FROM SAN JUAN HILL TO CHENGUE

Colin Powell's Attitude Towards Colombia

He had a busy finale, didn't he, primarily saving his own hide and
issuing pardons: eeny meeny miny mo, Marc Rich yes, Leonard Peltier
no. In Rolling Stone he called for an end to the disparity in
sentencing for powder and crack cocaine that he adamantly refused to
fix a few years earlier. What else? Let's see, he gave Teddy Roosevelt
the Medal of Honor and boasted in the accompanying speech on January
16 that in 1993 he'd broken with the usual policy of incoming
Democratic Presidents, who would pull the portrait of TR off the wall
above the mantelpiece in the White House's Roosevelt Room and put up
FDR instead. Then the incoming Republican Commander in Chief would
reverse the process. Not our Bill. He kept TR up on the wall,
triangulating right from the start. On January 16 Bill said it was
high time to give TR the medal for which he had been recommended right
after the charge up San Juan Hill.

Exit Bill, enter the new team, including Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who now has a chance to live up to those fine words of his to
the Republicans massed in Philadelphia for their convention last
August. Powell told the plump delegates they should not forget the
poor and the afflicted.

How might Powell distinguish himself from his predecessor Madeleine
Albright? The latter's final act in office was, with the approval of
Clinton, to insist that a slab of US military aid to Colombia should
not be held up out of any pettifogging concerns for human rights. The
Colombian military and its death squads have a documented record for
bestial carnage unrivaled in the entire world, and so, in admiration
for this pre-eminence, last August Clinton waived four of the five
human rights criteria laid out by Congress to release the first chunk
of $ 781.5 million. A certification or waiver was also required for
the second installment, of $ 56.4 million. While conceding that the
record of the Colombian military was not all that it could be, the
Clinton Administration nonetheless decided that because the second
slice of aid was not included in "regular funds" but rather in an
emergency spending bill, the certification and waiver process did not
apply.

On January 17, the day after Bill honored the imperialist hero of the
Spanish-American War, and when Albright and the others were still
chortling at their ingenuity in circumventing the human rights
provisions, the BBC's correspondent in Bogota, Jeremy McDermott,
reported that "alleged right-wing paramilitaries" had attacked a
village on Colombia's northwest coast, killing twenty-five people.
"Fifty men in military uniform arrived in Chengue in the early hours
of the morning," McDermott told his audience. "They rounded up 25 men
whom they accused of being guerrilla sympathizers and hacked them to
death with machetes. They then set fire to thirty houses of this
village in the northern province of Sucre." McDermott added that the
massacre had all the hallmarks of the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia,
a right-wing paramilitary army of 8,000 fighters "deeply involved in
the drug trade."

For months the inhabitants of Chengue had a pretty good idea of what
might lie in store for them. On October 6 they wrote a letter to
Colombian President Andres Pastrana, detailing the threat of violence
and human rights abuses that the people of the Municipal de Ovejas
feel could occur at any moment on the part of paramilitary groups
operating in the region. The terrified townsfolk urged Pastrana to do
something "to avoid a massacre," explaining that the government's
presence was minimal in the area and that the people live in "anguish
and tension" because of the documented barbarism. Attached to the
letter were the signatures of ninety-nine residents of the town.

While the villagers were appealing to Pastrana to save their lives,
the Clinton Administration was putting spurs to "Plan Colombia," a
strategy straight off the Pentagon's Vietnam and Central American
drawing board. Beefed up by US training, "advisers," arms and
intelligence, the Colombian military has been planning to overwhelm
guerrilla bases in southern Colombia, simultaneously eradicating the
coca and poppy fields, which are the peasants' only resource, the
option of legal crops long since sabotaged by US economic policies.
Pretenses that the Clinton Administration is strongly supportive of a
peaceful solution to Colombia's troubles has become increasingly
ludicrous, as dollars and kindred practical support for the Colombian
military and its death squads have flooded from Washington to Bogota.

As a man who helped cover up the My Lai massacre, Powell knows all
about such campaigns of pacification. And since he's not dumb, he
knows that Plan Colombia will merely augment that country's misery,
which has more than half the population below poverty level, internal
refugees by the million and no prospects for improvement. He knows too
that "drug interdiction," partly the official US rationale for Plan
Colombia, is a farce. He knows where the $ 1.3 billion should have
gone: into the drug education and rehab programs here in the United
States. The Clinton Administration and its Republican allies
successfully beat back an effort by Senator Paul Wellstone to get
about $ 225,000 of the package reserved to that end.

What's the chance of Powell pressing for a different approach in
Colombia? Zero, I'd say. But at least once we should remind him of his
rhetoric in Philadelphia, just as we should remind Bush at least once
of his eloquent inaugural speech about helping the poor. Why collude
with these folks in their degradation of language and morals?

And Bill? He's in Chappaqua glad-handing the locals and contemplating
the memoirs that will doubtless be as mendacious as those of Teddy
Roosevelt, like Clinton a Force Ten blowhard and self-inflater. In a
couple of weeks Bill will be ogling the girls in the bank and
suggesting sorties to the local hot-mattress motel, if such sanctuary
is available in the purlieus of the Saw Mill River Parkway. If she's
called Gennifer we'll have come back to the beginning, just as, on the
larger canvas, we do year after year with San Juan Hill.