The U.S. War of Terror in Colombia
by Doug Stokes
Dissident Voice
December 9, 2002
In the aftermath
of September 11th, a counterterror orientation developed within U.S. foreign
policy that has led to a blending of the war on drugs with an alleged “war on terror.”
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stated, “The State Department has called
the FARC the most dangerous international terrorist group based in the Western
Hemisphere,” and that Colombia’s leftist guerrillas have “engaged in a campaign
of terror against Colombians and U.S. citizens.” The U.S. Assistant Secretary
of State, Otto Reich, has argued that the “40 million people of Colombia
deserve freedom from terror and an opportunity to participate fully in the new
democratic community of American states. It is in our self-interest to see that
they get it.” As a result, the Bush administration, which has committed $514
million to Colombia for the year 2002—with 71 percent of the grant in the form
of military aid—is now set to commit some $700 million for 2003 for what it
argues is an extension of its international “war on terror.”
While all the
armed actors within Colombia conduct terror campaigns against civilians,
right-wing paramilitaries that maintain close ties with drug traffickers and
the Colombian military—the primary beneficiary of U.S. military aid—are
consistently responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths. Leading
human rights organizations attribute over 80 percent of all civilian killings
to these death squads. Human Rights Watch, together with Colombian human rights
investigators, conducted a study that concluded that half of Colombia’s
eighteen brigade-level army units have extensive links to the
narco-paramilitaries. This collusion is national in scope and the units include
those receiving or scheduled to receive U.S. military aid.
In its 1999
Human Rights Report on Colombia, the U.S. State Department concluded,
“Paramilitary forces find a ready support base within the military and police,
as well as local civilian elites in many areas.” The latest Human Rights Watch
report states that there has been an almost complete failure on the part of the
Colombian government to effectively address “the problem of continuing
collaboration between its forces and abusive paramilitaries and military
impunity has contributed to a continuing, serious deterioration in human rights
guarantees.” The report also points out that “the United States has violated
the spirit of its own laws and in some cases downplayed or ignored evidence of
continuing ties between the Colombian military and paramilitary groups in order
to fund Colombia’s military and lobby for more aid.”
The role of the
United States in Colombia’s paramilitary terror against the Colombian civilian
population escalated when U.S. military advisers traveled to Colombia in 1991
to reshape Colombian military intelligence networks. This secret restructuring
was supposedly designed to aid the Colombian military in their counternarcotics
efforts. However, Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of the order and nowhere
within the order is any mention made of drugs. Instead, the secret
reorganization focused solely on combating what was called, “escalating
terrorism by armed subversion.”
The
reorganization solidified linkages between the Colombian military and
narco-paramilitary networks that in effect further consolidated a ”secret
network that relied on paramilitaries not only for intelligence, but to carry
out murder.” Once the reorganization was complete, all “written material was to
be removed” with “open contacts and interaction with military installations” to
be avoided by the paramilitaries. This strategy has allowed the Colombian
government to plausibly deny links to, or responsibility for, paramilitary
human rights abuses that “dramatically increased” after the U.S.
reorganization.
In effect then,
U.S. military aid is going directly to the terrorist networks throughout
Colombia primarily responsible for trafficking cocaine into U.S. markets in
order to fund their activities. Moreover, the United States has been
instrumental in helping develop what Human Rights Watch termed a “sophisticated
mechanism...that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and
Colombian officialdom to deny it.” While the so-called wars on drugs and terror
are being waged in Colombia, they are merely components of a much wider and
more significant war against the FARC—the largest leftist insurgency in Latin
America—and Colombian civil society.
Targeting the
coca plantations within FARC territory serves a dual purpose: It allows
Washington to continue claiming that Plan Colombia is an anti-drug plan, while
at the same time pursuing its counter-insurgency objectives. But more
importantly, by concentrating all of its militaristic drug war efforts on coca
plantations within FARC territory, Washington aims to cut off significant tax
revenue for the rebel group, thereby making the insurgency harder to fund and
thus sustain. In short, the Bush administration has chosen to wage a war on
terror in Colombia by allying itself with the terrorist narco-paramilitaries
that share Washington’s political and economic objectives.
The United
States has substantial economic interests within Latin America in general and
Colombia more specifically. Vast oil reserves have been discovered in Colombia
and as a result this South American country has become the U.S.’s seventh
largest oil supplier. In an interview with the Bogotá daily, El Tiempo, the
U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson, explained that the September 11
attacks have made the “traditional oil sources for the United States” in the
Middle East “less secure.”
According to
Ambassador Patterson, sourcing U.S. energy needs from Colombia would allow “a
small margin to work with,” which would mean the United States could “avoid
price speculation.” Such a strategy necessitates the elimination of any
regional threat to U.S. oil interests, which is clearly illustrated by the Bush
administration’s request for $98 million in aid for a specially trained
Colombian military counterinsurgency brigade devoted solely to protecting the
U.S. multinational Occidental Petroleum’s 490-mile-long Caño Limón oil pipeline
in Colombia.
U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell explained that the money will be used to “train and equip
two brigades of the Colombian armed forces to protect the pipeline” in order to
prevent rebel attacks which are “depriving us of a source of petroleum.”
Ambassador Patterson noted that although this money is not being provided under
the pretext of a war on drugs, “it is something that we must do,” because it is
“important for the future of the country, for our oil sources and for the
confidence of our investors.”
Colombia’s war
fits into the classic mode of counterinsurgency that emerged under President
Kennedy’s reorganization of Latin American militaries as part of the National
Security Doctrine. Counterinsurgency involves focusing on internal enemies
that, during the Cold War, were accused of being communist subversives. For
U.S. counterinsurgency experts, communism was typically manifested through
political demands for reforms or popular organizations that sought a more
egalitarian distribution of national resources.
In the case of
Colombia, civil society organizations, especially those that seek to challenge
prevailing socio-economic conditions, are construed by the U.S. government as
potentially subversive to the social and political order, and in the context of
counter-insurgency, legitimate targets for “paramilitary, sabotage and/or
terrorist” attack. As outlined above, the 1991 post-Cold War U.S.
reorganization of Colombian military and paramilitary networks and the massive
levels of post-Cold War U.S. funding of the Colombian military serves to
underline the continued relevance of counterinsurgency for destroying movements
that may threaten a stability geared towards U.S. interests.
The primary
weapon in a strategy that has been called “counterterror” in U.S.-sponsored
counterinsurgency—but what can be more accurately described as “terror”—has
been the use of paramilitaries. In the Colombian context, the link between the
paramilitaries, the Colombian military and the United States is clear. As a
result, in the last fifteen years, an entire democratic leftist political party
was eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries, some 151 journalists have been
killed, and 2.7 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes.
Also, 4,000 activists were murdered in the 1980s; three out of four trade union
activists assassinated worldwide are killed by the Colombian paramilitaries;
and so far this year, there have been over 8,000 political assassinations in
Colombia with 80 percent of these murders committed by paramilitary groups.
Paramilitary death squads also regularly target human rights activists,
indigenous leaders, community activists and teachers.
This repression
serves to criminalize any form of civil society resistance to U.S.-led
neoliberal restructuring of Colombia’s economy and stifle political and
economic challenges to the Colombian status quo. According to right-wing
militia leader Carlos Castaño, he and his paramilitaries “have always
proclaimed that we are the defenders of business freedom and of the national
and international industrial sectors.” Amidst this repression, according to the
World Bank, over half of Colombia’s population live in poverty, with those most
vulnerable being “children of all ages.”
During the Cold
War, anti-communism served as the ideological vehicle to justify the repression
of any attempt to change the prevailing socio-economic structure of Colombian
society. In the post-Cold War era anti-drugs and the “war on terror” have
served as the latest justifications for the continued U.S. backing of a terror
war in Colombia. There has thus been a major continuity in Washington’s Colombian
policy that has crossed from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period.
Furthermore, this policy continues to have terrible human rights implications
and leads to the death of significant numbers of Colombia’s civilian
population, while maintaining structural inequalities and destroying any
democratic alternatives.
Doug Stokes is an academic at Bristol University, UK. His research is
on the continuity of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy in the global South, in
particular those policies that continue to lead to large-scale civilian
suffering. He has published extensively on U.S. counterinsurgency in Latin
America with a strong emphasis on Colombia. Read more of his work at www.dougstokes.net. This article first appeared in Colombia Report. Please
visit their website and consider supporting their vitally important work: http://www.colombiareport.org