By Joseph Raso
Colombia Report
Policymakers in Washington are preparing to substantially increase their materiel backing for Latin America's premier human rights violator under the guise of a "war on drugs." Although the Clinton Administration's $1.6 billion aid package for Colombia was cut to $1 billion by a U.S. Senate panel -- $1.7 billion was approved by the House of Representatives in late March -- the final version of the bill, when it is passed, will furnish the Colombian security forces with a massive amount of aid in the form of equipment and training.
International and local human rights monitors have documented the involvement of the Colombian military in widespread atrocities perpetrated by paramilitary allies against noncombatants. According to a Human Rights Watch report released in February, half of the army's brigade-level units are complicit in paramilitary repression. Another recent HRW publication revealed 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 under 10 percent of political killings, the paramilitary system has slaughtered approximately 25,000 Colombians in the past decade alone. Peasants have been particularly selected for savage torture and assassination by death squads but other victims include scores of unionists, human rights monitors, Church and indigenous activists, leftist politicians, university professors and independent journalists.
This military-paramilitary model is analogous to the approach employed in East Timor last year by the Indonesian army, which organized and then managed murderous 'pro-Jakarta militias. The similarity is attributable to the U.S. advisors who instructed both the Colombian and Indonesian armed forces in counterinsurgency strategies. An academy renowned for its alumni of Latin American dictators and brutal human rights abusers, the U.S. army's infamous School of the Americas has trained more officers from Colombia than any other country.
U.S. government and military representatives in conjunction with the mainstream media have deliberately misrepresented the crisis in Colombia as an armed conflict between drug-trafficking guerrillas, 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 guerrillas while the state struggles to protect innocent Colombians. Twenty years ago, U.S. officials and the major media depicted El Salvador's war in the same duplicitous fashion.
In reality, although the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and National Liberation Army 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 seeking their ultimate objective of defending the neoliberal 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 percent are indigent and a landed oligarchy possess most of the 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 U.S. prisoners surpassed two million, accounting for 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. An estimated one-quarter of those imprisoned in the United States 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 in fact merely a pretext for exercising dominance over the impoverished sectors marginalized by corporate-oriented globalization 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 United States.
To evaluate the international drug war, U.S. policy toward Colombia must be considered in a regional context. U.S. officials have expressed concern that the Colombian war could transcend national borders and destabilize the entire Andean region. The U.S. foreign policymaking community also perceives its interests threatened from recent events in countries bordering Colombia. Venezuela, which became the leading foreign supplier of petroleum to the U.S. market in 1996, is governed by a regime employing nationalist and populist rhetoric. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has even disclosed his sympathy for the social objectives of the Colombian guerrillas. Meanwhile Ecuador's elite has encountered several challenges to its rule including two coups in the past three years incited by a powerful anti-neoliberal movement. Perhaps equally significant for U.S. officials was the loss of sovereignty in January over the strategically-critical Panama Canal.
Colombia itself is a major "national security" dilemma for U.S. policymakers. Colombia's guerrilla war has jeopardized the considerable Colombian investments of U.S.-based transnational 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 U.S. support for El Salvador's death-squad regime during the 1980s. Some critics have persuasively contended that the United States is embarking on the path that led to the Vietnam quagmire. Proponents of the assistance predictably dismiss the comparisons and emphasize that the aid will restrict the number of U.S. military personnel in Colombia. Yet the same rationale for deepening intervention in a foreign counterinsurgency campaign was adopted by U.S. government officials as the Kennedy administration was surreptitiously planning to authorize the deployment of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam and heighten operations to a level of outright assault. General Charles Wilhelm, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, has already stated that the aid should eventually be extended to cover a five-year commitment to Colombia and U.S. army officers are notorious for underestimating the duration of military adventures abroad.
Further U.S. 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 opposition emerges within the United States, Colombia will receive the first portion of the assistance package in the next few months. Millions 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 currently researching post-Cold War U.S. policy toward Colombia for his PhD dissertation at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.