War
of Terror
The Men Who Claim to be Fighting “Evil” on
Behalf of “Good” are Also Funding One of the World’s Dirtiest Wars
by George Monbiot
Dissident Voice
February 4, 2003
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 installment 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 25th 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 left-wing guerillas. 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 eleven 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 which carried out the massacre, and who had witnessed the prior
coordination 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 $80 million. Its
military funding, through the programmes it calls Plan Colombia and the Andean
Regional Initiative, now amounts to $2 billion 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 whom 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 left-wing 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
right-wing 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 which 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 ten 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
United States 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.
George Monbiot is Honorary
Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the
Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes
a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper of London. His articles and contact
info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com