COLOMBIA: US to intensify support for terror state
By Joseph Raso
United States policymakers are preparing to substantially increase their materiel backing for Latin America's premier human rights violator. A $1.6 billion package for Colombia, introduced by the Clinton administration ostensibly for the foreign "war on drugs", is currently under consideration in the US Senate following its approval by the House of Representatives in late March.
On April 12, Senate majority leader Trent Lott pledged to Colombian president Andres Pastrana that Congress would grant the assistance by May or June. The legislation will furnish the Colombian security forces with the vast majority of the aid in the form of equipment and training.
International and local human rights monitors have documented Colombian military involvement in widespread atrocities perpetrated by paramilitary allies against non-combatants. According to a February Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, half of the army's brigade-level units are complicit in paramilitary repression. Another recent HRW publication disclosed that the 1991 US-supervised restructuring of Colombia's military intelligence incorporated the paramilitary apparatus to form "killer networks".
Although uniformed soldiers are responsible for less than 10% of political killings, the paramilitary system has slaughtered approximately 25,000 Colombians in the past decade. Peasants have been targeted for savage torture and assassination by death squads, but other victims include scores of unionists, human rights and indigenous activists, leftist politicians, university professors and independent journalists.
This military-paramilitary model corresponds to the approach employed in East Timor last year by the Indonesian army, which organised and then managed murderous "pro-Jakarta militias". This similarity is attributable to the US advisors who instructed both the Colombian and Indonesian armed forces in counterinsurgency strategies. The US army's infamous School of the Americas, an academy renowned for its alumni of Latin American dictators and human rights abusers, has trained more officers from Colombia than from any other country.
US government and military representatives in conjunction with the mainstream media have deliberately misrepresented the crisis in Colombia as an armed conflict between drug-trafficking guerillas, the so-called "narcoterrorists", and a besieged yet incorruptible military establishment. To the extent that the existence of paramilitary groups is acknowledged, they are portrayed as an autonomous force attacking the civilian base of the guerillas while the state struggles to protect innocent Colombians.
In reality, although the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) finance insurgency through taxes collected on drug production in territories under their control, the paramilitary groups are ideologically and politically aligned with the narcotraffickers. They are united in their ultimate objective of defending the neo-liberal order from even minimally reformist popular projects.
The landowner-narcotrafficker-paramilitary nexus has resorted to unmitigated violence to preserve this elite-dominated "democracy". Such actions are essential for the ruling class to maintain social control in a country where 40% of the population are indigent and some 3% possess more than 70% of arable land.
Washington's "war on drugs" is executed by an amalgam of domestic and foreign policies designed to safeguard existing national and global socioeconomic arrangements.
This year, the number of US prisoners surpassed 2 million, accounting for 25% of the world's incarcerated population. An estimated one-quarter of those imprisoned in the US have been convicted of drug-related offenses, primarily the victimless crime of possession, with African Americans serving as the principal target of this campaign.
The domestic drug war is merely a pretext for exercising control over the impoverished sectors marginalised by corporate-oriented globalisation and reactionary government policies. Demonstrating these priorities, House Republicans rejected an amendment to the Colombia bill that would have provided funding for the treatment of drug abuse in the US.
To evaluate the international drug war, US policy toward Colombia must be considered in a regional context. US officials have expressed concern that the Colombian war could transcend national borders and destabilise the entire Andean region.
US foreign policymakers also perceive as threats to the US's imperialist interests recent events in countries bordering Colombia. Venezuela, which became the leading foreign supplier of petroleum to the US in 1996, is governed by a regime employing nationalist and populist rhetoric. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has disclosed his sympathy for the social objectives of the Colombian guerillas.
Meanwhile, Ecuador's elite has encountered several challenges to its rule, including two coups in the past three years resulting from the protests of a powerful anti-neo-liberal movement. Perhaps equally significant for US officials was their loss of control in January over the strategically critical Panama Canal.
Colombia itself is a major "national security" dilemma for US policymakers. Colombia's guerilla war has jeopardized the considerable investments in Colombia of US-based corporations, particularly oil companies whose pipelines and other facilities are regularly bombed by the armed rebels. A 1997 White House report indicated Washington's intention to reduce reliance on Middle East petroleum by shifting to imports from Colombia and other sources in the western hemisphere.
The architects and endorsers of the proposed military package are on the verge of sponsoring state terrorism to a degree exceeding US support for El Salvador's death-squad regime during the 1980s. Some critics have persuasively contended that the US is embarked on the path that led to the Vietnam quagmire.
Proponents of the assistance predictably dismiss the comparisons and emphasise that the aid will restrict the number of US military personnel in Colombia. Yet the same rationale for deepening intervention in a foreign counterinsurgency campaign was adopted by US government officials as the Kennedy administration was surreptitiously planning to authorise the deployment of US combat troops to Vietnam and heighten operations to a level of outright assault.
General Charles Wilhelm, commander of the US Southern Command, has already stated that the aid should eventually be extended to cover a five-year commitment to Colombia, and US army officers are notorious for underestimating the duration of military adventures abroad.
Further US hardware and funding for the Colombian security forces will undermine and perhaps abrogate the incipient peace process in Colombia, while simultaneously increasing the incidence of politically motivated torture, "disappearance" and murder. Unless immense public pressure emerges within the US, Colombia will receive the first portion of the assistance package in the next few months.
Tens of thousands of Colombians have demanded peace and justice in demonstrations staged throughout the country. In the absence of international solidarity, however, the bloodshed will escalate.
[Joseph Raso is a PhD candidate in Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney.]