast Colombia to the Caribbean port of Coveñas. The pipeline
has been a frequent target of guerrilla bombing attacks.
The White House has asked Congress to approve $98 million in the 2003
budget for training, arming and supplying US air support for the
Colombian pipeline troops.
The pipeline "is important for the future of ... our petroleum
supplies and the confidence of our investors," US Ambassador Anne
Patterson said in an interview with the Bogota daily El Tiempo.
The funding is on top of $731 million that the administration is
seeking "to support anti-drug activities ... economic development and
the strengthening of democratic institutions" in Colombia, Peru,
Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela and Panama.
The lion's share of this funding will go to strengthen the already
bloated military establishments that have in the past overthrown
elected governments and established dictatorships in each of these
countries, with the exception of one. Colombia, which often bills
itself as the "oldest democracy in Latin America," has not had the
same experience with US-backed military coups. It has, however,
existed under a state of siege or emergency for most of the last 50
years. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed by the army
and its allies in the paramilitary death squads, and more than 2
million people have been turned into refugees in the last two decades
alone.
According to press reports, the administration is planning to funnel
another $1 billion in military supplies and training to the Colombian
military. US Green Beret special forces troops, meanwhile, will play
a more direct role as "advisors" to a counterinsurgency campaign
waged against the country's two largest guerrilla groups, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym
FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN.
At the same time, the Pentagon is preparing to expand intelligence-
sharing with the Colombian military, providing it with communications
intercepts and satellite photos to allow it to prosecute a deadlier
campaign against the guerrillas and the peasant communities in which
they operate.
The deployment of additional advisors, together with providing air
support and intelligence, marks a qualitative change in the US role
in Colombia, which officially had been limited to military aid linked
directly to anti-narcotics operations.
Even under Clinton, however, securing oil supplies was an unstated
objective of Plan Colombia. The provision of attack helicopters and
the training of new anti-narcotics brigades in the southern coca-
growing regions freed up other units to protect Occidental
Petroleum's interests in the north. It was no accident that the
California-based petroleum company and the now bankrupt Enron, which
carved out extensive natural gas holdings in Colombia, were among the
biggest backers of Plan Colombia, lobbying Congress to approve the
military aid package.
Colombian oil workers union leaders and community leaders in towns in
the oil-rich northeastern Arauca province have warned that the
proposed new pipeline brigade will mean an intensification of the
fighting and the killing of noncombatants.
The region has been a center of operations for right-wing
paramilitary groups that function as allies of the Colombian armed
forces, while receiving funding and supplies from US oil companies to
carry out massacres of suspected guerrilla members and sympathizers.
These mercenary killers have assassinated union leaders, human rights
advocates and government prosecutors, while slaughtering entire
villages believed to have harbored the guerrillas.
In a report released earlier this month, three human rights groups—
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office
on Latin America—recommended that US military aid be withheld from
Colombia on the grounds that the government in Bogota had failed to
meet conditions set by previous legislation, particularly relating to
the collaboration between the military and the rightist death squads.
While required by law to consult with the human rights groups, the
Bush administration brushed aside their findings.
The report cites Colombia's Office of the Public Advocate as
recording 92 massacres in the first 10 months of 2001, the vast
majority attributed to paramilitary groups working in conjunction
with the security forces. It provides numbing details of
assassinations and slaughters carried out by these elements, as well
as lists of known leaders whom the government refuses to arrest.
Collaboration between the death squads and the military, the report
said, includes "coordination during military operations between
government and paramilitary units; communication via radios, cellular
telephones, and beepers; the sharing of intelligence, including the
names of suspected guerrilla collaborators; the sharing of fighters,
including active-duty soldiers serving in paramilitary units and
paramilitary commanders lodging on military bases; the sharing of
vehicles, including army trucks used to transport paramilitary
fighters; coordination of army roadblocks, which routinely let
heavily-armed paramilitary fighters pass unchallenged; and payments
made from paramilitaries to military officers for their support."
Last year, the US State Department placed the largest of the
paramilitary groups, the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia, or
AUC, on a list of "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" alongside the
Colombian guerrilla organizations.
Despite this formal proscription, the AUC has been one of the
principal beneficiaries of the ballooning US military aid, with the
military passing on a substantial portion of the increased arms and
funding from Washington to the death squads. As a consequence, the
ranks of the AUC have swelled dramatically in the last two years.
It is widely recognized that the paramilitaries benefit from
Colombia's cocaine trafficking even more than the guerrillas do. To a
large extent, they originated in the attempt of major narcotics
traffickers to protect themselves against kidnappings by the
guerrillas. Yet there has been no attempt in the "war on drugs" to
interfere with their activities.
After a visit to Colombia in December, the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights protested the impunity enjoyed by the paramilitaries,
noting that "the confessed perpetrators of crimes against humanity,
with pending orders of arrest against them, move throughout Colombia
while giving press interviews." Carlos Castaño, the leader of the AUC
and a one-time "asset" of the US Central Intelligence Agency,
recently published his memoirs and has frequently appeared on
television.
Just as US forces intervened in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia to
assert American hegemony over the oil supplies of those regions, now
Washington is openly pursuing the same agenda in South America. While
Colombian oil exports to the US are not today decisive for the US
economy, Washington is looking to the region from the standpoint of
its strategic objective of diversifying its sources of petroleum
supplies.
Already, Colombia and its oil-producing neighbors, Venezuela and
Ecuador, export more oil to the US than all the Persian Gulf
countries combined.
Venezuelan oil figures centrally in the US strategy for the region.
The third-largest US oil supplier and the hemisphere's sole OPEC
member, Venezuela has 77 billion barrels in proven reserves—the most
of any country outside the Middle East.
The Chávez government's populist and nationalist rhetoric combined
with its role in urging OPEC members to cut production has made it a
target of Washington's wrath. In particular, the US government and
the big oil companies are hostile to its vow to prevent the
privatization of the national oil corporation. While Bush has yet to
add Caracas to his "axis of evil," his administration has issued
clear warnings that it could face the same treatment as other regimes
viewed as hostile to US interests.
"We have expressed our disagreement on some of his policies directly
to him," Secretary of State Colin Powell said of Chavez earlier this
month during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, describing
the Venezuelan president's positions as a "serious irritant." He
added that Chavez had visited "strange countries," referring to his
trip to Iraq in 2000, the first by a head of state since the Gulf
War, as well as trips to Cuba, with which Venezuela has established
commercial ties.
Powell's statements were followed by an even blunter warning from
Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford, who claimed that there was
evidence that Chavez was aiding the FARC and other guerrilla groups
in Colombia, adding that "we are going to watch much more carefully
what is happening in Venezuela, and particularly with its president."
Within days of the US threats, a Venezuelan Air Force Colonel and a
Captain in the National Guard publicly called for the overthrow of
the Chavez government and participated in an anti-government
demonstration in Caracas. The two officers turned themselves in after
the failure of any military units to join their call for a coup.
Officials in Washington and at the US-dominated Organization of
American States expressed concern that the rights of the two putchist
officers be respected.
The area in Colombia where the new US-backed brigade is slated to
operate is situated on the porous border with Venezuela. This border
divides an oilfield spanning both countries, and it is widely
believed that any intensified fighting would quickly spill across the
frontier, raising the threat of a direct military confrontation
between Washington and Caracas.
A US delegation arrived in Colombia recently to begin talks on the
expansion of the US military presence. Leading it were Otto Reich,
the undersecretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, and John
Maisto, the director of inter-American affairs on the National
Security Council. Reich, a right-wing Cuban émigré, ran an illegal
propaganda operation supporting the CIA-backed contra mercenaries
waging war against Nicaragua in the 1980s. He then went on to become
ambassador to Venezuela. Maisto was the US ambassador to Managua
during the contra war and went on to serve as charge d'affaires in
Panama during the 1989 US invasion that ousted General Manuel
Noriega. Joining them was General Gary Speer, chief of the US
military's Southern Command.
The type of military intervention now contemplated by Washington
would ultimately dwarf both the contra war in Nicaragua and the
Panama invasion. US imperialism is proceeding with the same
combination of recklessness and gangsterism in Latin America as in
the Middle East and Central Asia. It sees the post-September 11 "war
on terrorism" as a window of opportunity to lay hold of strategic
resources at the expense of both the Colombian and Venezuelan people
and its economic rivals in Europe and Japan.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
If you are interested in a free subscription to The
Konformist Newswire, please visit:
http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist
Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the
subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!"
(Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool
catch phrase.)
Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!:
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--- End Message ---
