As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

As the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, Colombia has long been the US’ most important ally in Latin America. Simultaneously, Colombia has also become the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator, with Colombia’s numerous paramilitary organizations recently taking center stage, as they’ve gradually become directly responsible for more human rights atrocities than the formal military and police. In the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” poor people and dissidents are massacred, assassinated, tortured, and disappeared, among other atrocities—done to eliminate particular individuals and to “set an example” by intimidating others in the community. 97 percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished.

In recent years, a variety of human rights organizations, as well as mainstream academics and journalists have found it impossible to ignore the astronomical human rights violations. However, even though these groups have accurately reported on the actual atrocities, Jasmin Hristov argues that in their reports, the atrocities are largely de-contextualized from the powerful forces in Colombia and the US that directly benefit from this repression. According to Hristov, this mainstream presentation serves to mask the fact that US and Colombian elites directly support (via funding, training, supervising, and providing legal immunity for) state repression carried out by the police and military, as well as illegal paramilitary groups that are unofficially sanctioned by the government. Whether it is murdering labor organizers or displacing an indigenous community because a US corporation wants to drill for oil on their land, Hristov passionately asserts that death squad violence is purposefully directed towards sectors of society that stand in the way of the ruling class’ efforts to maintain economic dominance and acquire more resources to make even more profit.

In her book, Hristov does make a convincing argument that Colombia’s notorious death squads are inherently linked to maintenance of the country’s extreme economic inequality. Particularly since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s that have increased poverty, Colombia’s poor continue to resist their oppression in many different ways. In response, state repression on a variety of levels is needed to terrorize unarmed social movements and other community groups and activists.

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov seeks to expose the rational motivations behind state violence for capitalism’s economic elites in the US and Colombia. In meticulous detail, Hristov shows how the super-rich benefit from state repression and how the violators of human rights have essentially become immune from any consequences for their actions. If death squads are truly to be abolished in Colombia, we must look honestly at how and why they exist today. Hristov’s new book is a powerful tool for exposing who truly calls the shots.

Neoliberalism or Neopoverty?

Hristov asserts that “it is not a mere coincidence that during the era of accelerated neoliberal restructuring, the deterioration in the living conditions of the working majority has been accompanied by an increase in the capabilities and activities of military, police, and paramilitary groups, as well as the portrayal of social movements as forces that must be monitored, silenced, and eventually dismantled.” The scandalous epidemic of poverty in Colombia is key to understanding Colombian politics, and why the upper classes so fear political organizing among the poor, who could mount a formidable opposition to the status quo if allowed to organize unrestrained by state repression.

When neoliberal policies were adopted by the Colombian government in the 1990s, it dramatically increased poverty, and made an already terrible situation worse. Hristov writes that the “essential components of neoliberalism are trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Trade liberalization entails the removal of any trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas. Privatization requires the sale of public enterprises and assets to private owners. Through the removal of government restrictions and interventions on capital, deregulation allows market forces to act as a self-regulating mechanism… Austerity requires the drastic reduction or elimination of expenditures for social programs and services.”

She argues that the “main cause that led to the official adoption of neoliberal policies by the developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere was the pressure to service their external debts in the late 1970s. In order to receive loans from the World Bank (WB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nations had to agree to a program of structural adjustment that included drastically reducing public spending in health, education, and welfare,” and much more.

Because Colombia had less debt than other Latin American countries, “major neoliberal restructuring did not begin until 1990, under President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-94), when the country began to receive massive amounts of US military aid…In addition to the significant social damage wrought by these policies, by the mid-1990s Colombia had to almost double its borrowing from the IMF because of the economic crisis brought on by the market liberalization,” writes Hristov.

These drastic reforms have intensified since current President Alvaro Uribe came to power in 2002. After the IMF loaned $2.1 billion in 2003 on the condition that the reforms be accelerated, Uribe “privatized one of the country’s largest banks (BANCAFE), restructured the pension program, and reduced the number of public-sector workers in order to cut budget deficits, as required by the international lending institution. Uribe also closed down some of the country’s biggest public hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs, and denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors,” reports Hristov.

These are a few of the statistics compiled by Hristov, who writes that “in a country of 45 million, around 11 million people are unable to afford even one nutritious meal a day. According to statistics from 2005, 65 percent of Colombians are unable to regularly satisfy basic subsistence needs. In rural areas, the poverty rate is as high as 85 percent… In 2000 it was estimated that half a million children suffer from malnutrition and close to 2.5 million children between the ages of six and seventeen are forced to work… Furthermore, there has been a notable decline in school attendance, literacy, and life expectancy as well as access to child care and education over the past couple of years.”

Blood, Capital, and the State Coercive Apparatus

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov details many horrifying ways in which the rich are empowered by violence from what she identifies as the “state’s coercive apparatus” (SCA). She argues that “two intertwining motifs run throughout Colombia’s history: (1) social relations marked by inequality, exploitation, and exclusion and (2) violence employed by those with economic and political power over the working majority and the poor in order to acquire control over resources, forcibly recruit labor, and suppress or eliminate dissent.”

Dating back to the European conquest of the Americas, Hristov asserts that violence has been central to the creation of modern-day Colombia’s government and economy. She writes that “starting in the late 1500s, the conquerors began clearing the indigenous population from territories with desirable characteristics—mineral deposits, fertile soil, access to water, transportation routes, and so on. The separation of the indigenous from their means of subsistence allowed the formation of a local colonial elite who transformed what used to be the native inhabitants communal lands into large estates or haciendas. The creation of landless peasants facilitated the supply of labor for the Spaniards’ ventures, such as mining and agriculture.”

State violence supporting the economic elite continued, but became much worse in the 1960s under the direction of the US military. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights reports that in the 1960s, “during the Kennedy administration,” the US “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.” This “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine… not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game… the right to combat the internal enemy… this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.”

As Edward Herman, co-author of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism explained in a previous interview with Upside Down World, US support for repressive governments in Colombia and throughout Latin America was, and still is, part of a general policy towards third world populations. Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Herman and co-author Noam Chomsky argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights.

In the 1960s, the US and Colombian governments launched Plan Lazo, designed to target the “internal enemy.” Hristov writes that “the military aid that was part of Plan Lazo (and all subsequent programs, including those in place today, such as the Patriot Plan) were given on the condition that Colombian forces would use terror and violence, since these formed a legitimate part of the overall anticommunist offensive. In 1966 the field manual US Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while antiguerrilla should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was acceptable and was justified as a necessary response to the alleged terrorism committed by rebel forces.”

Hristov asserts that while the US handled the “financial and ideological aspects” of building and strengthening the SCA, locally the Colombian elites also played a key role. “It implemented many of the policies suggested by the US counterinsurgency manual in order to discipline the civilian population through measures such as press censorship, the suspension of civil rights (to permit arrest on mere suspicion), and the forced relocation of entire villages. President Guillermo Leon Valencia (1962-66) boosted the anticommunist campaign by declaring a state of siege whereby judicial and political powers were transferred to the military while the latter was freed from accountability to civilian authorities for its conduct.”

With US financing and supervision, the Colombian armed forces have since become one of the most renowned human rights violators in the world. This despicable conduct eventually created significant local and international opposition, and under this pressure the SCA has been forced to adjust. In response, the responsibility for repression has shifted more towards paramilitaries, whose activities are officially independent of the government. In this situation, when paramilitaries target the “internal enemy,” the same goal is accomplished as if the government itself did it, yet the government cannot be officially linked to the violence.

The Paramilitarization of Colombia

The size and strength of paramilitary death squads in Colombia has steadily increased since they were first established in the 1960s. According to Hristov, the paramilitaries are now responsible for about 80 percent of human rights violations in Colombia, compared to 16 percent by the rebel guerrillas. The paramilitaries’ evolution, Hristov argues, is the result of “perhaps the most creative and intelligent effort by an elite-dominated state to counteract revolutionary processes… The Colombian parastatal system represents neither a traditional centralized authoritarian regime, as those that existed in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, nor merely a collection of autonomous armed bands dispersed over rural areas, each ruling locally, as in Mexico. What we see in Colombia is a mutated SCA that has assumed a nonstate appearance.”

The function of the paramilitaries in Colombia was explained well by Captain Gilberto Cardenas, former captain of the national police and former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit in the Uraba region. In 2002, testifying against the commander of the Seventeenth Brigade of the Colombian armed forces, Cardenas told representatives of the United Nations and Colombian authorities, “The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and the police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, the [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces…members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.”

The paramilitary system first began in the mid-1960s when the Colombian government passed legislation that authorized citizens to carry arms and assist the military in repression. Hristov argues that “paramilitary forces entered the scene to perform two main functions.” The first was to participate in combat at a local level, as described by the 1966 US Army Counterinsurgency Forces field manual, which stated: “paramilitary units can support the national army in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations when the latter are being conducted in their own province or political subdivision.” Second, Hristov writes that paramilitaries “were intended to monitor and gather intelligence on the rebels, their civilian supporters, and social organizations by establishing networks throughout the country.”

While these early paramilitaries did play some role in state repression, it would not be until the 1980s that they really began to increase in size and influence. Hristov writes that “the 1980s were the golden age of paramilitary development, as many new groups formed, expanded, and rapidly acquired financial and military strength… This second wave of creation enacted by large-scale landowners, cattle ranchers, mining entrepreneurs (particularly those in the emerald business) and narco-lords took place in a particular context, characterized by five main features: a shift in the state’s (unofficial) policy toward the partial privatization of coercion; the state’s fusion with the elite; a legal framework that had set the ground for the design, training, equipping, and administration by the state military of armed bodies outside its institution; a prevailing anticommunist ideology; and militarized patches of the country that served as models to emulate.”

This second wave was given another boost in 1994 with the creation of the Community Rural Surveillance Associations (CONVIVIR) by current President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who was the governor of the department of Antioquia at that time. Hristov writes that Uribe made CONVIVIR into “a replica of the original paramilitary bodies designed in the 1960s. As it had thirty years ago, now the civilian counterpart of the SCA was to take on a central role in the Dirty War under a legal mantle. By the time CONVIVIR was outlawed, in 1999, most of the numerous paramilitary self defense bodies had united, attaining an organizational and military capacity unsurpassed by paramilitary forces in any other Latin American country.”

In August, 1998, just before the legislation supporting CONVIVIR was abolished, hundreds of members publicly announced that they would be joining the AUC paramilitary network, which became the most prominent paramilitary network in Colombia. The AUC had been created in 1997, mostly under the leadership of Carlos Castano and his paramilitary group, the ACCU, which became the largest group in the AUC federation. Others that operated in this loose confederation of paramilitary groups included Bloque Cacique Nutibara, the Bloque Central Bolivar, and the Bloque de Magdalena Medio.

Following official “peace negotiations” between the AUC and the Colombian government which began in 2002 with an official AUC ceasefire agreement, the AUC officially disbanded in February 2006, as part of an overall public disarmament of many paramilitaries throughout Colombia. However Hristov argues that “there are many factors challenging the legitimacy of the peace process. First, during the entire period of the cease-fire announced by the AUC, its groups regularly engaged in military actions against civilians, thereby committing human rights violations (and such activities continue to take place). Second, often those who claimed to be demobilizing were not the real paramilitary combatants but hired criminals, or drug dealers who had bought the AUC franchise. Third, large quantities of arms that should have been turned over were not. Fourth, fighters who are officially considered demobilized are in reality already active militarily in new organizations, where their skills of terrorizing the civilian population for economic gains are necessary and valued.”

Since 2006, there have been several government initiatives that give the formal appearance of the Colombian government working to combat paramilitaries. Hristov explains that “early in 2007 the Supreme Court began investigating numerous connections between paramilitaries and important state actors, such as senators, representatives, deputies, councilors, and mayors. As time went by, the public learned of more and more cases in which the legal (state officials with their political authority and legitimacy) and the illegal (paramilitary groups with their economic and military power) had entered into alliances to advance their mutual interests. Through mid-2008, 38 percent of members of Congress have been implicated in this parapolitica scandal.”

While Hristov recognizes some importance in these recent investigations, she feels that their real impact has been extremely limited. She argues that “despite all the cases that have been exposed, parapolitica is not likely to be eradicated from the Colombian political system. On the contrary, the flood of revelations about politicians’ connections to the paramilitary actually allows serious crimes, such as complicity in massacres, to get buried under waves of minor offenses, and eventually the entire issue becomes just another corruption scandal.”

In their 2009 report on Colombia, Human Rights Watch concluded that there are many “threats to accountability for paramilitaries’ accomplices,” reporting that “the Uribe administration has repeatedly taken actions that could sabotage the investigations. Administration officials have issued public personal attacks on the Supreme Court and its members, in some cases making accusations that have turned out to be baseless, in what increasingly looks like a campaign to discredit the court. In mid-2008 the administration proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have removed what are known as the ‘parapolitics’ investigations from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, but it withdrew the proposal in November. The administration also blocked what is known as the ‘empty chair’ bill, which would have reformed the Congress to sanction parties that had backed politicians linked to paramilitaries.”

Hristov concludes that the centrality of paramilitaries to Colombian politics will not be disappearing anytime soon, mostly because repression has been necessary to enforce the country’s stark social/political/economic injustice. Hristov argues that the paramilitaries have become an essential tool of repression, and because Colombia’s poor majority will continue to resist this outrageous poverty, the paramilitaries’ repression will continue. Seen in this context, the recent demobilization process is only a tactical restructuring of paramilitaries and the SCA, similar to their restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s. Hristov sees this restructuring as an “adaptation response” to “assure its future survival” in the face of “the reality of resistance and opposition by numerous sectors of society against further dispossession,” with the state’s ultimate goal being “the institutionalization of paramilitarism and the legalization of capital accumulation through violence.”

War on Narco-terrorists?

Since the official end of the Cold War in 1989, US rhetorical justification for allying itself with and providing military aid to the Colombian government has shifted from fighting “communism” to fighting “narco-terrorism.” Hristov argues that official rhetoric may have changed but it’s still easy to expose this fraudulent war on narco-terrorism as actually being a war against poor people. Concerning the so-called war on terrorism, how can the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator fight terrorism? Then, similar to the absurd notion of a terrorist fighting terrorism, how can a government heavily complicit in the drug trade claim that it is fighting a war on drugs?

The Colombian government’s multi-faceted complicity in drug trafficking extends all the way to current President Uribe, who was listed by the Pentagon itself, as one of the most wanted international drug traffickers. A declassified National Security Archives report dated September 23, 1991, explicitly accused Uribe of being a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of Pablo Escobar. This report states further that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the US and Colombia. These individuals are also contracted as ‘HIT MEN’ to assassinate individuals targeted by the ‘extraditables,’ or individual ‘narcotic leaders,’ and to perform terrorist acts against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”

It’s not just the Colombian government! Hristov argues that the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) “has in reality been converted largely to an instrument of drug traffickers and paramilitaries.” To support this assertion, she cites a 2004 memorandum issued by a lawyer at the US Department of Justice named Thomas M. Kent, which accused the DEA of extreme misconduct. Kent states that strong evidence of misconduct is routinely ignored by the control agencies of the Department of Justice. Hristov summarizes key points made in Kent’s memorandum, including “to supplement their $7,000 monthly salary, some DEA agents have managed to negotiate with Colombian drug dealers… DEA personnel have been implicated in the killing of informants… Members of the AUC [paramilitaries] have been assisted by DEA agents in money laundering… DEA agents have participated in the extortion of drug traffickers awaiting extradition.”

On another note, Hristov makes the important point that drug trafficking and the rise of paramilitaries have both fed each other in two key ways. “First, the groups involved in trafficking needed to protect their laboratories, illegal cultivation, and clandestine airstrips in rural areas stimulated the emergence of local armed groups outside the state. Second, many drug dealers had begun to invest their capital in millions of hectares of the best agricultural land in the country… and they needed armed forces to protect their lands.” Hristov adds further that “the preexisting concentration of land ownership in the hands of the elite and the displacement of impoverished peasants was aggravated dramatically by this trend.”

To further expose this fraudulent “war on drugs,” it should be noted that the US government has a long history of complicity in drug trafficking, particularly in Latin America. While author William Blum has written the definitive short article on the topic, Alfred McCoy has written the most comprehensive book, titled The Politics of Heroin, documenting the CIA’s relationships with drug traffickers around the world, including in France, Italy, China, Laos, Afghanistan, Haiti, and throughout Latin America. In 1989, a Senatorial Committee chaired by Senator John Kerry documented that during the 1980s, while working with the anti-Sandinista “Contras,” the CIA and other branches of the US government were complicit in trafficking cocaine into the US from Latin America. The Kerry Committee concluded a three year investigation by stating in their report that “there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region… US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua… In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.”

The Kerry Committee’s report and the story behind it has been analyzed well by authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their book Cocaine Politics. In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News (later expanded and made into a book in 1999) which directly tied Contra cocaine traffickers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses (both protected by the US government) to Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross, who played a key role in starting the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The mainstream media launched a smear campaign attacking Webb’s story that eventually caused even the Mercury News to denounce Webb. However, several prominent journalists came to Webb’s defense and challenged the mainstream media’s smear campaign, including Norman Solomon, Robert Parry, and Counterpunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Unmasking The Unholy Alliance

The relationship between the US and Colombian elite is truly an unholy alliance. With US President Barack Obama praising the Colombian government and attempting to build several new military bases in Colombia, it is more important than ever to expose the truth about who supports death squads and why. Hopefully Blood & Capital will receive the attention that it deserves, and Hristov’s meticulous research can be used to truly disarm the state coercive apparatus in Colombia.

Chomsky is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. The Kentucky segment was sponsored by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), where participants witnessed the impact of Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on local communities. In Colombia the delegation met with human rights activists, trade unionists, members of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and others affected by coal production in Colombia.

Hans Bennett: Having just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation’s trip to Kentucky and Colombia, can you please tell us about your visit to Kentucky, and about the group ‘Kentuckians For The Commonwealth’ (KFTC)?

Aviva Chomsky: KFTC is a community organization working on social justice issues, one of them being local resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining that is destroying lands and communities in Appalachia. I’ve been working with them since last summer, when four people from that organization came with us on our delegation to the Colombian coal region. The connections they made between the two regions were amazing. In both, big companies run roughshod over some of the poorest and most marginalized people. People are losing their land, their water, their right to clean air, and their homes to the coal mines. The Kentuckians felt a real link with the Colombian communities, that they were part of the same struggle. Last fall, we worked with KFTC to organize a tour for two Colombian coal union leaders. They spent a week in Kentucky, seeing for themselves the results of mountaintop removal, and speaking to different audiences there. The Colombians were also incredibly moved by the destruction of land and lives in Kentucky. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the First World. We decided we’d really like to organize a delegation that would visit both regions — and that’s what we did this summer. We spent three days in the Kentucky coal region, and then went to Colombia. We also had five people from Appalachia, all involved in different aspects of the movement against mountaintop removal, with us on the Colombian part of the delegation.

HB: What did members of the group share with the delegation?

AC: One thing that really struck me was the ways that people in both the Colombian and the Kentuckian coal regions talked about the land. I’m from the city, and have lived a pretty cosmopolitan life. For people in eastern Kentucky, like those in northern Colombia, the land is tied to the essence of their identity. People have generations-long ties to the land, they farm the land, they feel personally connected to the mountains, to the rivers, to the farms. Also, in both regions, people are aware that they are seen as expendable, not only by the coal companies, but by the centers of power. Both regions suffer from a lack of state services, and have been really politically marginalized. But also in both regions, there is a really powerful sense of collective identity that I think has contributed to the strength of the social struggles there.

In one interview a few years ago, a Colombian indigenous leader explained to us that for his people, the earth was “la madre tierra,” mother earth. “It hurts us to see the earth damaged,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of the mine. People in eastern Kentucky talked the same way about their mountains.

HB: What has been the impact of the coal mining industry, Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on the local communities?

AC: The impact has been devastating. I’ve never been anywhere else in the United States where you can’t drink the water! But the tap water smells so sulfurous that I was even wondering if it was safe to shower in. People in the region complain of the same kinds of illnesses and reactions that we’ve seen in Colombia — respiratory ailments, rashes and skin diseases, eye diseases — reactions to coal particles in the air and in the water. Rivers that used to run crystal clear have turned into toxic sludge. People’s homes are being surrounded by the various impacts. A mountainous region is being flattened. A way of life and a people are being forced into extinction.

After visiting Kentucky, the Colombian union leaders told us they were shocked by how “irrational” the mining was there. I didn’t really understand what they meant until I saw it myself. In Colombia, there are huge seven-foot seams of coal. The mines there are giant operations that have opened up many-mile long areas. In Kentucky, whole mountains are being felled for little seams that are only a few inches wide! And believe it or not, there seem to be more serious reclamation efforts going on in Colombia than in Kentucky.

HB: After visiting Kentucky, the delegation flew to Colombia, which your flyer explains is “the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and also the country with the highest levels of official and paramilitary violence, including forced displacement, killings of journalists, trade unionists, and human rights activists.” The flyer asserts that, “foreign corporations are some of the major beneficiaries of this situation.” How do the corporations benefit from this? How does US financial and diplomatic support for the Colombian government influence the situation?

AC: Colombia is the poster child for neoliberalism in Latin America. Since the 1970s the United States — and the international financial institutions that it plays a leading role in, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have been pushing a development model on Latin America that calls, essentially, for governments to act in the interests of multinational capital. Governments are supposed to invite in foreign investment, and provide it with low taxes, low wages, and low regulation. They are supposed to cut back on social spending, and offer state enterprises up to the private sector. And, they’re supposed to quash any popular protest against these policies, using force if necessary. These policies have gone by names such as structural adjustment, the Washington Consensus, the Chicago Boys prescriptions (referring to the role of Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago), or neoliberalism. The United States has played a key role in the implementation of these policies — from working for the overthrow of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and their implementation there, to Plan Colombia today, by which the United States provides military and economic aid that goes directly to implementing this economic model and crushing protest.

Union leaders have been some of the most visible victims. In the U.S.-owned Drummond mine in northern Colombia, three union leaders were assassinated in 2001. The company is currently facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly paying a paramilitary force to carry out the murders. Another U.S. company, Chiquita Brands, admitted to making payments for years to the paramilitaries. They claimed that they made the payments to protect their workers, but banana workers — and especially union activists—were the main victims among the hundreds murdered by paramilitaries during the 1990s and early 2000s.

HB: Before we talk about the delegation’s visit to Colombia this month, I’d like to first refer back to our 2007 interview in Z Magazine titled “Colombia Solidarity Work,” and ask you to please give an update about what has been going on since then, during this two year period since then.

AC: When we visited the Cerrejón mine in the summer and late fall of 2006, the company had taken the stance that it would not recognize or negotiate with the displaced Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco. It also insisted that community issues and union issues be kept completely separate. The union had included a demand about the rights of the communities in its 2006 bargaining proposal, and the company absolutely refused to include this in the contract — although they did agree to a side letter inviting the union to participate in the company’s social programs.

In the summer of 2007, Cerrejón announced that it was forming a Social Review Panel to evaluate its relations with the communities and provide recommendations. The Panel concluded that the displacement of Tabaco was a festering wound, and that the company simply had to rectify this if it wanted to develop any kind of working relationship with the local communities. The company agreed, finally, to engage in collective negotiations with former Tabaco residents, aimed at a resettlement of the community. This was a struggle that had been going on for ten years! In December of 2008, the company signed an agreement with the community defining the terms of the relocation and for compensation for the people who had been displaced. This was a huge victory.

Still, in some ways we were struck with how much has not changed. Although the agreement was signed with Tabaco, the relocation process has not yet begun—so people are still displaced. In the other communities we work with, the company has been engaging in collective negotiations for relocation — but they are still desperately poor, landless, and living in the shadows of the world’s largest open-pit coal mine.

In the Cesar Department, where the U.S.-owned Drummond mine operates, things are even worse. Union leaders there live in daily fear for their safety and lives. We had hoped to return to one community that we visited last summer, Mechoacán — but it had been wiped off the map. We met with the communities of Boquerón, El Hatillo, and Plan Bonito, that are slowly being strangled by the mine. Drummond, unlike Cerrejón, still refuses to recognize any right to collective relocation for these communities, and is simply trying to starve people out in hopes that they will leave.

HB: Okay, now let’s talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?

AC: The main issues we’ve been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.

Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations — Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón’s size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.

The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine — and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country’s policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy — the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.

HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?

AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky — because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region — people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.

Unions in Colombia — especially those in the coal mines — are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country’s natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.

In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.

HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels’ effects on the environment, including global warming?

AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don’t we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo’s response really challenged all of us, I think. “There is no clean source of energy,” he said. “You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world’s energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal’s. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects — from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers — and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food.” Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction — like our overuse of energy. “As long as you want to keep using that much energy,” he said, “we’re going to keep mining coal.”

There’s always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that’s narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don’t get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we’ll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBYism [i.e., “not in my back yard”] — we don’t want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That’s how our system works—and that’s how we’re encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.

This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water — thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don’t have to see where our energy comes from, and we don’t have to see where our waste goes — we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away — all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth’s resources!

HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and ‘left of center’ Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?

AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call “U.S. interests” — which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations — in Latin America. Ecuador’s new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.

There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish — neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries’ resources internally, to address the region’s devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.

Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we’re entering a new era, in which the United States will choose — or be forced — to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama’s diplomatic language, he’s already shown that he’s quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors — the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet’s limited resources — could contribute to some real changes.

HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?

AC: We’re hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional “urgent action” requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia@comcast.net if you want to get more involved in the planning.

* This interview was first published at UpsideDownWorld.org on June 15, 2009.

ENRIQUE (septuagenarian who picked us up on side of road in province of Esmeraldas
in northwest Ecuador): Baghdad is the capital of Iran.

Enrique was a retired bakery owner en route to the Ecuadorian coast, where he and his considerably younger wife Gina were hoping to invest Enrique’s savings in beachfront property in case the dollar proved unsustainable and the sucre was suddenly reinstalled as Ecuador’s national currency. Amelia and I offered alternate suggestions for the capital city of Iran and suggested that the installment of the Iranian rial, instead, might grant the Ecuadorian economy a greater degree of insulation in the event of subsequent global financial crises.

US Secretaries of State had also exhibited a tendency to view members of the Axis of Evil interchangeably, and Madeleine Albright’s assertion that sanctions against Iraq were worth half a million dead children was followed up by Hillary Clinton’s recommendation that Iranians consider the possibility of total obliteration. For his part, Enrique dismissed the strengthening of ties between Ecuador and Iran on the grounds that both nations produced fruit and oil and that redundant commercial relations were not worth the wrath of the US; he then addressed other instances of geographical confusion outside of Iran and Iraq, such as why Amelia and I were in the province of Esmeraldas if we were trying to get to Venezuela.

We explained that we intended to travel northeast along the Colombian coast. Enrique asked why we had failed to consult a roadmap, and informed us that the only way to cross from Esmeraldas to Colombia without dealing with guerrillas was on a boat that departed once a week. This revelation complicated our current schedule, according to which we were supposed to reach Venezuela with enough time to insert ourselves into the national health care system prior to the referendum scheduled for 15 February.

Amelia and I had based our medical endeavors on Hugo Chávez’ past offers of free eye surgery to millions of citizens of the western hemisphere, the parameters of which we were hoping could be expanded to include dental work. Direct benefits of such expansion for Chávez, we felt, would consist of heightened convictions among sectors of the international community that there was nothing inherently harmful about leaving him in power for the next several decades, one possible outcome of the February referendum. Enrique foresaw eager replications on the part of Correa of free dental programs for foreign nationals — lack of adequate Ecuadorian resources notwithstanding — and proposed reappointing the evicted Venezuelan ambassador to Israel as head of Ecuador’s new embassy in Iran in order to save on airfare. Gina meanwhile limited herself to flapping her hand in front of her husband’s face every few minutes in order to indicate that he was about to plunge over a speed bump, pothole, or chicken.

After passing the Esmeraldas oil refinery, which Enrique claimed was a likely benefactor of increased Iranian influence in the country, we stopped for seaside piña coladas at the request of Gina, who downed hers immediately and proceeded to recount for us her marriage at age 14 to a British CIA agent 30 years her senior. She appeared to have alternated between the agent and Enrique until the agent’s recent death; Enrique condemned endorsements of the Monroe Doctrine by British individuals and briefly declared patriotic support for Correa’s squandering of public funds on hospitals and roads.

Support diminished when we got back in the vehicle and resumed damaging its underside. As for Amelia’s and my Venezuelan intentions, Enrique and Gina invited us to stay at their hotel on the coast for a night before hitchhiking back east to Quito, where the Pan-American Highway would then lead us north to more navigable sections of the Colombian border. By the time we reached the hotel, the Panamericana had come to constitute a glorious Bolivarian vision linking the nations of the former Gran Colombia with no interference from unmarked mounds of asphalt. (Other potential obstacles to Bolivarianism were ignored for the moment, such as that:

1. the Panamericana was in fact a system of roads linking Argentina to Alaska.

2. the Panamanian portion of the Panamericana was separated from the rest of Gran Colombia by forests and swamps.)

Following a destructive ride to dinner that evening, Amelia and I raised the possibility of Iranian improvement projects on provincial roads. Iran’s expertise in such fields had already infiltrated the borders of other nations in which the US dollar was an encouraged unit in daily transactions; additional similarities between Ecuador and Lebanon included unique interpretations of laws of centrifugal motion on the part of motorists, although reversing down the highway appeared to be less of an institution in Ecuador.

One likely outcome of Iranian contributions to Ecuadorian roadways was the erection of roadside emblems of the Islamic Revolution, replacing current signs featuring the Energizer bunny and entreating drivers to have faith in God but to drive carefully. The substitution of symbols would in turn legitimize the inclusion of the roads in lists of wartime casualties, thereby necessitating additional improvement projects by other concerned nations, as had happened during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. Following the war, the US had declared its intention to restore the Mdairej Bridge, the infrastructural culpability of which presumably stemmed from the fact that it helped link Beirut to Damascus; the only difference between American and Iranian postwar contributions to Lebanese roads was that Iran had not provided the weapons to destroy them in the first place.

Enrique explained that Ecuadorian infrastructure was already in danger, as Correa had advocated arms purchases from Iran in order to guard against Colombian convictions that one’s territorial sovereignty did not end at one’s borders. Along with infrastructure, other likely casualties of Correa’s recent policies included Ecuador’s foreign debt—which he had defaulted on in December—and the US air base in Manta, the lease for which was set to expire in 2009.

As for other Iranian military apprentices aside from Correa, Enrique reprimanded Hamas for the “lluvia de cohetes” (rain of rockets) that had prompted Israel’s own convictions on the nature of territorial sovereignty; he then backed down under pressure, illustrating the susceptibility of Latin America to pernicious outside influence:

ENRIQUE: There was a lluvia de cohetes.
US: There was not a lluvia de cohetes.
ENRIQUE: Yes, you’re right.
GINA (downing further piña coladas): Enrique is like my father.

Enrique was subsequently demoted to grandfather and then to devil, which was the same label Hugo Chávez had previously applied to George W. Bush. In a show of regional continuity, Correa had then proclaimed the label offensive to the devil; additional continuity was exhibited in the Ecuadorian referendum of 2008, which resulted in the passage of a new constitution potentially permitting Correa’s reelection to two more consecutive terms. (Correa had thus far refrained, however, from establishing a unique time zone for Ecuador, according to which Ecuadorian clocks would strike the half hour when the rest of the world’s clocks — minus those in Venezuela and a smattering of other locales such as Iran — struck the hour.)

Three days later Amelia and I found ourselves on the Panamericana in the southern Colombian department of Cauca, where a Colombian truck driver analyzed Álvaro Uribe’s compatibility with regional continuity and added that at least neighboring political leaders held referenda to assure their immortality. As for competing geostrategic interests in South America, the truck driver expressed the imperial tendencies of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in terms of the number of people from his village who had lost fingers, tongues, and other appendages to paramilitaries.

The Pan-American vision Amelia and I had concocted had already begun to fade prior to this point, due to certain realities such as that:

1. the Panamericana often appeared to be a euphemism for cliffs, falling rocks, and Colombians posing with shovels in one hand and receptacles for donations in the other—part of an ongoing road improvement charade.

2. the Ecuadorian Energizer bunny was superceded in Colombia by ubiquitous black four-pointed stars outlined in gold that were painted on the road to commemorate victims of traffic accidents. (Amelia and I quickly adopted billboard slogans in favor of star reduction, such as “No más estrellas en la vía.”)

3. standing on the side of the road in Colombia with one’s thumb extended was an ineffective means of travel, thanks to the seemingly pervasive assumption that female hitchhikers were accomplices in plots to deprive motorists of their savings and/or physical wellbeing.

Amelia and I had arrived to Colombia via the Tulcán-Ipiales crossing, where the goal of a Latin America without borders appeared to still be within reach given that it was entirely possible to cross from Tulcán to Ipiales without being asked a single question aside from “Qué es eso?” — in reference to the cups of yerba mate we were holding. During the several hours that then elapsed between the time we stuck out our thumbs and the time we got a ride, we were thus able to contemplate not only why the FARC was not keeping tabs on foreigners standing alone on the side of the road but also why US financing of the war on drugs had merely produced curiosity in the national beverage of Argentina.

In order to combat Colombian resistance to hitchhiking, Amelia and I eventually devised new tactics such as drawing Spanish-language stop signs on notebook paper in red marker and stationing ourselves in the middle of the street. When vehicles continued to careen by undeterred, we began approaching checkpoints belonging to the Ejército Nacional de Colombia, where — provided there were people on duty and not life-size cardboard cutouts of people on duty — we recruited mercenaries for our hitchhiking cause. The Ejército enjoyed a higher rate of success than we had at stopping vehicles, underlining the fundamental link between possession of arms and prospects for social change in Colombia, and Amelia and I were inserted onto a succession of trucks, eventually making it to the city of Cali.

In Cali we were picked up by a father-son team en route to Bogotá in two separate trucks marked TÓXICO. The truckers described their toxic cargo as products for farmers; they did not specify whether the products were meant for use by farmers on their own crops or for use on farmers and crops alike by government airplanes.

During a stop at one of the various roadside establishments bearing the name Restaurante Panamericano, Amelia’s and my geographical sensibilities were once again called into question when the truckers asked why we were going through Bogotá to reach Venezuela. The confusion, which this time stemmed from the fact that our map of Colombia featured rivers and not roads, was rectified by transferring Amelia and me to a different road leading to the city of Cúcuta on the Venezuelan border. The transfer took place at an Ejército checkpoint after the city of Ibagué in the department of Tolima, where the Ejército confirmed that the Pan-American Highway did not begin and end in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and loaded us into a truck with a driver named John. John was transporting feminine hygiene products to a city near Cúcuta, accompanied by very loud salsa music.

Our trajectory was promptly interrupted when a two-truck collision resulted in the closure of the road for 4.5 hours. John amused himself with even louder salsa music, interspersed with shouted lectures on how the distribution of the Ejército across Colombian thoroughfares brought far greater seguridad to the nation’s poor than the distribution of Venezuelan wealth brought to poor Venezuelans. Amelia and I, in turn, tried to interest John in possible Iranian contributions to the campaign against estrellas en la vía.

John rejected Iran’s ability to reduce fatality rates and suggested that Iranian road works would consist of replacing the estrellas with Hezbollah martyr posters, which he speculated might already line the streets of Caracas. Once the accident had been cleared, we continued in the direction of Venezuela, where the upcoming referendum will help determine future intersections of the Panamericana and the Pax Americana.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims — It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying, “I’m not going to get into these matters.”¹ Where have we heard that before?

After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: “We regret the loss of life.” These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called “terrorist”.

I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the “changes we can believe in” in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me.

Iran

Just leave them alone. There is no “Iranian problem.” They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That’s generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnapping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”²

Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare?

Russia

Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia’s neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it’s to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions — The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told.

“The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. “At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians.” But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia’s weakness.³

Cuba

Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life.

In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba.

The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.

Iraq

Freeing the Iraqi people to death … Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”⁴ The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity.

Saudi Arabia

Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo?

Haiti

Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance.

Colombia

Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America?

Venezuela

Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he’s no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington’s role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can’t understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list.

Put an end to support for Chavez’s opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections.

Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism.

And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It’s a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: “Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.”⁵

Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you’ve already accused Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”⁶ This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington’s history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office — that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world’s savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela’s leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia?

Bolivia

Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state.

Afghanistan

Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world’s powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan.

If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country’s wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists.

But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo.

And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington’s domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq?

Israel

The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence.

North Korea

Bush called the country part of “the axis of evil”, and Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table.”⁷ But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear.
Central America

Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can’t undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade.
Vietnam

In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those “who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh.” So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes?

You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology.

Kosovo

Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America’s natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country?

NATO

From protecting Europe against a [mythical] Soviet invasion to becoming an occupation army in Afghanistan. Put an end to this historical anachronism, what Russian leader Vladimir called “the stinking corpse of the cold war.”⁸ You can accomplish this simply by leaving the organization. Without the United States and its never-ending military actions and officially-designated enemies, the organization would not even have the pretense of a purpose, which is all it has left. Members have had to be bullied, threatened and bribed to send armed forces to Afghanistan.

School of the Americas

Latin American countries almost never engage in war with each other, or any other countries. So for what kind of warfare are its military officers being trained by the United States? To suppress their own people. Close this school (the name has now been changed to protect the guilty) at Ft. Benning, Georgia that the United States has used to prepare two generations of Latin American military officers for careers in overthrowing progressive governments, death squads, torture, holding down dissent, and other charming activities. The British are fond of saying that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. Americans can say that the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram began in the classrooms of the School of the Americas.

Torture

Your executive orders concerning this matter of utmost importance are great to see, but they still leave something to be desired. They state that the new standards ostensibly putting an end to torture apply to any “armed conflict”. But what if your administration chooses to view future counterterrorism and other operations as not part of an “armed conflict”? And no mention is made of “rendition” — kidnaping a man off the street, throwing him in a car, throwing a hood over his head, stripping off his clothes, placing him in a diaper, shackling him from every angle, and flying him to a foreign torture dungeon. Why can’t you just say that this and all other American use of proxy torturers is banned? Forever.

It’s not enough to say that you’re against torture or that the United States “does not torture” or “will not torture”. George W. Bush said the same on a regular basis. To show that you’re not George W. Bush you need to investigate those responsible for the use of torture, even if this means prosecuting a small army of Bush administration war criminals.

You aren’t off to a good start by appointing former CIA official John O. Brennan as your top adviser on counterterrorism. Brennan has called “rendition” a “vital tool” and praised the CIA’s interrogation techniques for providing “lifesaving” intelligence.⁹ Whatever were you thinking, Barack?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi

Free this Libyan man from his prison in Scotland, where he is serving a life sentence after being framed by the United States for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people over Scotland. Iran was actually behind the bombing — as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July, killing 290 — not Libya, which the US accused for political reasons. Nations do not behave any more cynical than that. Megrahi lies in prison now dying of cancer, but still the US and the UK will not free him. It would be too embarrassing to admit to 20 years of shameless lying.

Mr. President, there’s a lot more to be undone in our foreign policy if you wish to be taken seriously as a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr.: banning the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and other dreadful weapons; joining the International Criminal Court instead of trying to sabotage it; making a number of other long-overdue apologies in addition to the one mentioned re Vietnam; and much more. You’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to bring some happiness to this sad old world, make America credible and beloved again, stop creating armies of anti-American terrorists, and win over people like me.

And do you realize that you can eliminate all state and federal budget deficits in the United States, provide free health care and free university education to every American, pay for an unending array of worthwhile social and cultural programs, all just by ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new ones, and closing down the Pentagon’s 700+ military bases? Think of it as the peace dividend Americans were promised when the Cold War would end some day, but never received. How about you delivering it, Mr. President? It’s not too late.

But you are committed to the empire; and the empire is committed to war. Too bad.

1. Washington Post, January 24, 2009.
2. Interview with al Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009.
3. Gorbachev speaking in Florida, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 17, 2008.
4. Washington Post, May 5, 2007, p.1.
5. New York Times, January 11, 2009.
6. Washington Post, January 19, 2009.
7. Newsweek, May 27, 2002.
8. Press Trust of India (news agency), December 21, 2007.
9. Washington Post, November 26, 2008.

“Dios Mio Gracias”: DMG´s Spectacular Rise and Fall

The resulting protests by the enraged victims induced the Government into finally confronting this troubling elephant in the room, the notorious multi-million dollar phantasmagoria known as DMG. It was named after its mercurial founder and owner, 28-year old David Murcia Guzman. Unlike DRFE and many of the country’s estimated 200 pyramid systems, DMG for three years consistently had been fulfilling its promises of rapid enrichment of its clients, and in fact, benefited hundreds of thousands of “investors.” DMG distributed prepaid credit cards to investors, with which they could buy various electronic-domestic products and other devices from selected retailers. In a remarkable twist on traditional brand name loyalty strategies, DMG then offered a return of 150-300% on the original investment within six months. In DMG’s commercial heartland in the province of Putamayo, up to 85% of its adult residents invested their savings in DMG, lifting its devoted subscribers out of poverty and allowing many to move away from coca cultivation. Some observers warned of the dangers of the resultant culture of idleness, easy money, and a recessive lifestyle but the overwhelming feeling within this neglected sector of the population was one of huge relief. Now able to pay for their education, healthcare, and home improvements, the people came to express the company’s initials as “Dios Mio Gracias” (My God Thank You).

The DMG Way

Within a short space of time, DMG expanded from Colombia’s south to its active metropolitan economic heartlands in Bogota, Cali and Medellin, while simultaneously rising from being an exclusive attraction to the poor, to becoming an increasingly attractive, if problematic, alternative for the country’s middle and upper classes. Despite persistent doubts over its legality, not to mention its financial sustainability, the country’s political establishment and society at large appeared almost amorously hypnotized by Guzman’s ostensibly miraculous ability to do the impossible: multiply people’s often modest savings to levels beyond their wildest dreams. The final collapse of DRFE, in addition to the pressure from Colombia’s orthodox financial sector (who had been nervously watching the increasing amounts of money being withdrawn from bank accounts in favor of investment in DMG), prompted the Government to seize DMG’s offices, while at the same time issuing arrest warrants for its managers. Guzman was dramatically captured in Panama on 18th November and extradited to Bogota within a matter of hours. Meanwhile, the Government promised to repay some of the citizens’ investments in exchange for turning in the necessary documents and handing back the prepaid credit cards. It opened up the Camping football stadium in order to expedite the return of the tainted funds to investors. Of course, the actual amount of funds found sitting in DMG’s immediate accounts amounted to far less than the amount owed to investors, meaning that, to date, it is far from clear how many people will get their full deposits back, if at all.

What Is Being Revealed?

These episodes, reminiscent of the magical realism highlighted by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, open up serious questions concerning all levels of Colombia’s society. In many ways, DMG can be seen as maintaining a Colombian tradition of extra-legal “ghost economies,” operating in an atmosphere of legal impunity, and apparently defying conventional laws of economics in order to offer unimaginable benefits to otherwise neglected sectors of society. The extent to which significant amounts of the population have kept relying on ghost economies as the primary means of their economic advancement belies a reality far detached from the Government’s conventional discourse on economic growth and political stability along with a populace apparently immune to the often outlandish “populist” promises handed out by neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador. The majority of investors in DMG were poor Colombians who would not otherwise have benefited from the country’s high growth rates in recent years, making Guzman’s invitations to join “the DMG family” extremely attractive. In contrast to the venom now being directed against DRFE, average DMG investors at first mobilized in various cities to defend the company from what they saw as discrimination against the “poor people´s bank” by the Government. Protesters in Putamayo virtually paralyzed the province, targeting banks and government institutions, and even talked about separating from the Colombian state in order to allow DMG to keep operating.

Underneath questions over why it was so easy for DMG to build up such a committed support base lies doubts over the nature of the Government’s response to the phenomenon. While the authorities now openly accuse DMG of having links to drug trafficking and money laundering operations, this does not explain why the operation was allowed to carry out its activities in the open for over three years. One potential answer to this might rest in the company’s usefulness in satisfying sectors of the population which otherwise would not have benefited from the high economic growth registered during President Alvaro Uribe’s tenure: good for statistics, good for Uribe’s political standing. In fact, the sheer quantity of people who benefited from DMG and other pyramid schemes raise questions about the Government’s claims to have reduced poverty with its free market policies. Alternatively, the Government’s inaction in light of these massive acts of fraud might be ascribed to basic cowardice — a clearly justified fear that any intervention would, and ultimately did, lead to concerted opposition to the Government. However, given Uribe’s highly pro-active style of Government (he is self-gratifyingly known for the refrain “iron fist, big heart”), and his willingness to aggressively confront “delinquents” such as the country’s guerrilla groups and drug traffickers, his failure to take any significant action against DMG for so long appears bizarre, if not downright strange.

Capturing the State

Perhaps the real answer behind Guzman’s ability to mesmerize the authorities in Bogota into over three years of inaction lies in the emerging revelations about his influence in the very elite circles which now condemn him. DMG went far beyond simply operating in the poorer sectors of society, as could be seen by the well dressed businessmen queuing outside the Camping stadium in desperate hope of recovering some of their funds. Various pillars of the establishment had invested money, or maintained healthy relations with the enterprise, from high profile politicians and businessmen, down to the celebrated soldiers who rescued Ingrid Betancourt and even the President’s children. By employing high profile lawyers and journalists, as well as financing regional politicians, DMG had managed to penetrate the inner circles of the modernizing, progressive, efficient Colombia so often portrayed by Uribe. It is now known, moreover, that Guzman ordered the formation of a “lobby” in Congress to guarantee the legal protection of DMG. This was all part of his strategy of co-opting power from the centre in order to allow his enterprise to keep functioning in impunity. Such events draw comparisons with the ability of Colombia’s drug traffickers to wield significant influence over Bogota’s major political actors since the 1980s.

Stupid People, Greedy Banks, or Something More Obvious?

Meanwhile, the debate as to the roots of the crisis has largely divided into two categories of critiques, both of which are somewhat lacking in explanatory power. For those on the right, wing, moralistic explanations are used to blame the DMG phenomenon on a culture of “lazy, ignorant” people, who prefer to take a risk than engage in hard work. The other explanation, more common among leftists, is to blame the problem on the restrictive nature of Colombian banks. The first theory is essentially unrealistic and contributes little to the debate. How many people in the world, particularly those living in poverty, would resist the opportunity to multiply their savings? What right do middle and upper class people, many of whom inherited their economic and educational status, have to lecture the poor on “easy” money? And while most people could sense that there must have been something illegal or immoral about DMG, it actually did operate legally in venues such as shopping malls, as well as in paying taxes; therefore, it was logical to conclude that it was no more “immoral” than any other aspect of the very thoroughly corrupted society found in Colombia. As for the financial system, it is indeed true that Colombian banks are generally restrictive in terms of the availability of credit, particularly when it comes to poorer sectors of society, but to conclude that the DMG catastrophe never could have occurred if the banking system had been more “progressive,” is illogical. A bank’s function is not to only multiply savings, and no bank in the world could possibly have competed with what DMG was doing. Moreover, in cases where individuals did get access to bank loans, they often invested those loans straight into DMG (the same was also true of many recipients of social services like Familias en Accion).

There are only two really clear policy implications to draw from the entire DMG affair. The first is that, as has been seen in the United States, deregulation of the formal financial sector invites recklessness, and simultaneously causes an accelerated deregulation of the informal and illegal sectors. Ironically, the deregulation of the financial system demanded by the banks worked against their own interest by weakening the regulating body that likely could have stopped DMG years earlier. The other, more profound implication, is that DMG provides the strongest proof yet of the catastrophic failure of Plan Colombia to weaken the grip of sordid illegal actors in the margins of Colombia’s economy and society. This thesis is nothing new: It has been known for years that eradication of coca in one area only causes a “balloon effect” of greater cultivation in other areas. Despite billions of dollars of investment, the quantity and quality of cocaine arriving at North American and European airports has not diminished, suggesting that its production and availability remains stable. Given that it is now widely accepted that DMG worked primarily by laundering profits from drug trafficking, we can infer its spectacular rise as good reason to believe that Colombia will never be free from the economic and social distortions of the drug trade until there is a radical rethinking of cocaine prohibition.

Colombia´s Uncertain Future

Regardless of such implications, the fallout from DMG and the pulverized pyramids left many Colombians waking up on New Year’s Day with a headache far worse than that typically associated with excess aguardiente on New Year’s Eve . DMG’s rise and fall revealed a face to Colombia’s society that had been proclaimed by Government officials to be a thing of the past, and its demise leaves behind a hard core of citizens determined to vote against a President they previously had adored. Along with other recent scandals such as the authoritarian treatment of indigenous protests, revelations about military commanders ordering the assassination of civilians in order to inflate statistics of killed “enemy combatants” the reconstitution of supposedly disbanded paramilitaries as “aguilas negras,” and an increasingly uncertain macro-economic outlook, the fallout from the DMG crisis, is enough to leave the country facing an increasingly uncertain future, with excuses and braggadocio some of the few weapons the government has at hand.

Published in September 2008, the 248-page document though unclassified, is restricted “to U.S. Government agencies and their contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination under the International Exchange Program or by other means.” The Department of the Army urges recipients to “destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.” Wikileaks has guaranteed that the disappearance of this critical primary source into the bowels of the Pentagon will not occur.

Special Warfare’s Nazi Provenance

Since the end of World War II, the United States has acted through proxies either to defeat leftist insurgencies or to subvert “hostile” governments, e.g. those states viewed by Washington and the multinational corporations they serve as ideological competitors.

Historically, U.S. unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine was derived from Nazi experiences in countering “partisan warfare” across Europe during World War II. As analyst and scholar Michael McClintock detailed in his essential study on the topic,

American special warfare doctrine would draw considerably on Wehrmacht and SS methods of terrorizing civilian populations and, perhaps more importantly, of co-opting local factions to combat partisan resistance. The Department of the Army’s A Study of Special and Subversive Operations (November 1947) was an early assessment of the lessons learned from World War II in the context of Cold War imperatives. (Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, p. 59)

But the United States did more than translate captured Wehrmacht and SS documents: they recruited many Waffen SS veterans, often with an assist from high Vatican officials. Tens of thousands of war criminals were spirited out of Europe along “ratlines” into U.S. hands for clandestine war against the new enemy: the Soviet Union and the international left.

Pathological killers such as SS veteran Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, was instrumental when the CIA and the Argentine death-squad generals launched their 1980 “cocaine coup” in Bolivia. Barbie, along with operatives linked to the CIA, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and preexisting Nazi networks, “reorganized” Bolivia’s intelligence services to reflect the Southern Cone’s “changing realities.” (For background, see Robert Parry’s excellent series, Dark Side of Rev. Moon, The Consortium for Independent Journalism)

Even when the “competition” was peaceful and confined to the political-economic spheres, once the U.S. intervened, violence, civil war and chaos followed. This scenario was played out in Chile during the 1970s, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and El Salvador throughout the 1980s, in Yugoslavia and the Balkans generally during the 1990s, today in Bolivia and Venezuela and on a planetary scale under the rubric of the “global war on terrorism” (GWOT). The lesson for those who buck the global hegemon? U.S. political subversion and state terror will wreck havoc and halt independent development in its tracks.

And when the global Godfather’s military forces directly intervene? Although the U.S. was defeated in Southeast Asia, target countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were destroyed by the United States in the process. Devastated economically and socially, decades later these nations have yet to fully recover from the depredations wrought by their American “liberators.” However, the U.S. military did learn certain unique skills, not least of which was the application of selective violence against the communist National Liberation Front’s civilian infrastructure.

The Phoenix Program, meticulously analyzed in researcher Douglas Valentine’s definitive account, was launched in 1967 by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces as a means to win “hearts and minds.” But from its inception, Phoenix operators worked in tandem with drug-linked South Vietnamese and Laotian “allies” and morphed into an assassination and torture program that killed thousands. Long after the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia, lessons learned through Phoenix and related programs such as Condor and Gladio, were “refined” during the 1970s-1980s in Afghanistan, Italy, Turkey and Central America, and now constitute the bedrock on which the Pentagon’s unconventional warfare doctrine operates today.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. power in proxy states was exercised through repressive police, intelligence agencies and by far-right civilian allies (referred to as “foreign internal defense,” FID). Such forces, trained and funded by the U.S., combined a neofascist political outlook with organized criminal activities generally, though certainly not limited to, the international narcotics trade.

NATO’s infamous “stay-behind” Operation Gladio networks in Italy and Turkey for example, worked directly with international narcotics syndicates and pro-fascist political parties such as the Italian Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard) founded by the terrorist drug trafficker Stefano delle Chiaie and the Turkish Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Party, MHP) and the drug-linked terror gang, the Grey Wolves, founded by Alparslan Türkeş, a German sympathizer during World War II.

With links to those nations’ intelligence services, the CIA and the Pentagon, these organizations waged a relentless war against the left through terrorist bombings, murders and assassinations in a bid to destabilize their governments and spark a full-fledged military takeover. Along with the CIA, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) have been instrumental in organizing and waging unconventional warfare with the express purpose of maintaining the economic-political status quo in target countries.

As long-time readers of Antifascist Calling are aware, among the more critical issues explored here are those relating to the intersection of corporate and military power and how those interactions play out on the contemporary political plane to subvert democracy and movements for social justice.

Indeed, reference is frequently made to what I have identified, following Peter Dale Scott and other analysts, as the corporatist deep state: that is, the objective interface amongst political elites, multinational corporations, the military, intelligence agencies and organized crime. Unlike Scott however, I contend these linkages do not “transcend” the left-right continuum, but rather are part and parcel of Washington’s decades-long war against the left, social justice movements generally and in particular, democratic socialist movements from below.

As we will see in my analysis of FM 3-05.130, USSOCOM make these links explicit, arguing that “UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces.”

As I averred, proxy forces, often aligned with far-right groups and organized crime-linked assets (for the most part interchangeable players) are the preferred “irregular forces” employed by Washington. USSOCOM states that this definition “is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW” and goes on to cite its “support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.” It doesn’t get any more explicit than this!

Ideologically Coherent

The authors of FM 3-05.130, far from being militarist troglodytes are knowledgeable and erudite, presenting a broad and ideologically coherent narrative that is both informative and historically intriguing in its transparency and methodological purpose. In other words, unlike their political masters, they don’t pull any punches.

Right up front they inform the reader that UW establishes a “litmus test” which is warfare conducted “by, with or through surrogates” and that their preferred assets are irregular forces:

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political “undesirables.” (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3)

While “conventional warfare” is viewed as a conflict between states, Irregular Warfare (IW) and UW according to FM 3-05.130 is “about people not platforms.” Irregular and unconventional warfare “does not depend on military prowess alone.”

It also relies on the understanding of such social dynamics as tribal politics, social networks, religious influences, and cultural mores. Although IW is a violent struggle, not all participating irregulars or irregular forces are necessarily armed. People, more so than weaponry, platforms, and advanced technology, will be the key to success in IW. Successful IW relies on building relationships and partnerships at the local level. It takes patient, persistent, and culturally savvy people within the joint force to execute IW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5)

Indeed, FM 3-05.130 explicitly states that its “strategic purpose [is] to gain or maintain control or influence over the population and to support that population through political, psychological, and economic methods.” While both IW and UW seek to influence “relevant populations,” UW in contrast to IW, “is always conducted by, with, or through irregular forces.” In other words, local surrogates drawn from relevant far-right and/or organized crime-linked assets are the means of eliciting “influence” over “relevant populations.”

In Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, “irregular forces” deployed during U.S./NATO destabilization operations in the former Yugoslavia included elements of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets, e.g. al-Qaeda, which have been linked to the CIA, Britain’s MI6, Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as long-established drug, arms and human trafficking networks aligned with the Albanian and Turkish Mafias. Indeed, “irregular forces” such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) demonstrated all of these relationships in spades.

According to FM 3-05.130, the constituent elements of contemporary IW theory include: Insurgency; COIN (counterinsurgency); UW; Terrorism; CT (counterterrorism); FID (foreign internal defense); Stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operations; Strategic communication (SC); PSYOP; Civil-military operations (CMO); Information operations (IO); Intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) activities; Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial transactions that support or sustain IW; and Law enforcement activities focused on countering irregular adversaries. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5)

Its but a short step as far as it goes, from citing the elements of UW to deploying the most dubious players as strategic assets in planetary-wide U.S. destabilization operations.

The Media’s Role

Explicitly stated is the media’s role in advancing the goals of United States national power. As recent exposés in The New York Times and elsewhere have documented, “message force multipliers” such as retired Pentagon officials and former high-ranking officers, often linked to corporate defense firms that rely heavily on Pentagon largesse, have leveraged their expertise and conducted illegal domestic psychological operations (PSYOPS) and information warfare, with the complicity and full knowledge of the giant media firms.

It is important for the official agencies of government, including the armed forces, to recognize the fundamental role of the media as a conduit of information. The USG uses SC to provide top-down guidance for using the informational instrument of national power through coordinated information, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the other instruments of national power. The armed forces support SC themes and messages through IO, public affairs (PA), and defense support to public diplomacy (DSPD). The armed forces must assure media access consistent with classification requirements, operations security, legal restrictions, and individual privacy. The armed forces must also provide timely and accurate information to the public. Success in military operations depends on acquiring and integrating essential information and denying it to the adversary. The armed forces are responsible for conducting IO, protecting what should not be disclosed, and aggressively attacking adversary information systems. IO may involve complex legal and policy issues that require approval, review, and coordination at the national level. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-2)

Indeed, as the authors aver, since UW consists of operations conducted “by, with or through irregular forces,” engagement with the “human terrain” is “fundamentally a conflict of ideas”! In a nutshell, the “human terrain” explicitly includes the American public who are also the targets of Pentagon propagandistic “information operations.” This is stated explicitly:

By contrast, USG-controlled specific instruments of informational power, while narrower in scope, can achieve specific and measurable results useful to prosecuting UW. ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] can work with DOS [Department of State] counterparts to identify and engage select TAs [target audiences] that are able to influence behavior within a UWOA [unconventional warfare operating area]. Such TAs may be inside the UWOA itself or outside but able to influence the UWOA. The USG can then subject these TAs, directly or indirectly, to a DOS public diplomacy (PD) campaign coordinated to support the UW effort. Similarly, since UW may be a long-duration or politically sensitive effort, ARSOF and its DOS partner, the Bureau of Public Affairs, can craft a PA campaign intended to keep the U.S. domestic audience informed of the truth in a manner supportive of USG goals and the effective prosecution of UW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-3)

Economic Subversion

For the authors of FM 3-05.130, “properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW.” Never mind that such “manipulation” can and did result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings in Iraq prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation as well as in a score of other nations that have defied the U.S.

The cases of Chile and Nicaragua are instructive in this regard, where the disgraced president, Richard Nixon, vowed to “make the economy scream,” prior to the 1973 coup, or the crippling sanctions and economic embargo imposed on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Various sanctions regimes unambiguously “can build and sustain international coalitions waging or supporting U.S. UW campaigns.” A similar methodology is being applied today against Iran as “punishment” for its legal development of civilian nuclear power.

Like all other instruments of U.S. national power, the use and effects of economic “weapons” are interrelated and they must be coordinated carefully. Once again, ARSOF must work carefully with the DOS and intelligence community (IC) to determine which elements of the human terrain in the UWOA are most susceptible to economic engagement and what second- and third-order effects are likely from such engagement. The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) placement abroad and its mission to engage human groups provide one channel for leveraging economic incentives. The DOC’s can similarly leverage its routine influence with U.S. corporations active abroad. Moreover, the IO effects of economic promises kept (or ignored) can prove critical to the legitimacy of U.S. UW efforts. UW practitioners must plan for these effects. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

Indeed, ARSOF plans for waging UW take an integrated approach and assert that they “can and should exploit the active and analytical capabilities existing in the financial instruments of U.S. power.” The application of financial warfare however, including the “persuasive influence” of state and nonstate “actors” regarding the availability and terms “of loans, grants, or other financial assistance” is predicated on towing the U.S. line. The authors aver that “such application of financial power must be part of a circumspect, integrated, and consistent UW plan.” In other words, threats, bribery and economic subversion generally can work wonders in getting the attention of recalcitrant states not “on board” with the U.S.

Narcotrafficking Networks and the “Global War on Terror”

For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationship amongst international narcotrafficking syndicates, neofascist political groups, U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. Special Forces in the war against leftist adversaries.

Dozens of books and hundreds of articles by journalists and writers such as Alfred W. McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, Henrik Krüger, Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Jonathan Marshall, Douglas Valentine, Daniel Hopsicker, Bill Conroy as well as exposés by former DEA investigators such as Michael Levine and Celerino Castillo III, have documented the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade.

While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into so-called drug eradication programs in target countries such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan and Mexico through ill-conceived projects such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, also know as Plan Mexico, recent reports, most notably by The Narco News Bulletin, have documented the close interrelationships amongst narcotraffickers, rightist extremists, political elites and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Indeed, investigative journalist Bill Conroy recently documented how a U.S. trained and equipped special operations group within the Mexican army (the Zetas) “is now assisting the Mexican military in its narco-trafficking operations along the border.”

None of this however, phases the authors of Unconventional Warfare. And why should it. As they themselves describe the doctrine, unconventional warfare is “conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces,” the next logical step in the equation is the utilization of transnational criminal networks to advance U.S. national power. The section, “Law Enforcement Instrument of United States National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” states this explicitly: no tinfoil hat needed here!

Actors engaged in supporting elements in the UWOA may rely on criminal activities, such as smuggling, narcotics, or human trafficking. Political and military adversaries in the UWOA will exhibit the same sensitivity to official exposure and engagement because criminal entities routinely seek to avoid law enforcement. Sometimes, political and military adversaries are simultaneously criminal adversaries, which ARSOF UW planners must consider a threat. At other times, the methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be useful as supporting elements of a U.S.-sponsored UW effort. In either case, ARSOF understand the importance of coordinating military intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) for specific UW campaigns with the routine intelligence activities conducted by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

During subversive operations by U.S. ARSOF soldiers in target areas, indigenous networks, many of whom are linked to far-right and narcotrafficking groups (Nicaragua, Bosnia, Kosovo), including “former” allies such as al-Qaeda, are referred to as “The Underground” and “The Auxiliary” in FM 3-05.130. Details however, are few and far between and the authors state unambiguously:

There is more SF participation in developing and advising underground [and auxiliary] elements than is widely understood or acknowledged. Most such participation is classified and inappropriate for inclusion in this manual. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

Preparing the ground for U.S. attacks and/or subversive operations by proxy forces aligned with American goals are a key component of UW theory. Whether a population is “on-board” with U.S. geostrategic goals or the tactical modalities employed in such campaigns is irrelevant to the new cold warriors of the GWOT. When “persuasion” fails the muscle moves in to get the attention on the “natives.”

Organization of the larger indigenous population from which the irregular forces are drawn–the mass base–must likewise be conducted primarily by the irregular organization itself under indirect guidance of SF. The primary value of the mass base to UW operations is less a matter of formal organization than of marshaling population groups to act in specific ways that support the overall UW campaign. The mass base, or general population and society at large, is recognized as an operational rather than a structural effort for ARSOF in UW. Elements of the mass base are divided into three distinct groups in relation to the cause or movement–pro, anti/con, and those who are uncommitted, undecided, or ambivalent. ARSOF, the underground, and the auxiliary then conduct irregular activities to influence or leverage these groups. These groups may be witting or unwitting of the UW nature of the operations or activities in which they are utilized. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

In Colombia for example, U.S. “counterdrug” assistance to the corrupt Uribe government flowed directly to the narcotrafficking far-right death squad, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. Though designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, the Uribe government’s military high command, directly advised by the Pentagon, funneled weapons and intelligence that was used by the narcofascists to murder union organizers, often after payment by U.S. multinational corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, of anyone the group identified as a “guerrilla.”

In ARSOF parlance, AUC “influence”–dragging unsuspecting citizens off a bus and beheading them in front of their children, for example–is what is meant when corporate- or drug-linked death squads “conduct irregular activities” to “leverage these groups.” But the international community has another term to describe these activities: state terrorism.

In 2004, as part of broad U.S. efforts to unseat Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities arrested some 100 AUC fighters who were planning to attack specially-selected targets in Caracas. According to published reports, several high-ranking American and Colombian military officers were implicated in the operation.

The parapolitical scandal which continues to rock Bogotá, revealed high-level involvement by Colombia’s political and military elite with the narcofascist AUC. But the scandal also revealed the involvement of the U.S. 7th Special Forces Group and the 1st Psychological Operations Battalion in directly training and advising Colombian military units responsible for the worst human rights abuses.

Numerous reports have emerged that detail these linkages, including the 2007 disclosure by the National Security Archive that Colombian Army commander General Mario Montoya “engaged in a joint operation with a Medellín-based paramilitary group. ‘Operation Orion’ was part of a larger military offensive in the city during 2002-03 to attack urban guerrilla networks. The sweep resulted in at least 14 deaths and dozens of disappearances. The classified intelligence report confirmed ‘information provided by a proven source,’ according to comments from the U.S. defense attaché included in the document.”

This is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however.

In Afghanistan, the world’s number one producer and processor of opium and its finished “product” heroin, bound for European and U.S. markets, drug trafficking according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) in their 2008 World Drug Report, is “out of control.” According to UNDOC, drug money is used as “a lubricant for corruption, and a source of terrorist financing: in turn, corrupt officials and terrorists make drug production and trafficking easier.”

Indeed, since the 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation, opium production has skyrocketed some 1,000% and accounts for a large percentage of the country’s gross domestic product. Tellingly, some of the staunchest U.S. allies in the area are directly tied to international narcotics organizations. According to UNDOC, the global increase in opium production “was almost entirely due to the 17% expansion of cultivation in Afghanistan, which is now 193,000 ha [hectares]” reaching 8,700 metric tons in 2007, accounting for a staggering 92% of global opium production!

Despite these horrendous statistics, the authors of FM 3-05.130 can asset that “the methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be useful”! Indeed they can, as a seemingly limitless source of black funds earmarked for U.S. planetary subversion in the interest of expanding American corporate power.

According to a June 2008 report by The Times, after last year’s bumper crop sent the price of opium spiraling downwards, the Taliban and U.S.-connected drug lords linked to Hamid Karzai’s government, are stockpiling vast quantities of opium in order to induce a rise in world prices. And Time Magazine reported in October that the value of hoarded opium may be as much as $3.2 billion.

Celebrated by the Pentagon and the U.S. media as a “splendid victory,” the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan quickly spiraled out of control and the country now faces a resurgent Taliban, a new base of operations for al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan and evidence of Pakistani ISI involvement in aiding the fundamentalist insurgents and the global drugs trade. But for American unconventional warriors, a full accounting of war crimes that ARSOF supervised and their Northern Alliance “allies” carried out have yet to be answered.

As Peter Dale Scott noted in 2002,

It’s a bitter irony: The largely successful U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan is resulting in an increase of funds for terrorists around the globe.

It is true, as President Bush has insisted, that global terrorism is financed by the flow of illicit drugs. Yet by installing and rewarding a coalition of drug-financed warlords in Kabul, the United States has itself helped restore the flow of Afghan heroin to terrorist groups, from the Balkans and Chechnya to Tajikistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. (”Poppy Paradox: U.S. War in Afghanistan Boosts Terror Funds,” Dissident Voice, August 3, 2002)

Indeed, among the staunchest U.S. allies in the region, characters such as Hazrat Ali and Gul Agha, “have been ‘bought off’ with millions in deals brokered by U.S. and British intelligence.” But while America was happy to endorse a drug-linked status quo that relied on its so-called “warlord strategy” to “stabilize” Afghanistan, part of the blowback from these dubious alliances included allowing bin Laden to escape into Pakistan in 2001 after the “battle” of Tora Bora.

But for Pentagon proponents of unconventional warfare, the “price is always right” when it comes to strategic and tactical alliances with narcotraffickers and international terrorists. After all, since “UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces,” everything is permitted.

Chavez recounted phone conversations he had during the night of March 1st with Ecuador President Rafael Correa, whose land had just been invaded by Colombian troops, pilots and police. Their objective was not Ecuador itself but an encampment of FARC guerrillas located two kilometers inside northern Ecuador.

Raul Reyes, FARC’s second in command, and twenty-four other guerrillas were murdered, many in cold blood. Among those murdered was Olga Marin, Reyes companion and the daughter of Manuel Marulanda, FARC’s founder and leader for 40 years. The guerrillas had not been able to resist, because they were asleep, later found in their underwear, when attacked by planes from the US base Manta in Ecuador, which dropped five “smart bombs”, followed by helicopters flying in from the south of Colombia. Several of them were shot in cold blood directly in the back of the head or face as was the case with Reyes and Julián Conrado, the only cadavers taken to Colombia in a police helicopter. The other persons were found by Ecuadoran troops in the coming hours. Three wounded persons, who were able to hide, were found and gave eye-witness testimony to their rescuers and to an OAS (Organization of American States) investigation team, which later came to the area. Among the dead and wounded were five Mexican students, who were not guerrillas.

President Chavez told the nation that Uribe had lied about the operation to Correa, whom he telephoned after its “success”, as Uribe viewed the blood bath.

“Uribe is a lying lackey of the US Empire, a mafiosa, a criminal supporting para-militarist assassins and a narco-trafficker. He doesn’t want peace.”

[Uribe did nothing to aid the process of returning four captured Colombian congresspersons, which FARC had unilaterally released just two days before this horrible massacre.]

“Uribe operates in the style of Israel, converting Colombia into the key arm of US interests in Latin America just as Israel is in the Middle East.”

“We won’t tolerate this and we must protect our borders against this satellite. Correa has broken diplomatic relations and moved troops to the border. Correa can count on us. Generals, send ten battalions with tanks and aircraft to our border with Colombia!”

In the upcoming investigations by Ecuador, Venezuela and OAS we learned that Operation Phoenix, as the Uribe-US plan was named, used technology not possessed by any Latin America country and which had disclosed where Reyes group was hiding. Army and police units from Colombia cooperated with Ranger army units of the United States operating out of its Manta base. Manta had been used during eight years against Colombian peasants and their armed forces, FARC, as part of the billion dollar-a-year Plan Colombia extermination operation. At least 50,000 Colombians—mostly civilians—had been killed in Plan Colombia’s eight-year operation. And 300,000 had been forced to flee their homes into the welcoming arms of Venezuela. They live there with the same rights and benefits as citizens, just as do all three million Colombian immigrants.

President Correa declared that he will not renew the Manta contract at the end of 2008.

In these days, I witnessed intense concern in La Victoria about a possible war, a subject that embraced everyone across the nation. Just after Chavez’ announcement of cutting diplomatic relations with Colombia and sending troops to the border, I heard my next door neighbors yelling, “Who wants war? Chavez that’s who. It was Ecuador that Uribe violated not Venezuela. Then why mess in it?”

My neighbor across the Plaza Ricaurte park told me, “I support Chavez 100%. I’m ready to die for the fatherland. But I’m tired, tired of the oligarchy, the corruption within the Chavez government, tired of all the waiting. I want it all to end. It’d be better to declare war and get it over with.”

This park contained many opinions. There were those who applauded Chavez’ action and hoped it would prevent Bush-Uribe from testing Venezuela’s will to defend its revolution by sending provocative bullets across the long border, not possible to close off entirely. Then there were the young men with fancy cars and motor cycles who could care less about anything else. As one neighbor described them, “They play with life and wait for capitalism to return in full.”

Both Chavez and Correa had been patient, too patient many militant revolutionaries maintained, with Bush-Uribe provocations. Chavez reminded us of occasions when Colombian soldiers and para-militarists had been captured on Venezuelan soil. They were preparing sabotage and murder, hoping to start a war. Para-militarists sold drugs and pistols to young inane gangsters, hoping to destabilize the government. After some arrests and a short time in prison, Chavez had agreed with Uribe to return them to Colombia. Correa told the world that he had been patient with Uribe too. His troops has found several small FARC camps and turned them away. Colombian soldiers had crossed into Ecuador five times between February 2007 and January 2008. And now this massacre.

During this tense week, Uribe’s generals claimed they had found three computers among Reyes possessions. Miraculously, they were the only material left untouched by the “smart bombs”, and they allegedly showed that Chavez had financed FARC with $30 million. They also claimed that Correa’s people were cooperating and trading with FARC. Correa answered that his emissaries, and Chavez’, were on the verge of accomplishing final negotiations for the number one held prisoner, Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. Chavez had served as the principle international negotiator in the two prisoner releases by FARC. These seven released prisoners, and Betancourt’s mother, all praised Chavez for his humanitarian efforts on television.

Meanwhile in Bogota, the cadaver of Reyes was placed on public display. A newspaper photograph showed a boy hitting his hanging body with a bat while his father stood proudly behind him.

VEA newspaper ran a photograph of a Coca-Cola worker in Venezuela wearing a t-shirt with the words: Don’t Drink Coca-Cola. Although there is no grassroots boycott of Coca-Cola in Venezuela, as there is in Colombia, India, USA, UK and other lands, there is general knowledge that Coca-Cola companies inside Colombia pay death squads to murder workers who try to organize a union, struggling for decent conditions. In fact, Coca-Cola is on trial in Miami for doing just that: murder. Chiquita banana had to pay a $25 million fine for hiring death squads to murder its workers in Colombia. No one went to prison, of course. And Bush-Uribe talk of democracy, accusing Chavez and Correa of financing and cooperating FARC, which the Coca-Cola/Chiquita bosses and their politicians contend are “terrorists.” The devil claims God is the devil.

It is an Alice in Wonderland world we live in!

Just as the Venezuelan troops had settled in at the border, Chavez ordered them home. A week had gone by since the massacre in Ecuador. OAS had met about the conflict and so had the 20-nation member Rio Group. Even before OAS’ investigation was completed, these bodies expressed unanimous agreement that what Uribe did was wrong. They simply needed to read aloud what is written in all the agreements of these bodies, the United Nations and all other international agreements. It is unlawful for any nation to invade another without the agreement of international bodies, namely the UN or OAS, or if not acting in defense of an armed attack by forces of another government.

Uribe said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again.

Chavez called this a great victory for all of Latin America and a great defeat for the US Empire. Fidel did the same in his written reflections. Correa was a bit less optimistic and somewhat taken aback when he saw Chavez embrace the “lying, murderous, criminal…” and then call Uribe to be his “brother” and “friend” a week later.

As the media was proclaiming that calm had returned, another leader of FARC was murdered, this time by a compatriot hired by the Colombian army. Pablo Montova turned on his leader, Iván Rios, killing him and his female companion and then cutting off one of Rios’ hands, which he turned over to the army as proof of his ugly deed. He was to receive $2.6 million for these murders, and the security, according to him, that the army would not murder him and his female companion. Although the death penalty is legally prohibited in Colombia, the government fulfilled its promise of paying the hired killer.

This occurred at the same time that unionists in Colombia and progressives conducted a peaceful march in Bogotá. They sought an end to the internal war and the corrupt Uribe government. Dozens of Uribe’s staff and ministers, connected to narco cartels and para-militarists, had been condemned and even sentenced to prison by a sometimes independent attorney general and Supreme Court. Within three days of this march, three unionist leaders of the protest were murdered, and one had been tortured prior to death.

In the middle of March, Marulanda died of a heart attack. FARC did not announce this, however, for two months. Half of FARC’s seven-man leadership was now dead. It had lost several thousands of its 17-20,000

The brave of FARC is everyone

It is an Alice in Wonderland world we live in!

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

A couple hours later, a bus burst into flames following a seventh small explosion near the international airport of El Dorado. While inner-city violence was once a common occurrence throughout the nation, the past several years have been quite calm in comparison thus creating a new wave of tension and fear among urbanites.

Commander of the metropolitan police, General Rodolfo Palomino, hastily made his accusation clear about the culprits. His unsubstantiated blame lies where one might expect – on the typical scapegoat known around the world as the FARC, Colombia’s leftist guerrilla group with nearly fifty years of state opposition under its belt. As usual the trend is guilty until proven innocent as one would expect in a country where the rule of law has been absent for so long.

Fortunately, neither the Minister of Defense Manuel Santos, nor the city’s Mayor Samuel Moreno, are as reckless to point the finger of accusation without evidence. Santos justifies his reservation by stating that “the guerrilla group lost control of the capital city’s department some time ago”, and as such he believes it unlikely that they were the actors in this display of aggression. Meanwhile, Moreno confirms that the incidents had nothing to do with the current protest marches being conducted by indigenous groups in the department of Cauca Valley.

So, the question arises, who is the responsible party and what was the objective for these acts of aggression? It is natural to immediately interpret that the attacks were meant to be fairly benign; attention getters so to speak. There exists no doubt that if the intention were to target civilians or achieve wide-spread damage, it would have been accomplished. However, that was not the case with these attacks which leads one not only to speculate the motives, but also to rule out the General’s ignorant and expected accusations based on zero credible evidence and inconsistent FARC behavior.

The timing and coordination of the explosions automatically eliminate the possibility of amateur involvement, while the strategic placement of the bombs indicates a willingness to avoid multiple deaths and thus eliminates the possibility of a group wishing to make a bold statement. The subversive and somewhat benign nature of the attacks therefore leaves an opaque understanding of the culprits and their motives.

After having spent three years living in Colombia, while being cognizant of the government’s unwillingness to negotiate with the “terrorists” (FARC) prior to and in the midst of an attempted third term unconstitutional run for Presidency on behalf of Uribe, it is unavoidable to speculate that this somehow may have been an inside job conducted for the simple reason of jolting the public. With so many eyes of humanitarian groups on Uribe and his government, care must be taken to avoid additional criticism. As such, it isn’t difficult to fathom that yesterday’s events were purely intended to raise tensions amongst the populace while it looks to its leader and his security forces for answers. After all, manipulation through fear tactics has been an effective tool of the governing body since long before the FARC arose from the country’s blood-stained soils. Unfortunately, the truth is often evasive in Colombia.

The international environment is favorable to the Colombian state’s strategy of making its enemies invisible before physically attacking them. The US electoral spectacle is a black hole for attention, mainstream and alternative. The US Democrats have a slightly different position from the Republicans on free trade with Colombia, and the question of murdered union leaders even made it into a presidential debate (McCain ignored it, while Obama actually suggested that Colombia’s murdering union leaders was a bad thing). The policies of privatization, social service cuts, militarization, and the pillage of Colombia’s resources by multinationals have been bipartisan for decades. But so has the dispensability of individual Colombian leaders and contractors of dirty work. Perhaps Colombia’s President, Alvaro Uribe Velez, and his team, are worried that their heads could roll if there is a change of administration in Washington. Perhaps they are trying to accelerate their own program to destroy local opposition before this occurs. That may explain the particular brutality of the past few weeks.

The causes of the protest run deeper, however. The history of this part of Colombia mirrors much of Latin America. In the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of people were thrown off their lands through massacre, violence, and civil war (an event called “La Violencia”). Many of these people were then forced to come back to lands that had been theirs, and work as insecure laborers on massive sugar plantations owned by a wealthy elite. Some groups, like the indigenous Nasa of Northern Cauca, over decades of struggle, succeeded in winning back their lands and recovering much of their culture and traditional economy. Many others, including thousands of Afro-Colombian cane workers, struggled hard just to keep themselves and their families alive.

Today, the economics of sugar plantations are absurdly exploitative. In a full 14-hour day of work, a cane cutter can harvest some six tons of cane. That ton gets turned into 200 kg of refined sugar that sells for about $120. The cutter gets, before deductions, about $2.50. After deductions, it’s about $1.50.

The plan is for such plantations to expand massively. And, indeed, much of the land of the 3.5-4 million internally displaced people in Colombia (the majority of whom are Afro-Colombian and a huge disproportion of whom are indigenous) has been taken over by sugar plantation owners. The plan is not just for refined sugar, but also for biofuels. Long after Venezuela’s oil runs out, North Americans will still be able to pour the products of Colombia’s sugar plantations into their car engines.

The enemies of this plan are the indigenous and peasants who want to stay on their land and use it to grow food and a decent agricultural economy, and the laborers who want to be able to survive on their wages. Both are treated the same way: to false accusations, to arrested and murdered leaders, to tear gas, and to bullets. The cane workers have been on strike since September 15 and their demands are heart-breakingly minimalist. They want to have an actual contract, rather than the piecework system they have now; the right to unionize; and a decent salary and working conditions.

On October 19, the indigenous protesters held a press conference to outline their position. “We don’t have a government in Colombia”, said Nasa spokesperson Feliciano Valencia. The indigenous authorities announced their own agenda: “No to the economic model and the FTA’s with the US, Canada and Europe, removal of legislation that impoverishes peoples, destroys and denies rights and freedoms, delivers the wealth of the country to corporate interests and has not gone through consultation with those affected. No more war and terror as the main Government policy. Respect and application of international and national agreements and establishment of the conditions that will allow the people to construct a new, possible and necessary country.” Next Tuesday (Oct 21), they announced, they will march from the site where they are gathered, La Maria Piendamo, to Cali. They will be joined by other movements and organizations. They will accept a dialogue with the government but the military must cease fire and remove itself from the territories.

Colombia’s movements continue to shoulder more than their fair burden against one of the most brutal regimes in the hemisphere. The regime can’t be allowed to drown out their story.

* To read more about and to financially support the cane workers: visit here.

* The statement of the indigenous movement:

On October 13, communities participating in the indigenous protest blocked a portion of the Pan American Highway that connects the cities of Popayán and Santander de Quilichao, in the department of Cauca, in an act of civil disobedience meant to force the government to meet with them to discuss some of their demands. Instead of talks, what resulted was serious confrontations between special police units and the assembled communities.

These unfolding developments come just days after two other Nasa Indians — Nicolás Valencia Lemus and Celestino Rivera — were assassinated by unidentified gunmen early Sunday morning, a few hours before the start of the mobilization. Eyewitnesses say the assassins of Lemus and Rivera were members of the Aguilas Negras, or Black Eagles, one of the newly-formed paramilitary groups that have emerged throughout Colombia in recent months. Their killings bring the total number of indigenous activists murdered in the last three weeks throughout Colombia to 11.

The 39-year-old Lemus, the brother of two well-known Nasa activists, was driving his car on the road from the town of El Palo to the indigenous reserve of Toribio, in the mountainous region of northern Cauca. His wife and son accompanied him. According to eyewitnesses, Lemus was ordered to stop and get out of his car by two hooded gunmen, who proceeded to drill him with bullets in front of his family. The assassins, before leaving the site of the attack, wrote “Aguilas Negras” on the window of Valencia Lemus’ vehicle. Meanwhile, the current governor of Cauca, Guillermo Alberto Gonzalez, denies there are any new paramilitary groups operating in the department. Despite his denials, it appears that a “dirty war” against the indigenous and popular movement in Colombia is well underway, and it is emanating from many different sources.

On October 11, the Council of Chiefs of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) received a call from the office of Cauca’s governor, informing them of intelligence reports that provide evidence that the Teófilo Forero column of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) intended to assassinate the well-known indigenous leader and member of the CRIC’s Council of Chiefs, Feliciano Valencia. On Friday, the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) received a faxed letter from the FARC warning of a campaign of extermination against alleged government collaborators within the indigenous cabildos of Toribio and Jambaló.

It is no coincidence that while government officials repeatedly accuse the indigenous leadership of being manipulated by FARC guerrillas in their protests and mobilizations, the FARC is quick to return the favor, unilaterally targeting so-called sapos, or collaborators, from within the indigenous communities. For the indigenous communities, the results are tragically the same, despite years of declaring their autonomy from all armed actors in the conflict.

Indeed, since receiving a seven-page email threat from a group that described itself as Angry Peasants of Cauca (CEC) on August 11, five indigenous people in Nariño, three in Caldas, and now three in Cauca have been assassinated. The governor of the indigenous cabildo of Canoas, also in Cauca, was saved only by the courageous act of a member of his community, who refused to provide details of his whereabouts to armed gunmen who were looking for him two weeks ago. It should be pointed out that indigenous activists are not the only victims of this latest wave of political violence. Along with the above-mentioned murders, an Afro-Colombian leader in Tumaco, two non-indigenous peasant activists in Cauca, and Olga Luz Vergara, a woman’s rights leader from the organization Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres in Medellín, have also been assassinated in the last month.

Before the October 12 mobilization began, indigenous leaders both in Cauca and on the national level warned about the potential for a repressive backlash against the indigenous movement on the part of the state security forces, as well as other armed actors in their territory. That fact that President Uribe declared a “state of internal commotion” on the eve of the protests gave the indigenous leadership considerable reason to be alarmed, despite the president’s assurances that the extraordinary measure was invoked to address the growing crisis in the judicial system, crippled by a four-week strike of judicial workers throughout the country.

As stipulated in the 1991 Constitution, the “state of internal commotion,” allows the president to govern without the oversight of the legislature, giving the president unprecedented powers, particularly in the area of security and “public order.” In announcing his decision to invoke this measure, Uribe pointed to the 2,600 “delinquents” who have been released as a result of the 42-day judicial workers strike, saying that something needed to be done to reign them in and resolve the crisis facing the country’s legal system. The “state of internal commotion” and Uribe’s increasingly authoritative approach to domestic affairs, therefore, was once again justified in the name of security.

Now that the government and the judicial workers union, ASONAL, seemed to have reached a tentative deal on a new contract on Tuesday, the big question is whether or not the president will deactivate the measure, criticized by many constitutional scholars as unnecessary, if not altogether undemocratic. We will probably find our answer to this question in the way the government is confronting the indigenous mobilization in La Maria, Cauca, where helicopters and heavily-armed riot police of the so-called Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squad (ESMA) are surrounding the communities. In earlier, similar mobilizations organized by the indigenous movement, the government refused to negotiate with the leadership until they lifted their blockade of the Pan American highway. Even then, excessive use of force was applied against the communities in November 2005 and October 2006. To this day, the movement’s demands regarding the return of lands promised to the indigenous groups by previous governments — the essence of their earlier actions — have fallen on deaf ears.

In the face of the unfolding crisis, ACIN, along with regional and national indigenous organizations, have communicated directly to Santiago Cantón, the Secretary General of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights of the Organization of American States, calling on the commission to directly monitor the situation in Cauca. Making matters worse for ACIN, by early Tuesday afternoon, their website was shut down and made unavailable, further complicating its ability to communicate information about the mobilization and subsequent crackdown to the outside world.

The ongoing protests in Cauca are a continuation of the movement’s “Liberation of Mother Earth” campaign, initiated by the indigenous communities in 2005. This land recuperation and resistance effort was organized by the leadership in response to the government’s failure to fulfill its obligations to the victims of the December 16, 1991 massacre of 20 indigenous people from the Huellas community, including five women and four children, who were murdered as they met to discuss a struggle over land rights in the El Nilo estate.

The 1991 massacre had followed a pattern of harassment and threats against the Nasa community by gunmen loyal to local landowners who were disputing the community’s claim to ownership of the land. The Special Investigations Unit of the Office of the Attorney General, which handled the first stages of the investigation, uncovered evidence of the involvement of members of the National Police, both before and during the execution of the massacre.

As a result of these findings, the Colombian government agreed to return 15,600 hectares of land to the community that had been targeted by the assassins. As was widely reported at the time, in 1998, then-President Ernesto Samper publicly apologized for the role the state played in this atrocity and promised to compensate the victims. Yet Samper’s public apologies contrasted considerably with the attitude of President Alvaro Uribe, who stated publicly upon taking office four years later that there were simply no resources to provide any more lands to the indigenous communities affected by the massacre. The president’s stance marked the beginning of a very rocky relationship.

In his six years in office, Uribe has followed a strategy of outright defiance against the indigenous community’s demands, not only in Cauca, but also throughout the country. He has made it a practice to accuse ACIN, CRIC, and even indigenous members of the Colombian Congress, of being accessories to delinquency and criminality. This week’s mobilizations are part of the movement’s ongoing response to what they perceive to be the government’s intransigence towards indigenous people.

It is ironic that on this, the same day that government forces are directly confronting indigenous protesters who are demanding, among other things, compensation for the massacre of 20 Nasa people in Huellas in 1991, Colombia’s State Council ordered the government to pay $3-million in compensation to 82 family members of at least 40 indigenous Colombians that were massacred by paramilitary forces in Naya, Cauca in 2001.

According to the State Council in a ground-breaking ruling issued on Tuesday, just as the government was complicit in the 1991 attack, the Colombian state neglected to prevent the incursion of paramilitary groups that led to the murder of at least 40 people—some reports say the number was closer to 100—and the forced displacement of another 3,000 in Naya ten years later. At the time of the Naya massacre, the government of President Andres Pastrana had ignored repeated warnings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about a possible upcoming paramilitary incursion in the area.

In the infamous 2001 attack, 500 men of the Calima Bloc of the paramilitary organization Self –Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) murdered people with chainsaws in several villages in the Naya area of western Cauca. This is the same Calima Bloc whose founder, the jailed paramilitary commander Ever Veloza, alias H.H., now claims to be responsible for influencing the gubernatorial elections that brought Uribe-ally and anti-indigenous politician Juan Jose Chaux to power in Cauca in 2003. Chaux recently resigned as Uribe’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic when it was revealed that he had close ties to paramilitary groups in Cauca. As governor of Cauca, Chaux developed the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most racist, anti-indigenous politicians in the country, regularly employing derogatory language to describe the indigenous movement and its leaders. On August 11, 2008, that same language was contained in the previously mentioned email threat sent to ACIN and CRIC. The thousands of indigenous protesters in La Maria currently facing government forces understand very well that they should take such threats lightly.

Recognizing the uncanny ability of Uribe to get his message across to the Colombian people through its powerful public relations machine, organizers of the current popular mobilization have been putting out statements of their own for weeks about the nature of their protest. In essence, the indigenous movement, in alliance with other popular sectors, has a comprehensive program that it is promoting within the context of the current political crisis, maintaining an extremely critical view of the Uribe government, while stating unequivocally its independence from the guerrillas or any other armed group.

For weeks, members of ACIN’s communication team have been carrying out an education campaign throughout northern Cauca, speaking directly with locals about the current threats facing the indigenous movement in assemblies, workshops and town hall-style meetings, held all over the region everyday leading up to Sunday’s mobilization. In these so-called barridos, as well as in their many communiqués, the organization consistently says “no to free trade agreements like the ones negotiated behind closed doors with the United States, Canada, the European Union,” trade deals that look “to displace us of our rights, our culture, our knowledge and our territory.” Tied to this is their vehement opposition to the many constitutional counter-reforms and legislative measures that have been implemented under the current government that have chipped away at the territorial rights of the country’s 85 indigenous communities.

They are also demanding that the government comply with a series of agreements, accords and conventions that have been signed with the indigenous communities over the past 16 years, but that up to now have been systematically ignored, including the ones relating to the Nilo massacre. And they are calling for an end to the militarization of their territories, whether it is manifest in the widespread presence of state security forces in the area, FARC guerillas or paramilitary groups working under the auspices of powerful local interests. CRIC and ACIN and all the other indigenous organizations in the country are simply making sure history does not repeat itself on their territories and that the blood of their people is not spilled once again with complete impunity.

Photographs of men, women and children search out your eyes from the gallery walls. They are all victims of the state, murdered by the Colombian armed forces or by “paramilitary” forces acting on behalf of the government or the trans-national corporations who call the tune in this troubled country. Each face represents many more victims of assassinations or forced disappearances in recent years, whose names are lost to memory and whose bodies have never been recovered.

“It is better to die for something than to live for nothing,” in the words of Eduardo Umana Mendoza, whose smiling face beams down from his memorial plaque. He was a human rights lawyer murdered in his forties. Most of the victims represented in the Memory Gallery died for expressing their opinions or for trying to organize against repression. Some were killed as a warning to others. Some were simply guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After eight years of planning and research, the Memory Gallery opened in Cali in 2007. One of the organizers, Freddi Caicedo, said it is hard for human rights activists and families of victims to find spaces to remember them. Landlords and rental agents don’t want to rent their buildings for such a purpose. They are afraid. Project organizers also travel to universities and street locations with photographs, encouraging others to share their own stories, to remember their own dead. “Without remembering, the crimes will continue,” said Caicedo.

But with or without remembering, the crimes continue.

Between 1982 and 2005 paramilitary forces perpetrated more than 3,500 massacres and stole more than six million hectares of land (a hectare equals two-and-a-half acres) in Colombia, according to Memory Gallery statistics. Colombia now contains more than four million displaced persons or internal exiles. Who was robbed? Mostly poor farmers and indigenous groups, growing food for their own use. Who took over the land? Large corporations, running high-profit mono-crop agribusiness.

Though supposedly demobilized in 2002, paramilitary forces are still blamed for about six hundred murders a year. About a third of the national legislature is estimated to be under their control. Also since 2002, the National Armed Forces have committed more than 950 executions. In January 2008 alone, paramilitaries committed two massacres, murdered eight people and “disappeared” nine others, while the Army executed sixteen people without benefit of any judicial process. At least twenty union leaders have been murdered so far this year.

The U.S. government enables the violence, repression and dispossession that constitute Colombia’s “permanent crisis.” In the name of fighting leftist guerillas and the war on drugs, the U.S. government-funded Plan Colombia supplies the Colombian armed forces with sophisticated weaponry and military training.

U.S. support funds few social programs or schools. Eighty percent of the Colombian gross national product goes to war. Paramilitary forces do not fight narcotics traffickers, but poor farmers. Coca eradication campaigns poison huge tracts of land on which small farmers grow subsistence crops. The pseudo drug war despoils the land, forcing small famers to migrate to cities, freeing up that land for corporate control. Meanwhile illicit drug production and export continues unabated.

Colombian activists have condemned more than thirty prominent multi-national corporations for employing paramilitaries to harass and murder workers, farmers, union leaders and student protestors. The list of these human rights abusers contains some familiar names: Coca Cola, Chiquita Brands, Del Monte, Nestle, Occidental Petroleum and others. How can these companies — and the U.S. government — literally get away with murder? U.S. media parrot the Bush administration line that Colombia (and the trans-national corporations) are fighting for freedom.

Who will tell the people that the opposite is true? Your U.S. tax dollars support kidnapping, torture and murder on a massive scale in Colombia. Eight years ago there were 70,000 soldiers in all the Colombian armed forces combined. Now the police and military number 450,000, made up partly of dispossessed impoverished job-seekers. As the U.S. outsources war to Halliburton and Blackwater, Colombia does the same with paramilitaries. In many ways Colombia seems merely a less inhibited, because less scrutinized, version of Bush America.

On a quickie visit in July — miraculously coinciding with the high-profile release of Ingrid Betancourt and other FARC hostages — John McCain declared his support for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, despite Uribe’s scandalous human rights record, his phony, ineffectual “war” on drugs and his attempt to subvert the country’s judicial branch. No reporter challenged McCain or Uribe about any of it.

Information is just one more important resource the authorities want to control. Colombia’s prodigal natural wealth has proved to be its curse, from the days of El Dorado, the fabled lost city of gold, which drove the invading Spaniards into a frenzy of exploitation, enslavement and genocide of native peoples.

With U.S. backing, on behalf of the multi-national corporations, including major narco-traffickers, the Colombian government continues the rapacious tradition of seizing lands and water sources which once benefitted many, in order to enrich its own patrons, the mighty few. Formerly a major sugar exporter, Colombia must now import sugar for its domestic use. The huge tracts of sugar cane here are grown now for use as bio-fuels, a more lucrative, if less nourishing enterprise.

A couple hours’ drive outside the city of Cali, the picturesque town of Trujillo lies in a verdant valley, its church steeple pointing heavenward. But Trujillo’s bucolic façade masks a hidden horror. Over the course of eight years, the twenty thousand residents of this town suffered a slow-motion massacre, the tortures, disappearances and murders of 342 people. Major drug traffickers in the region allied with the Army and Police to get rid of anyone they wished, with no fear of prosecution.

At the town’s own memory gallery, a sign declares: “Trujillo, a drop of hope in a sea of impunity.” Here too the faces of the murdered victims — many very young — beckon us and implicate us in their unfair destinies. Several widows, one of whom also lost two sons, fourteen and sixteen, came out to see the American visitors. Still emotional about their losses, they were eager — almost desperate — to share their stories.

The people of Trujillo have begun an ambitious memorial project. When the Colombian government offered to pay reparations to the town, the families of the victims bought a large tract of land, an entire hillside, to build a memorial. Our guide was a twenty-two year old woman whose father was disappeared when she was four. At the time her pregnant mother also had a three-year-old and an eleven-month-old. Her father was twenty-six when he was taken, along with his two brothers, partners in a carpentry business. Why were they tortured and killed? Perhaps they saw something they shouldn’t have. Perhaps they complained too loudly.

The Trujillo memorial wall winds up a hill beside a stone path, with names and dates of death or disappearances. Children were busy on the day of our visit, scraping and whitewashing the walls. Many of the murdered were young: 17, 39, 26…. Villagers who marched to demand a better road and a health clinic were labeled agitators and murdered. One old man, the town character, was ordered killed by troops to prove their loyalty to their commanders. Nine people are included in the memorial who died of broken hearts, after the torture and murder of their children.

Trujillo’s priest, Father Tiberio Fernandez Mafla, organized worker co-ops to help his parishioners make more money. When the disappearances began, Father Tiberio denounced the kidnappings from the pulpit and demanded the safe return of the victims. Returning from a funeral, he too was detained and disappeared, along with his niece. His decapitated body, missing hands and feet and genitals, was found in the river. Cali’s Memory Gallery is named in his honor.

A fellow visitor to Trujillo, Tom Clements, said he hoped the next U.S. president would tell Alvaro Uribe that Plan Colombia will not survive, nor will any Free Trade Agreement be signed, until genuine reparations are made to the victims of state-protected terror in Colombia, including the end of impunity for the known perpetrators, starting in Trujillo. Tom’s idea is morally sound, but unlikely to happen.

The suffering, the courage and the determination of the Colombian people, in Trujillo and Cali and many other places, is inspirational and heartbreaking. A Memory Gallery sign says: “Neither forgiving nor forgetting, we seek truth, justice and fundamental healing.” The United States government and leading U.S. corporations, too long complicit in the spread of terror and injustice in Colombia, should spearhead the drive for that truth, justice and healing. They/you/we can’t claim they don’t know.

Unlike most Latin American countries, Colombia has never experienced the modernization of its political system. Since the 19th century Liberal and Conservative parties run by urban and rural oligarchies have controlled the political process through violence and patronage.

Middle and working class ‘radical’ and center-left parties in Colombia have been violently repressed and marginalized, in contrast to the political differentiation, which took place in Chile and Argentina in the early 20th century. No labor or social democratic or Marxist parties were allowed to secure representation and legitimacy unlike the experience in Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia or elsewhere in Sough America. The ‘two party system’ based on oligarchic family elites were ill prepared to accommodate and accept the challenges of the burgeoning urban working class and rural peasant movements of the post-World War period. In Colombia, resistance to plural social representation and to a multi-party system reflecting lower class interests took the form of civil war – la violencia – as the Liberal and Conservative Parties resorted to massive blood letting in the 1950’s to resolve which of the two factions of the ruling class would rule. The result was a bi-partisan pact to alternate the presidency between the two parties. The key theoretical point is that the unity of the Colombian elite was based on rule through mass violence, social exclusion and the monopoly of political power.

Colombia’s failed ‘transition to modernity’ was based exclusively on the selective introduction of Western institutions of counter-insurgency by a traditional oligarchy devoted to the politics of mass exclusion. The historical legacy of oligarchic party continuity and mass violence provides the framework for the contemporary practice of elections and death squads.

Calvo Ospina’s study provides detailed accounts explaining the pervasive influence of the US government in Colombian politics. The entire senior officer corps with command of troops and control of strategic intelligence agencies have passed through US military and indoctrination programs. In fact, attendance and certification by US military programs are a necessary step up the career ladder. Central to these training programs is ‘counter-insurgency’; training Colombian officials to violently repress any mass movements which challenge the Colombian oligarchy allied with Washington. The strategies taught by the US military instructors include the recruitment and arming of paramilitary death squads; ambitions junior military officers are pre-selected by the US military for their political loyalty to the US and aptitude for engaging in war against the Left and the mass movements led by their own compatriots. Calvo Ospina provides numerous ‘case studies’ of Colombian generals who follow this ‘career path’: From selection and training in the US ‘advanced’ military training schools, to command of troops, to protectors and promoters of death squads, to authors of multiple massacres against civilians, to recipients of numerous decorations from Colombian presidents and visiting US political and military dignitaries (page 213).

Calvo Ospina’s study synthesizes a wealth of testimony, documents, news reports, eye witness accounts and human rights investigations detailing the organic links between the Colombian government (including the Uribe cabinet) over 60 members of Colombia’s congress (allied to Uribe), right-wing governors and mayors and the 30,000 strong death squads, the principle of which was Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia ( United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). In fact, the rise of Uribe from Governor of Antioquia to the Presidency was linked to his ties with the death squads (page 235). Calvo Ospina’s study demolishes claims that the ‘death squads’ operate independently of the state. Not only are the death squads an arm of the state, but they also play a major role in linking the oligarchy and the political elite to the multi-billion dollar narcotics trade. The study provides us with a clear account of the complex network of inter-locking elites made up of the Colombian ruling class, the US imperial apparatus and the Colombian military. While the death squads played a major role in the killing of thousands of popular leaders and dispossessing 3 million peasants, they received the support of the Colombian oligarchy. Once the military and the regime, with $5 billion USD in US military aid, took possession of disputed regions from the guerrillas, the death squads were in part demobilized. The growth and decline of the death squads was clearly a result of US and Colombian policy: They were ‘tactical’ instruments designed to carry out the bloodiest tasks of purging civil society of popular, mass-based opposition. Calvo Ospina’s detailed survey of the horrific human rights record of the first five years of Uribe’s rule stands in stark contrast to the barrage of favorable propaganda showered on the macabre figure after freeing Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt by Bush, Sarkozy, Zapatero, Chavez, and Castro among others. During the first three years of the Uribe Presidency (August 2002- December 31, 2005) over one million Colombians were forcibly displaced, the great majority peasants violently uprooted and dispossessed of their land and homes by the death squads/military, who subsequently seized their land under the pretext of eliminating potential supporters of the FARC and other social movements. The peasants-turned-urban-squatters, who became local leaders, subsequently were assassinated by the regime’s secret political police (DAS) or death squads. Uribe’s regime has murdered over 500 trade union activists and leaders since coming to power in 2003. One trade union leader succinctly summed up the dismal political choices for Colombian activists: “In Colombia its easier to organize a guerrilla (movement) than a trade union. Anyone who doubts that should try to organize one at their workplace” (page 348). According to the European Union, more than 300 human rights activists were murdered by the Uribe regime in its first term of office (page 349). In the first two years of his regime, Uribe was responsible for the assassination or ‘disappearance’ of 6,148 unarmed civilians in non-combat circumstances.

The use of paramilitary death squads promoted/financed and protected by the Uribe regime to murder and ‘disappear’ popular leaders serves several strategic political goals: It allows the regime to lower the number of human rights abuses attributed to the Colombian Armed Forces; it facilitates the extensive use of extreme terror tactics – public amputation and display of dismembered corpses – to intimidate entire communities (psychological warfare); it creates the myth that the regime is ‘centrist’ – opposed by the ‘extreme left’ (FARC) and the ‘extreme right’ (death squads, especially the AUC). This claim is particularly effective in furthering the regime’s diplomatic relations in the US and Europe, providing a convenient alibi for liberals and social democrats who provide Colombia with military and economic aid.

Calvo Ospina’s study of US-Colombian relations provides useful insights into the mutual benefits to Colombia’s ruling class and the empire. The death squads (sicarios) were originally organized by the Colombian elites to destroy peasant movements pursuing agrarian reform. With the massive entry of $6 billion USD in US military aid and several thousands US Special Forces, the death squads expanded from scattered, decentralized local killers into centralized 30,000 strong extension of US and Colombian counter-insurgency forces. They were oriented exclusively to exterminating villages and social organizations in guerrilla-influenced regions. Calvo Ospina’s study highlights the central role of the Colombian ruling class as well as the US military in the growth of the totalitarian terrorist state. His study clearly rejects the simplistic view of many on the Left who see oppression, exploitation and terror simply as impositions by ‘outside forces’ (imperialism). The theoretical point is that the US military’s entry, expansion and influential role was possible because it coincided with the long-term, large-scale interests and needs of the Colombian ruling class.

The most important contribution of Calvo Ospina’s study of Colombian politics is his account of the construction and elaboration of a totalitarian terrorist regime, with the open collaboration and support of US, European and Latin American capitalist democracies.

The infrastructure of totalitarian terror defines the boundaries, content and participants of electoral politics. It includes: Rule by Presidential decrees suspending all constitutional guarantees (page 295); A nationwide secret police network of 1.6 million spies (page 296); Peasants forcibly recruited and forced to act as local military collaborators (“Soldiers of My People”) in 500 of Colombia’s 1,096 municipalities; 30,000 military-trained and armed death squad paramilitary forces; 300,000 active military forces, the DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguidad – Security Administrative Department) – the secret police numbering in the tens of thousands. The private militias of landowners, bankers and business leaders involving private security agencies number over 150,000 gunmen.

Colombia is the most militarized country in Latin America. The Congress, electorate, judiciary and civil service exercise no effective control. The constitutional protections are totally non-existent. The scope and depth of human rights violations exceed those of any military dictatorship in recent Latin American history, including those in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia.

The totalitarian terrorist infrastructure of the state defines the political character of the political system. The electoral process serves exclusively as a façade facilitating ‘normal relations’ with liberal, conservative and social democratic regimes in Europe and North and South America. In effect their praise and support of Uribe in the aftermath of the Betancourt affair served to legitimize the terrorist regime. Their condemnation of the FARC was also a rejection of the anti-totalitarian and anti-terrorist left.

While Calvo Ospina’s study has deepened our understanding of the structure and practice of contemporary totalitarian terrorist regimes, there is a need to proceed further to examine the emerging mass base of support for the regime. Uribe mobilized over one million Colombians against the FARC in the spring of 2008 in support of his totalitarian regime, at a time when the mass media, the Colombian judiciary and former leaders of the death squads revealed that scores of pro-Uribe Congresspeople, Cabinet Ministers and Generals were linked to the AUC. In other words, hundreds of thousands of middle class Colombians knowingly embraced a totalitarian leader.

The emergence of mass-based totalitarianism, replacing the traditional authoritarian oligarchy, is part of the emergence of new virulent right-wing politics in Latin America. In Bolivia, the far-right Santa Cruz ruling class has combined a mass middle class base with its own ‘para-military’ shock forces in pursuit of ‘autonomy’ (secession) and control over the massive oil and gas revenues accruing from partnerships with foreign multinationals. In Argentina, the hard right in the provinces has built a mass base of several hundred thousand in defense of huge commodity profits. In Venezuela, the hard right can put several hundred thousand in the street and engages its own paramilitary shock troops.

The emergence of the totalitarian right coincides with the inability of the ‘center-left’ and the left to capitalize on the commodity boom to finance structural changes and organize the working and rural poor into ‘fighting forces’.

In Colombia, the center-left (Polo Democrático) has generally sided with the Uribe right against the FARC – and in the process given a powerful impetus to the regime’s attraction of the mass urban middle class. The ‘center left’ regimes’ embrace of agro-mineral export strategies in the rest of Latin America have immobilized the masses and vastly increased the power of the new totalitarian right and encouraged their use of ‘direct action’ tactics. Far from Uribe’s Colombia being the ‘exception’ to a ‘progressive wave’ in Latin America, it is more realistic to view him as emblematic of the new totalitarian leaders who combine elections and political terrorism.

Colombia, as Calvo Ospina describes it, is indeed the ‘Laboratory of the Extreme Right’. Uribe’s success spells danger for the workers, peasant and popular movements of Latin America.

In the evenings the streets fill up with strollers window shopping on their way home from work and no one seems to be in a rush. They stop and chat with acquaintances in this city where, despite a growing population, everyone seems to know each other. In fact, there is little to distinguish Pasto, Nariño, except for its governor, Antonio Navarro Wolf, a former guerrilla leader of the M-19.

Wolf is a folk hero to many on the left in Colombia. Running on the platform of “Zero corruption,” he was elected mayor of the city of Pasto where he served until he ran for the national senate. He won his bid for the senate to represent the federal district of Santa Fé de Bogotá with the largest percentage of the votes ever tallied for a single senator in Colombia and only narrowly missed taking the leadership of president of Colombia’s left party, the Democratic Left Pole (PDI), the position being won by former president Carlos Gaviria. His influence on the writing of the Constitution of 1991 was significant and led to the inclusion of many progressive elements that today haunt Colombia’s right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe.

Wolf has been governor of Nariño for just over six months, and while the changes may not yet be visible outside of the government building housing his offices, within the building there are young faces, several of whom, in strategic places such as the Ministry of Agriculture and the Office of Community Development, are indigenous. Nubia del Rocío Tatamues, Sub-secretary of Community Development, and Minister of Agriculture Javier Cuaical Alpala represent the Nariño government’s attempts to deepen democracy and focus on what Wolf calls “ethnodevelopment.”

Recently, Navarro Wolf granted me an exclusive interview in his office where we talked for over an hour about his life in politics, what he hopes to accomplish as governor of Nariño, and his views on the current situation in Colombia.

The government building housing Wolf’s office is somewhat elegant with sparkling hardwood floors and a courtyard with an enormous chessboard that could easily represent the governor’s approach to politics with a national government reputed to be the most right wing in today’s Latin America.

Wolf’s office is clean and neat and the man sitting behind the desk doesn’t look like someone who spent years underground in the cities and the jungle. He’s properly dressed and looks like any other higher government functionary, but one might guess that these neat clothes and business-like manner are also disguises for a man determined to help turn his country upside down. I wonder this to myself as I sit down: how much of the revolutionary is left in this man who hides his age better than his wounds from a failed-assassination attempt? The limp from the missing leg is noticeable, but the speech problems are more so.

“I was a guerrilla for 16 years in the M-19 movement, from 1974 to 1990. In 1990 we signed a peace agreement with the national government and we began our eighteen years of what you could call our legal political activity. So I’ve been doing political work now for thirty four years,” he tells me.

I ask him why he became a guerrilla in the first place. “There were a number of reasons at the time,” he said. “First, there had been an electoral fraud (in Colombia), taking place on April 19 of 1970, hence our name, the Movement of the 19 of April. It was also a time of the guerrilla all over Latin America. A that point the Sandinistas were still fighting in Nicaragua, as well as [the FMLN in] El Salvador, in addition to all the older guerrillas from the 1950s. And so, at that time, it seemed possible to bring about reforms by the use of arms, especially when the electoral [route to change] seemed closed.”

Wolf had been a student activist when he entered the movement. He recounts this dramatic part of his life quickly, as if it were a brief and minor incident and not a sixteen-year saga during which time he “was involved in everything.”

“I fought in the mountains, was captured, tortured, freed and then almost murdered, lost a leg… and then negotiated a peace agreement with the government, which we signed a year later in 1990. Why did we sign [the peace accord]? Simply because we saw that armed struggle was going nowhere and we would never win — even if we weren’t going to lose.”

Those conditions, which led the M-19 to negotiate a peace, included the rise of the paramilitary organizations and the backing the government received from the U.S., combined with the fact that Colombians, who for a few years had supported the guerrillas, in their majority, now opposed the armed struggle for power.

“In the mountains you can easily lose perspective for what you’re doing,” Wolf says. “But we noticed that the conditions in Colombian society were changing. It was no longer the rural society of the 60s and 70s, but an increasingly urban society. And without the support of the majority of society, we weren’t going to win. We weren’t going to lose; we could have maintained our positions, but there wasn’t enough support nor social conditions for a victory, either, and we knew conditions would simply deteriorate with time. Armed struggle is a method to achieve political victory, and that method would no longer work to achieve a political victory, so we signed the peace agreement and entered the legal political struggle.”

The M-19 began an internal discussion about a negotiated settlement in 1979 and then made their first unsuccessful attempts to negotiate peace in 1984. In that sense, the M-19 were what Wolf called the “precursors” of those guerrilla groups that negotiated peace agreements. They were followed by the FMLN in El Salvador in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, and other smaller guerrilla groups in Colombia, like the EPL (Popular Liberation Army), the Armed Indigenous Movement.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), however, thought they could achieve a military victory and refused to negotiate. “They still believe that, even though conditions continue to deteriorate for them,” says Wolf. “Ten years ago, 1998, was their high point in terms of military strength, capacity and results. That’s when they should have made peace. It may be that they won’t be defeated, but their time for possible victory is completely gone now.”

Needless to say, Wolf feels that the FARC/ELN made a big mistake by not seizing the opportunity to move from armed to legal political struggle when it arose.

“If we had all signed peace agreements at the same time, I feel sure we would be in a situation like El Salvador, with a strong left on the point of political victory.”

The fact that guerrilla groups have signed different agreements at different times has weakened the left in Colombia, even though Wolf also feels that there is still great potential for a strong left party in the country. Nevertheless, the presence of the FARC/ELN as an armed, left guerrilla movement, has not only tended to limit support for legal left political organizations, like the Democratic Left Pole (PDI), but has also helped, more than anything else, to strengthen the right wing in Colombia.

“We [the legal left] continue paying the bill because their [FARC/ELN] presence and activities continue to hurt the left working in electoral politics by affecting uninformed public opinion since the right wing continues to associate us with the FARC. And today, the only way to transform society is through the electoral process.”

Could it be that the FARC doesn’t want to sign a peace accord because it fears a repeat of the massacres of the 1980s into the 1990s of the Patriotic Union (UP) when FARC members attempted to take the electoral route and between two and five thousand members were murdered by paramilitaries? And how did the M-19 escape a similar fate?

“We signed the peace accord in spite of that [slaughter of the UP] because we felt that by making a complete commitment to separate ourselves from armed struggle we would have some sort of guarantees. Of course, some of our members were killed, but we weren’t entirely eliminated, nor were even the majority of us killed. In general, we were respected. The situation of the UP was quite different; they had an element against them. The guerrilla continued to be armed while people connected to that guerrilla tried to do electoral political work, the simultaneous combination of two forms of struggle. This is similar to other situations, like ETA and Batasuna in Spain or the IRA and Seinn Fein, at one time, in Ireland. On the other hand, we made a public commitment to legal process with zero connection to the armed struggle.”

In 1990, the M-19 ran their former military commander for president of Colombia, Carlos Pizzaro, who was murdered before the elections. His funeral brought out massive numbers of people into the streets and Wolf took his place in the elections, coming in third place with 12.7 percent of the vote. The outpouring of support shown for Pizarro at the funeral, Wolf believes, protected other members of the M-19 from a similar fate. Thus began the legal, political struggle of Antonio Navarro Wolf and the M-19.

How has that legal struggle been? “Difficult. Difficult. But we won great support after the death of Carlos Pizzaro and were about a third of the National Assembly, playing a decisive role in the writing of the Constitution. And so that year, 1990-1991, was a year of great hope. But then it became very difficult. We had nothing. We had no money, nor experience in electoral politics. But the later development of the PDI came as the result of getting more experience and we’re all there [in the PDI]: the demobilized M-19, the ex- Communist Party, the Maoist left, people from all sectors of the left, we’re all there.”

The PDI is working in coalition with smaller centrist parties under the umbrella organization of the Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA). I ask Wolf if the PDA is going to go the route of the Frente Amplio of Uruguay or the Worker’s Party of Brazil which, by including the center, became a peculiarly “left” version of capitalism. The so-called “Pink Tide,” with perhaps the exception of Venezuela, and certainly of Cuba, hasn’t demonstrated a predilection for anything socialist but the rhetoric associated with it. Most would argue that the economies of the so-called “pink” nations of Latin America have continued to be thoroughly dependent capitalist economies.

Wolf, by contrast, doesn’t seem to like the rhetoric associated with “socialism,” especially given his Colombian context, so he uses the language of “democracy,” “opportunity,” “justice,” and “equality.” The inclusion of the centrist parties in the PDA has created a party which, “it seems to me, is too far to the right.” This year, he says, “we’ll be dealing with this issue [about whether or not to include the centrist parties in the PDA]. I think what we’ll end up with will be three distinct choices: a right wing with Uribe; a center; and a left alternative.

I raise the question of his proposal, in 2006, of government subsidies for housing in which he proposed giving the poor of his country $100 per month to help with housing. He dismisses the proposal immediately.

“I proposed that at one moment without considering the consequences of how it would be paid, of the intermediaries and so forth. These direct subsidies have many problems. They feed into the clientelism you see all over the world. Along with that comes the deterioration of ideas, proposals and political lines. In the end, you have poor people just voting for the subsidies [and not candidates]. And finally, all this public assistance is ultimately unsustainable. And so here we’ve decided to do no subsidies. None. Here, if we’re going to subsidize anything, it would be done in such a way that would require a commitment on the part of the people to contribute to, and support the project themselves.

“Nearly all of Latin America is pulling back from the idea of welfare programs. We want to see people take part in their own lives and take initiative. We don’t want to make the people into beggars, conceptual beggars, waiting for manna from heaven. And so we’re happy to finance productive enterprises with credits. But they’re credits that have to be repaid. And so they have to put in their part and make an effort. Everyone puts something in. People may be very poor but they have to put something in. We’ll feed you lunch, but you have to work for it. And so they have to make an effort, insofar as they’re able.”

I ask Wolf about the Socialism of the 21st Century. “Yes, so we’re talking about democratic socialism. I prefer social democracy, political democracy, social democracy which implies the power of the majorities, the option for the majority. Not that I oppose socialism per se, but my formation was in the M-19 and we were motivated by the power of democracy and we defined ourselves from the beginning by economic and political democracy, social justice, social democracy and national sovereignty. That was the vision of the M-19 that, because of the electoral fraud, we organized around the concept of democracy and that meant a deep, participatory democracy.

“Here [in Nariño], for instance, we’re doing a sort of participatory budget, working on developing communitarian enterprises, and supporting rural workers (campesinos), indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups. And when there are struggles for land, we side with the campesinos because we believe they have a right to land. From my point of view, the concept of ‘democracy’ includes all this and it’s also more clear and direct.”

In all these struggles, Wolf says, the state plays a key role.

“In the economy, the state needs to offer support to the weak against the strong. And, even though it’s a bit out of style, the state needs to work toward the redistribution of the means of production. And so in this Department [Nariño], 70 percent of the campesinos have land, an exceptional situation in Colombia. But the problem is they’re very weak, and their parcels of land are small, one hectare, or half a hectare. And so we’ve attempted to strengthen them by financial credits, technical assistance and connecting them with other campesinos. And all this is encompassed in the concept of democracy. Clearly what’s needed is agrarian reform, and this is also part of democracy.”

Nevertheless, Wolf maintains, it’s important to be realistic in approaching agrarian reform. “We want to see land given directly to the campesinos, and not to cooperatives and associations. What seems to work is technical assistance, helping the campesino sell his or her products directly and without intermediaries but ensuring that the campesino is owner of his or her own piece of land. Because cooperatives might work well with the indigenous campesinos and even, more or less, with the Afro-Colombians, because there is a tradition of collective work among them but not with the other mestizo campesinos. There it’s important for each family to have its own piece of land.”

But how can the campesino compete with the flood of cheap, subsidized food produced by agribusiness and shipped from the U.S. under the Free Trade agreements? Navarro Wolf is working on that problem.

“We’re selling organic and fair trade products to Europe, where there’s a big market for this sort of thing. This is a great opportunity, and especially now, with the price of oil being so high, to move toward organic methods of agriculture. We’ve been developing those methods, for example, in the cultivation of coffee where we’re using both organic and commercial fertilizers. After all, this is a slow process, this transition. But we’re working on that: organic methods and fair trade.”

The new Secretary of Agriculture and the Environment, Javier Cuaical, has been working with indigenous groups in “shagras,” which, Wolf explains, is an integrated farm which has its own economy, produces its own food and medicines, all based on a return to the indigenous cosmovision. “All of this is oriented toward the establishment of food security. But this is program, what we call ‘ethnodevelopment,’ is new, only developed in the past six months. Before then none of this existed.”

I ask Wolf if his government has had any difficulty with Uribe’s right-wing government and he says not up to the present. “Well, they’re not very happy about this new governor here, but neither have they opposed us. So far we’ve maintained a constructive relationship based on an attitude of mutual respect, working as best we can on the problems before us.

“For instance, right now in two municipalities our [Department of Nariño] government is proposing to stop the aerial spraying of coca and voluntary substitution programs in two municipalities. We’re proposing this to the national government as an experiment in which we would accompany and assist the two municipalities over a period of ten years. We’re doing this because the spraying as a strategy has completely failed.” Wolf points out that after years of spraying, over 284,000 hectares in Nariño alone, the areas under coca cultivation has actually increased from 13,000 in 2002 to over 20,000 in 2007. That’s why Navarro Wolf is hoping to get a hearing from Uribe and possibly getting funding for his pilot project of voluntary crop substitution for coca cultivation. “The spraying is certainly cheaper than what I intend to propose, but it has produced no results. We’ll see if they listen, but I’m sure that we’ll get better results than the spraying has done. And besides, my plan doesn’t poison the earth.”

This plan is part of a proposal Wolf calls “Life and Peace,” in which he hopes to bring an end to the violence in his corner of Colombia which results from drug production and trafficking.

“In municipalities where there is no coca production, murders are at 20 per hundred thousand people — and there are 21 municipalities where that number drops to zero. Where there is coca production, that number rises to over 80, that is, four times the number of homicides — and more.” Through voluntary crop substitution and a prioritization of social investment and spending, the governor of Nariño hopes to make his department a model for peace and human development.

Wolf has to get back to work but he’s willing to answer one last question so I ask him about the role the social movements will play in his government. “They’re everything,” he says. “They’re the people.”

* First published in Upside Down World.

It is uncanny that great portions of Bogotá and Cali are so prosperous while such large segments of the country’s population live in abject poverty (including much of Bogotá and Cali), worse than average for Latin America because of the violence and displacement. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), 46.8 percent of Colombia’s general population lives in poverty and 20.2 percent in indigence, while overall in Latin America, the level of poverty is 36.5 percent and indigence 13.4 percent.² This economic constellation does not cease to entice U.S., Canadian, and European capitalists and elected officials, among them President George W. Bush, who seems never to miss an opportunity to stress the importance of ratifying the Colombia-U.S. FTA.³

For decades, Colombian capital has fused more and more with the transnational companies that do business in the country. Over 500 foreign companies have branches in Bogotá.⁴ According to the U.S. State Department, approximately 250 U.S. firms do business in Colombia.⁵ Foreign holdings of Colombian stocks stood at $972 million in August 2005 compared to $246 million when President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002.⁶ Now the Colombian government and elites, the U.S. government, and U.S. transnationals are pushing for a free trade agreement to consummate foreign control of the Colombian economy.

As Libardo Sarmiento, an economist and editor of the magazine Cepa, puts it: “The Colombian government has steadily been opening the Colombian economy more and more to U.S. corporations ever since 1985. The free trade agreement between Colombia and the U.S. is the marriage after a long courtship.” Simultaneous with the internationalization of the Colombian economy, economic power has become concentrated in fewer hands. There are now only 17 banks in Colombia while in 1990 there were over double that many.⁷ Since the Colombian bourgeoisie is now so linked to foreign capital, it forms a reduced segment of the movement to stop the FTA compared to the movements in other Latin American countries. So the debate over the Colombia-U.S. FTA is chiefly a battle between the right and the left; or more fundamentally, a battle between the rich and the poor.

According to Sarmiento, the violence that has raged in Colombia over the past decades is a struggle for economic power. In order to carry out macroprojects for oil, wood, gold, silver, and other raw materials, the government and the paramilitaries have massively displaced the campesino, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian populations in the countryside. There are currently 3.5 million persons who have been forcibly displaced as part of the effort to accommodate the pillaging of the country’s raw materials; 552,000 of those are external refugees.⁸ As Aura Rodríguez, of Corporación Cactus, a group that campaigns against the Colombia-U.S. FTA, puts it: “If you were to map out the paramilitary activity in Colombia and then superimpose a map of the country’s natural resources, they would coincide completely.” Estimates range from 31,000 to two million deaths in Colombia’s civil war.⁹

In addition to exploiting the country’s raw materials, the multinationals exploit Colombia’s workforce. Apparently in an effort to facilitate the passing and implementation of the free trade agreement, the Colombian government recently passed a law extending Colombia’s regular workday from twelve to sixteen hours, i.e., from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. so that working evening hours no longer gives entitlement to overtime pay.¹⁰ Since 1985, more than 2,500 trade unionists have been killed.¹¹ Drummond Company and Coca-Cola, among others, have been accused of paying paramilitaries to bust unions. Cincinnati-based Chiquita brands pleaded guilty in a U.S. court last year to funding Colombian paramilitaries.

While the paramilitary violence seems to have somewhat subsided, the Colombian government’s perpetration of human rights violations skyrocketed from 17 percent when President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002 to 56 percent at the end of his first term in 2006.¹² While some have noted a decline in union assassinations, others have pointed out that as more unionists and union leaders have been killed, there less are left to kill. In Guatemala, killings of unionists dropped during the DR-CAFTA negotiations but then increased sharply once the treaty had been implemented.¹³

The fact that the violence is still rampant in Colombia indicates that the campaign of aggression that favors multinational corporations is not being addressed as a problem. But few in Colombia or elsewhere make the link between the country’s armed conflict and its economic transformation culminating in the Colombia-U.S. free trade agreement. According to Consuelo Ahumada, Director of the Observatorio Andino and the Masters Program for Latin American Studies at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, over the last year or so, a series of issues related to the violence in Colombia ate up the media’s attention. First, the parapolítica scandal dominated the political debate: the infiltration of the Colombian congress by politicians with links to paramilitaries. Thirty-four members of the Colombian congress currently have been or are being investigated for ties to paramilitary death squads; 33 more have already been detained.¹⁴

After that, the big issue was the kidnappings by the FARC. Then in March of the present year, the confrontation between Colombia and the U.S., on the one hand, and Ecuador and Venezuela, on the other, claimed the media spotlight. Since my visit, two big issues have been challenges to the validity of Uribe’s election and the liberation of Íngrid Betancourt and others, including three U.S. citizens. Although these issues deserve plenty of attention, they are seen as completely unrelated to a project to exploit Colombia’s natural and mineral resources and labor force. In fact, the FTA has been framed as a safeguard against aggression from Colombia’s neighbors and a bonanza for the Colombian economy.

According to a billboard that appeared in multiple locations in the country during my visit, “Either you’re with Colombia or you’re with the terrorists.” Álvaro Uribe’s name appears under the statement. It seems that by extension, you’re either with the free trade agreement or you’re with the terrorists. Uribe’s approval rating is currently over 80 percent. The public’s justifiable loss of tolerance for the FARC’s kidnappings, violence, and general humiliation of the Colombian populace seems to translate into unconditional backing of Uribe and his policies, among them the FTA with the U.S.

According to Consuelo Ahumada, being against the FTA is often construed as being in favor of the FARC. Colombian Senator Jorge Robledo agrees: the FARC are a disaster for the left in Colombia. Robledo compares Colombia with Argentina: “In Argentina, people don’t necessarily support the Left, but they view the Left with a certain degree of sympathy because they see them as people who sacrifice themselves for the oppressed. In Colombia, however, leftists are seen as kidnappers and extortionists…” According to Ahumada, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega’s support of the FARC only aggravates the crisis in Colombia. Ahumada adds the choice shouldn’t be between Uribe and Bush or the FARC, but that’s the message people get. She cites Evo Morales, who has condemned the FARC, as a more helpful role model.

Meanwhile, the Uribe administration’s accusation of leftist activists and marginalized groups of being linked to the FARC has often constituted a death sentence. In connection with the March 6 protest against violence in the country perpetrated by paramilitaries and the state, six unionists were killed who were involved in organizing the protest. Many more activists were threatened. Right after the murders in March, an Op-Ed article in the New York Times by Edward Schumacher-Matos appeared in which he claims that “it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year.” He states that “of the 87 convictions won in union cases since 2001… the judges found that 15 of the murders were related to common crime, 10 to crimes of passion and 13 to membership in a guerrilla organization.¹⁵ But Schumacher fails to mention that, in the days preceding his article, three trade unionists, Leonidas Gómez Rozo, Gildardo Gómez Alzate, and Adolfo González Montes were killed on three different days in Bogotá, Medellín, and Riohacha, respectively, and were killed in exactly the same way: They were tied up in their homes and cut and stabbed numerous times. In other words, they were tortured to death in exactly the same way in three different cities, and the only common denominator was that they were unionists. Such acts instill terror in fellow labor activists, according to Héctor Mondragón, Advisor to Convergencia Campesina, Negra e Indígena and consultant to the Centro de Cooperación al Indígena (CECOIN) (campesino, Afro-Colombian, and indigenous groups).

While in Colombia, I interviewed three members of the flower union Untraflores, which holds meetings about an hour outside of Bogotá in the flower district. Union members Aide Silva, Nidia López, and Orlando Romero explained to me how their struggle has persisted. Despite the type of union busting and intimidation against union members that also occur in the U.S., unionizing has proven worthwhile; they have made modest advances such as a 48-hour, 6-day work week, being able to take time off for doctor visits, and modest vacation pay. They have not been able to obtain a collective bargaining agreement for larger sectors of the industry. They had never been the victims of threats or violence, but after I left, there was word of statements by government officials linking the union to the FARC, which caused great alarm. Untraflores has always condemned all forms of violence.

Evidently, the violence against union organizers, the indigenous, Afro-Colombians, and activists will not stop in order to facilitate the free trade agreement precisely because the free trade agreement and the state and paramilitary violence in Colombia are part of the same project. Some of the ideals that anti-FTA activists in Colombia strive for are affordable food and medicine, labor rights, and a clean environment. One organization that opposes the Colombia-U.S. FTA, the Center for Research for Development, strives for full employment and price stability, its director Professor Germán Umaña Mendoza told me.¹⁶ Héctor Moncayo of Recalca, an FTA information campaign that launched in 2003 as a coalition of organizations of different political stripes and has progressively become more fervently critical of the FTA, stresses the importance of the government’s role in social programs. He asserts that they are undermined by the so-called Singapore topics that protect the pre-eminence of investor rights over national laws and the strengthening of intellectual property at the expense of public health. But specifically in Colombia, the FTA is about land distribution. Will the land belong to the poor who have traditionally populated and cultivated it or to the multinational corporations that want to exploit it for oil, gas, minerals, and the agro-industry?

The pro-FTA camp seems to accept a society in which “there will always be winners and losers. The best we can do for the losers is to mitigate their losses,” as Rafael Padilla put it. Rafael, who works for a European multinational, is a friend of my hosts whom we ran into on my first evening in Bogotá. He turned out to be a very articulate defender of the Colombia-U.S. free trade agreement. His strongest argument was that the FTA, by requiring the country to comprehensively adopt international standards, for example for electronics and machinery, would allow Colombia to become more competitive internationally. He also put forward classical pro free trade arguments, such as the FTA enabling Colombia to exploit its comparative advantages. While he believes, for example, that Colombia should stop producing wheat, which it does inefficiently, he argues that the country can greatly boost its profits in coffee. When I confronted him with the fact that Colombia competes with many other coffee-producing nations, he countered that Colombia could expand its business by delivering the whole production cycle, from cultivation, to processing, to merchandising coffee. He believes that Colombia’s equivalent to Starbucks, Juan Valdez, could insert itself in the U.S. market.

The FTA with Colombia is particularly worrisome given the country’s already existing violence particularly against groups who will be negatively impacted by the FTA, such as labor unionists, the indigenous, and Afro-Colombians.¹⁷ Yet the free trade agreement with Colombia is one in a series of disastrous agreements with Latin American countries (and countries in other parts of the world such as Oman and South Korea), in the process of negotiation or already implemented. By conservative estimates, after ten years of NAFTA, 1.3 million Mexican farmers had been forced off their land because of U.S. corporations dumping subsidized agricultural products on the Mexican market.¹⁸ In the maquiladora sector in Mexico, which grew exponentially after implementation of NAFTA, workers have been systematically abused and exploited, including violence against union organizers. The environmental destruction caused by these factories, which also obviously impacts the health and well being of the workers, has been of epidemic proportions. Rafael’s answer to this was that perhaps Mexico has done a poor job of implementing a good treaty. Of course, the experience could theoretically not apply, but experience is the most conclusive evidence there is either against or in favor of the FTA, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, over 700 Salvadorans are leaving El Salvador daily, at least in part due to dramatic price jumps resulting from U.S. products flooding the market.¹⁹ Instead of U.S. investment rising in El Salvador, U.S. capitalists have taken over many Salvadoran companies, such as Citibank’s takeover of Grupo Cuscatlán. The country is not exporting more to the U.S., as had been promised before ratification, but less since implementation of the FTA.²⁰

When I mentioned Rafael’s argument about international standards to Senator Robledo, who has been one of the highest profile and strongest opponents of the agreement, he agreed that it is possible that the standardization of technology could constitute a marginal improvement to the Colombian economy in the midst of many other perils of the FTA. He also pointed out that minor improvements to matters such as hygiene could be devastating to Colombian producers. “For example, in terms of veterinary vaccinations, say that we’re functioning at 99% safety, in other words, laboratories are working with extremely high safety standards, but instead of 99%, they impose 99.9%. Of course we’re talking about arbitrary figures, but the increase in technology is going to rob part of the profits they are making; so you see how technical standards can also become a factor for imposing the price of multinationals and monopolies.”

According to Héctor Mondragón, the Bush administration seeks to use the conflict in Colombia as a jumping board not only for the Colombia-U.S. FTA but for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). While there is much talk of Latin America’s turn to the Left, the U.S. government, the transnational corporations that it serves, as well as the Colombian and Latin American elites are countering the new leftist politics in Latin America with another model. As Mondragón puts it: “Colombia is an example of how the resistance against neoliberalism can be paralyzed by massive violations of human rights, through persecuting social movement leaders. To permit this model of violence and impunity, as has occurred with the negotiation by the [Colombian] government with the paramilitaries is a new model of impunity. If we allow this model to be imposed in all of Latin America, it will constitute an essential element for imposing the FTAA in all of Latin America.” Mondragón also believes that as people’s rights have been violated to the benefit of transnational companies in Colombia, people’s rights can be violated in the U.S. in much the same way.

Witnessing the level of prosperity of major sectors of Bogotá and Cali, I had to ask myself how much further removed we in the United States are from the misery in Colombia’s countryside than the prosperous residents of those Colombian metropolises. And how much less responsibility we bear. After all, we live in a globalized society.

1. Formerly known as The NYC People’s Referendum on Free Trade (or La Consulta Popular sobre el Libre Comercio de NY), Trade Justice New York is a grassroots coalition that campaigns against unfair trade agreements between the U.S. and Latin America and seeks alternatives to neoliberal globalization.
2. ECLAC, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Social Panorama of Latin America 2007, November 2007.
3. Canada and the European Union are also currently attempting to conclude free trade agreements with Colombia.
4. Proexport Colombia, “Foreign Companies Bogotá-Cundinamarca.” As of 2003, 504 foreign companies had branches in Bogotá.
5. U.S. Department of State. “Background Note: Colombia,” March 2008.
6. Murphy, Helen. “Colombia’s Rich Lure U.S., European Investors as Violence Ebbs,” Bloomberg.com. September 27, 2005.
7. See under “Establecimientos de Crédito,” then “Establecimientos Bancarios.” See also: Series estadísticas del sistema financiero colombiano. Asociación Bancaria de Colombia, editor and publisher. July 1990. This collection of statistics shows over double the number of banks and financial corporations in the year 1989 of what the Superintendencia Bancaria reports presently. It covers members of the Asociación Bancaria de Colombia. According to Sarmiento, there were around 150 banks in Colombia in 1990.
8. Redacción BBC Mundo, “Colombia/desplazados: sigue en aumento.” June 17, 2008.
9. Scaruffi, Piero. “Wars and Genocides of the 20th Century.” Scaruffi’s estimate of 31,000 deaths in the Colombian civil war evidently only encompasses the period from 1966 to the end of the 20th century. Libardo Sarmiento estimates the number of deaths in the war at 2 million since 1985.
10. Arias Pulido, Armando E., reposted: “La Reforma Laboral a la luz de los ingresos de los trabajadores.” Actualidad Colombiana. No. 447 March 12-26 2007.
11. “U.S.: Reject Colombia Free Trade Deal,” Human Rights Watch. April 7, 2008.
12. Leech, Garry. “Colombia’s Economic Growth Fueled by Repression.” May 19, 2008.
13. USLEAP (U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project). “Violence Against Colombia Trade Unionists and Impunity: How Much Progress Has There Been Under Uribe?” April 2008.
14. INDEPAZ (Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz). “Parapolítica en el congreso,” 26 July 2008. These are the figures according to Indepaz as of July 26, 2008. And they state that the number keeps rising.
15. Schumacher-Matos, Edward. “Killing a Trade Pact,” New York Times. March 29, 2008.
16. Professor Germán Umaña Mendoza is an economist at the National University of Colombia and Director of the Center for Research for Development (CID in Spanish), an organization that has published research documenting the hazards of the FTA.
17. According to Héctor Mondragón, yearly killings of indigenous people. in Colombia have risen from an average of 62 historically since 1970 to 146 during Uribe’s administration.
18. “Another America is Possible: The Impact of NAFTA on the U.S. Latino Community and Lessons for Future Trade Agreements, A Joint Report by Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.” August 2004.
19. Andrade, Teresa. “Naufragio de Salvadoreños, un sueño truncado,” Centroamérica 21. October 29, 2007.
20. Equipo Maíz. “El fracaso del TLC con Estados Unidos,” March 2, 2007 and on Page 184: “Se hacen humo las promesas sobre los TLC,” February 9, 2008. From the year 2005 (before the FTA) to 2007, El Salvador’s exports to the U.S. diminished by 31 million and the U.S. augmented its exports to El Salvador by 161 million dollars.

Despite the historical precedence of the FARC and its habitual kidnapping tendencies, the Colombian media cartels seem to demonstrate a preference for the high-profile variety hostage. While all kidnappings are initially reported in some form or another, only a fraction of these continue to make headlines with the passing of time. Indeed, most captives are lucky to receive follow-up stories of their time in FARC captivity. A select few, however, manage to remain in the media’s spotlight throughout their tenure as prisoners.

Case in point, the most recent high-profile captive who was liberated this past 2 July, Ingrid Betancourt. Throughout her 76-months in FARC custody, Ingrid seemed to be the focus of a perpetual story being run by one of Colombia’s numerous papers, television or radio broadcasts, and the trend persisted internationally. For more than six years, she was unarguably the poster child for FARC prisoners. Her notoriety as a Colombian ex-presidential candidate for the 2002 elections being held captive catapulted her to rock star status which drew both international attention as well as criticism against the government and her captures.

Consistent media coverage of Ingrid’s captivity turned constant as her health began to decline about a year ago. Her fame finally became iconic when a photo of her was released depicting a fragile woman who appeared thinly malnourished and depressed – reports claimed that she was on the verge of death and a letter addressed to her family was made public. Physicians were subsequently brought in to the FARC camp where she was being held in order to evaluate her health and substantiate the reports. In fact, media coverage made it appear that her days were numbered, and until her liberation the world also believed this to be true. Yet on 2 July, Ingrid stepped off the plane in Bogota as a woman who had gained weight and seemed perfectly healthy with a glowing smile. What happened to the frail woman who was on the verge of death? It seems the media overlooked reporting her miraculous improvement in health over the past several months approaching Operation Check.

While estimates range anywhere from 700 to 3,000 hostages being held in custody of the FARC to date, Ingrid appears to have been the only captive who turned ill in the jungle and was thus deemed even more worthy of media attention. It makes one wonder how all the other incarcerated victims have managed to evade illness while in captivity, or if the media simply picks its preferences on which to report. Chances are the latter scenario merits more consideration.

The truth is, not all FARC hostages are created equal. As tourists, security officers, defense contractors, politicians and businessmen are still being held in captivity, it is nearly a sure bet that none of them will ever receive the same press coverage as Ingrid did while in captivity. Even Jhon Frank Pinchao, the police officer who was captured in 1998 and escaped on his own in May of 2007, didn’t receive as much coverage as Ingrid. The ex-prisoner consequently wrote a book to share his nine-year ordeal with the public.

All the media frenzy over Ingrid raises suspicions as to the motives of the press and its supposed adherence to fair reporting. Analyzing Ingrid’s capture by the FARC on 23 February 2002 reveals even more absurdity. While on her presidential campaign in 2002, Ingrid was warned in advance by the Colombian government, the military and police forces not to enter the southern, demilitarized zone (DMZ) of Caqueta in order to pursue her campaign. She was repeatedly advised not to campaign in the DMZ, but nonetheless their warnings went unheeded. Lack of cooperation from the government and military to fly Ingrid into the DMZ at her request brought the candidate to decide that ground travel into the department was her only option, despite the known risks. After the last security stop before entering Caqueta, she was kidnapped by the FARC. Somehow, it would become the government’s responsibility to liberate the stubborn politician who apparently knew better than her advisors.

Like a child who gets burned playing with fire despite parental warnings, Ingrid’s decision as a severe critic of the FARC to enter the DMZ resulted in a difficult lesson to learn over the course of the next 76 months. She, however, would not be subject to biding her time alone without media coverage as so many captives are forced to endure. Contrary to the majority of hostages being held by the FARC, Ingrid’s victim role took on a new level of media coverage that surpassed any other hostage and resulted in her eventual liberation.

While there are demands from France, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and on around the world that all remaining hostages be set free, the media have seemingly traded in their Colombian jungle captive for the French cosmopolitan, debutante variety. For now, the public will be receiving their news reports on Ingrid from France, and a new star will eventually be born in Colombia for the media cartels.

In her July 7 Wall Street Journal column titled “FARC’s ‘Human Rights’ Friends,” O’Grady ludicrously suggests that the Colombian military’s recent rescue operation proved successful because the FARC and progressive NGOs are allies. She claims that it is this alleged alliance that made it possible for Colombian soldiers disguised as NGO workers and journalists to simply waltz into FARC territory and convince the guerrillas to handover the hostages. “How else to explain the fact that the FARC swallowed the line without batting an eye?” she writes. She later declared that, given the relationship between NGOs and the guerrillas, “It’s not surprising that the FARC thought a helicopter from an NGO was perfectly natural.” However, O’Grady’s unoriginal hypothesis is nice from a propagandistic perspective, but holds little water when the reality on the ground is taken into account.

For more than eight years I have worked as an independent journalist primarily focusing on US foreign policy in Colombia. Consequently, I have spent a significant amount of time working in that country’s remote rural conflict zones during which I have met and interviewed numerous rank-and-file guerrillas and several high-ranking FARC commanders — Raúl Reyes, Simón Trinidad, Ivan Ríos and Alfonso Cano. And yet, despite the familiarity that these FARC commanders have with both my name and my work as a lefty journalist, I still had to endure terrifying experiences whenever I encountered the rebel group.

For example, in 2001, FARC guerrillas in the city of Barrancabermeja in northern Colombia detained me in a poor barrio and accused me of being an informer for the military — it was no easy task to convince them otherwise. In 2004, I was detained overnight by the guerrillas in rural Caquetá while investigating displacement caused by the Colombian military’s Plan Patriota counter-insurgency operation. And, in August 2006, I was detained by the FARC in eastern Colombia, interrogated and held at gunpoint in a remote farmhouse for eleven hours as they sought to ensure that I was who I claimed to be. In each instance, I was detained by a local commander who was unwilling to make any decision regarding my fate without first conferring with higher-ranking FARC commanders.

The point I am trying to make here is that journalists and NGO workers who have encountered the FARC in rural Colombia know full well that the guerrillas do not take anybody’s claims about who they are at face value. Nor do they automatically assume that if you are a journalist or an NGO worker that you are in any way sympathetic to their cause. In fact, it is just the opposite. The FARC is paranoid about anyone who enters its territories — particularly with regard to journalists and NGO workers — and automatically assumes that such people are threats. And, to the same degree that the Wall Street Journal’s O’Grady and Colombia’s President Uribe accuse progressive NGOs of being fronts for the guerrillas, the FARC believes that the very same NGOs are fronts for capitalist imperialism — as difficult as that might be for O’Grady to accept.

If she had any understanding of how the FARC operates in rural Colombia, O’Grady would have known that César, the rebel commander in charge of the hostages, would had to have been convinced in advance — perhaps by undercover military operatives, as the government claims — that it was a legitimate mission that had been authorized by his superiors before he would hand over the hostages. No local FARC commander would simply assume that an NGO was working with the guerrillas just because they showed up in the region, which is precisely what O’Grady suggests occurred so she could claim it as proof that progressive NGOs work hand-in-hand with the guerrillas.

Consequently, the key aspect in the rescue operation — if it did unfold as the Colombian government claims — was not the fact that the undercover soldiers were impersonating NGO workers and journalists, but the convincing of César that higher-ranking rebel commanders had indeed authorized the hostage pick-up. Without receiving any such advance authorization, it would not have mattered who the undercover soldiers carrying out the operation were impersonating, the local FARC commander would have detained and investigated them. Therefore, while the rescue mission might illustrate the effectiveness of the Colombian military’s intelligence operations, it does not support O’Grady’s and President Uribe’s assertions that NGOs are fronts for the guerrillas.

Because I have had access to the FARC, I am regularly approached by NGOs — both Colombian and international — asking if I could help put them in contact with the guerrillas because they would like to discuss a variety of topics (i.e. child soldiers, kidnapping, landmines, hostage release and other human rights issues) with the rebels. If, as O’Grady and President Uribe claim, NGOs — particularly human rights groups — are fronts for the FARC, why would so many of them lack contact with the rebel group and need help from people like me? Most NGOs I have dealt with over the years, and there are many, do not like the guerrillas, which the FARC is fully aware of and why it is so distrusting of them and often refuses to engage with them. This distrust is illustrated by the fact that, while NGOs are active in rural regions being contested by all the armed actors — the guerrillas, the military and the paramilitaries — they have virtually no presence in the remote rural areas of eastern and southern Colombia that constitute the FARC’s traditional strongholds.

Ultimately, right-wingers like O’Grady and President Uribe want to have their cake and to eat it too. On the one hand, they claim that the FARC has no significant support among the Colombian population. And yet, on the other hand, they claim that all these NGOs support the guerrillas; that the thousands of peasants living in FARC-controlled regions that are victimized by the military’s counter-insurgency operations are sympathetic to the rebels; that the thousands of leftist politicians, NGO workers and community leaders who have been arbitrarily arrested by the Uribe government in recent years are all guerrillas; that many of the leaders and members of the country’s unions are rebels; and that the Colombia’s universities are full of guerrilla sympathizers. These claims represent a contradiction repeatedly voiced by the right that has gone unchallenged for far too long.

The right cannot have it both ways. If the FARC has no significant support, as they claim, then all of those sectors of civil society that are routinely repressed by the government cannot be guerrilla sympathizers. In which case, there must be alternative reason for the State repressing those sectors of the population; and that reason is simply that they dare to non-violently and democratically challenge the government’s security and economic policies. The government conveniently labels these sectors as guerrillas or “terrorists” in order to justify repressing them.

Finally, when people like O’Grady and President Uribe publicly label NGO workers as terrorists, they are endangering the lives of these people by increasing the possibility that the Colombian state security forces and their right-wing paramilitaries allies will target them — which, on second thoughts, perhaps does make the Wall Street Journal a front for state terrorists. Ultimately, such accusations by O’Grady and President Uribe are not only irresponsible, they also illustrate an unwillingness to tolerate the democratic and non-violent expression of political views that differ from their own.

Colombia’s Marxist guerrilla group, las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, has been misunderstood and underestimated since its germination. Even today they are mistakenly labeled as the sole offenders and primary cause of violence in the country, as Colombia and its armed forces, along with U.S. assistance, continue attempting to extirpate them.

This notion of the FARC, while common around the world, contradicts reality. Violence in Colombia was a regular occurrence long before the FARC arose from the country’s blood-stained soils. In fact, during the past half millennium, “war torn and oppressed” is the most accurately succinct description for civil society in this country of extreme contrasts.

When dissecting Colombia’s internal conflict, the objective should be to develop a comprehensive understanding, even it if juxtaposes mainstream imagery. Awareness as such begins by realizing that the majority of people affected by the conflict are the impoverished indigenous communities, rural farmers, and common folk. However, their accounts of the violence are rarely printed or reported, an important point to keep in mind.

Information that is traditionally reported are testaments by the government, military and national police force. This is the news that makes its way around the world, and this is what produces popular perception. In fact, personal accounts that contradict this news, often surfacing weeks or months later, rarely reach the public here in Colombia, let alone around the world.

In order to have a more integral and impartial understanding of Colombia’s Marxist revolutionary group, one must examine the socio-political climate at least two decades prior to their inception. By doing so, it is clear to see that a particular social impetus was the cause of this revolutionary effect.

When viewing a time-line depicting the events, one also notices that Washington’s involvement in this Latin American paradise has been incessant since shortly after WWII. That preliminary involvement was initially rationalized to fight communism which was sprouting in the backyard.

So, who were the supposed communist elements in Colombia in 1948? Well, on 9 April of that year, only a day after meeting with Cuba’s “Fidel Castro at a conference of anti-imperialist student leaders,”¹ the country’s most publicly supported populist leader and presidential candidate of the people, “Dr. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was assassinated in Bogota’s downtown center at roughly 1:15 p.m.”² The capital city and national provinces were quickly destroyed after erupting into absolute chaotic rebellion.

The supposed patsy of that day, Juan Roa Sierra, was found by the infuriated mob in a local store, removed from the establishment, beaten to death, dragged through the streets and finally put on display in the city’s center. All the while, neither the government nor the armed forces did anything to stop the resulting civil violence. On the contrary, they set out against the enraged mob. Since then, that day has become famously known throughout the country as the Bogotazo, at the cockcrow of an era notoriously called The Violence.

It’s quite relevant to point out that Dr. Gaitan was a genuine populist, estimated to have had more than 80% of the populace’s support – a sure winner for the coming elections of 1950. He was also a member of the Colombian Liberal Party, courageously hoping to overturn the oligarchic stranglehold and implement social programs for the common people; education, health care, infrastructure development and centralized resource management were a few cornerstones of his campaign.

The entrenched rulers of the oligarchic class however, likely found it difficult to accept the occupation of the House of Narino (Presidential Palace) by a people’s president like Gaitan, as they certainly didn’t share his social interests. The country’s history consistently demonstrates this dominant, plutocratic attitude since the curtailing of the Independence Wars against Spain in 1848.

The insurgency organizes

What then became of that impetuously black April afternoon in Bogota? Some of the people who supported Dr. Gaitan and his political ideology became known as Gaitanists. In the department of Tolima, neighboring Cundinamarca of which Bogota is the capital, these Gaitanists took up arms against the inveterate system. One member of this guerrilla group was Pedro Marin, commonly known as Manuel Marulanda, or Tirofijo (Sureshot).

By 1950, the fledgling, Gaitanist guerrilla group of peasants formed ranks in the countryside with fighters from the Social Democratic Party (PSD). This group would gain momentum over the next sixteen years in the defense of peasant-proletariats. Marulanda would go on to officially name this group the FARC, which he then presided over, in 1966. He would assume this position until his recent death, reported to have been this past March 26, 2008.

The origins of the FARC are rooted in the soils of socialist ideology. Contrary to popular belief, their inception had nothing to do with drugs. The core of their doctrine sought to establish overdue land rights for the peasants. Along with this they promoted the development of unions within the controlling sectors of agricultural big business, which was becoming monopolized and yet ever more oppressive by the national and foreign oligarchs of the day.

The FARC originally functioned as a “regional structure of social warfare, of individual and collective survival”, and eventually became “a setting for the building of real local power.”³ This is the course they maintained throughout the 1970’s. However, since the 1980’s, with the emergence of cocaine trafficking and counter-insurgent, state-sponsored paramilitary troops to contend with, their ideological roots began to wither somewhat.

Cause and effect are often unavoidable and inherently universal principles. As such, if the governing body decides to abandon or abuse the people in favor of power and profit, the people will likely resort to their own measures. This is precisely what happened after the Bogotazo. Thus, conditions were optimal for a group like the FARC to sprout in response to calculated, systemic corruption which had been oppressing the less affluent portion of the population since Spanish colonial times.

This is the communist force that Washington intended to uproot while in vegetative growth, yet they somehow failed to succeed. Today, forty-odd years into its commemoration, the FARC still stand their ground. Over the decades they’ve been labeled as communists, as narcotraffickers and today as terrorists. And though at present they are estimated to be weakening, they nonetheless continue to exist as an armed opposition to be reckoned with.

Resistance as such helps Washington justify its gracious annual donations to the Colombian government of roughly $700 million dollars in US taxpayer’s money under Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia, which has only sustained the internal conflict, poisoned the environment and produced the highest internal human displacement figure in the world. In fact, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveals that even Iraq, at nearly 2,000,000 internally displaced people, still fails to fit the crown.⁴ Although this constitutes imperative data to consider in achieving our initial objective of developing a comprehensive understanding, we shall postpone any further analysis of this anti-terrorist/anti-drug program for another article.

Redefining the conflict’s perpetual scapegoat

Taking into account the historical origins of Colombia’s primary guerrilla group is a requisite for any degree of comprehension apropos of the conflict. However, by no means is this to suggest that the FARC are exempt from having committed illegal and atrocious crimes over the decades. Nor is this to indicate that they should continue to be granted impunity as numerous paramilitary and guerrilla forces have already been fortunate to achieve under President Alvaro Uribe’s transparency-lacking Justice and Peace Law of 2005. This paper seeks not to validate the FARC’s immorality, but simply to reveal for the reader a more accurate depiction of Colombia’s conflict relevant to this group.

Let us now proceed by establishing some parallels and deviations between the two previously mentioned groups. Paramilitaries are organized civilians developed militarily to act as, or assist, regular military troops. The reference mentioned in the previous paragraph coincides with this definition.

The FARC, on the other hand, are not a paramilitary group. They are classified as guerrillas, like Castro’s revolutionary players, combating against the military and their paramilitary associates. So, it has been guerrilla groups like the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and M-19 that throughout the years have held up arms against the Colombian government, its army, national police and paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Force (AUC).

Aside from the inaccurate assertion of many Colombians and others in foreign circles that comfort themselves by exclusively condemning the conflict on the guerrillas, it would be naive to believe that the FARC are the sole culprits in this condemnable chaos. Observation from Amnesty International contradicts the blind-eyed and wide-held belief completely by stating that “although all parties to Colombia’s internal armed conflict – the security forces, paramilitaries and the guerrilla – have systematically violated human rights and international humanitarian law, the paramilitaries have, in recent years, been responsible for most of the killings of civilians, “disappearances”, and cases of torture, while the guerrilla have been responsible for most politically-motivated kidnappings.”⁵

Reports such as this aren’t any more reassuring when attempting to construct a comprehensive understanding of the conflict, because in essence the scenario has just become even more complicated with additional factors. Unfortunately though, that is Colombia’s conflict in a nutshell, a monumentally complex, socio-political quagmire.

Just the same, if one sincerely aims to arrive at a more realistic awareness regarding this country’s internal conflict, stereotypes of the Marxist guerrilla movement and preconceived notions of its rebellion must be abandoned in order to see the real picture. The contemporary reality of massacres, torture and other human rights violations are indeed not dominated by the FARC, as popular opinion has been intentionally and irrationally shaped.

The majority of these violations, rather, are by a dominate force and its associates, whose concentration of power permeates the country’s social, economic and political realms. One has to look no further than the Colombian government to identify the principle agitator. That may read like a bold claim, but the majority of rural Colombians with whom this writer speaks concur nearly unanimously.

In an interview conducted in 2002, Noam Chomsky shares some of his personal experiences, while in Colombia on a humanitarian agenda to the militarily active department of Cauca, which confirm this reality. In response to a question establishing that the Colombian government claims it’s caught between a guerrilla insurgency and a paramilitary army, neither of which it can control, Chomsky responds by stressing that “both international and Colombian human rights organizations now attribute the large majority of atrocities to paramilitaries, who are so closely, and so visibly, allied to the military that Human Rights Watch calls them the ‘Sixth Division,’ alongside the five official divisions. There’s overwhelming evidence of intimate connections and cooperation, both from ample personal testimony and published reports of the major human rights organizations, which are detailed and informative. The proportion of atrocities attributed to the military/paras has been steady over the years: about 75%-80%, with the military component declining as atrocities are ‘farmed out’ to the paras in ways that are familiar elsewhere.”⁶. This doesn’t constitute acceptable information that either the US or Colombian establishments care to have the global public contemplating around dinner tables, as it contradicts la carte du jour.

Conclusion

By reflecting on these latter diagnoses from Amnesty International and Chomsky, previous assumptions of the FARC as the “lone Marxist group” being the sole conspirator of terroristic violence in Colombia, hereby begin to fade and lose credibility. This is especially true when comparing information released by the government and mainstream sources, with that which one would expect to be more reliable and objective data supplied by humanitarian groups and intellectuals, whose commitment to compiling accurate information is not subject to imposing forces. Personal testimonies of peasants who have been caught in the crossfire weaken those assumptions even more.

In order to develop a more accurate understanding of the FARC and Colombia’s conflict, one must look beyond the biased headlines, the nightly 6 o’clock cover stories and back-page snippets of the dominating media sources, to the wellspring of alternative media. If that fails to suffice, an excursion to the country itself will provide plenty of opportunity to discuss the issue with those directly affected. This is the most forthright manner to change perception while grasping the reality of the FARC as participants in Colombia’s conflict.

1. Hylton, Forrest; Evil Hour in Colombia; 2006, p40.
2. El Tiempo, 9 April 2008.
3. Pizarro Leongomez, “Revolutionary Guerrilla Groups”, in Bergquist et al, eds, Violence in Colombia: Historical Perspectives, p181-182.
4. International Displacement Monitoring Center.
5. Press release, “Colombia: The Justice and Peace law will benefit human rights abusers,” Amnesty International, 12 September 2005.
6. Noam Chomsky interview with Justin Podur; Cauca: Their fate lies in our hands, 12 July 2002

One of the American contractors who was freed in the mission even boasted to NPR that it was “the greatest rescue mission in history”. Indeed, it may be, but it’s a little too early to tell just yet. After all, it took about a week before the Jessica Lynch story began to unravel. This could take even longer. Many readers will remember Lynch as the baby-faced GI who supposedly fought off a swarm of Iraqi regulars “Rambo-like” before making her way to safety.

Unfortunately, the whole story turned out to be an elaborate farce concocted by Rumsfeld’s Strategic Intelligence Unit to drum-up support for the war. In truth, Lynch had simply taken a wrong turn on the road to Baghdad, rolled her vehicle in a ditch, and was patched up by some magnanimous Iraqis. Some hero!

It was the same with Pat Tillman, the Niger uranium, WMD, Saddam in the spider-hole and myriad other whoppers cooked up by the Bush spinmeisters. Every one of them was a fabrication. And what about the 75 Pentagon chieftains who appeared regularly on commercial TV to pollute the public airwaves with their war-promoting bilge? There wasn’t a word of truth in any of it; 100% unalloyed horsecrap.

Already, the holes are beginning to appear in the “official” rescue narrative. First of all, how did John McCain manage to show up in Bogota just as Betancourt was getting off the plane and the champagne was being uncorked? The whole incident was eerily reminiscent of the way the American hostages in Tehran were released on the day of Reagan’s inauguration. Now there’s a coincidence. Seems like “straight talking” McCain might be just as lucky as the Gipper.

Isn’t it reasonable to assume that secret negotiations may have been going on behind the scenes and McCain was tipped off at the last minute so he share the limelight with Uribe and breathe some life into his moribund presidential campaign?

And what about the reports on Swiss Public Radio that “claim that the entire episode was nothing but a sham to disguise the payment of a ransom. SPR cited an unidentified source ‘close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years’ as saying the operation had in fact been staged to cover up the fact that the US and Colombians had paid $20 million for their freedom.

“The hostages released on Wednesday, including Ingrid Betancourt, ‘were in reality ransomed for a high price, and the whole operation afterwards was a set-up,’ the public broadcaster said… The report said that the wife of one of the hostages’ guards had acted as a go-between after being arrested by the Colombian Army. She was released to return to the guerrillas, where she allegedly persuaded her husband to change sides.”¹

Irc.indymedia.org tells a similar story in their article “The Real Operation to Rescue Ingrid Betancourt and US Mercenaries”:

“On June 3rd, Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba revealed that she possessed information that the government of Colombia was negotiating a deal with the FARC a to trade money for the release of Betancourt and the mercenaries.”

Mediaparte, the French news web site founded by the former chief editor of Le Monde, reported that the rescue was “not an achievement of the Colombian military, but due to the surrender of a group of the FARC members” following “direct negotiations by the Colombian secret services with the guerrilla group that held Betancourt captive.” Citing Colombian sources, it reported that Uribe had told a group last May that a surrender of those holding the hostages was being negotiated. Mediaparte added that the Sarkozy government agreed to offer the ex-guerrillas sanctuary in France after their surrender.²

Now how did that little tidbit manage to slip by the New York Times?

And isn’t Betancourt’s announcement that she’s planning to write a play about her experience just one day after her release a bit suspicious? No one recovers from trauma that quickly. Something is fishy here. Clearly, this is not a woman who has been subjected to excruciating psychological pain like the US prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. Those unlucky fellows have been put through the full-range of sadistic abuses meted out by the Pentagon’s new breed of Dr. Mengeles and other intelligence “professionals”. Apparently, Betancourt was never water-boarded, beaten, raped, dragged around her cell in a dog-collar, or stacked naked on top of other prisoners. In fact, her medical report indicated that she was in remarkably good health. That says a lot about her captors.

So, what is the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and why are they traipsing around the jungle with Kalashnikovs instead of engaging in the political process?

The truth is, they were part of the process until the right wing death squads started killing their candidates and party bosses and forced them to go underground. As James Petras explains in his article “Homage to Manuel Marulanda”:

“In the early 1980’s, many cadre and leaders decided to try the electoral route, signed a ‘peace agreement’ with the Colombian President, formed an electoral party – the Patriotic Union – and successfully elected numerous mayors and representatives. They even gained a substantial vote in Presidential elections. …. By 1987 over 5,000 members of the Patriotic Union had been slaughtered by the oligarchy’s death squads, including three presidential candidates, a dozen elected congressmen and women and scores of mayors and city councilors. Those who survived fled to the jungles and rejoined the armed struggle or fled into exile.”

The FARC tried politics, signed a “peace agreement” with the government and were butchered anyway. That’s the way it works in Colombia. So now they are in the jungle waging war to gain entry into the political system. Is that terrorism?

The Colombian government has one of the worst human rights records in the world and much of the repression is facilitated by the billions of dollars they get from the United States via Plan Colombia. Again, James Petras details the effects of US support for the Uribe regime:

With an unprecedented degree of US financing and advanced technological support, the newly elected narco-partner and death squad organizer, President Alvaro Uribe took charge of a scorched earth policy to savage the Colombian countryside. Between his election in 2002 and re-election in 2006, over 15,000 peasants, trade unionists, human rights workers, journalists and other critics were murdered. Entire regions of the countryside were emptied — like the US Operation Phoenix in Viet Nam, farmland was poisoned by toxic herbicides. Over 250,000 armed forces and their partners in the paramilitary death squads decimated vast stretches of the Colombian countryside where the FARC exercised hegemony. Scores of US-supplied helicopter gun-ships blasted the jungles in vast search and destroy missions — (which had nothing to do with coca production or the shipment of cocaine to the United States). By destroying all popular opposition and organizations throughout the countryside and displacing millions Uribe was able to push the FARC back toward more defensible remote regions.

Noam Chomsky draws the same conclusions as Petras in this excerpt from his book Rogue States:

“In Colombia, however, the military armed and trained by the United States has not crushed domestic resistance, though it continues to produce its regular annual toll of atrocities. Each year, some 300,000 new refugees are driven from their homes, with a death toll of about 3,000 and many horrible massacres. The great majority of atrocities are attributed to paramilitary forces. These are closely linked to the military, as documented in considerable and shocking detail once again in February 2000 by Human Rights Watch, and in April 2000 by a UN study which reported that the Colombian security forces that are to be greatly strengthened by the Colombia Plan maintain an intimate relationship with death squads, organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in their massacres directly or, by failing to take action, have “undoubtedly enabled the paramilitary groups to achieve their exterminating objectives.” In more muted terms, the State Department confirms the general picture in its annual human rights reports, again in the report covering 1999, which concludes that “security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups” while “government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998,” when the report attributed about 80 percent of attributable atrocities to the military and paramilitaries.³

So now we all know something about the FARC and the repressive political program called Plan Colombia which is funded by the United States with the clear intention of perpetuating a war between a venal oligopoly and disenfranchised workers and farmers. But having searched the 4,253 articles written about the “Miraculous Bentancourt Rescue”; one thing appears to be missing, that is, a few candid comments from someone — ANYONE — who can speak for the FARC.

Here’s an excerpt from an Interview with FARC Commander Raul Reyes by Garry Leech that fits the bill. Readers can decide for themselves whether they hear something that “rings true” or if it is just revolutionary mumbo-jumbo:

FARC Commander Raul Reyes: “The goal of revolutionary struggle is peace”

When we speak of the New Colombia we are speaking of a Colombia without social, economic or political inequalities; of a Colombia without corruption; with neither paramilitarism or state terrorism; of a Colombia with industrial development; of a worthy Colombia, independent and sovereign; a Colombia where resources are invested in scientific research and technological development; a Colombia where the environment is protected; a Colombia whose wealth is used for the benefit of the population; a Colombia that does not continue privatizing, that does not continue selling the businesses of the State but instead uses these businesses to benefit social programs; a Colombia with agrarian reform that includes infrastructure for the peasants and that makes it possible for their children to study; an agrarian reform in which a market and the purchase of their products is guaranteed; an agrarian reform in which they can obtain affordable credits from the State; a Colombia with employment; a Colombia with subsidies for the unemployed; a Colombia that guarantees education, healthcare, homes and all that.

That it is the Colombia that we dream of and that we call the New Colombia…
But to achieve this is a task for titans, because Colombia has a mafia class and a corrupt murderous ruler. And as long as they continue controlling the destiny of our country it is going to be very difficult for the people to become controllers of their own destinies. This is the reason that the FARC continues its revolutionary struggle.

The end of the revolutionary struggle being waged by the FARC is peace. For us, peace is the fundamental thing. We understand that peace is the solution to the problems that affect our people. We understand that peace means that in Colombia we have a true democracy. Not a democracy for the capitalists, but a democracy for the people, who can protest, who can participate, who have the right to live, who have the right to healthcare, to education, who have the right to communication, to electricity, to agrarian reforms, to fight corruption, to not have to kneel before foreign powers, but to be a country free, independent and sovereign with respectful relations with all countries on equal terms. Also, that the weapons of the army not be not used against the people, but just for the defense of our sovereignty and nothing more. To achieve that objective is why we are here in this jungle. And in search of that objective we are willing to continue for as long as is necessary.”

These are comments that you won’t find in the 4,253 articles on Google News, because they stimulate critical thinking and shape hearts and minds. And that’s exactly what the corporate propaganda system hopes to avoid.

1. Times Online.
2. “Mounting Questions about the Colombian Hostage Operation” Bill Van Auken.
3. Noam Chomsky, “Plan Colombia”, from Rogue States, 2000.

According to the Colombian government, military intelligence operatives infiltrated the highest levels of the FARC’s command structure. These operatives then convinced the guerrilla commander responsible for guarding the hostages that Jorge Briceno (alias Mono Jojoy), a member of the group’s seven-person secretariat, had ordered that three groups of hostages be brought together in preparation for a humanitarian exchange agreed to by the FARC’s Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano. The Uribe administration claims that Colombian soldiers disguised as aid workers and journalists then arrived at the rendezvous location deep in the jungle and retrieved the 15 hostages and captured the guerrilla commander and another rebel without a shot being fired even though there were some 60 other FARC fighters in the immediate vicinity. The government claimed it was an elaborate long-term operation that was conducted flawlessly.

However, there is a far more plausible scenario. The FARC had already decided to unilaterally release the 15 hostages following talks with two European envoys who had arrived in Colombia in late June to meet with high-ranking rebels in the region in which Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano is located. Consequently, it was Cano who gave the order to gather the hostages together from the three separate camps in which they were being held.

Meanwhile, under this scenario, the Colombian government was seeking to bribe FARC commander Gerardo Antonio Aguilar (alias “César”), who was in charge of guarding the hostages, in order to gain their release. The Colombian military had captured César’s rebel wife several months earlier and convinced her to contact her husband to offer him $20 million in return for the release of the hostages.

Ultimately, the coinciding events of FARC commander Cano ordering the hostages to be gathered in one place in preparation for their release, the interception of this information by Colombian and US intelligence services and the bribing of César allowed the Colombian military to exploit the situation and stage a rescue of hostages who would have been liberated anyway. The benefits of such a staged operation for the Uribe administration are clear: the government would receive the credit for the release of the hostages rather than the FARC; and the military could sow seeds of distrust in the ranks of the rebels by claiming it has infiltrated the guerrilla group at the highest levels.

This hypothesis is supported by various sources that have been quoted in the several media outlets over the previous few days and by certain events of the last few months. Several days prior to the liberation of the hostages, the Associated Press and other media outlets reported that two international envoys — Noel Saez of France and Jean Pierre Cotard of Switzerland — were seeking to meet with FARC Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano to gain the release of the hostages. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s press secretary, Cesar Mauricio Velasquez, confirmed the presence of the envoys in Colombia and acknowledged that they had the Colombian government’s permission to meet with the rebels.

According to an unidentified source quoted by Inter Press Service, the FARC Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano agreed to unilaterally release the 15 hostages and ordered that they be brought together in one location. “Their release was planned for this weekend (Jul. 5-6) or the next, as agreed by the Secretariat (FARC’s governing body) and ‘Alfonso Cano’ (their top commander) himself, that’s why they were brought together,” the source claimed. “The (Colombian) armed forces found out, and intercepted their liberation to make it look like a rescue.”

The success of the military “rescue” may well have been guaranteed by the Uribe government’s ability to buy the cooperation of FARC commander César, who was responsible for guarding the hostages. Several months earlier, the Colombian military had captured the wife of César, and according to Swiss radio station RSR, quoting a “reliable source” close to the operation, she was trying to convince her rebel husband to release the high-profile hostages — former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors — in return for a $20 million payment agreed to by the Colombian and US governments.

This claim is buttressed by recent public comments made by Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe that his government had established a $100 million fund to pay to individual guerrilla guards who released their hostages. And then, last month, Uribe publicly stated that his government was in touch with guerrillas guarding the hostages. Perhaps the most compelling evidence that César might have agreed to release the hostages and cooperate with the staged rescue mission is the fact that he and another guerrilla laid their weapons on the ground before boarding the helicopter unarmed. It is common knowledge that FARC guerrillas are trained to never leave their weapons and the fact that César did so suggests that he was quitting the armed struggle rather than following orders he believed had come from his superiors.

The Colombian government has vehemently denied that it paid any money to obtain the release of the hostages. The Uribe administration claimed that the unidentified “reliable source” quoted in the Swiss radio report was none other than Swiss envoy Jean Pierre Cotard and immediately set out to discredit him. However, in their attempt to discredit Cotard, they also validated his credibility as someone who would know such information.

On July 6, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos accused Cotard of providing the FARC with almost $500,000 in funding. Santos claimed that emails in the laptop of the late FARC commander Raúl Reyes suggested that Cotard was responsible for delivering the money to FARC envoys in Costa Rica where it was later seized. Santos did not make the alleged email public and did not explain why the Colombian government had approved Cotard’s role as a negotiator the week before the hostages were liberated if it believed he was affiliated with the rebel group. Ultimately, whether or not the alleged email exists — and if so, whether it does link Cotard to the FARC — it is evident that Cotard has been in a position to obtain sensitive information related to the hostage saga and his comments cannot be summarily dismissed — if he is indeed the “reliable source” quoted by the Swiss radio station RSR.

Ultimately, the government’s version of the how the liberation of the hostages occurred appears too neat-and-tidy and a little far-fetched, even given the FARC’s current disarray. The alternative scenario seems far more plausible: that the liberation of the hostages resulted from a combination of the FARC agreeing to release them, government intelligence sources learning of the planned liberation, the bribing of the guerrilla commander in charge of guarding the hostages, and a staged rescue operation to make the Uribe administration and the Colombian military appear heroic. The staged rescue also allowed the government to steal the positive public relations spotlight that the FARC would have enjoyed through a unilateral release of the hostages and to hide the fact that the Uribe administration paid for the liberation of the captives.